by Daniel Perry
It’s not quite a sport, and not quite a pageant, and Precision is a stupid name because there’s always that imprecise person tucked out of sight in the back, like the guys who can’t dance — all the guys — in the Currie Community Theatre musicals. That girl was me, making up the points my skills lost with my petroleum-jellied smile and hairsprayed-down skirt. I hung on till the max age, twenty-one, Senior Double A — I was driving back from Fanshawe College for practices — and even that year, I walked the moist-aired arena hallway smelling the French fries and feeling the familiar half-hope, half-dread butterflies, unsure which half went with made the team or cut. In no particular order (my mom, the coach, always said), Megan was atop the list again and I was twentieth. No one begrudged Megan — it wasn’t her spot they were after — but the girls who didn’t see their names hated me for barely scraping through and went home in tears and bitched, Of course Jessie made the team. It wasn’t my fault, though: every summer another skater left town or got pregnant or grew overnight into the massive farm girl her mother had long been, leaving me holding the last pair of hips once again, turning the four-spoke wheel out from the centre face-off dot.
IT’S CALLED PRECISION because there are twenty bodies on the ice, which is more than a hockey game, counting even the referees. If you’re not where you’re supposed to be a collision’s a risk, knee-on-knee or head-to-head and you’re not wearing pads. The boys who play hockey know how much those hurt; the boys who figure skate, less so, but by age seven most have traded toe picks and leather for sticks and skates with hard boots, and intermission performances for three sweaty periods. The only boy who didn’t was Brian Callaghan, and he was the best skater we had — better than Megan, even. His parents argued with the club executive for a few seasons, demanding to know why a boy couldn’t be on the Precision team, but eventually they dropped it, to Brian’s relief. He was already the club workhorse, partner to every girl who skated pairs, and in addition to his singles program he cooked up wacky rock-and-roll routines for the end-ofyear fundraiser. When he was thirteen, he slicked his blond hair back and his mom altered an old pair of his dad’s black jeans. They were too big in the crotch but close everywhere else, and behind giant black sunglasses he vamped his way around the oval to Pretty Woman. My age group waited to perform next, and when he skated past us at the corner of the rink he pointed at me, tongue curled for the Rrrowr. It hit me in the throat and sent a charge through my body suit — along the seams, around the hips, down to where they met in the middle.
Brian lived for the year-end show because he’d never stood a chance against the Diamonds; while their boys had been protected through Montessori schools and Children’s Museum memberships, Brian was general population in Currie. He quit skating in Grade Nine after an ass-whupping at lunch hour, when Chad Mitchell, captain of every other team at our high school, dragged him out of the cafeteria to the smoking pit where he and a few other meatheads bruised Brian’s ribs and bloodied his face the way Chad would later bloody mine. Brian didn’t answer when they taunted, “You still feel pretty?” and for a long time he didn’t say another word about figure skating.
Of course that was the first year that I was asked to skate pairs; I’d had my growth spurt young, but all the other girls had caught up, so now I was back among the shortest and the lightest, bigger than only Megan but without the talent. They had scheduled me into Brian’s strong hands and I was ready for him to lift me, but as our first practice had been set for the day after the beating, he didn’t speak of me again, either.
IN OUR LAST season, Megan slipped during the Diamonds’ closing block as she moved into the twentieth position. She wasn’t better than me at that. We didn’t win the meet, but we finished ahead of Forest City for the first time, so Mom called the fire department to get the trucks for a parade like the hockey teams had every year no matter where they finished in Tri-County, (usually first), or how they fared in Regionals against a London team, (one upset win ever, thirty years ago, that Hank still talks about).
