First Light
Having lost her voice, Dorsey during the third period lets her eyes go out of focus, so that she watches the game as an abstract spectacle of objects moving across a field of low friction. She sees the men abstractly, almost as if they were Isaac Newton’s billiard balls set in motion on a green pool table and bouncing off the cushions in absolutely predetermined and predictable angles. She still watches Hugh, but now that Holbein has scored two more goals, she’s sure his team will win, and it’s no longer a human drama; it’s physics. It’s Newton’s laws of motion enacted upon the puck, crossing the blue line; the young men, pushing backwards against the ice with their blades to throw themselves forward toward the puck and each other and the goalie; and the goalie himself, masked and faceless unlike the other players, the resistor to whatever charge of opposing energy comes hurtling his way. The goalie is Maxwell’s Demon, whose job is to sort, to say yes or no, to keep certain objects from entering the wrong space.
The goalie always says no to the puck. The puck, a forward moving projectile, must not occupy the space protected by the masked demon; if it does, a light goes on and half the men raise their arms and their sticks into the air in celebration. Sitting back, very quiet now, Dorsey sees the action on the ice as the drama of physics and—she does not want this to be true, she doesn’t want life to operate this way—sex: forward projectiles, protected areas, raised arms. The men want to throw this thing into an area that is guarded, shielded; if they overcome resistance, if they get this part of themselves into it, and do it often enough, they win. If there’s no resistance, there’s no game. Dorsey looks at the webbing around the goal box and then down at her mother’s hands, knitting a web of cloth for a baby.
What is the connection between physics and sex, she says to herself, and who will ever explain it to me?
Women resist; men overcome their resistance. Is that it? That’s too simple. It can’t be right. The puck slides along the boards, and a horn sounds. The game’s over. Dorsey’s father has been very quiet, and hasn’t shouted once. She’s annoyed with him, and she runs down to the side of the rink. Hugh skates over to her and drapes her with one of his big sweaty arms and ruffles her hair with the hard leather of his glove, which he took off once tonight, for a fistfight. His face is reddish white with exhaustion, and his body smells of an odor that Dorsey has just now started to associate with adult men after periods of physical work. She doesn’t mind the smell; it’s different from hers.
“You looked great,” she says to Hugh. “You looked …” She can’t think of an adjective. “Sensational!” Right away she knows the adjective is wrong, too girlish, for a girl who has started high school. Her brother laughs. He knows it’s the wrong adjective, too; his face shows it, but he likes her pleasure in his honor as a winner, a warrior.
“Talk to you later,” he says. He clumps off down the tunnel behind the Holbein goalie, and at once, off the ice and on solid planked wood ground, the truer surface of the earth, Hugh looks as awkward as a seal or some other animal forced to move in a medium unsuited for it. He wobbles and tilts. She’s never seen his power turn so quickly into precariousness: one hundred sixty-eight pounds balanced on two thin blades.
In the car Dorsey sits up in the front seat with her father. She resists the impulse to put her booted feet up on the dashboard. “You didn’t cheer,” she says, staring out at the two cones of their headlights on the highway. “You didn’t cheer Hugh once. He needs cheering.”
“I was watching him,” her father says.
“You didn’t cheer. It’s not just anybody. It’s Hugh.”
“I was watching him.”
“It’d mean a lot to him if you cheered.”
“He doesn’t expect me to. I’m not that kind of father.”
“You should surprise him. Get excited about what he’s doing.”
“He wouldn’t notice.”
“Yes, he would. He would too notice. It’d make him happy.”
“Well, he knew we were there. We were doing something for him.”
“What? What were you doing for him?”
Her father waits. “We were there.”
Dorsey slumps down in the front seat. Their car passes a farm with a long white fence for sheep, and in her anger the fence blurs so that it appears to be a series of boards and sticks zooming past the car, thrown by some furious nocturnal giant.
