The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (26 page)

Padeen pulled up outside Bob's in her jerking Volvo and yanked the emergency brake. I was seat belt–less in the bucket seat beside her and shot across the cracked plastic and onto the floor. “Hand me your clothes,” she said.

“What?” I said from the seat well. “No.” The floor of Padeen's car smelled of decomposing leaves, earthy and ripe. I considered burrowing like a small animal and resting safe and snug there.

“Don't you have your swimsuit on?” Padeen's voice rose, tense.

“Sort of,” I said.

Padeen rolled her overly mascaraed eyes, a blond Liza Minnelli, and thrust a narrow hand out of her fitted ski jacket for my sweats. “Then go.”

I sat up. To one side of the car was the long dog run where Bob kept half a dozen greyhounds he raced at venues across the state. To the other was the pool, a primordial soup behind fogged glass, like a worn diorama at some questionable natural history museum. “Aren't you coming?” I said, inching down my sweatpants, the seat cold and stiff beneath my goosefleshy thighs.

“I can't.” She flipped her arm to see the watch face that spun freely on her thin wrist. “There's stuff I have to do. Hurry,” she said, pulling the last bit of sweatshirt over my head. She reached across my chest and pushed open the door. “It's just an hour.” She gave a little shove, and I raced toward the heat of the pool, hearing the Volvo grind down the driveway as soon as my feet hit gravel.

Two other girls were already there. One, dark-haired, was still dressed and holding her mother's hand; the other, skinny in a red bikini, shook her head and cried while a woman in a big wool coat stood over her.

“Quinn!” Bob shouted, and I jumped. I'd been around Bob enough to be wary. He was cool in his way, white T-shirt, rolled-up jeans, handsome and moody and slightly failed, as if he'd meant to be Brando or Kerouac but ended up racing greyhounds, not motorcycles, teaching high school English instead of writing novels. Teaching little girls to swim. “Quinn,” he said again wearily, “you're not scared, are you?” The other girls watched, big-eyed. I tried not to look at them. “Then get in,” Bob said.

The pool was a strange, viscous green that hid the bottom. Bob stood on the wet deck, an unlit cigarette behind one ear, while a girl not much older than Padeen waited in the water. Bob pointed toward her, and she waved cheerily for me to come in. I stared at my feet, almost as gray as the concrete, toenails long and ragged.

Bob looked toward the driveway beyond the glass. “Breaststroke's your sister's event, right?” He nodded, as if mulling things over. “She's good. Think you could ever be that good, Quinn?” He spat out my last name like a minor curse he enjoyed saying for the hell of it.

“I don't know,” I said, uncrossing the arms I'd been clenching tight as a corset across my thin chest.

Bob pointed to the water with one hand and pushed between my sharp shoulder blades with the other. I stumbled onto the top step, and Bob's firm hand guided me down. The water was warm, peelike. Bob wanted me to put my face in it. “C'mon,” he said, “you don't even have to leave the stairs.” I felt the pressure of his attention, firm and insistent as his palm had been. I took a deep breath, then slapped my face at the water, ears still bone-dry. “Ha!” Bob said, whacking one thigh. “See that?” he said to the pool in general. “Quinn's not afraid.”

I wanted Padeen, who would tell Bob how I could have died, how I might just need a little time. I looked to see how soon an hour was, but there was only a lap clock propped at one end of the pool, its big red hand spinning freely. There was no room for a regular clock on the pool's transparent walls, where branches of barren trees pressed against them from outside. The only treeless wall had a clear view down Bob's long, empty driveway to the road.

“What's the story, Quinn?” Bob said, fingering the cigarette along his ear.

“No story,” I said, giving in to fate. I let my body bump along the stairs and slip under the water.

 

That night I sat with my brothers and sisters at our two matching kitchen tables, dark expanses of faux-wood Formica acquired from a breakfast place at Holiday Village that went out of business. A long bench upholstered with blue vinyl flowers ran L-shaped along the back wall. There was room for 11, though Mom rarely sat down. Our father sat alone at the short end of the L, with a tiny TV between him and us tuned loudly to the evening news. This was not deemed rude, but sensible self-occupation. Reading at meals was also encouraged, anything to keep conflict in check. Dad still carried overlapping ellipses scars of fork tines tattooed across the back of one hand, from mealtime skirmishes with his own many siblings.

