by Cara Hedley
She touched her fingers to her lips and tilted her head. ‘And that’s my story.’ She smiled. ‘What do you think? Have we bonded yet?’
‘Pretty close,’ I said, and she winked at me and flipped the sheet in her lap. Stan ambled past and gave us a questioning thumbs-up.
‘We’re good,’ Boz said to him, and Stan looked pleased.
‘I knew you two would be a good pair,’ he said, nodding happily, then wandered off toward Woo and Toad. Stan seemed perpetually on the hunt for some elusive team adhesive: stick together, tight, like glue, good, we’re gelling, girls, we’re really coming together now. He’d walked through twice already and called out ‘Team bonding!’ like a photographer reciting ‘Cheese!’ and hoping for that shot with everyone smiling in perfect order, no one caught in a blink.
‘Getting to know you, getting to know all about you ... ’ Boz sang, her singing voice a shade deeper than when she talked. A framed black-and-white next to her head showed two men in buckskin parkas standing over a deer, its blood casting a Rorschach pattern onto a bed of snow. I wanted to know: did she fight the boyfriend after he punched her?
She cleared her throat.
‘Okay, Number Five. Here we go. Number Five – why do you play hockey? Do you want to go first again, babe?’
I shook my head. ‘No, you go ahead.’
‘Okay ... wow. Hmmm.’ She cupped her chin with a hand and stared at the floor. ‘I guess it’s supposed to be a simple answer, huh? You know, “Because I love it,” or something along those lines. And I do love it, of course, but I don’t want to just ... ’
She stared at the floor again, head tilted.
‘Okay, I’ll tell you a story. When I was at home this summer, my brother was watching this show on TV. This gangster movie. And I usually can’t stand those movies, with the shooting and all that, but I was hanging out with my brother, so I just sucked it up. Anyways, so there was one scene where they had this guy tied in a chair, and they were trying to get information out of him, but he was resisting – the usual. They say, Tell us or we cut off one of your fingers. But he still doesn’t tell them, he’s squirming and crying – it was awful. So, of course, they cut it off – I didn’t watch that part. But that whole night I was thinking about it, because it was so brutal – but also, I was thinking, what would I do that for? You know, sit there in a chair and let someone cut off my finger. I was up all night. Anyway, you don’t need to know all that. My point is, I suppose, hockey. It passed the test. I asked myself, cut off your finger or never play hockey again in your life? I know this probably sounds stupid, but I pictured never playing again and the way that I would just suffer, you know? The way I see it, it comes down to this equation, a sort of math. The physical pain of having a finger cut off goes away, heals in a relatively short period of time, versus losing hockey forever, which, I think, would be like walking around with a broken heart for the rest of your life. Like a never-ending breakup. With your man. You know? So do it, then. Chop it off. Done.’
Boz pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. ‘Whew. I talk too much.’
‘What else?’ I said.
‘Sorry?’
‘What else passed the test?’
‘Oh. Well.’ Boz smiled and counted off on her fingers. ‘God. Family. Friends – you guys.’
‘Oh.’
Boz settled back on the couch and laced her hands together. ‘How about you? Do you think you’d do it?’
‘Chop off a finger?’ I looked at my hands doubtfully, spread my fingers wide.
‘Yeah – goodness, that sounds awful coming from someone else’s mouth. You must think I’m morbid.’
‘No, no, it’s okay. Um, would there be anaesthetic?’
Boz smiled and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Anything for the pain?’
Boz leaned forward. ‘Oh, babe, I’m sorry I brought it up. I just didn’t want to say ‘because I love it.’ I’m sorry. I’m disturbing you.’
‘No worries, no. You’re not disturbing me. Yes, I’d trade. I’d – I’d give up the finger.’
I’d never cut off a finger for hockey. I wouldn’t cut off my hair.
I kept going. Boz tilted her head. I wanted to know: how could anyone punch her? I’d tell her the right things, the words that would keep her nodding like that, nodding and nodding and saying ‘mm hmm’ like I was infinitely interesting, like she understood, like she had fought for this interview with me, this was exactly where she wanted to be.
