by Cara Hedley
‘If women weren’t so bad with directions, she could’ve gone first and they might both be alive today,’ Toad said, raising her glass as though offering a toast. Pelly made a clicking sound.
‘Oh, Toady, why do you do that? You’re such a chauvinist,’ Boz said.
‘Boz, I’ve told you. Why must you make me relive the trauma?’ Toad pretended to cry. ‘I remember when my mom brought home the skates. But there was something wrong with them. I told her there was something wrong with them, and she laughed. What the hell was wrong with them? I thought they were freaks, these albino freaks, you know? My mom, she just laughed. Oh, the horror, when she forced them onto my feet. The horror. And there you have it, ladies. The truth: I was once a ... I can’t speak the words. I was a fingerpainter. I was a hockey player trapped in a figure skater’s body. There you have it. I swear on Mooner’s track suits.’
Toad pretended to blow her nose into the napkin. Pelly rolled her eyes and turned to me. She held the wineglass with her pinky finger raised.
‘You like?’ she nodded at the lobster. I hadn’t touched it yet. I nodded, and took another sip of wine. I watched Boz wipe pretend tears from Toad’s face. The other tables buzzed like hives around us. Perfume everywhere.
‘Shit,’ Pelly said under her breath and then Mrs. Pelletier glided up to our table behind Toad and Boz. She wore her hair in a bun and had the same stretched-forehead look Pelly did when her hair was in a ponytail, the corners of her eyes pulled back. Pearls, French manicure. I smiled idiotically at her, my hand travelling instinctively to my hair, pushing it down. Hal and Toad had ultimately decided to compromise on the hair: a crimped pigtail on one side of my head, and one huge back-combed snarl on the other. When Mrs. Pelletier looked at me, I felt the black eye makeup as pointedly as though it were a real bruise, roots plunging into my eye socket.
‘What a lovely gown that is,’ Mrs. Pelletier said to me, without a trace of irony.
‘Ma!’ Pelly chided, mortified. ‘She’s one of the rookie – it’s a joke!’
‘Well.’ Mrs. Pelletier turned to Pelly, nonplussed. Toad bowed her head and closed her eyes in concentration, trying not to laugh. ‘It is time now. Before the dessert.’
Pelly wiggled around in her seat a bit in protest, then Mrs. Pelletier dragged her off toward the black piano, angled open and gleaming at the far end of the room, the domino floor pouring shrinking diamonds toward its small stage.
Hal and Toad waited for Mrs. Pelletier to disappear into the kitchen, and then retrieved the garbage bag they’d left between the front doors when we came in. Hal cradled the plastic bulk as she and Toad walked over to our table.
‘We’re going alphabetically through the rookies, so you’re up,’ Hal said to me.
‘B is for Barbie,’ Toad chanted.
‘I’ll go first!’ Woo yelled from the next table, swivelling around in her chair, pompadour wobbling. Her mascara had already streaked below her eyes.
‘Ooh, not looking good,’ Toad said. ‘You’re up against the alphabet there, Woo, and looks like you’re losing.’
Pelly’s first notes boomed out, slamming shut the noise in the room. The kidney-shaped circles of heads rotated toward the piano. Its top opened out toward the room, so that it resembled, from my distance, the hood of a broken-down car, Pelly tinkering angrily in its belly. The notes vibrated during pauses in the song, like the aftershock of a hit, lingering violence.
‘Let’s go, Barbie,’ Hal said, the music shrinking her voice.
I hesitated, eyeing the bag cradled like a baby in Hal’s arms. I knew the bag contained King Kong Beer Bong. Toad had sat the rookies on Boz’s living-room floor like a group of nursery schoolers and revealed the long contraption, its impressive machinery that she and Bitty, an Engineering student, had built with their own hands using parts from a hot tub. Its name was written in black marker on the large funnel, a thick snout of tube trailing down, these two parts hinged together with a complicated system of levers and valves. Toad had performed a ceremonial bong. When Hal flicked the switch on King Kong, Toad’s face had grown alarmingly red and a vein pulsed in her forehead, as though she were being strangled.
As they arranged me around the toilet in the handicapped stall, Toad brushed the front of her dress.
‘Do mind the frock, dear,’ she said, holding out her hands like a surgeon for King Kong as Hal wrestled it out of the bag. I gazed into the toilet bowl, the bathroom’s dim chandelier washing everything with moving, honeyed light. The wine had crawled up from my legs to behind my eyes and the dominoes in the floor moved like a game. Air freshener leaked peaches into the stall.
