by Cara Hedley
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘Taking a walk.’ He didn’t look at me, examined the zipper on his jacket.
‘Why?’
His eyes scraped across my face.
‘Okaaaay,’ I said, buying time. ‘What – are we breaking up? Why are you acting so...’ It kind of started as a joke, but dribbled away from me, my voice cracking a bit at the end. Scared of his face.
‘Isabel. There’s no such thing as breaking up.’ He sounded tired. He paused and looked at the door. ‘There’s this conversation, there’s me taking a walk, there’s us sleeping in our own beds tonight. And then there’s tomorrow.’ His bulldozer eyes on my face again. ‘Seems to me you look at your life, Isabel, like you’re looking through a telescope. Through one end, things are huge, they’re giant, swallowing your life. And then you flip the telescope over to the other end and everything you’re looking at’s microscopic, it’s so small you can almost pretend it doesn’t exist, you can almost convince yourself.’
I wanted to force him to stay now, close the door. I wanted to tackle him to the bed. ‘That sounds like a breakup,’ I said.
He hovered at the door. ‘Your world,’ he said finally, shrugging wearily. He shut the door quietly behind him. The surprising fact of his disappearing back, like a body spasm upon entering the May lake, cannonballing, and the ice gone out just hours before.
I wasn’t sad yet.
I told myself this: when he guessed at me like that, he was just plucking out another rib of his own, leaving spaces open like doors. Doors anyone could walk through. I told myself: he’s the one who’s going to get hurt. My skin was growing layers. It was my world. I didn’t feel any pain at all.
Sigstood in the doorway to the living room and watched the skates. They lay on their sides across a blanket of newspaper, in front of the fireplace. The boots now dry and stiff, mummified brown. She sighed and went over, ran her fingers down the rows of eyelets.
Just beyond them, next to the couch, sat Grace’s old blue duffel bag. Sig hesitated, then pulled the bag over, opened the zipper. A shaggy nose poked out, dirty grey fur and the musty, ashlike smell of a fur coat left forgotten in a trunk. A taxidermy eye, luminous brown, with a liquid, lacquered centre. Mouth open in a friendly grin and, at the back of its throat, the screen through which you looked.
Grace had dropped the bag off before she left for Thunder Bay to visit her grandkids. The wolf costume was part of her gig as mascot for a hockey league for kids on a couple of the neighbouring reserves. The kids bussed into town once a week and Grace put on the wolf costume and danced around like a fool and they ate it up. Grace thought it might be good for Sig to fill in for her while she was out of town, a reason to get out of the house, to give back to the community and all that, and Sig had given that a firm no – her exact words being ‘Hell no, woman. You’ve lost your frigging mind.’
And yet there was a kind of suppleness around the joints of the day, a pliability that made Sig feel like hockey. Throwing the duffel bag into the back of the truck was not a commitment. When she walked in the arena’s back entrance, past the closed dressing room doors, and the tiny room was wide open, she thought, what the hell, she might as well try it on. Trying it on was not a commitment.
She worked the heavy suit on with some difficulty, already beginning to sweat, her right leg refusing to slip into its place at first, pawing the air like the hoof of an agitated horse. When she pulled the costume slowly up over her shoulders and zipped the front, it cloaked her body with surprising weight. Her steps felt suddenly athletic, this flexing of forgotten muscle, every movement meeting a reckoning. Her body became deliberate.
When she put on the head and looked at herself in the mirror through the screen in its mouth, the embarrassment she’d anticipated was there, absolutely. But it felt detached somehow, this separate thing that existed outside of the costume’s layers, beyond the small cross-hatched stitches filtering her vision through the wolf ’s mouth. And so she was able to take a few steps down the hall. She wasn’t responsible for this beast. It wasn’t her.
Nothing happened. The game went on, the players’ knock-kneed enthusiasm spilling them all over the ice, a few parents laughing and shouting in the stands. Kids in winter boots chasing each other around the periphery of the rink.
