Brace for Impact Page 2

  Two other recruits confirmed that they too had seen the van on the freeway, which only heightened Soup Beans’s excitement. She didn’t fully calm down until Alice stated that the movie Whip It was the reason she had come to Roller Derby Recruit Night.

  “I need you all to know that modern roller derby is nothing like Whip It,” Soup Beans said. “Well, it’s a little bit like Whip It. I mean, I joined a million years ago because I wanted to drink and wear hot pants. But the rules are nothing like in that movie. And you can’t just punch a bitch in the face anymore.”

  Alice was visibly disappointed. “But it’s still full contact, right?” she asked. “Like, what if I punch a bitch in the face by accident?”

  Soup Beans pursed her lips. “Look, if any of you are here because you want to punch somebody in the face, leave now.” She paused dramatically to see if anyone would get up; I averted my eyes. “Good,” Soup Beans finally said. “And besides, in the first six months, none of you will be able to control your bodies enough to throw punches anyway. You’re all gonna be flappy-armed loose cannons, and nobody is going to want to skate within arm’s reach of you.”

  None of the remaining six recruits mentioned Whip It, but the woman sitting on the track below Alice said she had come because she had the perfect roller derby name, which also irritated Soup Beans. “So like, I’m a cosmetologist right,” she said, smacking her bubble gum. “And suddenly it just came to me. Blades of Glory. Wouldn’t that just be the best roller derby name? Blades for short? Do you get it? Cause I’m a hairdresser?”

  Some of the other recruits laughed, but when Blades wasn’t looking, I saw Soup Beans roll her eyes, fluttering her eyelids for dramatic effect.

  Kelly didn’t even offer her name when it was her turn. “I’m just here for moral support,” she said, nodding at me. “I don’t want to skate or anything.”

  Then all eyes were on me. I felt suddenly nauseous—unsure how much information to give. I said my name and repeated what I had written in my email exchange with Soup Beans. It seemed important to justify my presence with my decade-long sports history, even though I knew the skill set I developed as a competitive swimmer probably wouldn’t translate at all to this game. What I didn’t say was that I couldn’t stand to look at the water anymore, not after my disastrous last college season. That I’d only played individual sports and worried I wouldn’t know how to fit into a team. That I needed a physical activity I wouldn’t turn into a weight loss regimen. What I didn’t say was that I had just moved to St. Louis and was desperately lonely for a community, queer friendship, and something fun that felt as far away from my hometown as possible.

  “And how did you find out about derby?” Soup Beans asked, eyebrows raised.

  The truth was a derby player had approached me shortly after I had left home in a hurry (hoping Kelly would let me stay). Kelly was studying math at Bowling Green State University, and I arrived one day with everything I owned. “How long will you stay here?” Kelly had asked me. I knew she wasn’t being rude—she was a pragmatist, always blunt in assessments and questioning. I told her I didn’t know, but I knew I would not be moving back home. While Kelly was at class, I’d go to the coffee shop around the corner, and I was in line one morning when a woman who was visibly queer—something I was not yet used to seeing, and which gave me a jolt of admiration and envy—struck up a conversation with me. It turned out she was on the Glass City Rollers, a roller league based in Toledo. She said I looked like the kind of gal who could be a big threat on the track; I wished I knew what it was about me that gave her that impression. Still, our encounter had the effect of making me immediately enamored with the sport and those who played it.

  That was way too much, I knew, to convey to a group of strangers. The long pause I had taken was already bloated and uncomfortable; I felt a familiar nervous tingling in my stomach. Was I being questioned more than the others? Could they sense how badly I wanted this Recruit Night to go well? Was this just a friendly way of trying to get to know me?

  “I don’t really know how I found derby,” I lied. “Kelly and I just moved to St. Louis. I guess I’ve been thinking about joining a team for a while.”

  “Did you move here for work?” Alice asked.

  “Graduate school,” I said, shyly. “I’m in the writing program at Washington University.” I thought about adding that my undergrad degree was in mathematics and art, but it seemed unnecessary and slightly pompous. They didn’t need to know that I chose math only because I thought a STEM major was a guaranteed career. Plus, Kelly worked in the math center: an easy way to get close to her when we were still building our relationship. Art was where I really excelled. I made huge pieces with pressed flowers and leaves, cyanotypes and old-fashioned medium-format Holga prints: once I even ditched my canvas and painted Kelly’s body instead.

