Interference (5 page)

And here it was. Claire had been sure Mrs. Rathbin would say something that would sum it all up — cancer, love, family, death. She would answer the question she had posed earlier as to what Claire was born doing. Mrs. Rathbin, with her orange knitted shawl, her purple lips, would be one of those gurus, Buddha-like, who would put it all together. Like the moral at the end of a story. Mrs. Rathbin would be Claire's Happily-Ever-After. This, she would say, is what you will learn from this horrific experience in your life. Claire couldn't help herself. She was actually waiting for the lesson, her mouth slightly open, her eyes wide.

“Brussels sprouts aren't that easy to ignore,” Mrs. Rathbin had said. And then she squeezed herself out of the car, she went around to Claire's side and she helped Claire out. Mrs. Rathbin had walked Claire up to her front door, she had made sure Claire got in safely, and, finally, she had left. Claire had stood in the front doorway watching her drive off, haphazardly, down the street. Mrs. Rathbin had beeped once.

“Brussels sprouts,” Claire says now, in bed, Ralph beside her listening. “Brussels sprouts. I don't get it.”

But that's okay, Claire thinks, because when Claire told Jude what Mrs. Rathbin had said, Jude didn't get it either. And neither did Ralph.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Parkville Ice Kats

Dear Dayton,

Congratulations on taking the first, most important step — signing up with the Parkville Ice Kats! A wonderful decision you won't regret. I guarantee it. By submitting your form on our website you have now officially registered for the Senior Ladies Leisure League. Games will be on Wednesday nights, from October 25th until March 7th. Because we know you ladies are busy and running around doing everything around the house — kids, housekeeping, jobs, dinner — we have tried to book ice time for anytime between 7 p.m. until 10 p.m. You will only have to play two or three late games throughout the season. A holiday schedule (Christmas is coming) will be sent to you at this email address. We end earlier in March this year because of all the absences in the last games due to those amazing vacations you all take with your hubbies and kids during the school break. Wish I were so lucky. Your deposit has been recorded. Please send the remaining outstanding balance to the address below. We do not accept credit cards or PayPal. Hard enough to figure out the website — you know what I'm talking about, don't you? Please note: there will be an end-of-season party sometime in March for all the Ice Kats teams. Be there or be square.

Remember: hockey is a game that requires competition but also fair play. There will be no checking allowed. Attached is your personal injury waiver. Please sign and return with your payment.

Enjoy the season! Go Ice Kats Go!

Tina Brady

Parkville Ice Kats

Co-ordinator Extraordinaire

P.S. Dayton, you are on the White Team — such a great group of girls. We have also placed your neighbour, Patricia Birk, on this team as per your request.

3

It's the first game of the season.

There are six of them on the ice, if you include the goalie.

Two forward, one centre, two defence.

And three of them are new to hockey. They don't really know what to do.

The puck is dropped and Dayton looks at it. She takes a poke at it with her stick but misses touching anything, even ice. In fact, the stick pulls her forward and she almost falls. The ice is slippery, freshly Zambonied, if that's a word. Dayton feels sick to her stomach and she's hot from the equipment and her heart is beating so loudly she believes she can hear it until she realizes that the noise is the other team banging their sticks on the boards. The last time she felt this way was in the airport with her daughter, Carrie. Holding onto her little body tight and going through customs trying not to look or sound scared. Trying not to be suspicious.

She rushes forward. All Dayton can do is skate. The blades swish on the ice. Trish skates past her, shouting, “Woo hoo,” without humility. Trish's stick is so high in the air that Dayton is sure she's going to take someone out. Are you allowed to hold the stick that high? Dayton wonders.

“Stick on the ice, stick on the ice,” someone shouts from their bench. Everyone looks the same in their equipment and so Dayton can't tell who said that. Even if she could tell, it wouldn't matter — she doesn't know anyone else on the team yet but at least she was right about how high you can hold the stick.

The other team shoots. The puck ricochets off the goalie's stick. Dayton stands still, watching, until she realizes that she can get involved. She forgets, sometimes, to move. Caught up in the speed of the game, in the back and forth of it. Someone shouts, “Skate, skate.” It's not often Dayton wants to move forward and take control. She tends to hang back and watch. That's the kind of person she is. Only once in her life has she pushed forward and taken control. But here, on the rink, she does it again. Moves forward. Skates. Dayton attempts to hit the puck away from the net but misses. Trish lends moral support with another “woo hoo.”