“I put my head underwater,” I said, and no one seemed to hear. “All the way under,” I said, louder, as the bread basket moved along the table.

“Duh,” Pat said, “isn't that the point?” He adjusted heavy black frames higher up his nose and grabbed three snail rolls, before shoving the basket past me. He was the only one of us with glasses and an easy tan, so that if people didn't know Bill, they might think it was Pat who was Diane's biological brother.

“I was the only one who did it,” I said, looking up and down the table. “First day.” I kicked my little brother, Brendhan, kitty-corner under the table so at least he'd listen up.

Mom turned from where she hunched over the counter and pointed a long knife my way. “Blushing is the color of virtue,” she said.

“Did you hear about Patty?” Diane said, sliding into her seat. Her hair was so straight it looked ironed. Diane adored Cher and Crystal Gayle, women with glossy dark hair so long they could sit on it. “Did you tell them already?” she said to Padeen, sitting across from me. “Patty” was what the older kids and their friends called Padeen; I was not supposed to call her that. Everyone looked at Padeen, who looked down, chewing.

“Dogcatcher let you go with just a warning?” Bill said, grinning at his own joke. His teeth were white and straight. He and Diane had nicer teeth than the rest of us, and Bill was extravagant, even coercive, with his smiles.

John stared evenly at Padeen. “You put on 10 pounds,” he said, not smiling.

“I made cheerleader,” she said flatly. Then John laughed. Padeen pushed two rolls off the end of her plate, and I snatched them up in one hand, sliding the butter dish near me with the other.

“What?” Bill said, mouth hanging open, but he already knew. It was no surprise to any of the oldest kids—Bill, Chris, John, Diane, and Padeen. They all went to the Catholic high school, Central, where girls trying out for cheerleader performed alone in the center of the gym while the rest of the school watched and then voted on the spot like Roman emperors, thumbs up or down.

Padeen shrugged. “I was the only girl with four siblings,” she said, burnishing achievement with modesty. I stabbed the potato on my plate, annoyed.

“And three cousins,” John said, “and those we bribed.” He looked up and down the table. “Where's Chris?” he said. “Oh, shit, must've sold him into slavery.”

“Don't say
shit
,” Mom said, not turning around.

Bill reached over and yanked Padeen's plate from under her fork. “Better watch that,” he said. “You're gettin' too fat to be a cheerleader.” Padeen's slender forearm stayed poised above where her plate had been.

“Why do girls want to be cheerleaders?” Tom said, turning the page of an expensive art book he wasn't supposed to have at the table. He was red-haired and thoughtful, with skin translucent as any Flemish virgin in his book. In short, an easy target, and he'd had trouble ever since leaving Our Lady of Lourdes for the public junior high. “Don't they get how cheerleading objectifies women?”

Mom went on shoving the dull bread knife into the long French loaf she'd made that morning. She sometimes said that skirts were so short these days you could see girls' Maxi Pads. But Dad looked up from the TV, humming with news of Nixon, napalm, and Vietnam, his gaze rare and magnetic, pulling our eyeballs toward him. “Hell,” he said, lifting his juice glass of Gallo toward Padeen, “good for you.” He looked right at her, mouth overfull with big Irish teeth, and winked. “That's my girl.”

I pushed most of the second roll into my mouth and chewed with some difficulty, lips clenched tight.

 

I learned to swim, of course. At my first swim meet I'd just turned seven, and since I competed in the Eight and Under division no one expected much, but I made the finals in four events and took second overall in breaststroke. I'd never felt such uncomplicated happiness. Even Pat looked up from his comic book and gave me a high five as I climbed onto the bus for the long drive over the mountains and back to Great Falls.

At home I tore through the smokehouse and made a hard left at the “Dad Pad,” a name we used without smirk or innuendo; it was my father's room, and that was that. He was watching football cranked up in the old iron filigree and red leather barber chair he used as a recliner, so that sitting down he loomed above us standing. The Seahawks were playing, and I lingered near the door until I saw they were up by seven. When I stepped into the room, Dad's hand shot out, palm forward:
Don't talk
. I stood, trying not to scratch dry patches that smelled of chlorine, waiting for the Seahawks to at least make a first down.

