| Outside The
Circle by Tima Smith |
Lori’s on the home team. White. Number twenty-one. She has my long legs and her mother’s straight blonde hair. Sometimes, when she’s in front of me walking down the hall or on the stairs, she gives her head a shake and her hair moves from side to side in one silky motion the way Kathleen’s did. And the pain shoots through me as sharp as ever. Like it hasn’t been thirteen years. Like she just died yesterday. I watch her as she dribbles the ball down court keeping it in tight to her body, under control, the way I taught her. We practice every night in the driveway with the big spot lighting up enough of the space around the hoop so we can do lay-ups and foul shots, because I tell her it can never be automatic enough, getting the ball in. It has to be your body that knows how to do it all by itself, so the mental pressure can’t ruin you, can’t rob you of the shot when you really need it. Her sneakers dig into the court. She holds the ball between her hands, looking right and left across the court. “Red,” she yells, and number eleven pulls away from a tight defense into the open. Lori fakes a pass to the right, then pushes the ball left from her chest, snapping it hard and quick. Number eleven picks it out of the air and breaks for the basket. The crowd leans forward, like on cue, and the noise level rises. I look at the shot clock. “Two seconds,” I yell. “Two seconds.” An echo from somewhere up behind me. The ball hits the air as the horn blows. It circles the rim once slow, hesitates, then begins to slide down into the net like it’s taking its time, enjoying the tension. The boy sitting next to me puts his fingers to his mouth and his whistle makes my ear go deaf. The scoreboard blinks, changes. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. Half-time. The girls bounce off the court, high on the winning. Lori walks. She’s surrounded by the others, but she seems to be walking all alone. It reminds me of the way she’s been lately, and I feel my mood go flat watching her. She flings herself at her chair and someone hands her a plastic bottle. She takes a long sip. The coach squats in front of his line, his hands gesture in a kind of shorthand, an abbreviation of passes, signals, throws. Lori listens with her head down, and I feel the muscles in my jaw get tight. Attitude. I try to make her understand. It’s prime, I tell her. I fire mechanics because of it. It’s the difference between a winner and a loser. Not just basketball, Lori, I say, everything. It’s prime. She listens. She always listens, and I like to think she understands, but she’s sitting there now like the score was reversed. Like her team’s the one down seventeen points and it’s her fault or something. When she was little, it was different. I could do something then ... make a face, tell a bad joke. It was an easy thing to make her smile then. Now nothing works. “She’s a teenage girl,” my mother says. “Moods. Just moods. Leave her alone.” So I do. She has pressures. Enough without me. SATs college applications, scholarships. Boys. And I’m not enough, I know that. She needs someone who can remember what it’s like, someone who can understand. She needs Kathleen. We both need Kathleen. The team stands up and the coach talks them into the locker room. He knows what he’s doing, so he’ll psych them both ways. Pump them up to keep the energy high, come down on them so they won’t think the game’s already over. I know. I listened to it a hundred times myself. A blast of cold air hits me and I turn to look. Three boys with their hands in their pockets are walking away from the parking lot entrance. Their faces are red from the wind. Caked snow outlines the wet tracks they leave on the waxed floor. They don’t want to pay the seventy-five cents admission they’re collecting in the hall, so they stand and knock until someone lets them in. They move to the wall at end court and sit down, their legs spread out long in front. They look bored. I don’t remember being bored when I was their age. I was busy all the time. Busy trying to be Dr. J. Busy trying to get another hundred miles out of my transmission. These kids don’t look like they need to worry about that hundred miles. They look like most of the other kids in the gym, like someone’s been taking good care of them. The blonde one in the middle says something and the other two laugh. They watch the girls walking back and forth in front of the bleachers, and the blonde gets up and walks over. The girls stand around him laughing at what he’s saying. He seems good at making them laugh. It’s a good time. Someone should try and tell them that, what a good time it is for them. “Girl’s looking good tonight. Better than her old man ever did, huh?” Number fifteen’s father climbs up two more bleachers and slides in beside me. His gold watch glints back the overhead light and I instinctively pull away from the camel coat. I didn’t have time to change after work, just time enough to scrub the worst of the grease off my hands. “Doing okay,” I answer, nodding. I don’t like him. He doesn’t seem to realize. I serviced his car once and only charged for the parts. I thought he wouldn’t come back if I did that, because it makes most people who have his kind of money feel bad, a little guilty as though they’re taking advantage. But now he’s in all the time. “Lori