Far Post

My lip is swollen like a bee sting. On the inside it keeps rubbing against my braces, sore. All I can think about is the salty flavor of the cut in my mouth, and I’ve been late to every class, my mind wandering down the hall, sucking on this sore. Last year whenever I got banged up people would stop me and say, Oh my god! What happened? Now they know what to expect and no one says anything. Not even Bret, who is at his locker. He is looking at me in a funny way, like he has a question but is afraid to ask.

***

At practice Coach Mark has us doing lemon squeezers, ab crunches where we lift our hips and shoulders and twist side to side. I’ve done thirty; my sides burn and my nose is starting to run. My eyes tear up from trying so hard. I flop down on the mat while the other girls keep working on the sets. No pain, no gain, Coach Mark says, but I’ve lost faith in that equation.

Coach says, What’s got into you, Margaret? He always calls me that. I hate my name, a little old lady name that reminds me of orange marmalade. Oscar, my dad, named me Margaret. He never called me Meg, not even when I got to middle school and started wearing eyeliner and asked him to. Coach saying my name makes the tears come again, and I get back to work on the lemon squeezers.

Last night I told Bret I missed Oscar, said it like a little baby, crying, and ever since I can’t stop. Can’t stop thinking about him, can’t stop crying. It freaks me out. He’s been gone two years; why am I crying now? I don’t want to have a boyfriend I tell all my deepest stuff to, not this stuff anyway. I just want everything to be normal, like it used to be.

***

I started going out with Bret spring of last year. He was a junior so we got to go to prom together. I was excited about that, but it wasn’t the big deal everyone talks about. I had the ugliest dress on; I kept looking at the other girls, wondering why I couldn’t have picked something pretty. Under those ballroom lights my dress looked like crap: a whole lot of puce-colored satin, tight in the wrong places, loose in others. I probably should have let my mom go shopping with me. She’d have known how to pick out a decent dress, but I was still mad at her for making me go to therapy. I’ve been seeing Sally on Wednesdays at five o’clock since May and it’s a waste of my time. All she wants to talk about is my dad. She says it’s normal to feel conflicted. I’d rather tell her about having mad sex with Bret, or make up something stupid like that. 

***

Coach teases me about my lip, tells me to quit pouting. I’m off my game, and he’s trying to figure out why. It isn’t the pain; I don’t mind that. This swollen lip is no different from the raspberries I get when I dive, the way the yellow bruises look when they come out days later. The worst was in eighth grade when some girl tore my nose with her spikes. Lifted that little flap right up off my nostril and I bled all over everything. My mom wanted me to quit playing, she said I had a death wish. Oscar had been dead a couple of months and maybe I was a little crazy, diving after balls I shouldn’t have. But making plays in goal was the only thing that made me feel good, and no way was I going to quit.

My nose looked gross, all swollen and red with dried bits of blood it hurt too much to pick off. The stitches were like little black bug legs stuck to my face and I took my mom’s nail scissors and cut them down as short as I could.

My mom hadn’t been at the game. She wasn’t even worried when I came home an hour late. She was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of wine and talking on the phone when I walked in. I could tell she’d been crying so I knew she was talking about Oscar. Her own therapy—Pinot Grigio and a phone call. I told her the coach had tried to call her five times. I stared at her phone, trying to make her feel guilty, but she didn’t get it. She held my chin, started crying again, and tried to tell whether the cut was going to leave a scar.  

I thought it healed up pretty good over the next ten days; unless you pushed on my nose to look into that pink crease, you couldn’t even tell I’d been cut. The doctor cleared me to play again when he took the stitches out, but my mom was thinking about plastic surgery. If we decide to fix it, she said, pretending she hadn’t heard the doctor say I was good to go, can you straighten out this bump? She was pointing to the middle of my nose, a broad, bumpy part people say is from my dad. The doctor looked at her like she was crazy, closed his folder on me and said No.