Dayton just moved to town from California. Six weeks ago, late summer, she climbed on the airplane, carrying her daughter and a diaper bag and as many of her things as she could get out of the house and into three suitcases. Clothes, passports, birth certificates, toys, a photo album, her mother's cookbook. The beginning cold, the trees turning colour, the rush of leaves under her feet, the fall, strikes her every time she goes outside. Knocks her down almost. It is the end of October, Halloween next week, and Dayton can see her breath in the air. She left palm trees and cactus and sweet warm breezes. She left green and blue and came into orange and brown, and now she is into the beginning barrenness of winter, trees beginning to tangle together, limbs empty. Now she is playing hockey because Trish asked her to and because she couldn't think of a reason not to. Trish's twelve-year-old daughter, Rachel, would babysit Carrie, Trish said. Trish herself would drive and lend Dayton equipment. Trish's husband's old stuff is too big and threatens to fall off. Dayton has to wrap tape around her hockey pants and there is a smell coming off the equipment that wasn't there when she first tried them on. She assumes she is heating them up with her sweat. It all made sense. Trish said the neighbours across the street, Tom and Maria, would be home in case anything went wrong. Oh, and Frank, he'd be home too, but Trish said he sometimes falls asleep in front of the TV and can't be woken up. Some kind of narcolepsy, she thinks, or just old age. But Tom and Maria are always available. Trish said they rarely go out. “In fact,” she said, “their bedroom light is often off at ten.”

“I go to bed at ten,” Dayton said, looking at the clock over the stove.
9:45
.

“Senior Ladies Leisure League,” Trish laughed. She was holding open a pamphlet and had her laptop there to sign Dayton up. They were in Dayton's kitchen and Trish was waving her glass of wine around dangerously over the laptop and Dayton was trying hard not to be nervous. The solid tile floor of her new kitchen busts glass like a bomb and Dayton didn't have the energy to get the vacuum cleaner out. Besides, the laptop might burst into flame if Trish's wine spilled. Carrie was asleep upstairs. Max, the new kitten, was sitting in Trish's lap. Max is Dayton's poke at normalcy — “get a kitten,” she thought, “life will be good.” But Dayton forgot about the cat litter, the incessant meowing when she finally got Carrie to bed, the desperate need for attention. Two empty bottles of wine on the table between her and Trish. Pinot grigio for Trish — “That's all I'll drink,” she had said. “That and anything red.” Trish snorted — she laughs loud, talks loud. Dayton was drinking red, only because she had only one bottle of pinot grigio in the house. Except for Trish and her booming, echoing voice, everything was quiet in Dayton's house.

“We aren't seniors,” Dayton said. “I'm forty-three.”

“I'm forty-eight,” Trish said. “I'm way more senior than you. But still, I find it extremely insulting.”

“What's even more insulting is calling us ladies.” The women laughed. They typed their information into the laptop, registering for the league.

“Any ailments?”

“What does that mean?”

“Heart issues? High blood pressure? Diabetes?”

Dayton thought about it. “Nope, nothing.”

“What if I write ‘overweight,'” Trish said. “Do you think that's an ailment?”

“You're not overweight.”

“Pleasingly plump?”

Trish swore she had never played on a team before, but she had watched the game at least. Her son, Charlie, plays, as does her husband, Frank. And occasionally, Trish confessed after she pressed Submit on Dayton's form, occasionally she plays shinny on the backyard rink her husband builds every year. Because Charlie plays hockey, Dayton assumes Trish must, at least, know the rules, she must know something about the game. “Dayton,” Trish laughed loudly. “You think I actually watch the game when I go? I catch up with the other moms. No one ever watches their kid play hockey. I couldn't even tell you what position he played.”

“There are positions?”

“Sure, I signed you up for defence.”

Dayton nodded.

In California hockey was occasionally on TV in the bars when Dayton went for a drink after work. In the old days, before she had Carrie and stayed home alone most nights, she remembered watching hockey on TV in the bars. She had maybe glanced at it on the news while washing up the dishes after dinner. John had said he played once upon a time — Dayton can never be sure of what is the truth when it comes to John — but Dayton never paid attention to hockey. Not really. Men moving fast. Skating hard. A puck you can't even see on TV, sticks everywhere. It was cold on the TV and Dayton was warm in sunny L.A. Beach volleyball, now that's something she watched as she strolled the boardwalks with Carrie in a Snugli.

“Do you have to wear a costume?” Dayton asked.

Trish snorted her wine. “Costume? We're not playing dress-up, Dayton, we're playing hockey. Costume. Oh, that's too funny. It's called equipment. I think. That's what I think.” Trish was getting drunk. Dayton smiled shyly.

But now, here they are, on the ice, and Dayton is pretty sure it is all about the dressing up. It took her a serious, confusing, complicated forty-five minutes to figure out how to dress herself in this equipment, this armour. That's only, Trish told her, because Dayton put everything on in the wrong order. Dayton will remember, next time, to plan it all out, to concentrate — her jill, then her shin pads, socks, shorts — and
then
put the skates on. She was lucky she didn't rip Trish's husband's expensive padded shorts trying to squeeze the sharp blades of the skates into them. Someone should have made her practise getting dressed beforehand. The other new woman on the team tells Dayton she practised in her living room. Someone should have given her a lesson ahead of time. Life is like that — no one helps anyone out ahead of time but everyone seems ready to give advice after. To chide you. Laugh at your mistakes.