‘Nice,’ Toad said as Pelly began to play a new song, a sad song, its notes creeping muffled into the stall. ‘Beautiful. A slow dance between Barbie and King Kong. This is incredibly romantic.’
Hal retrieved the hose from Toad’s hands and hovered it by my mouth as Toad poured a beer into the funnel. Her heels tapped an absentminded rhythm on the echoing floor, light swimming slowly across her face, red lipstick worn near the inside of her mouth.
‘Ooh, too much head. Shit. Hang on a sec, Hal.’ Toad peered into the funnel for a few long moments. ‘’Kay, ready.’
‘If you have to puke or spit or anything, do it in there,’ Hal pointed to the toilet. She smiled a bit. ‘Open up.’
I opened my mouth with a dreamy, detached feeling. Like I’d just been shot to the gills with Novocaine, making my mouth invincible. I briefly recalled Toad’s advice about confidence as Hal shoved the hose into my mouth.
I didn’t open my throat. They didn’t warn us that opening your throat wasn’t the same as opening your mouth. In that split-second after Toad flicked the switch, I assumed it was the same. And then the choking began. My head became a water balloon, flooded, swelling. My nostrils smouldered and I lunged toward the toilet as my face exploded, beer spurting out my nose, travelling down and up my throat at the same time. When I sputtered, ‘Fuck,’ the word felt separate from me, an underwater bomb.
‘Wow,’ Hal said behind me. Their shoes braced my knees.
‘I knew it,’ Toad said. ‘Hockey Barbie wears her sailor’s mouth on the inside. What else are you hiding from us?’ A run snaked up Toad’s tights from her shoe. It stopped at a mole-like glob of purple nail polish.
I hacked wetly, grasping a chunk of teased hair back with my glove, Hal’s hand on my back as Pelly played what sounded like a eulogy.
The bar moved in a dark glow that bruised the arms slanting bottles to mouths, the faces that opened on to our group as we walked in, Toad pushing us rookies ahead as though herding cattle. I stumbled through first, cutting a hall through the crowd, the crush of chests against my shoulders, beery laughter on my face and the flash of teeth. Bare arms humid against mine, the sway of ribs on the room’s muscled backbeat, damp skin of hands gripping my shoulders, strangers laughing at the gown, the makeup, their voices insistent and smeared. Roxy’s hand curled around my arm from behind as I tugged and pulled her through.
The evening tripping together into a dot-to-dot: blurs and gaps, flares of heady clarity, square moments drenched with light and noise. On the dance floor, my limbs flowing boneless, indigo faces around me exotic among their musky spread of feathers, hips tilting subliminal. I never danced. Why didn’t I dance, I never did, but it was this, it was dancing, and why didn’t I do it every day? Heezer, on the ground doing the worm to a song that had an accent, and the dancers jumped in circles around her – everyone jumping as soon as the song came on – arms raised, shirts bouncing up with flashes of perfect bruised stomach, and Heezer on the ground, body kinking forward, while Toad mimed a spanking. I never realized this – that Heezer was so hilarious, and I had to crouch to the ground, my laughter was so crippling.
The dim shrill of a whistle across the dance floor, and I gathered the booze-drenched hem of my gown in both hands, heading again toward the bar.
‘Ladies. Shooters.’ Toad announced when we were all there, all the h
alf-eyed rookies. She had offered the same declaration the past four or five or six times she summoned us with the whistle, extending her palms toward us, a benevolent dip of her chin. ‘Ladies. Shooters.’ As though bestowing a blessing on our weak-necked heads.
I stumbled fast into the bathroom, catching the toe of a Sorel behind me, and waited. Wait. The bathroom lurched under my feet, as though I stood in a boat. And the tequila. Wait. I could still taste the tequila’s burn in the back of my throat as I looked in the mirror and pulled my eyes open with my fingers. I’d forgotten about the hair. God, the hair. I was so incredibly ugly, I had never been uglier.
I pulled myself out of the bathroom, hands on the walls, the room slanted, then lurched through the door, my entrance unintentionally grand. A hand grabbed my arm as I veered back out into the darkness of the bar, and I swept around.
‘Those your dancing boots?’ Jacob said, his hand still on my arm. I stepped toward him, hovered for a moment, words gathering thick on my tongue, then I punched his shoulder.
‘Have I talked to you already?’ I said.
Jacob’s face twisted into a smile. ‘Just got here. The girls got you on some booze, eh? Are you okay?’
I rested my heavy head against the wall, closed my heavy eyes.
