A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  It turned around after that. They won the challenge. They kicked a field goal. And on the final drive, they stopped the Skins, Mitch and D combining for a coffin-nailing sack. Mitch had the front and the primary leverage, and D arrived a split-second later at the back. When they went to the ground together, Mitch could feel D’s wrath through 8’s pads.

  “Post it!” Mitch crowed the moment he got to his feet. He couldn’t help it. He had the power like he’d always had it, and “Post it!” had become the thing he said. They brought their helmets together, and Mitch saw D’s eyes up close. “You’re an alien,” Mitch told him, making peace. “You’re out of this world, 53.”

  In the locker room, he was happy to talk to the media. More than happy: overjoyed. They found him on his way back from the showers, his fawning suitors, presenting him with their bouquet of microphones and tape recorders. He let his towel drop; he let himself be himself. Amanda from the Inquirer was there, working hard to keep her eyes up. But she was cool, Amanda, she got him, they were friends.

  “Forgive me, y’all,” he said, looking especially at her. “I just have to. I feel too good to wear clothes!”

  They laughed collectively, and there wasn’t any time to decipher if the laughter was genuine or nervous or good-natured or what, because the questions started coming immediately.

  He was ready. He was born ready. He was certainly ready right now.

  “Oh, that sack was a thing of beauty,” he said.

  He felt so real. He was in his body and it was a good thing. And here in this crappy visitor’s locker room, cramped with tape and skin and stink, his own good thing met that other good thing that was the entire world.

  “The Martian’s my main man,” he said. “We love coming together like that.”

  And, “It’s a team game and that’s what a team game’s about.”

  And, “It’s a beautiful game. Football’s a perfect game. Honestly, we’re just trying to match it. We’re just trying to play at football’s level.”

  And, “Man, this feels good!”

  And, “I think about the past few weeks and all I can say is, I thank God. I thank God because we are blessed.”

  And, “We get to play a game for a living. We get to play a game and win.”

  Dressed, he found his women and children in the chilly family waiting area, where he gave his warm body to each of theirs, felt each of theirs in return. Tim was there, too, with Tracy. Caryn, naturally, was not.

  “That last hit sounded like a tree falling!” Cindy panted.

  “Pretty good, wasn’t it?” he boasted, looking at Tim, who clasped his hand, then clapped his back, then coughed in lieu of praise.

  “Almost ready to compete with my boys,” he said. Typical Tim. He looked thin. He coached varsity now in Nelson County.

  “Come on,” Mitch said, looking at Lori, who was bent sidewise to hold Maddie’s hand. “Right?” Her smile was studiously neutral. She had to drive back with Cindy and the kids tonight, and she’d have to collect him when he was done. And when would that be, his self inside him asked God, when would that be?

  “Right?” he asked the walls.

  “Jeez, Dad, you were good,” Alyssa capitulated.

  He swung around. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she swung back, flailed her arm at him. “You said you’d win and you won.”

  “That’s belief,” Mitch said to Kaylie and Tyler, who nodded to indicate they understood. He and his renewed faith were growing more attached by the minute.

  “They ran the ball on you,” Tim said. He was chewing his lip as he said it, as though the top half of him wanted the bottom half to shut up. “Give ’em a fifth quarter and they would’ve won.”

  Mitch laughed. Had to respect that: Tim had his own beliefs. “That’s why there are only four, though! Gotta do it in four!”

  On the train, Mitch tossed Moore his Twinkie. “Good one, Moore!”

  “You motherfucker,” Moore said, but he tore off the wrapper and ate it.

  “I gotta be honest, man,” Kohler was saying to D’s camera. “I was worried there for a bit in the fourth. Like, ‘Oh no, are we gonna blow it? Am I gonna get cut?’” I actually thought that in the huddle, ‘What would happen if I got cut?’” He scratched his billowy chin. “I’d have more time to work on my other interests, that’s for sure. Maybe I’d take up the violin—because that’s what people say, right?” He looked for agreement. “You fail at something, try the violin. I’ve never given two shits about the violin. Why is it always the violin? I’m serious!”