hear from any schools?” he asks. Every week we go through the same thing. “No.” I shake my head. “Beth got an acceptance from that one I told you about. The one in upstate New York.” “Great,” I say. He shrugs. “Yeah. It’s not the one she wants, though. Hasn’t heard from California yet. She really wants Stanford.” I nod, wait for the next question. “Lori hasn’t heard yet either, huh? From Stanford, I mean?” I look down at the court. A bunch of little kids are playing around the basket, trying to dribble. One holds the ball in both hands between his bent knees and heaves it up toward the basket. I shake my head. “Nope, not yet.” She’s had the acceptance pinned on her bulletin board for two weeks, but for some reason--her mood maybe--she hasn’t written back to say yes. And she hasn’t told anyone either. “‘Course, I’m not worried,” he says, stretching out his arms, then crossing them. “With my contacts there, I know she’s in. Nice to see ‘em both make it, though, you know? Hate to see one make it and not the other.” You mean you’d hate to see Lori make it and not Beth, I think. “They’ll both be somewhere good next year,” I say. “Yeah, but somewhere’s not good enough.” He stands up, leans over and pulls a punch at my shoulder. “I can feel it coming though.” He starts climbing down carefully, looking at each step before he puts out his foot. “This week. I know it’s coming this week.” He steps on the bottom bleacher. “For both of them,” he adds. I watch him go on his rounds. I made the mistake of telling him I played pro ball three seasons, and now he pounds me on the back and introduces me as the late great hope of the Golden State Warriors. When my back’s not there to pound, he laughs a little and calls me the ex-jock. Sometimes he calls me a grease monkey. People talk, but the stories go both way. It’s his wife’s money. He’s a mean drunk. The locker room door swings open and the team runs out. I keep my eye on the doorway watching for Lori, follow her as she runs with the others to the far side of the court. A teammate tosses her a ball and she lofts it, high and smooth from outside the circle. It hits and she doesn’t even smile. The bleachers shake, kids pound down past me. They never stay still even during the game. A lot of them are kids who used to come over to play on the swing or slide on the hill out back in the winter. “Hi, Mr. Gallagher.” They recite it like a chorus every time they pass. Sometimes Lori’s boyfriend stops and sits with me, probably out of politeness. But something’s happened and they’re not seeing each other now. Derek calls a lot, every night. I hear her say things like she’s busy and can’t talk. I wonder if that’s it, if that’s what’s bothering her. But I don’t see why because there’s been a string of boys. They come and go, and Lori’s mood over them, both bad and good, comes and goes, too. This mood stay, though. And Derek isn’t that special. He’s a nice kid, but he’s nothing special. I watch her during the next quarter, and the next. She plays a good tight game, but grim, and when the final horn blows, it doesn’t seem to matter that the home team buys if fifty-one to thirty-three. She looks up at the bleachers, holds up one finger and I nod back. She heads for the locker room, but just as she gets there, Derek intercepts her. They form a clog in front of the door, so people have to go around them, and from up here it looks like water flowing around a rock. She shakes her head at him. I can’t see her face, but I’m looking right at his, and it makes me cringe. Hope. Frustration. Rejection. She turns away and disappears through the door. Derek stands there, not moving, like he refuses to believe it didn’t work. Then he spins around and heads for the exit, moving like something injured and angry. People get shouldered out of his way. It makes me feel like I should talk to her, because maybe she doesn’t understand the damage she can do. We climb up into the wrecker and I wish I’d come out to warm it up first. Our breaths hang in the air, the seat is stiff with cold, and Lori’s hair is sweaty against her forehead. She says the cold feels good. I start the engine and lift a blanket from the back of the cab. “Cover yourself up,” I order, “you’ll catch pneumonia.” I climb out and start to scrape the snow from the windows with my glove. I used to argue that one with my mother. “You can’t get pneumonia from cold air,” I’d tell her. But I tell Lori to cover up anyway. It’s one of those automatic things, like saying gesundheit when someone sneezes. The truck chews across the parking lot and out onto the road, tight and easy through the snow. Heat begins to flow from the registers. “Good game,” I tell her. She nods. In the driveway, I pull the truck up under the hoop, turn off the engine and push the knob on the lights. The snow sifts down all around us. “Bet the sledding would be good tonight.” She moves under the blanket. “Give it a try?” I look at her. A joke really. She starts to make a face, struggles with it, then she nods her head. “Yeah,” she says. She looks surprised. I give her ten minutes to get ready or she’s a dirty dog. I’m surprised, too. Glad. I feel my way through the shed. I step on a rake and the handle hits me in the shoulder. My hands grope until they find the two fiberglass discs behind everything else, up against the wall, unused a long time. I bull