I told her about Kristjan, about his nickname – Norse Giant – and how he’d gotten it. I told her about that playoff game in Junior when he scored all the goals for his team and then the overtime goal too, and how his picture had been on the front page of the Kenora Tribune the next day with a headline reading, Norse Giant Does it Again. I told her about all the trophies in the Rec Centre engraved with his name. About how he’d died, the bridge of sticks at his funeral, how Sig told me sometimes people looked like they’d seen a ghost when they saw me as a kid, with my mushroom haircut and boy’s swimming trunks. I told her about Buck’s lake rinks, the way he measured and scraped them perfectly square, and then more snow came, and he was out there the next morning with his measuring tape, Sig laughing at him out the window but never to his face. I told her about Sig naming me after Isobel Stanley and my suspicions that the original Isobel had been an ankle-bender.
Boz leaned back and examined my face. ‘And that’s why you play?’
I nodded.
She smiled quickly and paused. ‘Those are all really good reasons,’ she said. ‘They are.’
Nodding again and again. Not like she was convinced, but like she was trying to convince me. Patience in her voice as though she’d forgiven me for something.
I knew right then is a bullshit line, as Sig would say. As though a life might be beaded together into a string of gaudy epiphanies, one long, lustrous highlight reel.
Like Sig, I refused to believe in such moments, a goal frozen in a highlight reel, the red light behind the net flooding the ice. Call it a TSN Turning Point.
I placed myself in that tree with Hal and Toad, passing a rock between my hands, the heaviest I could find, waiting to launch it at the boyfriend’s skull, but I also felt a brief glimmer I would never admit to. Understanding flung from the branches, a cold and brutal thread of it, out to the crying boyfriend, how he might have wanted to test Boz’s forgiveness, the self-mutilating love she could lay out there so calmly – to me, a person she’d sung ‘Getting to Know You’ to, practically a stranger, who didn’t understand, who could watch her gestures of hockey adoration like a play, but never move that way, never speak those words, without acting.
I looked around the room. They were all in on it, all my teammates. Their huge love for the game eclipsed any need for reason. It was simple. I felt far away then, floating away from Boz, from the team. As though I’d been watching them from the stands.
My decision wasn’t made right then. But I began to turn, to open toward its possibility. And as possibilities tend to do, it began to grow.
That night, I started to quit hockey.
Sig felt silly, as though she were being tugged unwittingly into ceremony, the dusky shove of the sky, the wind’s lean casting the scene around her with a portentous tenor. Of course, it was Grace’s fault that such things would even cross her mind, all that spiritual jazz she spouted mixed up now, despite Sig’s best efforts, with the eager waves there around the dock, the area she regarded as being as much hers as the jagged square of yard behind their house. She seriously considered, as she shifted the skates in the crook of her arm, disowning Grace.
Of course, her trudge down to the dock, skates in hand, held as much ceremony as did her march down the hallway, magazine in hand, to the bathroom. Truth was, she had no other option. She couldn’t just chuck them out with the trash. She’d imagined their presence out there at the dump among the piles of shunned junk, everything irrevocably broken. She would not subject the
skates to the noncommittal nosing of the dump bears, one of which Sig had recently seen with a sanitary pad stuck to the side of its face.
Nor could they go to the Sally Ann. They’d be scooped up, no doubt, by some heavy-ankled woman who would buy them because she didn’t know any better about skates, and she wouldn’t really use them, but they were cheap, so what the hell. And they’d fit the woman’s feet like a boy’s jacket on a fat man, the leather unfailingly loyal to the contours of Sig’s feet. And the woman would be a shrieker, undoubtedly a Bloody Murder type, whooping and flailing her arms like a drowning swimmer as she toddled around the ice.
No.
Sig stood for a moment at the end of the dock and made an effort to hold the skates casually. She allowed herself a final glance down at them, nothing too lingering. With the same discipline, she forced from her mind the calluses on Buck’s hands – jagged reefs of skin – passing over the skates’ eyelets. Ridiculous to wait when she’d made up her mind. And with every second she stood there the skates gathered to their beaten edges a significance they weren’t worthy of.