20
A big date. It’s mid-June, the summer after Hugh’s senior year of high school, Saturday afternoon, and he’s in the driveway, soaping down the heavy Chevy with Ivory flakes dissolved in warm water. Detergents and hot water damage the paint, his dad has told him; you have to use something milder. Tonight he’s taking out Evelyn D’Agostino, who has, Hugh thinks, been panting after him for weeks now, though she has the reputation of being a nice girl, not a slut. They’re going to go to Dellum’s Restaurant and then to the King Drive-In theater to see Bunny Lake Is Missing, and then … what they’ll do all depends on Evelyn’s attitude, as demonstrated by her clothes, her perfume, and what she does in the dark of the front seat.
He has soaped off the roof and the hood. Now with the rags from his mother’s collection in the basement he’s soaping down the doors and fenders and the grill. After rinsing them off with the hose, Hugh looks at his car’s chrome and red paint, and he breathes steadily, proud of himself and the car. The car was a bargain at seven hundred dollars, and it’s got guts and pride, a can-do car. This car says, Why the hell not?
Hugh’s mother leans out of the kitchen window, almost losing her glasses, and asks him to please turn down the radio, it’s distracting her. So he turns down WFOM so it’s loud instead of super-loud but still loud enough to make the dashboard rattle when the Beatles or the Kinks come on. After shutting the door, he almost steps into a puddle he’s made in the driveway, ringed with soapsuds. He looks at it. He’s barefoot. He steps in it. It feels great.
His mother calls down from the window again. Someone’s called, wants him on the phone. He reads his mother’s lips: it’s Turtle Findley. “Tell him I’ll call back,” he shouts. Turtle Findley is not an important person. Not sharp, not a good athlete, not funny, not a make-out artist, just a general slob Hugh has allowed to talk to him. Today he can’t be bothered. Too bad about Turtle, and guys like him, the ones who didn’t get the looks when they were being passed out, and who ended up with faces like rodents and reptiles.
Well, look who’s here. It’s the Shrimpo, carrying her new camera. She’s been all over the house, taking pictures of everything, including the front door, their mom and dad, the upstairs windows, the elm tree in the front yard. If she can get it into the viewfinder, she’ll take a picture of it, and then she’ll develop it herself. Hugh’s soaping the door on the driver’s side, humming along to “Please Please Me,” and Dorsey’s asking if she can snap his picture.
“Relax,” Hugh says. Dorsey sits down in the shade of the hill that slopes to the driveway, and she watches him do the car. She tilts her head, steadily gazing at him. Hugh loves being idolized. The Shrimpo can’t take her eyes off him, and he knows it. He grins at his little sister, Miss Brain Cell, and he wishes she were a little cuter, more of a knock-out, though she looks okay when she tries. He wishes she weren’t so serious. She doesn’t enjoy anything except her own ideas. Of course, she’s in junior high, the armpit of life. She doesn’t have many friends, though, and no one ever seems to call her.
He rinses, leaves the hose running in the driveway, and runs over to his sister, and pulls her by her hand to her feet. She asks him what he’s doing and he tells her to put the camera down, and she does. “Let’s dance,” Hugh says, and she blushes and tries to get away and sit down again, but he won’t let go of her hand. “Look how easy it is to dance to,” he says, whistling out the tune—“Where Did Our Love Go?”—and he feels how small her hand is. Because his hands are soapy, she wriggles away from him. “Suit yourself, Shrimpo,” he laughs. “Come back when you want to learn a few steps.”
?
??Yeah,” she says, picking up her camera. She puts it at eye-level and takes a picture of Hugh, and he stands still for a minute, but then there’s a horsefly buzzing around his head, and he has to move, so he lunges forward, trying to stomp Dorsey’s foot. She squeals and leaps backward, and he runs over to the other side of the car to get the hose. It’s a fact: sisters should be doused. He’s got the hose and has lowered his thumb over the nozzle to make it squirt and he’s ready to aim it right in the Shrimpo’s face when the voice of The Father is heard loudly from the kitchen window.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”
He takes his thumb away and stands there watching his sister, Miss Brain Cell, stick her tongue out at him and then make, unusual for her, a farting sound. “But Dad,” he says, “she was asking for it.”
