Girl in the Arena (2 page)

—Sick, he says, and winks at Allison.

*

I wait until we’re home, the last of the frozen items put away, which is practically all we buy now, except for razor blades, shampoo, and stuff. Six months ago Allison bought a mega freezer and ever since then she’s been down on fresh produce. And maybe there’s some consolation in knowing we can preserve everything we want till the end of time.

I watch her load the sink with the breakfast dishes now, the water running hard. She avoids the dishwasher, saying it wears out the plates.

—Can’t you just say I’m Tommy’s daughter? I ask.

—What are you talking about? she says.

—That guy at the store thought I was some freak of nature. He didn’t have to know I’m the daughter of 
seven 
gladiators.

—You take these things too seriously, Lynie.

—And 
you 
make me sound like I’m the product of seven types of DNA.

Allison is having a tough time getting the detergent to squirt out into the sink. She’s forgotten to remove the cardboard plug inside the cap. I watch her struggle until she gets the bottle open. Then she gives me this look, like all safety devices are my fault.

—I think people get the concept of stepfathers, she says, and looks out at her beloved garden. —I think people like knowing that a widow can remarry.

—And remarry and remarry, I say, raising my voice. —Not everyone is that interested in my lineage, Allison. And not everyone loves Glad culture the way 
you 
do.

Unwilling to negotiate the bottle another second, she throws it as hard as she can and the blue soap arcs across the kitchen, douses the linoleum, hits the dining room table, spatters the satin chairs, and soaks my legs. She’s been through a lot and I love my mother, but she can go off like a Roman candle. Like six months ago when we were driving out in Worcester, going 75 on a 45 mph road, and she kept needling me to talk about my plans for the future, and I finally had to tell her.

—I’m not planning on being a Glad wife.

She practically pulled underneath some guy’s rear bumper, as if she were begging him to make a sudden stop. Most of the time she’s not like that, and I think whiplash is largely a state of mind. And shortly after the anger subsided Allison went crazy with remorse. Sometimes she has full-blown panic attacks like she did that day and I had to take her to the ER, and pretty soon that whole business—my identity—was about her.

But I know what she’s suffered, so I help her clean up, and cleaning up soap is not an easy task because it keeps trying to clean the thing you’re trying to clean. I finally suggest that she go lie down and I’ll finish up. She stops crying and goes up to the master bedroom and stretches out on the Texas king bed, a moist washcloth over her eyes, her ear plugs in, the way she tries to fuzz out a few days before a match, when what she really wants to do is find a tall bridge, she’s so distressed.

It’s much worse this time because Tommy’s fighting tomorrow—at the American Title fight against a guy named Uber—and she can’t accept the idea that she could lose him. Because that would mean, among other things, losing her seventh husband, the best one she’s had, bar none. He’s the best in all the leagues really, the one everybody loves. And if you follow the Gladiator Wives Bylaws, which Allison has as long as I can remember, you know a Glad wife can only marry seven times and then she’s done. So that’s where she’s screwed herself. She doesn’t want to be done. Allison can’t stand being alone.

I know some people see it as a lack of affection, the way I call Allison by her first name. But when you have a mother who spends a lot of time trying to stay young so she can find that next husband—so she can take care of her children, the younger with special needs... She kind of messed up in the career department. And she asked me flat out to call her by her first name, so we could be 
more like sisters 
in a way. I’ve tried to go along. So it’s Allison this and Allison that.

When I go upstairs to check on her, she cautions me to whisper. My brother, Thad, is curled around the mound of her feet under the coverlet, nesting, watching cartoons with no sound on. Even when he’s not supposed to be quiet, this is the way Thad likes to watch a show because there’s so much noise going on in his head all the time. That’s what the doctor told us. The Italian ex-pat pediatrician compared my brother’s internal sounds to the rushing, cursing traffic around the Colosseum—Vespas, taxis, micro cars. My eight-year-old brother is a boy of internal cacophony. Allison is patient where Thad’s cartoons are concerned, as she is with most things that keep Thad happy.

Thad looks up at me. I stroke his hair lightly, and he returns to his state of mesmerization.