She heaved the skates with a grunt. They strained away from each other, laces still binding them together, and flapped vaguely, an ugly moth, rusted wings, before dropping. They splashed Sig’s shins when they went in, and she felt the lake seeping cold through her pants while she watched them sink, parts of blade untouched by rust gathering green as the algae claimed them. They sank quickly.
She bent for a moment, scrubbing angrily at the spots of water on her leg, avoiding the ripples still spilling out from where the skates went in. Then she turned and limped back down the dock, conjuring a Scotch into her hand and wool socks onto her feet. Straight-armed up toward the house that seemed to shrink and shiver on the cusp of winter like a blue-lipped girl. She stopped only briefly and, without looking back, cursed both the loon and train that were sad somewhere across the lake.
The big red W on the left side of the team winter jacket, over the heart, was supposed to forgive the jacket’s lack of fashion. Long and black, the jacket was boxy when the drawstring hidden in the waist wasn’t in use. When I cinched it in, the top part ballooned, the bottom becoming triangular. The first day I wore it, I felt big and puffy and hyper-visible, like I was wearing a mascot costume. The Scarlet crest whittled away my anonymity, narrowed me down.
When I walked down to Dr. Spencer’s desk at the end of English class to pick up a handout, he noticed the jacket and pointed to me, winked and then mimed a slapshot. I gave him a fake laugh, hurrying back to the stairs, and got stuck behind a guy on crutches. I wanted out. Should I have pretended to be a goalie? Should I have pretended to get hit with the puck? What did he want from me? The slapshot, had it been real, would never have gotten off the ice, would have been a low-slow. His flimsy, professorish arms. Imagining Dr. Spencer as an ankle-bender made me feel sad and apologetic.
As I was walking toward University Centre, a few people gave me looks, or maybe I was making it up. Definitely a double-take from a guy in a Canadiens baseball cap – he caught the crest and then looked back at my face like maybe he knew me. I’d started taking the tunnels to the rink for practice, walking through University Centre, past The Rock, a ledge of the wheelchair ramp next to the Snaxtime where the football guys gathered to drink protein shakes together and look at girls. A couple of them nodded at me as I passed.
‘Tough Bruce,’ Darius said at the end of their line-up. He stood and swaggered toward me, pants sagging. Raised his hand. ‘Touch it.’ I slapped his palm. He’d never talked to me before.
‘I love you chicks. You tell Boz I say hi, all right?’
‘I will,’ I said, palm still ringing as I walked.
The jacket had made me less careful. Jacob rounded the corner, coming at me with that careless amble, eyes jerking when he saw me. Wearing an identical jacket. It was the embarrassment of wearing the same outfit to school as a girl in your class – but twisted, like a balloon animal, into a hermaphroditic elephant. I didn’t stop. I pivoted on my toes, mid-step, heart thudding in my ears, and walked the other way. Jacob caught up and walked next to me, head wedged down as though trying to pry up my chin.
‘We’re twins,’ he said. I could see his teeth in the corner of my eye.
‘Absolutely not,’ I said, kept walking.
‘Could you stop for a second? I promise – just a second.’
I stopped, body perpendicular to his, eyes on his shoes. The University Centre lights sizzled yellow. Jacob didn’t say anything, too close. I took a step back, raised my eyes slightly and caught the birthmark under his chin. My eyes snapped away, and back again into the rink, nighttime, trying to lift the skin of that person who had rolled on the ice with Jacob. Impossible. I could only watch the two bodies, the strange alphabet etched by their limbs; the words my fingers had held were now an impossible story. He was looking at my face, I could feel it.
‘I guess I just wanted to apologize?’ he said.
I tucked my chin down farther.
‘Are you hiding from me?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Well, then you disappeared.’
I looked up quickly, down again. Teasing eyes.
‘I’ve been right here,’ I said.
‘You don’t have to be embarrassed – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left you there.’
‘We’re not talking about it.’
Jacob laughed. ‘Well, how about if we eat ice cream and not talk about it?’
