Twenty Miles (11 page)

‘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.

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.

Isobel Stanley wore white, the only one, at the heart of the dark pack all lunging toward a puck just outside the photo’s frame, sticks thrown out – most of them held their sticks with only one hand (‘Two hands, two frigging hands,’ Uncle Larry screamed in my mind) – with what I read as unskilled desperation. Equating ankle-bending with the skirts and hats, I thought, was justified.

Fair enough, Sig didn’t have much material to work with, and neither, then, did I. Giving Isobel Stanley the title of hockey player was, it seemed to me, grossly out of proportion to the evidence of this picture.

When I was three, legend has it I pounded out a rough version of ‘Chopsticks’ during Sig and Buck’s Christmas get-together for the neighbours. Who taught me or guided me was never revealed, the event shrinking over the years to the circumference of that singular spotlight, the pinprick illuminating tiny me on the piano bench, blond-headed and determined. It was decided by the neighbours that night that I wouldn’t be a hockey player after all, I’d be a virtuoso, a black sheep glowing golden among the jocks.

I never touched the lonely piano again. The Sawyers from next door continued to call me The Pianist well into my teens, until Sig, drunk, said, ‘For Jesus’ sake, the way you say it, you’d think a male member with legs had walked into the room whenever you see the poor girl.’

A three-year-old does not a pianist make. So Isobel Stanley played a couple of shinny games, skirts and all. So what? Would she have wanted to be labelled a hockey player, pinned like a strange butterfly onto that gilt-edged corkboard? Would she have wanted this responsibility? And if she had, wouldn’t she have taken it a little more seriously, wouldn’t she have traded in the hat and the skirt, wouldn’t she have made herself less girly?

There were some things I could never take back. My name was one.

I spent an awkward few moments clasped between Marge Pernsky’s breasts – I’d played hockey with her son since we were five – in the freezer aisle at Safeway a couple months before the Scarlets.

‘I’m just so thrilled for you!’ she sang. ‘Finally, a team full of girls for you!’

I’d gotten this a lot. As though I’d been held hostage by that long line of boys’ teams, as though I finally got to choose. But choice had never been part of it. I don’t remember when I first started to play. I don’t remember not knowing how to play. I must have been an ankle-burner at some point; my muscles must have made a series of corrections, found their way into the story, but I don’t know how. Playing became one of those unexamined functions, a muscle memory that came before any real memories. And so, skating like walking. Skating like breathing. This isn’t one of those destiny manifestos –
the sport chose me! We were meant to be together!
No. But choice was never part of it. Following Hal through the yellow door my first day with the Scarlets was the next correction.

T
he bottom half of the red B trailed a wavy cowlick behind it, the top half hinging a jaw around the first part of my name – Isa – making it look like a question. I sat very still in my seat in the lecture hall, holding the essay, as though the mark might begin to seep some sort of significance into my hands, dripping past the skin, my veins absorbing it like a phosphorescent dye, travelling up, up, illuminating parts of my brain like rooms in a house. Nothing. I scanned the chicken-scratch comments at the back. I did a few things decently and needed to work on some others. No mutations or deformities to speak of. I skimmed my conclusion and it didn’t sound like me.

All around me, students were swooping from the recesses of the lecture hall, flooding up the stairs, papers flapping in their hands. A girl in round glasses, a red smattering of eczema on her hands, sat a few seats away from me, essay flipped to the last page, reading intently. She moved her mouth slightly as she read and looked like she was about to cry. As I watched the quiver in the girl’s bottom lip,
devastation welling around her eyes, my own essay developed a kind of weightlessness; it lost its sense of gravity. It could have winged up, flown from my hand, out of the room, and my world would have looked exactly the same. I pictured Dr. Spencer glancing up, finding me there in the balcony, extracting the marrow from my reaction as he did with other students’ mean-well, stammered answers.

‘So, what I’m ... getting from you,’ he’d say, head bent, fingers tapping the bridge of his glasses, ‘is that you don’t give a shit. Essentially. This is what you’re saying.’

Looking at the B in my hands, pig-Latin alphabet. ‘Yes, yes. That’s it.’

This carelessness surprised me. I’d expected some change to come with my first mark – a knowing. This lack trickled into a form of bravery that buoyed me up from my seat, down the stairs, toward Dr. Spencer of the big words, that distant character on the room’s small stage. From my perch in the nosebleeds, he spewed a Tom Hanks–ish charm. Lisping, boyish energy cut with a kind of mediating care. He had a way of joking with the entire room as though we were one person, having a tête-à-tête at a dinner party. He was hospitable, a host; students laughed when he meant them to and then he smiled modestly and slipped into lush, segued trails that lost me again. I couldn’t help it: I kept slipping off the surface of his words, I drifted. I thought about hockey instead. Sig. Jacob. Those words on the ice returning to me as I flipped through
The Great Gatsby
to the pages Dr. Spencer shouted out like an aerobics instructor:
No. We shouldn’t.
How that bony place behind his ear felt on the tip of my nose. Dr. Spencer wore plaid, button-up shirts and corduroys except for once when he wore a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. He was far away.

As I slunk up, he was levering an unruly stack of paper into a brown leather satchel, his furrowed brow cordoning his face into a vip lounge. Standing next to him, I initiated conversation the only way I could think of: I said, ‘Uh,’ and then I cleared my throat. His eyes drifted over and then latched weakly onto my face, distracted.

‘Hellooo,’ he said, the O’s dropping into ironical depths into which I didn’t possess the skills to rapel.

‘Hi. Dr. Spencer, um – ’ A blush burnt two distinct territories on my cheeks. There he was,
bam,
like happening upon a movie star at Arby’s. But it was as though, now that the show was over, his makeup had dissolved, his orangey aura had turned off like a neon sign. He was far older than I thought, the creases around his eyes that, from my seat, made his face crackle into a smile, up close, anchored the eyes into a kind of wariness.

‘I just wanted to tell you – ’ I winced a bit at this, the intimacy around its edges inappropriate for a person who clearly had no idea who I was. ‘I’m missing class on Friday? I play on the hockey team, so we’re out of town. I just thought.’

Moon had told us we should do this, tell our professors when we’d be missing class. A courtesy. But Dr. Spencer seemed to get a kick out of it. A smile tugged on one side of his mouth, slowly, uncurling amusement. ‘The hockey team, eh? Well. Good for you. Well.’ He chuckled once, scratched his brow. ‘Just borrow someone’s notes when you get back.’ He gave an
I dunno
kind of shrug. ‘And win, of course.’ He looked back down at the papers now sprouting a bouquet from his bag, brow tenting again, slicing off the conversation. Done with me. I could miss every class and he’d never know, the mysteries of my schedule inconsequential to him. The strange hygiene of these huge classes. I could tweeze myself so cleanly from their middle.