‘I’m hot,’ I said. ‘I’m too hot. I’m hot and I’m ugly.’ I traced a lazy circle around my face with a finger.
‘Hey,’ Jacob said. I could feel his breath close to my face. ‘Even dressed like that, you’re not ugly.’
I opened my eyes, and Jacob peered at me. ‘Are you okay?’
The music pushed from inside of my head, trapped. I winced, put my hands over my ears. Jacob’s ears peaked up into triangular points. I wanted to touch one of those strange tips. So I did. He smiled and took my hand, brought it down to my side, held it for a moment, and then let go.
‘I’m too hot,’ I said.
‘You wanna go?’
‘Yes. Yes.’
Quiet. Away from the bar, sound played a strange inversion, noise only in my head, on the inside, silence lounging foreign all around the dressing room, the brown velour couch behind me so strangely empty, misplaced in its tattered skin.
I dressed fast – I could never go that fast, usually. Someone should have been timing me, I thought, as I waddled out to the ice. Jacob, skating around the far end of the rink, bent over and laughed. He kept laughing as he skated, hair venting out, and sprayed me in the shins with ice as he stopped next to me.
‘What?’ I said.
‘I was wondering what took you so long – what happened to just gloves and skates?’
‘No. Full equipment,’ I said. Jacob laughed incredulously.
‘Why?’
‘Safety first.’
‘When did you turn into such a comedian, Isabel?’
I stole the puck from Jacob’s stick, jockeyed it around, and looked across the rink. Quiet. The ice lay empty, one-dimensional except in the corners where it dropped into skies filled with the looming boards, the belled lights above.
I gave Jacob a sloppy pass and he began to skate, cutting a trail along the boards, his long strides, and I followed, sluggish. My legs filled with tequila.
Momentum. A flood in my legs then, the flash of my reflection on the glass as I stumbled into speed. Chasing Jacob around the periphery. The scrape of my blades tight against my ears, the hum fading slowly down. And Jacob’s back shifting under his jacket, shoulders rolling, white of teeth over his shoulder as he looked back at me, catching up. And then he was skating harder, I could see it in the way he crouched closer to the ice, in the lengthening of his strides. My breath magnified in my ears. The tinny scrape of my blades, muscles in my thighs coiling tighter. And my own head caught in the corner of my eye, gliding along the pane of glass, black of the helmet and the cage, and my face unreachable beneath.
Jacob breaking out into the middle of the ice, pivoting backwards to face me, and that smile as though he were cheating and getting away with it, and then the puck on my stick blade, and the instinctive give of the stick. Everything fast now. I didn’t see the puck until it was back on Jacob’s stick, and then my legs moving for the net, and the pass right before the blue line that made the sting come through my gloves, and my stick lifting, and then the awkward twist in my knee, so fast, the blade edge burying in the ice like an axe, my feet too careless, too slow, and I was falling, limbs tumbling away from each other, away from the slick suck of the ice, the ordered memory of my body. The air thickened. And I hit the ice – knee, elbow, chest, elbow, knee, groin, head. I laughed, face down.
‘Good thing you wore your equipment.’
I turned my head, laughter gushing from my belly like a tap I couldn’t turn off, and saw Jacob’s knee, skate folded underneath, stick nestled against the bottom of his thigh. I gathered myself up into a ball on my side, undid my helmet cage and let it dangle open sideways, the bright lights scratching against my dry eyes. The laughter ran out.
‘I’m going to tell you something strange,’ I said.
‘Okay.’ Jacob shifted his legs.
‘My dad died, right? Didn’t know him and all that. But, I don’t know, it’s like when you swim.’ I took my glove off, made my hand into a wave. ‘And you’re swimming because there’s the lake all around you and you’d drown if you didn’t and maybe that’s the same with skating. You skate because you’re thrown on to the ice because your dad played hockey. So you swim because you have to.’ I didn’t see the words coming before I said them. They just appeared, magnetic against the ice, logic reversing and colliding and settling. Then silence. Or the absence of the hum in my ears, jarred out when I hit the ice, like getting the wind knocked out of me.
‘I can see that,’ Jacob said carefully.
I nodded, helmet cage clanging.
He paused. ‘Well, look at us here. We haven’t drowned yet.’
I was cold. The ice, at eye level, was blinding, fluorescent lights trapped on its surface. Blazing white. I rolled over onto my back, and then sat up, cage swinging. I took off my helmet, tossed it at my feet.