She made her way slowly to the stands, gripping the outside edge of the boards, dragging the anchored body along. As she approached the stands, glances began to accumulate. One mother bent over and said something to her kid, pointing at Sig. A little boy with a runny nose stopped running mid-stride and stood stock-still, a few feet away, staring with a furrowed brow, as though trying to make the choice between laughter or tears. Sig could have turned around then, gone back to the dressing room, but she was almost at the stands and she needed a rest. She glanced up at the scoreboard – that automatic eye stutter tattooed into the brain of a lifer hockey parent – and sat on the bottom bench. Second period. People were staring now. This was ridiculous.
After Kristjan, after Buck, she’d been suddenly, entirely visible. Her head blown up with her own gaudy grief and other people’s sympathy, swelling into cartoonlike proportions. A garish boo-hoo face that everyone could see coming from a mile away. And yet, strangely, mercifully, the trick: she was hidden. They hadn’t seen her shrink. But there she was. A kernel buried somewhere under the padded layers.
They started to trickle over, the kids. Tentative at first, fingers thrust in their mouths, eyes rolling up her body to the shaggy face. Unused to this position – the prostrate, seated mascot. A pigtailed girl with chapped, wind-burnt cheeks shuffled up, paused, then leaned over and poked Sig in the gut, an experiment in bravery. Sig felt the poke like a touch on scar tissue: not the specific touch, but the numbed idea of it.
She got to her feet then, a bit unsteady, and they giggled, all these brown-eyed kids – five, seven, eight of them. Watching her carefully, their eyes dripping fear and anticipation, looking to each other for cues. They had her penned in on all sides. There was nothing else she could do. She raised her arms. She growled.
The kids screamed in surprise and relief. This was what they knew. Not Sig, but the wolf. She’d give them the wolf. They shrieked laughter and threw themselves at her. Sig shook her hands in the air. She shifted from foot to foot. She taunted them more and more, so they came at her harder, flinging themselves at her legs.
And there. There. She could almost feel it. Their little hands.
We went back the Thursday after Terry’s funeral. Moon had cancelled practice for a couple of days, her way of flying the Scarlet flag at half-mast. Plastic bags overflowed from Hal’s stall. No one mentioned the buffet’s cancerous growth since Hal had started missing practice, well before Terry died. It grew out of a sense of team duty, pack mentality, the bags marred with inadvertent competition – no one wanted to be that person, the only one who hadn’t contributed. Maybe it grew from collective confusion too. We’d been programmed to look at food mathematically, converting calories into time, distance. How long would a meal last us – how far to Regina before our fuel ran out, how many shifts into a game. One road trip, we’d arrived at the hotel restaurant to find Moon had ordered us all the Low-Cal Breakfast by accident: a minor stem of grapes, saucerful of Special K, small glass of orange juice. Outrage bristled the tables, some calling the waitress for menus – they’d pay with their own money if they had to – and Toad pounded the table with her knife and fork, bellowing, ‘Where’s the fat at, yo?’ We had a game to play that morning; the Low-Cal Breakfast wouldn’t last us even until warm-up. So, once the buffet for Hal was initiated, we didn’t know when to stop; the distance we were fuelling was unfathomable.
Smells layered our corner: cinnamon, garlic, yeast, melted cheese, broccoli, chocolate, hockey gloves, baby powder. Our hands conducted wafts as we pressed on shin pads, pulled haloes of tape around our knees and ankles, plastered Velcro straps, threaded skates – all this with awkward speed. Too much quiet, so
we dodged it, ducking into our boxes, the upper shelves of our stalls. This quiet was a dangerous brand, the kind that comes after you crash your bike, while you’re still counting the scrapes.
‘You know that fucking prof I was telling you about?’ Toad said, fingers all twitchy on her shoulder pad straps.
‘Yes?’ Boz said, her head down near her knees. She pulled a sock out from the lip of her skate.
‘He’s being a total dick again – you should see this essay I just got back. A massacre, these huge red slashes all over it – it literally looks like the pages have been stabbed to death. I’m thinking he might be asking for a flaming bag of shit to come the way of his front step.’
‘Oh, babe, maybe you should just ask – ’
‘No, I’ve had enough of this bullshit. If he’s such a fucking Einstein, he can figure out how to put out the fire without getting shit all over his urban-ghetto sneakers. I refuse to go kiss his scrawny ass – that’s probably what he wants – to see if he can get the hockey chick down on her knees. Jesus, it’s not my problem I have bigger muscles. Maybe if he fucking extricated himself from the library, and supplanted himself into the gym, we wouldn’t have this redpen issue.’