  D wasn’t even trying to contain his laughter. He didn’t care, he was so happy with himself and his teammates. Mitch collapsed into his seat, grateful for the camera and Kohler’s foolishness. He’d been floating since the clock ran out, but was starting to feel his age again. His burning elbows. His lower back.

  “That’s honesty, man,” D was saying. “Oh, shit, that is honesty.” He held the camera on Mitch. “Honesty is one thing. Truth’s another. Not to be confused. Don’t you agree, Wilk?”

  D smiled, so Mitch smiled, and now, again, he saw D’s anger. It still lived in him, high and hard in his shoulders, low and tight in his hips. Of course it did. No matter how happy he was, no matter how much he laughed.

  “Wilk,” D prompted him. “Wilk.”

  Anger was useful, that was why, even when you had the love of God. Mitch used his own to punch down the scared self inside him. To punch down physical pain. When he got home he’d use it to punch Hatchett’s tape in the trash. He’d watch it first, let those desperate young bodies rile him up a bit more, and when Hatchett circled back, he’d tell him he wanted a title and a guaranteed salary before he gave him any advice. Deputy Director of Player Engagement sounded about right. But that was for later. That was exactly what he had to punch down now. I got three more weeks and a post-season, he told his inside self. Don’t tell anyone, not even me.

  “Wilk!” D said again.

  “All right, man,” Mitch said. “You win! Honesty.”

  All this arguing over something that was fated, that was visible to anyone who looked. He looked at the camera and at D behind it, and he gathered himself to say something neutral that was also the thing they both already knew. His body. His time. It was the thing that made him angrier than anything else in this world, the thing he fought God on the hardest, and even so, he couldn’t help it, he started laughing. He let the laughter close his eyes and he let the camera disappear, and for D he did the best he could.

  “For real, though, man, no more words. Game over. We won. I’m done.”

  10. ALYSSA, 2012

  Four days after Alyssa dropped out of college, she snagged a job at the preppy clothing retailer that made sumptuous cashmere in a rainbow of farmer’s market hues. Persimmon. Morel. Sage. A friend’s brother had worked there the previous summer and he put her in touch with the manager, Mark, a hair-geller in herringbone who sat her down in the chairs normally reserved for customers trying on loafers to ask her a few questions about herself.

  “That’s a good school,” he said, looking at the resume she’d printed on a piece of her mother’s linen paper. Light from the mall-front window filtered through the sheet, illuminating a watermark that vaguely resembled an anchor, tilted rakishly on its end. Or maybe it was a crab. Either way, it was the sort of thing this company might embroider on a pair of green chino pants, so she figured she was set.

  “I’m taking some time off,” she told him, hoping he wouldn’t need a reason.

  He leaned forward in the chair and looked her over, resting his eyes an extra moment on her thigh. “When can you start?”

  Like most people with an ounce of talent, Mark had recognized hers right away. Alyssa was good-looking. Actually, she was better than good-looking. She was lucky. Her frame was symmetrical and not prone to weight gain, and she didn’t even have to wash her face much; it was naturally, almost ghostly, clean.

  Her mom was lucky in all the same ways, which
made sense, genetically. But she’d been at it much longer than Alyssa and she had some tips for getting by. “You’ve just gotta fake it,” she’d told Alyssa when she was little, and didn’t want to go to school. “If you can make your teachers like you, pretty soon they’ll let you do whatever you want.” What Caryn had wanted was respect. Alyssa was born when her parents were still in college, and even though her mom had finished her degree first, her dad, the football pro, was the one who shaped the world. He had a whole new family by the time Alyssa was in second grade. Fortunately, his new wife, Lori, was all about charity. She wore a diamond cross around her neck, and anytime she went to a beach, which was often, she liked to march giant hearts into the sand. Alyssa still got presents from her dad all the time, and Caryn’s life had actually gotten better. She’d moved them to DC, the city she’d always admired most. She had her own yoga studio. She had an even richer husband in Steve. So faking it, in Alyssa’s mind, wasn’t the worst way to live.