Allison tells me how sorry she is.

—I guess I’m pretty keyed up, she says.

—I know, I say. —It’s okay.

—How did he seem to you this morning? she asks.

She’s talking about Tommy and I say, —Solid. Really solid.

I go into her bathroom and get her 
beautiful tranquilizers
, as she calls them, and I bring her a glass of water as well. She kisses me on the cheek.

—I’m going to get completely off these after this competition, she says.

That’s her standard line, so I don’t know what to say.

—I told you two years ago things would change. Now that you’re eighteen, you’re free game to the media, and...

—
And 
I have such an 
impressive 
list of fathers.

—Well, you do, like it or not.

—Okay, Allison.

—Things will go better than you think once you get used to the added attention, she says. —Why don’t you call the girls and see if you can get together with them this afternoon? Do something fun.

This is Allison’s other kick: 
the girls, 
the effort to resuscitate my social life. Although I’ve always been kind of a loner, except for my best friend Mark, from seventh grade on I had two main girlfriends. Sam: the high-wire act who has her father’s broad shoulders, her mother’s practically bulging eyes, and a tendency to sometimes talk before her brain kicks in, and Callie: shy and smart and built like a support beam, willing to do anything Sam wants in order to be included. We were the only Glad girls at our high school—and we live in a culture in which most people think it’s fun to observe Glads and make jokes about Glads but not mix with them—so we clung fast.

We were all about the things threes produce, sometimes tight and inseparable, sometimes weirdly triangulated and full of drama. We finally broke apart over the asinine junior prom. Sam’s boyfriend Dirk had gotten his boy Adam—one of the popular Glads—to ask me to the prom and I had thanked him but said no. Adam was this moron who spent his days and nights watching fistfights on Jerry Springer. He was always taking cheap shots at everybody he could think of with his little BB gun mouth. And there was Sam, acting as if I was supposed to embrace all things Glad.

—I can’t believe you said no to Adam, Sam said. —Does anyone around here know how high up Adam’s father is in the GSA?

I didn’t say that my father Tommy outranked him. She knew that.

I watched her turn to Callie, who swallowed hard, as if she were washing her own little self down her throat.

—I wouldn’t have said no, Callie squeaked.

—Exactly. No sane girl would.

Sam couldn’t stand it when I just looked at her as I did then, waiting to see if she’d calm down. She had me pressed against a locker room stall. I was still slick from volleyball.

—Go ahead, screw up your life, she said.

—When he comes out of the gym, he smells like a Dumpster on a warm day, I said, hoping to put an end to the conversation.

—That’s disgusting, Callie said.

Sam gave her the eyeball and she was about to launch in again when I said, —Besides, the prom is a stupid waste of energy. All those silly little gowns and corsages and stuff.

—What are you, some kind of women’s power person? Sam asked.

—Wow, the curse of Cain, I said.

I didn’t say I think this whole concept of being a Glad wife is 1950s at best, because she’d tell her mother, who would call my mother. And it’s not that Allison doesn’t know how I feel, but she tries really hard to keep up appearances, and I have no reason to make things more painful for her. I know that gladiator sport blindsided her and that she stayed for survival’s sake.

—You know what my mother says? Sam went on, pointing her French manicure at me.

—I have no idea what Martha says, but I bet it’s good.

—She says Allison’s crazy and that it’s probably hereditary.

Then I lost it and said what I had been thinking for months: that I never had any intention of going to the GWC with her.

The GWC, or Gladiator Wives College, in Modesto, California, is where young women learn in two intensive years to be perfect Glad wives. At one time the three of us had talked about going together and sharing an apartment. Sam’s mother, Martha, who’s a lot younger than my mother, was one of their first graduates.

Sam shoved my shoulders against the metal stall. That was about the time when I first realized I might be a pacifist, so I kept myself from pushing her face in.

We stopped talking after that. Callie wouldn’t answer my calls because she was a hundred percent Sam’s now. My friend Mark asked me to prom at the last minute, thinking that’s what I secretly wanted. But I told him I just wanted to go paintballing and he was down with that so we suited up and drove over to Somerville. I never told Allison what Sam said, and how things unraveled. When she asks I just say we’re all pretty busy.