“Hugh,” his father says, ending the argument.
“You’re going to get it,” Hugh says. The flatulent sounds continue, getting louder, more insulting. With the camera on the ground, Dorsey hauls out all her noises: squeaks, belches, farts, it’s amazing what she can do. She grabs the camera and runs off. She’ll be okay, Hugh thinks, rubbing the tail lights with the soapy rag to a red gleam. Anyone who can make noises like that will do just fine.
21
“Where’s Hugh?” Dorsey’s mother asks, glancing at the kitchen clock. Dorsey says he’s left a note somewhere—the hall table, the TV set, she’s sure she’s seen it—telling everybody that he’d be down at the lake practicing his shots. “But it’s dark,” her mother says, and Dorsey with fake impatience explains to her mother what she already knows, namely that it’s winter and the moon’s out and there’s more than enough light to skate by on the lake. “Well, it’s quarter to six,” her mother says, dropping some brown leftovers out of a Tupperware container into a saucepan. “Would you run down and get him?”
She sighs. “All right.” It’s a sixteen-minute walk but a nine-minute run to Five Oaks Lake on a path through the woods; she checks her watch to time herself.
The moon is twenty-four hours away from being full, and it gives the street a gloss like stainless steel or an old black-and-white movie. Slowed by her overshoes, Dorsey runs past the McDonalds’ house, past the Fabians’ and the Blairs’, then cuts onto the path through the woods of Five Oaks Park. If there had been any snow this winter, she could see more clearly, but the winter’s been dry so far, and in the dark the path is a forest hallway, an obscure tunnel between shrubs and thin-fingered trees. Dorsey doesn’t need the light. Every step she takes is like one she’s taken before on this path. She’s done it blindfolded, when her brother challenged her to take the path with a scarf over her eyes, and she managed its length in eleven minutes, Hugh following her and timing her. She didn’t get more than one serious scratch.
She emerges at the south end of Five Oaks Park, where the moonlit bandstand gleams in a little meadow lined with night-silver benches. Beyond it is a public-access boat dock. The town itself is half a mile up Lake Street, which she crosses now, seeing Hugh’s Chevy parked behind a Ford. She peers out onto the ice and sees the makeshift rink the town council has put there, though there are no lights because Five Oaks can’t afford them. The town’s only lighted rink is down by the high school, a flooded surface over part of the JV football field. Hugh likes to skate in the open, the sky over his head, not under trees or roofs or lights. And he likes to skate in the dark. He says it improves his puck handling. Dorsey can see him out there, skating with someone else, probably his friend Tommy Connell. She can hear the puck slapping back and forth, the hollow sound of sticks.
The lake ice is smooth as a mirror, the result of a dry and windless December. Dorsey’s never seen ice as perfectly glassed as this, and she steps out onto it gingerly so that she doesn’t slip. There, at her feet, perfectly reflected, are the constellations of the winter sky, the Pleiades, Orion, Auriga, Perseus, and behind the trees shading the lake’s bank, the moon, almost blotting the stars with its owlish light. As she walks across the ice, Dorsey has the sensation of being a storybook goddess, stepping across the star field of the sky. Then, looking down, she sees her own reflection, very dark and almost invisible, place a foot underneath her foot and walk upside down through the water.
A hundred feet out into the lake she turns around and sees the lights of Five Oaks, a toy train model set up on a child’s board, with amusement park, working streetlights, and telephone wires, and then, behind the town and up on the hill, the lights of the houses, the McDonalds’ and the Blairs’, and, somewhere up there, in that necklace of lights, her own family’s house, where now her father and mother are preparing the dinner and waiting for her to return with her brother.
She walks across more stars, the stars moving as she moves. She’s still careful not to slip on this surface until she’s almost up to the rink, when she slides for a few feet. In the dark her brother, wearing his sweat pants and sweatshirt, is practicing blocking drills, skating backwards in front of Tommy, protecting his zone. He sees Dorsey, loses his concentration, and Tommy does a quick one around his left side, catching him unprotected, and does a hard final slapshot.