***

I got good instincts. That’s what Coach Mark says, and I know it’s true. You got to in goal. You got to know when to come out, that’s the most important thing. On a breakaway play, a lot of players will just kick the ball right to you, but if the girl has any skill at all she’s going to put the ball in a corner before you can even wave your hand at it. Coach says it’s my good instincts that I know when to come out, but there’s science to it, too. The second she touches that ball, you break. It’s all about timing. A fast girl with instincts of her own isn’t going to give you the chance to touch that ball. She will get to it again before you, and she will shoot. Your whole chance of stopping the shot lies in breaking down her angles. If you get your body horizontal and you’re just a few yards away when she kicks, she’s going to have to kick it right into you. And that’s the science of the angles. It’s just like a pool table, really. 

These are the kinds of things I try to tell Sally, the things that make sense to me. She nods her head and smiles and lets me go on. Then she asks some question about Bret and I know she doesn’t understand. 

Sally wanted to hear all about prom, so I told her. I told it just like it was—disappointing and stupid. Bret didn’t chip in anything for the hotel suite where we ended up after the dance was over. It was crowded and Bret loosened his tuxedo and did beer bongs until he was ready to puke. A bunch of girls sat on the bed doing shots. I stood around until they told me I could sit with them. They gave me a shot glass and a wedge of lemon. I felt ridiculous, dressed up and partying on a hotel bed with a bunch of girls I didn’t know. 

I drank two shots and then Bret came over and took my hand, and we went and sat in a chair together, started making out. It was weird making out with everyone around, but other people were doing it. The tequila and the beer flavors tasted weird mixed up together in our mouths, and I was thinking more about that than kissing. A little later the guys who had paid for the suite started kicking everybody out. Their girlfriends watched them and waited, and I was glad we were leaving. 

We pulled out onto Route One, which was almost deserted at two a.m. We were near the intersection of Randolph Road where we were supposed to turn when Bret pulled into the parking lot of a Red Lobster. He parked in the dark, far back in the corner. He reached across the seat and started kissing me, wet and sloppy. He started feeling around the neckline of my dress, trying to get his hand inside. 

Bret stopped making out with me as fast as he’d started. He opened his door and threw up on the pavement. When he was done he sat still for a minute. Sorry, he said. He was too embarrassed to even look at me. He rolled his seat back a little ways and fell asleep. I rolled my seat back too, until I was looking at nothing but the worn ceiling of Bret’s mom’s Honda Accord, listening to the traffic and the ticking of the engine as it cooled.

Time was up when I got to the end and Sally looked relieved our session was over.

***

Breakaways are easy to play compared to the rest. When it’s just you, you don’t have to factor in what your defenders are doing, and there’s no one obstructing your vision. When to come out on a corner is a tougher play. Most goalies just stand there and watch it happen, let the defense do all the work. But a good corner kick is a goalie’s play, at least if you’re tall or can jump at all. And it’s a great place to use your fists, because you don’t want to flub a catch right in front of the net. Most goalies are too scared to push through all those people, five or six attackers crashing your goal, and you’re going to have to jump right on some girl to get the ball. But your fullbacks are on the posts when you go for it. Defending a corner kick is a team effort, and you got to count on your teammates to do their jobs. 

Soccer is my therapy, I told Sally in the beginning of August. Tryouts had just finished and I had made varsity. Why do you think soccer is your therapy? Sally asked. I hate it when she turns everything I say into a question.

***

My mom tries her hardest, I know she does. If I had a subscription to Seventeen nagazine I think we would get along better. But we’re like on different astral planes or something. My mother’s perfume—you can smell it before she enters a room. And she has big, high maintenance hair, frosted with streaks of blond. I didn’t get that gene, the super feminine glamour gene. I’m the sort of girl who’d wear dirty sweat pants from the bottom of the laundry basket rather than a dress to school. I don’t think my mom is disappointed in me, she just doesn’t know what to do. I can’t blame her. She counted on Oscar being around to raise me. 

