by Evan Balkan
“But it’s only because you went and spoke with him. I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I’m sorry. If you don’t want to show up for practice, I’ll respect that.”
Caroline followed her mother downstairs where Mrs. Panski grabbed a magazine and sat down. She stared intently at it, turning the pages so rapidly that Caroline knew there was no way she was actually reading it. She wanted to say something to her mother, or have her mother say something more to her, but things felt very final. The decision was Caroline’s: go to practice or don’t go to practice. It was simple. And yet it was not simple at all.
Conflicting emotions swirled within her, feelings that didn’t have a name. It was true that she didn’t want her mother’s help. She’d wanted to earn a spot on her own. And yet, she had to acknowledge the bigger truth that she was, after all, a girl, and the world was a place that didn’t bend itself so easily to the wills of girls. Sometimes, girls needed help.
She didn’t know what to say or do, so she went back to her room. There, she saw her skates and stick, the wooden handle tucked inside the right skate, the curved end leaning against the wall. Even if she accepted the help given her, it would still be up to her to get out there and earn it on the ice, show the coach and all the other boys that she was there because she was good. That was the reason she was on the team. She’d show ’em.
She went back downstairs.
“Mama?”
Mrs. Panski was still in the same chair, but she was staring straight ahead, into space, the magazine closed and on her lap.
“Yes?”
“I’ll play.”
“Okay.”
“And, Mama?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
Mrs. Panski smiled, and this time, it came close to her real smile. Not entirely there, but close. Very close.
When she walked in the door at the Sports Center, Caroline was immediately struck by the smell. It was a familiar, sickly potpourri of sweat, stale beer, and old building. Caroline imagined that it smelled exactly like it had back in the days when her mother played on this same rink. She thought of how her mother had described the old galleys where the benches were so close to the audience that people used to spill beer on the players. That hadn’t changed. She imagined how difficult it must have been for her mom to step inside this place, to speak with Coach, and see the boys out on the ice.
Certainly she’d been by the Sports Center a few times over the years. Hard to remain in Baltimore and not at least pass by it once or twice—on the bus, perhaps, or on some errand that took her to a part of the city she didn’t usually frequent. So, yes, she’d seen it. But she hadn’t been inside. Not since the injury. Caroline was sure of that.
And so coming back must have been excruciating, to have had to smell that smell again. Because it smelled like competition and freedom and youth. Caroline knew that her mother had played her heart out in those years, and had enjoyed it immensely. And all that was gone now. And so Caroline decided she was playing, in part, for her mom.
And for her dad.
And of course, for herself.
“Look who’s here!” Alan. It was amazing what time had done to him, Caroline thought for probably the hundredth time. In essence, he’d uttered that same phrase—Look who’s here!—to her back at the pond, but back then it was mocking, full of venom and spite. Now he had a smile on his face and he looked welcoming.
“Hi,” Caroline said.
He looked down at her. Even without skates, he was tall. He used to be a shrimp. She used to tower over him. But even then he was broad. And he was broader still now. Some of the other boys passed by them, but no one said anything to Caroline.
“I heard you’re on the team cause your mom came and yelled at Coach,” Alan said.
“That’s not exactly true.”
“I didn’t think so. I told the guys you’re on the team cause you’re better’n most of them.”
She looked down. “I’m not sure that’s true, either.”
But then a shrill whistle blew and the pleasantries were over. It was Coach. “Let’s go, boys,” he announced. “Practice starts in ten minutes.”
They headed to the locker rooms: fifteen boys in one direction, one girl in the other. It was eerily quiet in the locker room alone. Even though she knew no one was there with her, Caroline kept looking around nervously. It felt like anyone could walk in at any moment. But no one did, and she needed to hurry. So she got dressed, trying hard not to think about how things would go on the ice. She tried to visualize success.
“I’ve got to trust myself,” she whispered. She felt a little silly talking to herself, but there was no one else there and she needed a pep talk. “Let instincts take over. If I’m concentrating on not messing up, I’m going to forget how to play. I can’t think too much about technique. I just have to let myself move on the ice. I just have to play the game.” She got up and headed out.
Once she hit the ice, there was no time to think anyway. Just like at tryouts, the coach demanded attention and precision, and practice proved just as hard as tryouts had been. By the first water break, Caroline was drenched in sweat. She poured half her water down the back of her neck and felt the relief it brought when it slithered all the way down to her T-shirt and underwear and to the tips of her toes.
Alan mashed his hand on her back. “I do that, too,” he said. “With the water. Feels good, doesn’t it?”
Caroline nodded. Again, the mysteries of this world. It hadn’t been that long ago when the prospect of Alan touching her, even through the thickness of shirt and sweater, would have repulsed her. But now the pressure of his hand felt good, like some kind of strange security in a place where she still felt on edge, still felt as if any moment the whistle would blow and the boys would refuse to play with her, realizing that, geez, that kid with the corny replica stick is a girl.