“Hey, Shrimpo. What are you doing here?”
“Mom sent me down. It’s dinnertime.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” He hops over one of the boards out onto the clear ice where Dorsey stands. “You want a ride?”
“Huh?”
“Hey, Tom!” he says. “Grab the Shrimpo’s feet. We’ll skate her back.”
She feels her brother lifting her up, holding her around the shoulders, while her brother’s friend takes her legs, so that she’s in a sagging horizontal as they skate back toward the lake shore, and at first she screeches. Then she calms and, turning her face, watches the ice speed by underneath her and listens to the blades cutting into the ice at her head and feet, but the stars stay steady, reflected on this unmarked surface, while the two boys, her brother and her brother’s friend, pant hard, her brother’s sweat flicking into her face, as they race toward shore, carrying their hockey sticks and this girl between them.
22
Around the house on weekends, Hugh’s father slips into a state of intelligent watchfulness, signaled by a focused-on-the-distance look that Hugh once thought indicated anger. He has seen this look outside the house, too, in rowboats; he has seen his father cast out his line and begin to reel in, nothing on the lure, and then stop, as if some sound audible only to him had begun to vibrate in the hot summer air over Five Oaks Lake. “Dad?” Hugh says, but the old man doesn’t come back to the world immediately. The fingers on his right hand still hold the crank of the reel, and his left hand grasps the cork handle of the pole. He’s caught something, but it’s not a fish.
Doing household chores with Hugh, the old man trails off in mid-sentence and turns his head as if he were listening for something. Painting the house together, their two ladders set up close to each other, Hugh and his father discuss brands of paint, baseball, the proper technique with the brush—short unrushed strokes, his father says, the speed of a pendulum—but then the old man stops as if he’d been hypnotized. His cigarette dangles out of his mouth and the smoke curls up into his eyes, and he doesn’t even blink.
But then something snaps him back, and he begins to talk. “Speaking of paint,” he says, “I knew a person in town who painted his house a shade of pink, a color to wake a man up. First pink house in Five Oaks. A schoolteacher did it, of course. He lived over on Lawrence Street, next door to the undertaker. By the way, how did this town ever get an undertaker with the name of Jolley? Anyway, this man, this teacher, his name was Leo Evans, though everyone called him ‘Doghouse.’ Don’t know why. His neighbors took the color of his house to the town council, and then …”
Hugh angles his brush to paint over a mothlike patch he has missed, and he waits to hear about what happened to the pink house. But his father, though still painting, has gone away.
“What happened?” Hugh asks. “Dad? The pink house?”
&nbs
p; Hugh’s father stubs out his cigarette on the side of the ladder and sails the butt down to the lawn. “The town council claimed there was no city ordinance against pink houses. And the teacher, the person everybody called Doghouse, moved away that summer.”
Once, shooting baskets into the hoop installed over the garage door, Hugh sees his father, who has been watching him, suddenly turn away, as if listening to someone calling him at ultra-high frequencies. In the fall, Hugh finds his father standing in the backyard, leaning on his rake, staring fixedly at a patch of nondescript grass. He catches his father lost in thought everywhere in the house: in the kitchen, staring out the back window at the willows and blue spruce and elms on the hill; in the basement in his workroom, his tools spread out in front of him, a piece of wood clamped into the vise.
“Dad?” His father looks up from his workbench. “What’re you thinking of?”
“When I was a boy,” his father says, “my parents sent me off to Sunday school, where they made us memorize Bible verses. The one I remember was a wedding song. ‘How sweet is your love, my bride. How much better is your love than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than any spice. Your lips distil nectar …’ Think of asking children to memorize that.” His father leans back and laughs, his hands behind his head.
“I didn’t know you went to church.”
“Once. Years ago. My brain is stocked with these verses we had to memorize.”
Hugh decides to blurt it out. “Dad, around here you never finish your sentences. You’re always daydreaming or something.”