I’d grown up skating, like so many other kids in my town part of a frigid pack that met up winter afternoons after school. The rink was arctic, unloved. But its high hissing lights blazed by four-thirty, erasing the dead winter sky and giving us wild shadows, and every other hour the maintenance crew shooed us off to bring out the Zamboni. It took forever; our hands froze; the machine laid down ice like pooling cream. We clung to the boards to wait for the first fresh steps.
When I was ten or so I’d asked my father for hockey skates, not caring for the fiddly picks on the front of figure skates’ blades or the million dainty little hooks required by their laces. I thought I’d seen pride in his face when I asked, pride in the way he took me to the sports shop as soon as a weekend rolled round.
Nothing at St. Paul’s came easily to me. Nothing felt like my natural due. But I’d been on hockey skates for years. I showed up for tryouts and made JV.
Because I could skate backward, I got to play defense (in theory, to block an incoming forward). I could deliver a good Iron Cross: front-stop, back-stop, side-stop, side-stop, over and over, until our sides knotted and we’d cut deep crosses into the ice, leaving piles of shavings all around. Our games were a circus, because so few of us knew what we were doing or where we were supposed to be (I certainly did not). It could take a good twenty-five minutes in the locker room just to figure out how all the pads were strapped on. But there was solidarity there, and there was a place for me.
The hierarchy of hockey teams went like this: boys’ varsity, boys’ junior varsity, girls’ varsity, girls’ junior varsity. We ponytailed scrubs were relegated to practice at 6 a.m. I’d troop across campus from Warren House, heading toward the first peach light in the sky, making a left at the library, and taking a shortcut through Kittredge House to where Gordon Rink was set back in the tall pines. Kittredge was ugly, with lousy light even on the brightest day. I’d still be waiting on the January dawn when I pulled open the heavy door. But several girls from my team lived in Kittredge, and they’d come pouring out of their house into the main hall, and in this way hockey delivered to me—finally, I felt—my true friends.
The hockey girls, six of them, were familiar faces. Two had played on my soccer team. Others I’d met in the halls. We met up in their dorm, exited into a wall of cold, crossed a footbridge toward unlit woods, and barreled through the door into the thrumming rink.
Our locker room was an unheated trailer. At 6 a.m. on a winter morning the wooden benches sang if clipped by a skate. We stripped to shorts and T-shirts to suit up, peered through clouds of breath to find where the Velcro of our pads snagged our tube socks, and tugged those socks up over skin goose-bumped so tightly it hurt. We dressed miserably, anxious, trying to take courage from the rancid plastic padding, our coughing and hacking, our halitosis.
One morning Brooke, a fourth former from California, could not find one of her kneepads. She’d asked a few times, but nobody replied. Finally she sat and opened her mouth and bellowed, “I NEED MY KNEEPAD,” in a monotone that went on and on until we all stopped to look at her because the sound she was making was so unsettling. When we were all quiet, she said, “Thanks. Can you help?” And we all laughed, and tossed our bags around until it was found. She’d been so rude, but everything about hockey was rude: the cold, the smell of unwashed pads, the hot morning spit in your mouth guard as you heaved after sprints. It felt delightful to be aggressive, to be a girl especially who could be crass and cranky and cold. After Brooke did this, we were easier with each other. On the ice we scrambled about like bears. And it might not have been pretty, but we were part of the hockey tradition at St. Paul’s School.
The passage through Kittredge to the rink became my normal route, and after practice I’d just head back to my friends’ dorm and stay. Brooke lived there. She had curly hair that was buzzed on the sides and earrings all up the edge of one ear, and a scratch confidence I could not chalk up entirely to the fact that her older brother was a much-admired sixth former (who would, by year’s end, be helping her select her next boyfriend). Her roommate, Maddy, was an Ohio brunette with green eyes, a dimple, and enormous, lovely breasts that the sixth-form boys had nicknamed the big guns. We all knew this—even Maddy, giggling, told us about it, her eyes wide with slight alarm—and instinctively protected her. She was exuberant and often imprecise, which endeared her to those of us who were so afraid of making mistakes. Hearing an excellent story, Maddy would mourn not having been “a spy on the wall.” Returning to a tiresome topic, she’d say, “Guys, not to kick a dead cow, but…” We all kicked dead cows thereafter, aware of the way Maddy might be caricatured at school (given those big guns) and unwilling to participate. Though we did not have words for this yet.
Next door to Brooke and Maddy were Linley, from Colorado, a pretty blonde whose dirty sense of humor lent power to her claim that St. Paul’s boys were coarse and lame, and Elise, a lanky artist from Kentucky with sultry, half-open eyes who had a serious boyfriend in the form above us. Elise’s refusal to say much about her beau seemed to me testament to her love’s maturity, and I was fascinated by the quiet steadiness of their relationship. Next door