Nerves did get to her, regardless. She didn’t perform near her best and Coach got on her. “Come on, Panski,” he yelled several times. And when she did mess up, Alan didn’t bother to try and make her feel better. He was, after all, concentrating on his own play and as the team’s best player and its captain, he had to set an example. It was as if his job of making Caroline feel welcome was complete. The rest was up to her.
But she couldn’t get it together enough to impress the coach or her teammates, and so she didn’t get any playing time when the games started. During the team’s first game, against Mount Saint Joseph’s, she sat on the bench, at times losing herself in the action, calling out encouragement to her teammates, and waiting for her name to get called.
And then the game was over, an 8-1 slaughter. The coach fumed. She could hear him all the way down the hall as he chewed out the boys for their sloppy, lethargic play. She could still hear the rise of his voice even as she entered her own locker room. But she didn’t need to shower. She just got back into her clothes and left.
And nothing changed the next time, either—nothing but the score, a loss again, but a more respectable 6-3. Again, she sat on the bench and again her name wasn’t called. She’d stopped cheering her teammates by the middle of the second period. When the game was over, and the players trudged off the ice and toward the locker room, Caroline realized her stick was gone. She panicked.
“Anyone seen my stick?” she asked. No one answered. She asked Coach, and his response was only a growling, “How the hell would I know?” as he marched into the locker room.
She stood in the hallway and listened again as Coach yelled at the boys. When he finished and everyone spilled out into the hall, she marched up to Coach and demanded that her teammates give her the stick back. “My father gave me that stick,” she said, tears welling in her eyes, standing there before the boys in their street clothes. They just looked at her, saying nothing. Even Alan was quiet.
“You should all be ashamed of yourselves,” she yelled and turned away so they wouldn’t see her cry.
Outside, a gra
y mist hung in the air, turning the entire sky into a gauzy mess. It matched Caroline’s mood. She looked at the bleak scene around her. There was no one out and about. It looked like someone had come along and tipped the world over and all the people had simply fallen away. She had thoughts of the entire building collapsing behind her, coming down on those jerks inside. She was as good as most of them. She knew that. And just because she was born one way and they were born another, they got to do whatever they wanted and she got to do nothing she wanted.
It wasn’t fair. Wouldn’t it have been better to have accepted the decision in the first place, blame it on an unfair society that disallowed girls the same opportunities it held for boys? Wouldn’t it have been better to quit while behind instead of having to endure a further, and double, humiliation? And now her beloved stick was gone. It was almost too much to bear. She had lost her dad once already and now, well, she just couldn’t think about it. It was all too much.
Why fight the universe? It was so very, very tiring. All that was left to do now was go home.
CAROLINE DIDN’T GO to practice the next day. Or the day after that. She told her mother she didn’t feel good and her mother didn’t ask questions. Instead they both retreated to their favorite spots in the house, Caroline upstairs in her room, her mother in her chair downstairs. Sam was off somewhere being a boy—playing in the dirt, chasing squirrels, finding mischief. The day seemed to draw out like a thin thread—until the shrill ring of the telephone broke the silence. After a few moments, Mrs. Panski called upstairs.
“Caroline?”
“Yes?”
“The telephone’s for you. It’s your coach.” Caroline had no idea how to react. She came down the stairs slowly, and when she entered the kitchen her mother thrust the phone into her hands.
“Hello?” she ventured.
“Hi, Caroline. Listen … we’d like you back. On the team.”
She had told him he should be ashamed of himself, told him, his star player, everyone. She had left the building without her stick. As far as she was concerned, she’d quit. And she should stay quit. Was this just another joke anyway, another opportunity to humiliate her? And even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t it be great to spurn him, show him how it felt?
She heard him sigh and then he said, “Listen. I’m not saying you’ll get lots of ice time. But we’ve got some injuries, you see—two of the guys are gonna be scratched for the next game. Alan, his hamstring. And, well, you keep plugging away, and—who knows? You know?”
“Someone took my stick.”
“I suspect I can locate your stick for you.”
Caroline looked at her mom. Mrs. Panski nodded at her daughter.
“OK,” Caroline said, and hung up.
Mrs. Panski reached out and pulled her into a hug. “I’m proud of you, kid.”
Caroline wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist. One more chance. She’d make sure it counted.
But there was one more thing she needed to do.
Caroline’s old school. It had hardly been a year since she’d been there, but it felt like it belonged to another lifetime. Things had been so much simpler then. She’d had good friends and her dad was still at home and her family was like every other family and her life like any other young girl’s in Baltimore. And then her dad had gone off to war and Joseph arrived and her dad died and her friends stopped being friends. It all seemed so long ago.
She walked into the main office. There was someone new working there, a mean looking woman with glasses on a chain around her neck. She seemed annoyed, as if Caroline was keeping her from something important. “Can I help you?” she snapped.
For some reason, Caroline could hardly speak. She muttered and stammered, making the impatient woman even more so. But fortunately, Principal Podolski emerged from his office at that very moment and greeted Caroline warmly.
“Miss Panski, how on earth are you?”
“I’m good, Principal Podolski.”
“How is junior high school?”
“It’s fine.”
“It can be hard. That can be a hard transition.”