‘Ah well,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering how I got so drunk tonight and then how I got here and so I was just thinking about ... ’
His eyes on my forehead. He reached over and I felt his fingertips pushing hair back from my face, felt the skin on the pads of his fingers growing damp with my sweat. My eyes heavy on the teeth biting his lower lip, their precise and crooked edges, and then he leaned in, his breath on my nose. And then I was kissing him before his lips were even there. I couldn’t see my movements before, couldn’t recognize them while they were happening – they were just there, the falling motions of my body, suddenly, and I was wondering if I should stop, his hands in my hair, the strangled snare of tangles against his fingers, dull pain of the tug in my scalp, and then his fingers breaking through. And my back against the ice, not thinking about stopping any more, the chill through my shoulder pads, through my jersey, through my neck guard, and then the back of my neck wet and cold, melting the ice beneath it, while the skin under my chin burned, neck guard gone, although I couldn’t remember him taking it off. His hands on my shoulders and back, fingers prying underneath the pads, over top of my jersey, and I moved my hand to his shoulder, down the length of his arm, and there, his muscle unravelling under my hand as his palm moved down my side, the jersey coming up. I arched my back to get it off, and then he stopped, and I didn’t care because there under my finger was the birthmark beneath his chin, and it felt like Braille, and tasted like salt, the grained remains of sweat on the nerves of my tongue. My jersey caught under my armpits and Jacob’s hands firm on both my shoulders, pushed.
‘You’re drunk – we shouldn’t – ’
I pulled the jersey over my head, the grating rip of Velcro, and then the shoulder pads gone, the elbow pads twisted up on my forearms, but I didn’t care, kissing him again, pushing his back toward the ice. Hovering over him, his lips moving from side to side, shaking his
head, even as he slipped his hand under my T-shirt, fingers flitting past the hockey pants, down to the small of my back. Jacob shaking his head, and me thinking, I am kissing, and then not thinking, the crush of my chest on top of his as his head turned. His hands moved out of my shirt, and I wanted them back under, but he was pushing again, gently, and then hard enough to get me off his chest.
‘Iz, no. No. Come on, you’re drunk.’
Wait. Wait.
Getting up off the ice, and thinking as I skated. Thinking about the word no, thinking about bed. Jacob calling my name behind me. Finally, thinking. And then the couch in the bathroom, sitting there so I could sort it out in my mind, all of it draining into place now, my lips swollen and dry, eyes heavy, and Jacob gone.
Two
Sig named me. She made it seem as though this task were bestowed upon her, a giant honour – yes, madame, oh yes. I recognized the overacting even when I was young. She was trying too hard, but I didn’t tie this behaviour to any particular variables, as I didn’t link her zealous swearing after Friday-night Bingo, her maudlin embraces of the dog, to the sharp smell on her breath when she bent over my bed to rub noses, Eskimo kisses goodnight. Goodnight, champ. Sayonara. Bon soir. Ciao. That incalculable behaviour of grown-ups.
Sig revealed my namesake one summer, around the time when childhood edges began unravelling, icons blown out: first the Tooth Fairy, then Santa Claus and on and on, magic dissolving like a baby tooth in the depths of a Coke bottle.
The girls in my class were named after goddesses: Athena, Helen. They had modern names that seemed directly linked to their popularity: Tiffany, Brittany, Jaime, Brooke. The gorgeous names. They wore them like boas, like diamonds. And in the midst of the attendance sheet’s movie-credit names was mine, Isabel. My namesake, apparently, was Isobel Stanley, daughter of Lord Stanley, as in the Stanley Cup. There it was: I was named after a non-mythical hockey goddess, who was probably an ankle-burner.
Sig produced an ancient newspaper clipping. The photograph was black and white and blurry in a vaguely creepy way, like photos of the Loch Ness Monster, so each of the six players – five in black, one white – was faceless. As though someone had gone over the picture and blurred the lines of their bodies, smeared their noses and mouths, their eyes, with an eraser. They looked nearly identical, all around the same height, shadows cast over the blurred faces by extravagant hats, hats tall and angled like wedding cakes. Skirts draped in reverent folds to their ankles, hiding the moving angles of their legs. Those skirts seemed so deliberately elusive, I wondered what they were hiding. Did they wear pants under there? Their legs would have frozen – they were playing on a nameless pond somewhere in Ontario. I knew January in Ontario. Later, I realized that what they were hiding was the fact of these legs, a secret in itself. The hot friction of skin while skating, muscle blooming under the spell of this heat, swelling voluptuous. Quadriceps, hamstrings, gluteus maximus. They were denying these names, pretending none of that heat existed, under the decadent folds. Proper ladies.