We were a normal, happy family; everyone would have said so. Then Oscar OD’ed, took pills and drank and didn’t wake up. My mom says it was an accident and I want to believe her but sometimes I wonder. I wonder who Oscar really was. I remember him the way kids remember their parents; he’s just a picture in my mind, an action figure in my life. I try to imagine how he saw me, but I can barely remember who I was two years ago; it was the beginning of eighth grade, and I was still figuring out how to wear a bra. When my dad died of an overdose everyone knew. Everyone looked at me in that special, awful way reserved for tragedies. No one knew what to say so no one said anything. I wish I’d been really little, like four or five, because then I wouldn’t have understood how weird everyone was acting. But then I probably wouldn’t remember Oscar at all.

***

The girls on my team like Coach Mark because he’s good at what he does, but they make fun of him behind his back. They call him Madman because he looks like John Madden, the football announcer. Coach Mark is big and fat with thick blond hair, fleshy lips and fat fingers. You can fault him for not being able to do all the stuff he yells at us to do, but that doesn’t really matter in a coach. A coach doesn’t have to be able to do a damn thing. A coach has to be there every minute, see every play, know what every girl needs to do. That sounds obvious but it’s not. I know because from the goal I see all kinds of things that need doing—like drop passing, for god’s sake—but how do you get people to do that? Coach Mark yells his head off during the game hard enough to pop blood vessels in his eyes, and then afterward he’s totally mellow, like he knows we’ll never figure out any of the stuff he’s saying until at least midseason anyway. 

***

Sally’s job is to listen to me talk, so I talk about soccer because that’s what I know. But as soon as I pause she asks a question about Bret, or my dad or mom, or even Coach Mark and I get so mad. The last time I saw her was the day before the game, so I was keyed up and going on about how to stop big plays. She asked me if Bret was coming to my game and I leaned back and crossed my arms and said, Why does everything have to be about sex? She tried to do that therapist thing and flip the question back at me. Do you think everything is about sex? Sally asked. No, I said. I kept my arms folded and didn’t say anything else for the rest of the session.

Even though I was thirteen when he died, my memories of Oscar are starting to fade. All I’ve really got are some photo albums and three shaky home videos of me blowing out birthday candles at different ages. I watch them sometimes to catch a glimpse of Oscar: he’ll be standing behind me while everyone sings happy birthday, or the camera will pan past him as he’s drinking a beer with the neighbor. 

He named me Margaret after his mother. My name is a weak reminder of a man I barely knew, worse than a candle on a cake. Then last year in English class we read a poem that goes: “Margaret, are you grieving, over golden grove unleaving,” and it sent a chill down my spine, like maybe Oscar had said those lines long ago when they couldn’t have meant anything between us except my name. I was crazy about that poem, even wrote a paper on it. It was the only time I ever got an A in English class. 

I thought about telling Sally this but decided not to. It’s a special piece of me, that poem, and I don’t want anyone handling it the wrong way.

***

Yesterday’s game was our season opener. The first game of the season matters more than anyone realizes. It isn’t the score, whether you win or lose, but the players on your team are either going to impress you or depress you in that first game. I was worried about it. If I screwed up my team would think I sucked and start covering my position. And then I wouldn’t trust myself, which is the worst thing for a goalie. 

 I was jumping up and down in little stiff-legged jumps, gritting my teeth. Nobody noticed because each of us was busy doing our own version of being stressed out. Coach Mark saw me though. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder, kept me from doing my little jumps. Margaret, relax, he said. Imagine all the shots you’re going to stop. Really imagine them, one after another. Take your time to really feel it. Imagine your perfect game. I started breathing deep and I stopped hopping around. I got my mind under control. For some reason I always need to be reminded of the shots I’m going to block; I can’t seem to master my nerves on my own.

I stood on the line waiting for the start of play, breathing deeply through my nose and imagined myself tapping a wicked corner kick out over the top of the goalpost. 

McLean is good. They have some of the fastest players in the county, girls who’ve played club soccer since they were eight. I had to bust my ass the whole game because we couldn’t seem to keep the ball at their end for more than a few seconds at a time. We had nothing going on the ground, our passing game was nonexistent, and they picked off every ball in the air. I’d trap it and punt it straight to my girl, crossing the field and sending it just past the midline. All she had to do was step into it. But every time some McLean girl was faster. She’d put a head on it and once again the ball was in their possession.   