them out. Things hit the floor all around. I stand at the bottom of the slope, waiting for her in the snow, and when she bends down to pick up the coaster, I give the tassel on her hat a yank. “Da-ad.” A familiar two syllable complaint. The hill spreads above us white, untouched. There are pictures in the album of Kathleen on a sled, holding Lori between her legs. She’s about two, and so wrapped up all you can see is eyes and a nose. The last time I looked at them, they caught me off guard. Kathleen looked so young. We start up the hill, our boots making black holes in the snow. All I can hear are the sounds I make as I move, the snow against the soles of my boots, my jacket rubbing against itself, my breath. These are noises I never hear, but there are no noises outside these tonight. Up at the top, we look down at the house, down across the slope of the hill. “You first,” I say, remembering that’s what she always insisted on. She pushes her saucer flat into the snow to set it, then sits down, folding her legs inside the curve, grabbing onto the handles. She jumps it forward a little, a little more, then I stick out one boot and give it a nudge. She slides down across the slope, going away from me faster and faster, silent until the saucer does a one eighty, and then she lets out a little scream. The paths of pounded snow shine across the slope. This will be the last slide. Each one gets faster than the last, the slope slicker and icier with the cold. It’s getting late. “Remember we used to hold hands,” she says, “try to hold on all the way to the bottom?” She’s having fun now. Smiling and laughing. Each time she comes up the hill, she seems a little happier, a little lighter. We start side by side, pushing off together, holding on to each other. Then we start to strain apart, come together, part again. The second time we come together, we hit hard. “Let go,” I tell her. But she hangs on and I feel her come out of the saucer. I drag her along until I lean back and let the disc skim away from under me. “You okay?” I ask, and for a while she lies there, saying nothing. “Lori?” I slide over to her. She sits up. She’s crying. I can see the wet tracks of the tears on her face. “Did you get hurt?” I feel something start to crawl in my stomach. She shakes her head. “No,” she says, and then, “Daddy.” A word I haven’t heard in a long time, and she keeps saying it. We sit there. I rock her. I don’t know what else to do.” I fit the socket on the bolt and shock the handle, then put my weight against it again, all my weight. Still it doesn’t budge. And then the handle’s out of my hand before I even know I’ve done it, somersaulting through the air, end over end. It looks like slow motion until it hits the wall and bounces back against the air compressor and skids along the stained cement floor. Kappy and Bates come up slow from their engines. They look at me. “When you’re done,” I tell Kappy, I gesture with my thumb, “U bolt’s frozen.” He nods. Outside, I climb into the wrecker. Radio said snow again tonight, after midnight. That means tow calls, and rush hour’ll be a mess. I glance at the clock on the dash. Four thirty-five. In an hour, I’ll drive to the school to watch Lori’s game. It’s the one they wait for every season. The rival team. Last year they lost, and tonight they’ll want to even it up. The coach called at the end of last week. He was worried because she missed a game, missed practices. “She’s all right, isn’t she?” he asked. “I talked to the other girls and they said they didn’t know.” I told him she was fine. Just something going around. I asked her this morning if she wanted to play and she said she did. “Don’t look at me like that, Dad,” she said, “I’m okay.” She seems okay. I’d like to think she is, that it’s all over for her. As if it never happened. But then I’d like to think that love lasts forever and people always live happily ever after, too. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one who’s not okay. I think about it all the time. Think about her having to say it. “I’m pregnant, Daddy, I’m pregnant.” I think about how it must have made her feel. How it made me feel. It didn’t sound right, coming out of Lori. It sounded like a foreign word. Even though I knew damn well what it meant, part of me said it didn’t mean that. Couldn’t mean that. I keep remembering the way she wouldn’t look at me. The way she kept staring at my chest. And how it wasn’t until after we’d talked a long time, after I’d told her for the ninety-ninth time that everything was going to be okay that her eyes finally connected with mine. Her eyes were red and her lips were puffy from crying. Her chin quivered. I’d seen that same face when she fell off the front fence and broke her arm. I’d seen it looking up at me from the emergency room table while they stitched up her chin after she fell off her bike. And the time I had to tell her the car had hit the dog real hard and she had to understand that sometimes there just wasn’t anything left to do. She wasn’t all that much older now than she’d been those other times, and I guess the decision was made right then, while I looked into her face. But I didn’t know it yet. I still had to find it. I walked the house all night. I developed a path. It went by her room so I could stop at the door and look in every time. The door was open for once because