‘I have to go to practice,’ I said. I looked up as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket, whipped out his dining-hall meal card and flashed it at me like a big spender. Same jacket, same crest, same drawstring.
‘Daddy’s paying,’ he said, straightfaced.
I laughed a bit. ‘I’m late already, so.’ I started to walk toward the tunnels again.
‘Isabel,’ he called. I half-turned. ‘You’ve pulled off an impossible feat. Looking beautiful in the team jacket. Just so you know.’
Toad and Pelly walked up to us then, Toad’s face lit with an expectant smile.
‘It’s the lovebirds in their matching shit. You’re like one of those old couples on a two-seater bike that dress all matchy, eh?’
‘Tweet tweet,’ Jacob flapped his hands at his sides, then he did a Michael Jackson pivot and walked the other way.
‘Toad,’ I said, face hot, as we walked into the tunnels.
‘What, accuser-face? Where’s your lover pride, eh?’
‘He’s not my lover.’
‘But he’s cute,’ Pelly said. ‘No, he’s handsome.’
A small bump of pride.
‘You know, you’re allowed to like boys, champ,’ Toad grinned. ‘You have our permission.’
‘I know I’m allowed to like boys,’ I said. This was the kind of logic Toad inspired.
‘So where’s your boyfriend then?’ Pelly said to Toad.
Toad looked at her like she was crazy. ‘What would I need a dude for when I’ve got all you losers harassing me at all times?’
This made strange sense. We were triplets in our jackets. They’d rescued me from Jacob. I imagined my stride sharper, heavier, calves biting off the end of each step with teeth. Legs that could swagger if I wanted them to.
I went to the bathroom after practice and when I came back, Jacob’s hockey card was lying in my stall. A picture of him taking a slapshot, following through, eyes wide. On the back, they’d circled part of his player profile in purple marker: Premier power forward. Scrawled below, Reach for the stars! Dream big! Go for the gold! Yer Lover.
Toad was grinning at me. ‘Premier power. Like the sounds of that.’
‘Come on,’ I groaned. Stuffed the card into my backpack.
‘I’m telling you, he’s handsome,’ Pelly said.
‘Whatever,’ I said. Put my hands up. Surrender: the only safe strategy. ‘Okay, whatever.’
‘And I resent – ’ Toad dropped her jaw as she looked at Heezer. ‘Ooh, Nelly! Heez. Yo
u getting some action tonight?’
Heezer turned toward us and looked down at the bra, a lacy, rose-pink push-up, a fake diamond heart in the middle nearly eclipsed by the cliffs the bra made of her breasts. The underwear some of them wore beneath their ordinary clothes – under their T-shirts and jeans, their sweats even. Different lives under there, hidden glittering worlds – after they’d peeled off the sweaty bondage of sports bras we all wore under our equipment and to the gym. I was still trying to figure some of it out. The complicated wiring, the delicate bones of Heezer’s bras that allowed them to stand upright in her stall, as though on legs. Hal’s minuscule thongs, which Toad called butt floss.
‘Nah, working,’ Heezer said. She shrugged and glanced at her watch. ‘Shit!’ She turned to her stall and whipped a white tank top over her head, a blur of orange lettering on the back before she threw on a hoodie, quick, zipping it up to her chin.
‘Holy shit,’ Toad breathed, gripping her chest. ‘Whoa. Okay, stop. Back the truck up, Heezy. You’re – no – I didn’t just.’
Heezer ignored her, throwing a limp handful of gym clothes into her backpack.
‘What happened?’ Pelly asked me. I shrugged and Pelly rolled her eyes at Toad, who was taking tentative steps toward Heezer, hand outstretched.
‘Just take the hoodie off for a second, Heezer. Please.’
‘Toad, I’m late.’ Heezer turned to face her, cheeks red, her orange hair twisted into a swinging bauble at the nape of her neck.
‘What’s going on?’ Hal rifled a brush into her stall as she walked across the room from the bathroom. She stood, fists on hips, and tilted her head at Boz.
‘Just let her go if she’s late, Toady,’ Boz said.