***

After the game I went with Bret to the bonfire party. It’s a big tradition, and I wanted to go to the bonfire party worse than I had wanted to go to prom. Parents and teachers have known about the party for years, I don’t know why it isn’t more secret, with kids lighting fires and drinking, but no one has ever put a stop to it. My mom banged around the house, slamming things down hard when I told her I was going with Bret. She kept saying how I was too young, that the bonfire party was for older kids. I’m not too young, I said. I’m in high school, or haven’t you noticed. I could see by how her lips went thin that she was tired of arguing with me. If your father were here, she said, you can bet he wouldn’t let you go to that damn party. Well, I said, my own lips getting thin, he’s not here, is he. 

 There were logs rolled up close to the fire for people to sit on. There wasn’t much to do but listen to music and drink flat beer. The only upperclassmen I knew besides Bret were a couple of girls from my team. After our McLean game there wasn’t much we had to say to each other. Bret left to throw a football in the dark with a bunch of guys. I thought about following him, but sitting on the log in front of the fire made me feel sleepy.

***

I saved way more shots than I could possibly have imagined, but the one I remember is the one that went in. A tall girl, number nine, had been pounding me the whole game. She had the speed and the footwork to bring the ball down the field all on her own. Over and over again she would fake out the defenders, bringing it in closer until the only people between her and the net were me and Carrie Ford, the sweeper. Carrie’s good, as good as this McLean girl, and she forced a lot of weak shots. But ten minutes left in the game she’s tired, and number nine gets past her and takes the shot that counts. She’s not a girl to miss an opportunity, and this one flies straight for the far post, low and hard. I came out and threw myself across the line of shot, but the ball got past me. The score was one to zero. We deserved to lose the game by a lot more, but we’d all been hoping to pull off a tie. After the game Coach Mark put his hand on my shoulder. You can’t stop all of them, Margaret. You know that, right? You did good out there.

I knew it. But I hated the way I felt, like maybe I could have stopped it. This is the psychology of the missed shot, guessing how things might have turned out had they gone differently. It hurts so much. I figure that’s why so few people ever want to go in goal. It has nothing to do with getting hit. Personally, I’ve loved playing goal from the minute I started playing soccer way back in kindergarten. Oscar used to take me down to the park Saturday mornings and we’d practice together, him rolling the ball fast on the ground, teaching me to get my body behind it. There aren’t any photographs of us doing that, so I know my memory is real, I didn’t just make it up from a picture. 

When I think about that missed shot, every missed shot, really, I can’t help but think what it would be like if Oscar was still here. When he died I had just become a teenager, really getting into the stage where I hated my parents. Being with them in public was embarrassing and all I wanted to do was stare at the computer and pretend I was someone else. I don’t even know if I talked to my dad the day he died. I wish I could go back in time, wake up and jump on his bed like I was five years old, watch him laugh and cover his face with a pillow like he used to do when I was little.

***

I was thinking about Oscar and the shot that got past me when Bret came back. He was sweaty from playing football and he smelled nice, the way a clean boy smells when he sweats. He took my hand and we walked off toward the trees, away from the light of the fire. 

In the dark he leaned down to kiss me, his hands under my breasts. Ow, I said, that hurts. What hurts? He asked. Everything, I said. My lip was pretty swollen, and Bret had been careful about that, but I hurt everywhere else too. Until Bret touched me, I hadn’t realized. 

What do you want to do? he asked. I could tell he was disappointed. I thought of letting him touch me even though it hurt, but the thought of doing that made me want to cry. All of a sudden I wasn’t sure if I was able to talk, or what I would say if I could. 

What did I want to do? I wanted to do what I hadn’t done. I wanted to stop the shot, talk to my dad. I wanted to rewind everything, back before the game started, when I could still imagine victory. I wanted to see Oscar again, trap the ball when he drilled it hard and low toward the net, just the two of us on a green field, a crisp morning in autumn that lasted forever. Instead, every part of me was a bruise. I used to think pain was a cup I could pour everything into. It kept me going, for a while. Now my cup was broken, and all the tears I had poured into the pain rained down. I couldn’t stop it.