she’d asked to please leave it open. She slept. When the air started to go gray, I stopped walking and sat down near the kitchen window. Outside, all the angles and corners were gone. The snow had rounded them out. Even the wrecker looked good. By then the craziness was out of me. I’d stopped wishing Kathleen was there. I’d stopped thinking about impossible solutions. Between twelve and three Kathleen was all I’d thought about. I’d walk my path, talking to myself. Lori needed her mother. It was all my fault because I wasn’t enough. I’d done a lousy job, and if Kathleen had been there, none of it would happened. None of it. And then around three, I saw her standing at the other end of the living room. I wasn’t even surprised, just relieved. It seemed reasonable she should show up when we needed her. It even went through my mind it was the least she could have done. After all, I’d taken care of it all for a long time. “It hasn’t always been easy, you know,” I said, “and just when I thought I’d made it, Kathleen, got her through it all ...” She stared at me. “I’m supposed to tell her what to do,” I said, “I’m supposed to know.” I looked at her. At her pretty face. It was the face in all the pictures in the album. Smooth. No lines. Kathleen was still twenty-six, and she didn’t know what to do any better than me. Less. She’d taken care of ear infections. Some bad dreams. And now she’d come back. But the timing was all wrong. The gears didn’t mesh anymore. I turned around and left her standing there. I started walking again. Between three and four I cleaned the basement. I got tired of walking, talking to myself, not getting anywhere. I started out just poking around down there, through sixteen years worth of junk I’d been meaning to throw away. The table hockey lay slanted across the top of some tires. I leaned down, pulled a rod. The player spun in place. The rod was bent. Most of the rods were bent. It’s what we used to do on Sunday afternoons, me and Lori. We placed bets. I bet you washing the dishes for a week that I win, Lori would say, and we’d shake. I saw the handle of her pogo stick. She fell and sprained her wrist the first day she had it. Roller skates. Ice skates. I thought her feet would never stop growing. The tire swing was next to the skates. It was an F350 tire I’d cut out with the chain saw, and Lori used to fit inside with almost none of her sticking out except her feet and ankles. A doll carriage with a broken wheel. A table and chair that sat about two feet off the floor. I started moving things, organizing it into tree piles. One for saving, one for giving away, one for the dump. Against the wall behind some plywood, I found her crib. It was black with soot and I got a rag and wiped at it. The oily film smudged, then came off. There were other things, too. A wooden playpen, a plastic baby seat. I remembered putting Lori in them. Custard pudding, she used to love custard pudding. When I was done, I looked at it all. I sat down on the steps. The house was quiet. Come September, it would be quiet all the time. “Bet you’ll like that, Dad, huh?” No more teenagers hanging around. No more stereo. No more telephone ringing. No more ball games to leave work early for. No more getting home before her on Saturday nights so I could lie in bed waiting for the sound of a car in the driveway. Bet you’ll like that, Dad, huh? It was all supposed to be downhill now. Time for me to do all the things I’d been putting off. Like the basement. But that was done now. I looked around. I didn’t have three piles. I had one. I was saving everything. The crib, the roller skates, the pogo stick, the hockey game with the bent rods. And it hit me that I could save Lori. Save her baby. Save myself. I’d straighten out the hockey rods. What else did I have to do on Sunday afternoons? Refinish the crib. Hang up the tire. I’d done it all once, I could do it again. This time, though, I’d do it better. Hire someone else to manage the shop. Lori could still have her life. I could still have mine. I sat there planning it out and then the windows went from black to gray and I turned off the basement light and went upstairs. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at what the snow had done during the night. I started thinking about Lori. About the letter on her bulletin board, the scholarship she’d been offered. I thought about Kathleen and timing and gears that didn’t mesh anymore. Then the phone rang. Someone needed a wrecker. I had to go to work. Lori only missed one game. She has a prescription so it won’t happen again. She sent a letter to California accepting their scholarship. I saw Derek the other day and I didn’t kill him. And I like to think it’s all over, like it never happened. I turn left onto our street and slow down for the driveway. The snow mounds up on either side. Branches from the spreading yew reach out from the snow bank and catch the sides of the truck as I make my turn. Up at the end of the driveway, the hoop’s orange rim stands out against black tree branches and gray sky. I shift into second, give it gas. I just make it into third before I hit the brake. The steel bumper connects with the pole. The aluminum post shudders, resists, then with a long slow motion it falls and settles with no sound at all into the snow.
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