His room was lined with the sort of books not allowed at meals, hardcovers on Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas; leather-bound transcripts of the Salem witch trials, the Dred Scott decision,
Plessy v. Ferguson;
and a big set of illustrated biographies of great artists, Giotto to Van Gogh. On the wall across from the art books, above a hulking black-and-white television, was a framed reproduction of a dimpled and redheaded Renoir bather, nude from the waist up, whom I long believed to be my mother in younger days.

A Rainier commercial came on and Dad raised his own beer, gesturing me forward. I brought the ribbon from behind my back. I'd kept it pressed between the covers of a Hardy Boys book on the ride home, and it was crisp as if freshly made. “Look at that,” Dad said, rubbing the strip of red between his big fingers. “Second place.”

I brushed crispy chunks of hair out of my eyes and grinned up at him. “Pretty good,” I said.

He smoothed the length of polyester across his broad, scarred palm and sucked in through his teeth. “Let me tell you something,” he said, almost reluctantly. He did not look up. “Second place is like kissin' your sister.”

 

Diane's and Padeen's rooms were above the rest of the house in a converted attic space accessed from the main floor by a yellow spiral staircase. Their bedrooms had peaked ceilings and views. Brendhan and I shared a corner bedroom in the basement, where we tried to guess by the tires whose car was outside when someone pulled into the driveway.

Diane's room looked south over alfalfa fields to the big trees and blue silos of the Ayshire Dairy. Padeen's pointed north, where the same fields ended in a looming crag known as “The Rocks,” with its pair of white crosses bolted to the cliff edge. Padeen's brass bed was pushed underneath her window, our mother's hope chest at its foot. The chest was as big as a coffin, with the same high gloss to its curved lid. I could have played inside there but was sitting cross-legged on top, quiet as a ghost so as not to get kicked out.

Although I liked wearing boys' clothes, I couldn't get enough of Padeen and her cheerleading outfit. Watching her squeeze too-tight knee-highs along each muscular calf was like watching a female Achilles arming for battle. I held my breath as she wrestled the little sweater with the bucking mustang over her breasts and ribs, aligning the seams straight along each side. She tugged at her short skirt, with its alternating panels of blue and gold, until it hung low across her curving hips. She pulled both vinyl boots up to her knees, then turned toward the mirror and popped her eyes like a Kabuki master, layering on mascara. She slicked on red Lip Smackers, adding a dab high on both cheekbones until she was glowing and fierce. I breathed as quietly as I could through my open mouth. Something about Padeen's shining toughness reminded me of her closet, where, behind the minis and maxis, the wooden and brocade platforms, the leather boots, fitted jackets, and denim ankle dusters, there was a neat row of hunting rifles and a couple of compound bows.

Padeen took a small bottle off her dresser, clicked it open, and shook something into her palm.

“What's that?” I said, risking expulsion.

“A pill,” she said, tipping back her head and taking it without water. We did not take pills, not even aspirin. Mom followed the doctrine of our family pediatrician, Dr. Urbanich, who held that children do not feel pain.

“What for?” I said.

Padeen started kicking at clumps of clothing on the floor. “Ulcers,” she said finally.

“What's that?”

“Like a stomachache.”

“Maybe you shouldn't go to the game—you might throw up.”

“Not that kind of stomachache,” Padeen said. “From other things.”

“Milk?” I said. John had just found out he was allergic to milk, which struck Brendhan and me as hilarious, since we lived on a dairy.

“Not milk,” Padeen said, lifting up a big down coat and finding her purse underneath. “Things like stress.” She snapped open the purse and dropped in the pills.

I waited while she shrugged on the coat and checked herself in the mirror, then shook it onto the floor and went hunting for a different one. We weren't allowed to leave the house without “proper clothes” in winter, even if it was to go from overheated car to sweltering gym. We were regaled with stories of people dying after their car slid off the road, just because they couldn't stay warm enough until help arrived.

“Why are you stressed?” I said, this time risking the heart of things.