Caroline nodded.
“Well, what can I do for you?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
In his office, the door closed behind them, Principal Podolski rifled through a file cabinet and then pulled out a folder. He opened it and pawed the sheaf of papers inside. “Let’s see. Joseph Wilson,” he whispered, wetting his thumb with his tongue and flipping through each page. “I have his primary residence as Wolfe Street, but I believe his family moved some months ago.”
“Yes,” Caroline confirmed. “But I don’t know where to.”
“I don’t have his new address, but as part of our tracking of A-listers and other integraters, we do have notes that he is attending—or at least was attending—St. Peter Claver Church School.”
Caroline looked at him blankly.
“It’s on the west side. Pennsylvania and … Fremont, I believe. It’s a school for Negroes.”
Caroline nodded.
Principal Podolski shrugged. “He didn’t have an easy time of things here, that’s true. I wish I could say differently, but I’d be lying. But I can tell you that you, more than anyone else here, more than even me if I’m being honest, tried to make him welcome. You should be proud of yourself for that.”
She thanked him and made her way, via three separate buses, to Pennsylvania Avenue, where she walked six blocks, past the Negro clubs along the strip, northward to Fremont, and entered the St. Peter Claver School.
“Can I help you, miss?” a kindly old gentleman asked Caroline as she wandered the lobby.
“I’m looking for a Joseph Wilson.”
The old man looked her up and down a bit suspiciously before he smiled at her. “Well, believe it or not, we have two Joseph Wilsons. I’ll fetch them both and you can tell me which is the one you want.”
“Thank you.”
It wouldn’t matter if there were a hundred Joseph Wilsons in that school, of course. She’d know him anywhere. And sure enough, the moment he came around the corner and down the hall toward her, she smiled. And he smiled back. And the “other” Joseph Wilson knew to leave them alone.
“Hi,” Caroline said.
“Hi,” Joseph replied.
COACH HAD BEEN lingering out front, waiting for something. Who knew what? But when Caroline arrived, it seemed that maybe he’d been waiting for her.
She walked from the trolley stop, having made the trip alone. Mrs. Panski had earlier seen her to the stop near their house and told her she’d see her later at the game. “Good luck, sweetheart. Have I told you I’m proud of you?”
“Yes, but thanks.”
“Let’s go, Panski,” Coach said, as she approached. When she got near him, he tilted his head and looked at her long hair, scrunched up in a ponytail. He scrutinized her closely, shaking his head almost imperceptibly, as if already regretting the offer he’d made. But in the end, he held the door for her as she entered. “Third line, second shift. With Reames and Abbott. You got it?”
“Yes, sir,” Caroline responded.
He handed Caroline her old beloved stick. She cradled it to her, feeling a bolt of electricity surging up and down her whole body.
“Let’s play some hockey,” Coach said.
It was a deep and desperate anxiety. Caroline sat alone in the locker room, testing her stick, making sure the tape she’d wound around its length was still holding up. She kicked at her skates, adjusted her pads, expending nervous energy. At moments, she felt like she might throw up. What if she failed out there? What if she got the call and then played terribly? She knew she had to be twice as good, not just okay, to earn continued playing time. This was to be her best shot, and probably her last if she blew it.
She could hear a faint rumble in the building all around her. A wash of noise, nothing discernible, but it seemed to match the rumbling in her stomach. She needed a way to calm down. If she went out th
ere a bundle of nerves, she’d never be able to perform.
And then silence. She couldn’t tell if it was her own mind or if something went quiet in the building, but somehow, she managed a shift in that silence. A calm descended on her like a palpable presence. A weighty thing that simply dropped from the ceiling and cloaked her.
She couldn’t know that this was the very spot where her mother, playing her own hockey games, had sat many years earlier. She pushed open the door to the locker room and walked into the hall, unaware that this was the very place where Eloise Weatherbee had spoken to Caroline’s father for the very first time.
She didn’t know that the phantoms of the past are never far, that they float in the filmy memories people carry in their brains and in the collective memory culled from space and time and place. She didn’t know that they were there—the ghosts that formed her were right there with her as she snatched up her stick, walked down the hall, and in a sea of calm, joined her team on the bench.
A few odd stares greeted Mrs. Panski as she made her way up the stairs. She returned each one, obviously content to meet them until inevitably the person doing the cowardly staring looked away. “Come on,” she said to the boys as they shuffled to their seats.
They settled in and looked around. A good crowd. Not as many as there’d been during Mrs. Panski’s playing days, but of course it was a different crowd anyway. Then, it had all been middle-aged men loaded with too much beer and too much testosterone. Today, there were more casual fans and more families, more youngsters, friends, siblings. And there was another thing. Back then, it was an all-white crowd. Today it was almost the same, except for one exception.
“Joseph, are you doing okay?” Mrs. Panski asked.
Joseph nodded, lost in the atmosphere, looking all around him, at the faces, the rink, the teams now spilling onto the ice to perform their skating warm-ups. Mrs. Panski placed a hand on Joseph’s shoulder and squeezed slightly. He didn’t seem to notice.