  She faked it straight to college. The one she chose had a decent track team and a romantic bell tower on a fleecy green quad. She’d always enjoyed gazing at natural fields of color. Who was she? Who would she become? The historic quad, which had seen it all before, seemed to have the answers. Plus, the school was in Pennsylvania, where her dad had played, and several guidebooks had singled it out as having particularly good-looking students.

  “How ’bout that?” Mitch said when she visited him that summer in Florida, where he did something involving beachfront condos and wore sunglasses even indoors. He’d retired several years earlier, after his fourteenth season, which she knew because she’d turned fourteen a few months later, and she’d always been the same age as his career. He was harder to keep track of now, out in the real world. He still had his trademark ponytail, and he was back to being clean-shaven, but his body was more massive than ever, reminding her, somehow, of a beached sea mammal. She worried about him, she knew he missed playing football, but he always managed to reassure her. In Florida, they looked at the ocean together feeling cheerful, and he told her the college she’d chosen sounded like the perfect school for her.

  Only it wasn’t. Nonsense assailed her from the start. Having to run the steps of every section of the stadium the first week of track practice. Having to write a business plan for a cookie company that would somehow empower the poor. Having her crotch prodded by shaggy prep school boys in moldering fraternity house rooms. Maybe it was just the girls who were supposed to be good-looking. “Your dad’s going to kill me,” her hook-ups always bragged, breathing festivals of bacteria in her face. “I can’t believe you’re real!” As though it even mattered what was real. She once found a girl crying in the laundry room because she couldn’t remember a poem. She kept wiping her nose on a pair of cotton panties she’d just taken out of the dryer. Alyssa was disgusted. Wasn’t she planning on wearing those later?

  “Everyone tries so hard,” she told her mother when she called to tell her she was quitting track. “It’s kind of screwed up.”

  Caryn didn’t tell her to fake it anymore. “Well, sweetheart,” she said instead, “not everyone’s as talented as you.”

  After a cleansing summer on the beach, Alyssa was ready to give sophomore year a chance—but the boys only got more barbaric, the girls needier and more competitive. How could Obama be losing ground to Romney while her classmates only cared about themselves? Freshmen elections were the final straw. Obnoxious signs polluted the quad with bubble letters and glitter, ruining the one lovely view on campus. “You Need A Nina!” “Badr Does It Better.” They depressed her because they were as shallow and desperate as the signs from the year before. In fact, the year before, she was pretty sure that Heather Did It Better. Heather, who’d won, and aside from tritely blowing half the lacrosse team, hadn’t done a thing.

  In this context, it was a comfort to return to her childhood mall, which went out of its way to celebrate nature, but never tried to be something it was not. The drive encircling it was packed with stately, peeling-bark trees, the corridors inside with oversized potted ferns, and each wing was lined with all the familiar storefronts selling just what they purported to sell. Her first day on the job she was assigned to the women’s section, where she was expected to hang things that had come unhung, fold things that had come unfolded, and use her cylindrical skeleton key to let customers into dressing rooms when they asked. She quickly found she loved folding the most. Each garment had a code: a series of faint creases she could follow to reshape it for display. The careless customers, those who left the trousers and cardigans they didn’t want turned inside out on the dressing room floor, were in some ways her favorite, because they provided her the opportunity to restore order to a rumpled pile of cotton flannel, stretch merino, and heavy worsted serge. She would extend the hidden shelf on the cash wrap and set to work with a fresh stack of tissue paper, humming along with the airy store mix, and if, when she was done, the floor was quiet, she’d flip through the catalogs in the wooden tray, their fibrous fields and textured beaches quelling any feelings of uselessness that lingered from her time at school.

  Her co-workers were exceptionally friendly. Nearly every shift brought new ones, both full-time personal shoppers and area college kids working for the discount, all of them eager to introduce themselves and welcome her aboard. Alyssa smiled and said hello, but sooner or later she knew they’d grow distant. People usually did. She’d seen it in their eyes a million times: something draining, like water from a bath grown cold.