People say Hockey and Skating support each other because on Friday night, at the last-place Junior C Comets’ games, the Precision team emerges from hockey-stinking dressing rooms to perform between periods while everyone’s rushing to the upstairs lounge to chug a beer. And on hockey parade days, the Senior Double A girls still line the street wearing club jackets over their bodysuits and full competition makeup: bright exaggerated eye shadow, the reddest possible lips and criminal amounts of blush. As the sirens sound, we smile and blow kisses to the boys no matter whether they’re seven-year-old Novices or teenage Juveniles — guys not even good enough for the Comets — because for these boys, this will be as good as it gets. None will leave town for a better team like Megan did. Most won’t leave for college. Most won’t leave at all.
WE FINALLY GOT the fire trucks on a Tuesday afternoon, not a Saturday morning like the hockey players did, and some of us couldn’t even get the time off work. Those who did show up laughed and hugged and cried a little at the fire hall; we’d skated our whole lives, and this was the end of it. We climbed on board and the siren wailed, but when we turned onto Main Street we saw virtually no one, just the Seed-Tribune photographer, our parents, and Brian, in his way-too-small-now Club jacket, which was wet from the shoulder down the front. At his feet was the McDonalds cup thrown from the passing car. They probably yelled, Faggot! too. He stood his ground, though, applauding anyway, and when he caught my eyes and returned my wave with a giant smile, I felt my cheeks flush. Then I blushed more, embarrassed that I had.
Our picture ran in the paper the next week with the caption Victory Parade. The Juveniles hit on us at Brewskie’s the weekend after, saying they were sorry they’d missed it and offering us our kisses now, dropping to their knees and head-butting our thighs as we squirmed away. Most of us giggled and swatted playfully, but I left a bright red handprint on Mitchell’s cheek.
Brian sat apart from it, neither one of them nor one of us, in the little booth in the front corner with a high seatback that blocks the window, shadows all but hiding him from the rest of the bar. He sat there every Friday night, and Saturdays, too, with his pick of girls from the skating club. It was Brandy Crawford that night, youngest on our team — barely nineteen, though it’s not like Brewskie’s checks.
Brandy dumped Brian’s best friend, Mike, for spending too much time hitting on Megan when they worked at the GT together — that’s not how Mike told it, though, after he and I had each moved to London and he began answering my calls after the bars closed and turning up at my place a half-hour later. I used to see him at Brewskie’s, too, when everyone came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, but most times he’d be so smashed with Brian that I’d stop drinking so I could drive them home, shuddering and flooring the gas when I passed the house I grew up in, where Hank still lived, alone.
It was a different story other weekends, when I came back to Currie for no specific occasion and stayed in the apartment my best friend Stella shared with her boyfriend Wade. Brewskie’s would fill on Fridays as always, and Brian would wait in the corner booth for the next girl to come to him, taking the extra step now of covering his lap and hers with her skating club jacket, hiding the hands that could have raised me as they instead dove under a waistband and produced drunken coos and heavy breathing.
THE LAST TIME I saw it happen, the girl was Megan; she was back living at her parents’ place after her perfect fiancé Stephen changed his mind and enrolled at St. Peter’s Seminary. I pointed her out as she climbed off Brian’s lap and smoothed her skirt as though no one knew, the idiot.
“Whatever,” Stella said. “Fucking slut.”
“Mike was so in love with her,” I said. “How could they do that?”
Stella laughed.
“Mike missed his chance.” She narrowed her eyes. “Besides, what do you care? You’ve got him right where you want him.”
I felt my cheeks redden.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Really. I don�
��t want Mike.”
“So what ... you just hate Megan?”
I shook my head, laughing a little.
“I don’t care about Megan.”
Stella’s expression froze, eyebrows raised, mouth halfopen.
“Brian?” she said. “My little brother?”
I exhaled.
“Yeah.”
She put a hand on my shoulder.
“Give it up, Jess.”
“What?” I felt myself getting angry. “We’re grownups now ... I mean, it wouldn’t bother you ... would it?”
She shook her head.
“It’s not that,” she said. “Go get off in the booth if you want. But he’s leaving town next week. He joined the army.”