Boz opened her mouth and closed it again as Woo walked over and pulled a plastic bag from her backpack. The careful way she plucked the handles, pulling up and out, nestling the bag carefully into Heezer’s stall. We all made our eyes busy with our equipment, as though Woo stood there stripping for the shower. More garlic, with a hint of hot mustard.
‘Ewww,’ Pelly said, wrinkling her nose. ‘It reeks over here.’
Toad snapped a look over at her, irritation bristling on her pale face, but Pelly wasn’t looking.
‘I had piano before this?’ she said to me. ‘And my piano teacher, he had this really bad bret? Like, so bad. Like, what’s it called – heliprosis?’
‘Halitosis?’ I offered.
‘Heliprosis – what are you, Icelandic? Fucking Frenchie,’ Toad grumbled into her shoulder pads as she pulled them over her head.
‘Like, his bret was bad. And I was thinking, what if I had heli – you know. What if I had it too? Would I even know it? Like, can you smell your own bad bret?’ Pelly looked at me sideways as she tugged on her laces.
‘Um, I think you’d know,’ I said.
‘Okay, but would you tell me if – ?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Pelletier! Shut up and throw me some tape!’ Toad flicked out a palm, her lips in a thin line.
‘What’s your problem?’ Pelly instinctively hid the tape behind her back, her voice quavering nasal.
‘Fuck you, that’s my problem. You’re being a totsi. Tape!’
Pelly looked like she might cry. ‘Why are you being so mean?’
‘Here.’ Boz rummaged around in her box and handed Toad a roll of tape. ‘There you go, Toady. It’s all good. Don’t worry about it, Pell.’
‘But, like!’ Pelly looked at me, the whine transferred to her eyes.
‘Jesus fucking Christ, this tape is out. Does the universe not want me to have fucking tape?’ Toad barked, spiking the empty roll onto the ground.
‘Oh, babe, maybe you should – ’ Boz put her hand out to touch Toad’s arm, but Toad slid from her reach, up off the bench.
‘And you know what? These – ’ she pointed to the mess of plastic bags ‘ – are fucking tacky. Doesn’t anyone see this?’
She pivoted sharply and began ripping containers from the bags, flinging them behind her. They fluttered drunkenly to the floor, the air folding new smells into our corner.
Toad clattered Tupperware and casserole dishes and cookie tins into Heezer’s stall. The lid of a margarine container came off and brownies tumbled into a pile of brown rubble. My mouth watered, my stomach rumbling hunger or warning. When I walked in, I hadn’t known if it was them, the external lean of grief I’d felt at Terry’s funeral, or if it was me. These boundaries were becoming harder to trace, like the garbage in the dressing room, the stalls all bleeding together – harder to tell where their mess left off and my own began.
Toad turned and began to gather the bags in her arms, shoulder pads shifting awkwardly as she crouched, head comically small above the huge equipment. Glaring, she looked up and took stock of our faces. Her eyes settled on me like Hal. That look that said you were about to be enlisted, useless to try to escape. Toad wasn’t as good at it, though; there was a kind of listlessness around her eyes. Her mouth was softer – a joking mouth even when she was furious, the threat curled in her lips that they could break at any time.
‘Iz, grab the rest, eh?’
I nodded quickly and crouched next to her, grabbed at the slippery skins and wadded them into the crook of my arm. Pelly watched me, frowning.
I followed Toad out into the hall, past the garbage can in the dressing room. We’d both already put on our skates, so our walk down the hall was a tandem waddle, bouquets of bags blooming ghostly from our hands. The garbage can inside the door to the rink was overflowing with ketchup-smeared cardboard baskets, Styrofoam cups, banana peels. A ripe, hot stench clouded around it.
Toad grunted in frustration. ‘Apparently no one works in this place.’
She stalked off around the perimeter of the ice, following the curve of boards to the back door, the one past Ed’s office that led to the parking lot. She flung it open and looked over her shoulder for me. At her back, I peered past the bulk of her shoulder pads, out into the combined grey of the parking lot and the night filtering in.