Allison holds out hope that I’ll come to my senses and pack my bags next month for the GWC. She says she’s talked to the president of the college, and that they’ll take me late because of Tommy’s standing.

As I back out of her room now, certain that the tranquilizer is starting to work, I shut the door without latching it so the snap won’t make her jump. She has a terrible startle reflex.

I know I have to move out soon, get my own place, my own life. But I stick around as long as I can for my brother Thad. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately because they say tomorrow’s fight is the toughest one of Tommy’s career, and every time I think about that, I feel somehow displaced.

CHAPTER 2

Often, I’m at my fast-food job on Friday nights serving trans-fat to the masses. But my boss, Sidney, is very big on Glad sport and Tommy in particular. He gave me a raise of fifty cents an hour the first day on the job when he figured out who I was. And this week he gave me the whole weekend off to be with my family after I gave him two tickets to tomorrow’s American Title match.

Once I tuck Allison in, I head for my bedroom and turn on 
La Boehme. 
While I send Mark an IM, I thumb through 
Glad Rag 
magazine, look at the crawl on a silent CNN, check the weather, download some tunes, and watch a couple of videos on YouTube. Allison can’t stand that I do so many things at once, but that’s her burden.

Finally I settle into the window seat, where I try to work on 
A History of the Gladiator Sports Association. 
But really it’s about waiting for Tommy to appear in the backyard so I can see if he looks ready to fight.

For several days leading up to a match Tommy does a series of limbering exercises on the lawn each afternoon. After that he lifts some weights and soaks for a while in the cool, warm, and hot baths we had built in what used to be the garage, so when he isn’t working he can feel like he’s hanging out at a Roman bath.

On something like cue, Tommy steps from around the side of the house. Allison worked very hard on the garden this spring so everything’s in bloom: the forsythia, the pink ladies, and the hollyhocks. And suddenly I’m having this horrible thought that if Tommy dies tomorrow we’ll have thousands of flowers for the funeral, because everything she plants has a high yield. And that means her sorrow as well as mine.

I think about going downstairs and talking with him, but I’m afraid I’d just make him nervous. He spent all morning sharpening his swords in the kitchen. While I slathered the toast with preserves and ground the coffee beans, he spun the whetstone, pulling one of his favorite swords across its rough surface. He seemed uneasy. Usually he looks pretty tough before a fight. I wanted to say something then as well, but we both kept grinding.

Tomorrow afternoon he’ll take his car in early so he can suit up in the locker rooms of the amphitheater in Boston, Romulus Arena. Allison, Thad, and I will follow an hour later. We’ll sit in our usual box and hope to God he makes it, because if he does he’ll only have two more matches to fight and then he’ll get out of the business for good and maybe we can start to have a normal life the way Allison always promises.

I told Tommy once, when he first dated Allison, that he would make a good trainer. I stopped short of saying he’s too smart to fight for the GSA. But Tommy takes his responsibilities seriously, that’s the way he is, and it turns out he had already signed his contract.

Now he’s pulling the long hose out into the yard and he has to stop to untangle it. He turns on the spigot and starts to water the hydrangeas—a bizarre thing to do the day before a fight. He always spends his time in preparation, even if this means sitting in the swivel chair in the library with his eyes closed, thinking about how he’ll take down his opponent. Tommy says it’s essential to see exactly what you’ll cut, precisely where you’ll strike, the way a professional golfer visualizes a ball arcing down the fairway, sailing toward the cup, the effortless hole in one. Tommy has a lot of discipline to see that kind of thing in his head—how he’ll sever a man’s arm or rip into his face. I couldn’t do it. When I’m up in our box and someone gets injured, I typically look away.

Tommy holds his thumb over the end of the nozzle and a fine spray of water hits the flowers. Maybe he’s worried they’re going to succumb to the heat? I’m trying to imagine when he began to care about Allison’s garden. As soon as he’s finished, he goes down on his haunches and pulls at a few weeds, inspects the undersides of leaves.