I looked at Brian and pictured him in khaki green everything, T-shirts and baggy pants and the four-season jacket he’d wear even on his own time. He’d get screamed at for six straight weeks of training then ship out to some garrison town, where he’d go to a bar a lot like Brewskie’s with a new crop of Megans in corner booths like this one.
“Why’d he do that?” I asked.
“He can’t stay here anymore,” Stella said.
It rushed in on me.
“But the booth, with the girls ...?”
She laughed.
“So nobody knows?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Just our family — and my parents will never tell.”
“Did they kick him out?”
“Not exactly,” Stella said. “They’re glad it’s the army, though. My dad thinks killing a man could straighten him out.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“I know.” She smiled a little. “Brian’s always been best with clear objectives, though. Like in skating. And he’s always been so competitive. He’ll love keeping score at the range.”
In my mind I watched him robotically shoot targets now, bull’s-eye every time while I missed mine completely. The last-call bell rang and I walked over and said goodbye to him with a quick hug and a peck on the cheek, so obviously not sexual for him and never would be. I drove back to the city instead of staying the night, and when I got in I called Mike but he didn’t answer this time. I crawled into bed and as I turned out the lamp, the last thing I saw was my club jacket. I shut my eyes but it was still there, hanging limply from the hook on the closet door.
Comets
WADE WORKS IN the yard at Gable’s Nursery, transplanting shrubs and lugging seed bags to the cars in the lot. He shows up every morning in the same grubby Aerosmith T-shirt, but the weather’s so humid that by ten he’s draped it over a fencepost. I watch him the same way I did that first summer, muscles flexed taut in his arms and his chest, six-pack and V-lines pointing down his jeans, cut off at the knees. He never wears sunscreen and I’ve never seen him burn; his skin just gets darker and more like leather every day.
He moved here seven years ago to play Junior C hockey. People say the C stands for “cut,” as in, “Windsor just cut Wade Smith, so now he plays in Currie,” the town as empty as outer space where a guy goes to work on his game or grow into his body before he quits hockey outright. But C’s not the lowest league, D is. That actually stands for “development.” D teams groom players for B, the steppingstone before Major Junior, the Ontario Hockey League, the O. As in “orbit.” With teams in London, Windsor, Sarnia and even Michigan, junior hockey’s the sun in Currie and Centennial Arena is Cape Canaveral, where teenage girls wait for the next rocket out, like I did.
Wade was the Comets’ sixth defenceman, heavy-hitting and slow on his skates. I never pretended he’d make the pros, but his marks were good enough that some forgotten-about hockey team at some football-crazy college in some place like Boise, Idaho would have given him a scholarship, had he applied. Story of a lot of guys out here. Wade never got back to the O, and he didn’t plan beyond Grade Twelve, so next thing you know he’s settled in Currie, just working at Gable’s, for now. We met at the counter always littered with catalogues — everything to hide the greener grass on your side of the fence — and a month later, we started dating, if you can call it that. We date and go out like kids in fifties movies go steady, but there aren’t many actual dates. I was seven when the Wizard Cinema closed, and the only sit-down restaurant in town is Wang’s Chinese, a dirty little room across Main Street from Brewskie’s where people get take-out but no one eats in. To have a date somewhere nice you need to drive to London, which most people don’t manage before they’re seventeen. We were older than that when we met, but until we moved in together a date meant a video in Wade’s apartment above Darla’s Flowers, volume cranked to drown out the sport trucks with no mufflers as they roared up and down the main drag, Main Street, County Road 17.
Where Wade and I live now, Lyle Street, there’s not even a barrier where the pavement ends, just greyed wooden posts, rusty fence wire and cornfield as far as you can see. It’s a subdivision from the sixties, when Currie didn’t boom; the four houses that were built are regularly sold, and thoroughly trashed, by a stream of twenty-something single guys who work at the Ritter plant, buying when their jobs feel safe then unloading when they get laid off anyway. We bought ours just over a year ago, peeling white paint and missing shingles and all, with a plan to fix it up then sell big to a commuter from the city, who’ll go on like an idiot about small towns and a slower pace of life; if anything, stuff happens faster here, and it’s usually because the girl’s pregnant. That’s not our story, thank God, but this spring Wade proposed regardless.