All hockey players have been instilled with the healthy fear of concrete; we’ve all imagined the sound our skates might make against it if we dared venture past the islands of black rubber. The intolerable scrape, fever-dream screech, fingernails against a chalk-board. Blade edges lost in a heartbeat.
We were trapped, Toad and I, marooned by our blades. Toad threw the bags overhand from the doorway, like she was pitching a ball, and I watched their white edges catch at the orange sky as they winged away on the breeze. I shut my eyes. I threw the bags like that, with my eyes closed, and when I looked again, they were scattered at the foot of the door, scuttling small tics across the pavement, the wind holding its breath.
A hockey game is the same story told over and over again. Shift the plot around, switch the characters, change the ending a bit, but it’s all the same and we already know how it will end. Even if the scoreboard doesn’t give you what you want after the last seconds have fallen down over the players’ helmets and the final horn has bounced off the ice, you’ll still be okay. It’s just a game. A safe place for people to put their hope. The promise of trying again and again. This is what they tell us.
U of A loped slow arcs along the boards toward the net, yellow and green, sprinting up around the red line toward the sloppy line of us waiting at the gate. Hard slow hard slow. The hammered blare of AC / DC and the announcer clearing his throat into the microphone.
‘Here come your Winnipeg University Scarrrr-lets!’
Flooding fast onto the ice, finding our rivets under the crowd’s eyes, quick circles.
The same circles. A few hours earlier, I’d written a history exam, a hundred of us hunched over identical booklets, all those blue lines, digging at the pages with our pens as though we might gradually unearth some buried machine, some system to initiate us into action. In Sam Hall, we skated these blue lines. We dug at the ice with our blades. We weren’t finding anything.
Spilling ourselves around the circles. The dull thunk of pucks against Tillsy’s pads. Warming up, revving our legs like snow-stunned cars, forcing the blood thaw.
The same circles, but Hal wasn’t there. It wasn’t like the whole team was injured just because she wasn’t playing; teams are adaptable, shapeshifters, growing over the holes, the hurt parts, inventing new ways to thrive. Hal was our captain and a ringer, but the team could reinvent itself around her absence for one game, Heezer taking her position on the first line, the line shifting, stretching, a different ladder of han
ds reaching toward the goal.
She wasn’t just MIA. Her absence, that loss into which she’d disappeared, had enacted a violence on each of us. You couldn’t see it, but it was there, as though we’d all gone out on our days off and gotten into a gigantic scrap, each of us limping back to the ice, to this game. The evidence hidden under our equipment, in the shadows of our helmets.
Our legs weren’t in it. Moon could see this before we even hit the ice. She’d tweaked our line combos, hoping this minor disorientation might jolt us awake. She wanted us chipping the puck past the trap. She wanted the 2–3 Press. She wanted.
‘Listen,’ she’d sighed in the dressing room after laying out our strategy. ‘I know we’ve all had a rough week and we’re worried about Hal.’ Here, she’d tried to goose up her tone a bit. ‘But we’ve gotta just get out there and give it a hundred and ten. Play every shift like it’s your last. And just ... keep it off the ice.’ No one said anything afterward, the silence pointedly empty, as though it should be filled with a gaudy Amen. Her words held a brassy quality, a Don Cherry monologue delivered by a bad actor. They weren’t hers.
‘Just imagine,’ Sig said once as I hovered in a snowbank next to the lake rink Buck cleared each winter, terrified of the ice’s deep-bellied percussion. These sounds seemed to come from the dark purple fissures threaded through the ice, bruised mouths that might creak open at any time, swallowing me whole.
Sig stood in the middle of the rink in her prehistoric skates with the long, sabre-toothed blades and she told me to imagine that the same family of giants who bowled in the sky during the summer – the ones who made thunder – moved south in the winter and there they were, playing, far beneath the ice. Instantly, I could see this: the sky-sized ice ruled by giants. She tapped her stick and shrugged and the ice sounds shrunk suddenly on that small jerk of her shoulders. With one touch of her hockey stick.
Moon wanted us to imagine. Imagine the ice was a safe place to put our hope. Imagine Hal and Terry never existed, just for one game. Keep it off the ice. I looked around the room at my team-mates’ faces. We didn’t believe.