A jill — now that was something new. Every little piece of Dayton's body is protected, even her groin. Trish said, “I've had my babies,” to the young guy in the sports store, “I don't need to protect anything down there.” He laughed, shrugged, blushed a bit. Old ladies, he must have thought, buying hockey equipment, protecting their old lady parts
.
Dayton could almost see him swallow down the bile. What's next? The end of the world? Senior Ladies Leisure League.

After the skates you put on the shoulder pads, neck guard, elbow pads, jersey and helmet. Trish and Dayton drew a line at the mouth guard. “How am I supposed to talk or cheer with that thing in my mouth?” And now Dayton's out on the ice, watching the puck slide quickly past her goalie and into the net, listening to the board-banging other team, and wondering about it all. About playing the game of hockey. About women — some mildly old, some young, some in between — gathering together at
9:00
on a work night, their kids in bed, to slide around with blades on ice and whack at this little, hard puck using sticks. And why is the puck so hard? What's it made out of? Even through her padding Dayton felt the smack of the puck when it hit the back of her leg.

“Off the boards, off the boards,” someone shouts. Dayton has no idea what that means. She skates away from the boards, thinking maybe she is too close to them.

Ever since she left John, Dayton has tried to do things differently. Her first thing was to move away. That was different. Not like her. And she didn't just move down the block either, but to a new country, to a city she'd never heard of, a small town, really. The second thing she tried to do differently was to make friends. She didn't have any friends in L.A. who weren't John's friends first. So when she needed help there was never anyone there for her. Dayton had no one. And now she's playing ice hockey. (“You don't call it ice hockey, ” Trish said. “It's just hockey. If you call it ice hockey, people will know you've never played.” “But I've never played,” Dayton said. “I know that, Dayton, and you know that, but you don't want anyone else to know that, do you?”) That's her third different thing.

The tree outside the window of Dayton's new house reminds her, late at night, of the one that sucked that kid into it in the movie
Poltergeist
. Dark and huge and thick, its limbs reaching out to her, scratching ominously against her window. Carrie's snuffles on the baby monitor echo through the house. John is somewhere back in California, probably out at the bars with another tanned, breast-implanted woman. After all, what other kind of women are there in California? How stupid Dayton feels to have believed him. To have married him. To have stayed with him when he did the things he did to her. “How stupid am I?” she asks the tree each night before she falls asleep. But Dayton knew she couldn't get away. Not without completely disappearing. John doesn't like to lose anything — his car keys, a dime, his sunglasses, his wife. Losing is for losers, he says.

“Dayton, puck,” Trish is screaming at her, and Dayton sees a break in front of her and rushes in to take a swipe at the puck. Again, she misses. She can't seem to connect that small black dot with her long wooden stick. It seems easy, but for some reason it isn't. But she can skate. Dayton knows she can skate — all those figure skating lessons as a kid paid off — if only she could hit the puck. Someone skates past her so quickly that Dayton can feel the wind. She looks at her stick as if it's the stick's fault. But, in fact, the stick has kept her standing. She realizes she is using it as a crutch. Balancing herself with it. Leaning on it. Heavy.

It's such a typical story — the Husband and the Buxom Blond. It happens all the time. Trish waved her hands around her head when Dayton told her and said, “Oh my god, can't men do something new once in a while? Can't they surprise us?” Dayton smiled then because John was full of surprises. Surprises Dayton could predict but that still surprised her. Angry, shouting, predictable surprises. She liked Trish immediately. Trish who has been married to the same quiet guy for twenty-three years. Trish who has a house full of kids and dogs and cats and goldfish, a messy, lived-in, disorganized, happy house. Trish who makes teddy bears for a living. Sewing on button eyes and sparkly ribbons. “Buxom,” Trish said. “Now that's a word I haven't heard since before I was born.” She held up her wine glass to toast the word. She laughed loudly. The kitten, Max, moved slightly on her lap. “Buxom.”

Dayton skates to the bench. Two minutes off. Two minutes on. The sweat is rolling down her nose, her temples, her neck. She feels as if she is wearing a sauna.

“I'm dripping,” she says to Trish. “Especially my hands.” Dayton holds up her gloves, looks at them. “Why are my hands so sweaty? And my elbows. And my neck.”

“This is way too much fun,” Trish says. “Don't you think this is fun?” Trish is panting beside her. They watch three other women skate out and take their positions. There is another woman standing with them behind the boards but they don't know her. Trish smiles and the woman smiles back and says, “Woo hoo,” and Trish grins. The woman says, “All I keep saying out there is ‘shit shit shit' every time I miss the puck. ‘Woo hoo' is much better.”

They all laugh.

Dayton tries to remember the last time she did something like this. She thinks it was grade seven, volleyball, that was the last time she played a team sport. After that it was all jazz dancing and ballet and gymnastics and swimming and figure skating and aerobics. Stuff girls do for themselves, not for a team. It feels good to be present with a bunch of women and not have to talk about anything much, not have to serve wine or worry about saying the right thing. Not have John hovering over her, watching everything she does, everything she says. And who cares about what you look like under all this equipment, under this costume? Who cares if you are buxom or flat-chested? Who cares if you are blond or brunette? Your bruises and scars don't show underneath all of this padding.