  “People are gonna hate you, kiddo,” Mitch had told her as a child. “That’s why you have to rise above.” He was fond of pep talks. They’d kept him from losing it when things got tough: nagging injuries, blood-thirsty reporters, watching New England win Super Bowls without him. She used to love the way they fueled her, though she’d never been churchy like her dad. He was less churchy now, and paradoxically, also less helpful. “You can’t let the haters distract you,” he’d told her when she first complained about college. “You just gotta keep on being you.” Often, in the last few months, she’d wanted to ask him who that was.

  “I’m worried about you,” her mother told her over dinner, after she’d been working at the mall a few weeks.

  When she’d moved back home, Caryn had made Bellinis and presented her with a spa treatment to help her through her “sophomore slump.” Her mom was smart, but sometimes she acted dumb.

  Now she seemed out of ideas. She pressed her fingers to her temples, giving herself a momentary facelift. “Steve is right when he says it’s important to plan.” She nodded toward her husband who sat complacently, leaving the parenting to her. He’d already raised his kids. They were in their thirties, with respectable careers selected straight from the drop-down menu: finance (hedge fund), law (environmental). “People who don’t have plans in this country just end up waiting around. Look at your Aunt Ellen.”

  Alyssa took a long, bored drink of water. Ellen was her mother’s older sister, the humorless one who wore shoulder pads and fancied herself a poet and sent so many email forwards about computer viruses, she seemed infected herself. It was impossible to imagine becoming Ellen.

  “Look,” Alyssa said. “I have a job. I make $10 an hour and I love it. Haven’t you always told me to do what I love?” She smirked. She couldn’t help it. It was exhilarating to be so unambitious, to declare without shame that she loved folding clothes in a big, clean store that sold items not everyone could afford.

  “Your father and I are just hoping you’ll finish your degree. It was a lot harder for us to do it later. Him especially.”

  “Dad knows my reasons. He’s cool.” Which wasn’t strictly true. She’d written him about her plan to take time off, somewhat disingenuously suggesting she might volunteer for Obama, but he’d never responded. A week later he passed through town on his way back from a meeting in Philadelphia, and it was clear he hadn’t read the email. She knew he was skeptical of the President. And she knew he was busy planning a
new business venture on the Jersey Shore, and that he’d recently thrown out his back. She knew all that. But still.

  “Shoot,” he said, when she reminded him. He smacked his forehead harder than necessary, his belly quivering from the reverberations of the blow. “Well, you know what I think, sweetheart.” He squinted at her through his sunglasses. Lately he’d been squinting at everything, as though the entire visible world were getting farther and farther away. “Never let anyone tell you you can’t do something.”

  But the folding, oh the folding—the turning in of sleeves, the flipping up of shirttails, the straightening of collars and cuffs. What did she care so long as she could fold? She thought of her dad’s locker room, how they used to hang everyone’s jerseys and pants every week, and she thought he’d appreciate what she was doing. There were no simulations here, just real pieces of fabric made right, several of which she bought so that she could wear them to work herself.

  “Oh, you got the Bonnie,” someone said one afternoon. She looked up from her pile of liquidy tees to see a ponytailed blonde standing before her, twirling a skeleton key.

  Alyssa examined the sleeve of her olive green cardigan and shrugged. “It just seemed practical with the discount.”

  The ponytail nodded emphatically. “It’s the best cardi. Michelle Obama has, like, five. Actually, I do, too. I’m Tory.”

  “Alyssa.”

  “Alyssa, nice. Good for you for not shortening it. Sometimes I want to shake my parents for nicknaming me before I was old enough to decide. I mean, seriously, Victoria is so much better than Tory.”

  “You can always change it.”

  Tory shook her head. “I tried once; didn’t work. I never knew when people were talking to me. They’d literally be shouting my name in my face before I got it. Even my parents don’t call me Victoria. Not even when they’re mad.”