We drove to this fancy restaurant in London with a view of the Thames, near the century homes in Old South, and for dinner we had the specials because they’re bigger and they’re always a good deal. Wade wanted to stroll through the park afterward and watch the sun set over the river, but I had told Jessie, who’ll be my maid-ofhonour, that we’d meet everyone at Brewskie’s. Of course we would. It was Friday.
In the pickup Wade sulked the whole way back to Currie. He’s two years older than me, but I told him to grow up anyway when we got out at the bar. I kind of regret it now.
Inside we found Jessie at a table with Mike Carrion. His brown eyes widened and he smiled when he saw us, but when Wade shook his head Mike flagged down the waitress and ordered Jager shots, which we downed before Jessie dragged him off. He’s no dancer, but at Brewskie’s what counts is that you try. Most guys don’t. Middle-aged women line the bar every week, believing their dream man will walk in tonight. After a few years they finally hone in on the guys down the rail who drink made-in-London Labatt beers and yell “Faggot Frog!” at the ones who buy Molson, knowing full well at least one is a Tremblay.
From the dance floor Jessie waved over Mike’s shoulder. I stood up and reached for Wade’s hand but he pulled it away.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Are you still mad? You’re such a child sometimes.”
He pulled a green velvet box from his pocket and tossed it on the table. It skipped toward me and slid to a stop near the edge.
Wade said, “You really should’ve come for a walk.”
I picked it up and pretended the surprise wasn’t blown — what else comes in boxes like this? — but I gasped when I opened it.
I said, “Wade, does this mean — ”
“Yeah,” he muttered.
I looked down at the ring and its three little diamonds. The biggest one leapt from the centre. It must have cost a fortune.
“Yes,” I said, then “Yes! Wade, yes!” I cried. “Yes! Yes!”
My screams carried over the music. Everyone stopped dancing and turned to look, so for show I jumped into his arms. He wasn’t ecstatic like I was, but then again, he doesn’t really do ecstatic. Sometimes you’d think he’s made of ice. But he caught me and I kissed him and I held the open box above his head. The stones caught the bar lights in red and blue and green and drew hoots and applause from the crowd.
MY BROTHER AND some friends kidnapped Wade last weekend for his bachelor party in Huron Beach,
where they played golf and drank beer and hit on coked-out cougars at Piranhas, the seedy bar at the bottom of the strip. I wasn’t going to retaliate but Jessie insisted. She even called my boss and got me this weekend off.
Six of us eat dinner at an Italian place in London, Garofalo’s, downtown on Richmond. It’s a Friday in May: the restaurant’s full of high schoolers laying groundwork for the prom, not drinking and taking the bus home. Our table empties four bottles of wine, but Jessie doesn’t have any. She’s chauffeuring us in her mom’s minivan.
“Tonight’s the real deal,” she says, and for a moment I imagine a super-stretch limo and all of us stepping out at Fifth Avenue, which even if it’s in London is a pretty ritzy club. We step onto the red carpet fifteen potato pounds lighter, bodies firm in silhouette designer dresses. Flashbulbs snap and teenaged hordes cry that they love us. And then I remember. We’re going to Brewskie’s. I’ll be in a tacky pink veil, and though it’s a girls’ night Wade will be there. He says he understands if we play all the games, and he even said that he could stay home; but like the sign says, Brewskie’s is The Only Bar in Town. I couldn’t ask Wade to do that. He still doesn’t know many people here other than Brian, who’s only home on leave until the day after the wedding, and Mike, who’s in from London and crashing in our parents’ spare room with Paula, this new girlfriend from Western we haven’t met yet.
On our way into Brewskie’s Jessie hands me the list. It’s in seven or eight hands and it covers all the classics.