  Soup Beans pointed to an older woman, maybe fifty, who was skating by herself on the side of the track. On the back of her helmet, purple stickers spelled out her name: NANNY MCWHEE.

  “Nanny’s a professor,” Soup Beans said. “I forget what she teaches. I know she’s fluent in at least one other language. She has a fucking PhD! You should go ask her about it and talk about smart-people shit.”

  I smiled meekly, and Kelly reached for my hand. I was always uncomfortable with labels associated with my education. One of my mother’s greatest achievements had been the day she called in to an NPR segment on “surviving in America without a college education.” I was too young to remember it, but she spoke of it often, and I always felt a sense of pride on her and my dad’s behalf. After I graduated from college, my mother once approached me while I was trying to grind coffee beans for my dad and reprimanded me for not knowing how to use the machine. “You’re college educated now!” she said. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t know how to do this.” In her mind, college inevitably led to wealth, which she resented in any form. She once rearranged the Nativity scene I had set up at Christmastime, shifting the Three Kings out of the barn with Mary and Jesus to make room for the livestock. “These rich men don’t deserve a front-row seat,” she said. My diploma and the status it represented made me feel like one of those tiny kings, looking in on a family in which I felt I’d never really belong.

  I checked my watch. I knew the agenda for Recruit Night was to watch a full scrimmage, but I had no idea how long that would take, and I only had twenty minutes left before I needed to leave to get back to campus. As though reading my mind, Soup Beans directed our attention back to the track. I was surprised by the presence of officials. On the backs of their jerseys were their own funny names—Ninja Sass’em, Code Adam, and Chopsaw. Before the first whistle, the officials gathered in the middle of the track for a meeting; it appeared they were divvying up their positions.

  When there were thirty seconds left before the first whistle, five blue and five red players skated onto the track. One from each team wore a helmet cover with a big star on it and lined up behind all the other players. I knew enough from watching footage online to identify them as the jammers—the only skaters who could score points for their teams. The other eight players on the track were blockers, and their job was to prevent the opposing side’s jammer from getting through the pack.

  With twenty seconds left, Soup Beans said, “All right, y’all. Your job is to watch carefully. On the jammers’ first pass, they don’t score any points, but whoever gets through first is the lead jammer, which is a huge advantage because the lead jammer can decide when the jam is over. For every subsequent pass through the pack, they score a point for every person on the opposing team they pass.”

  Blades of Glory raised her hand. “So there’s no ball?”

  I cringed at her ignorance. Soup Beans ignored her question entirely.

  When one of the officials shouted, “Five seconds!” all the blockers crouched low. I heard them talking to each other. “She’s looking in,” one said. “Now she’s looking middle.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I guessed it had to do with the jammer’s position on the track. They were trying to pinpoint her route through the blockers in order to stop her.

  While Kelly was completely engrossed in the action, the recruit standing above me tapped me on the shoulder. I couldn’t remember their name, but I recalled that they used to roller skate as a kid and used they/them pronouns.

  “Do you want a beer?” I asked, gesturing to the cooler in front of me.

  “Nah,” they said. “I was just wondering how you and your girlfriend met.”

  “Oh,” I said, tearing my eyes away from the track to return their gaze. “Our college swim team. She was a senior captain when I was a freshman. She likes to say she’s a cradle robber.”

  “Funny,” they said, pushing a stray piece of hair behind their ear. “I’m hoping I can meet somebody here.”

  I glanced quickly at Kelly to see if she had heard what the recruit had just said, but she was preoccupied by the derby scrimmage happening right in front of us.

  “Who knows,” I said, in what I hoped was an optimistic tone. “You might!”

  In an attempt to change the subject, I pointed to the track right as the whistle blew. We watched together as the jammers barreled toward the wall of blockers, and the Skatium filled with the sounds of screeching wheels and screaming skaters. “Out!” they yelled. “Flip! Flip! Here she comes!”

  The most effective blocking formation seemed to be three players in a triangle and the fourth—a floater—supporting the other three. Every time the jammer tried to get around them, the blockers in the triangle would rotate; whoever was the top would catch the jammer with her hips and whoever was previously in the corner would become the new top.


  After a few minutes, the recruit who had struck up a conversation with me started scrolling on their phone—a dating app?—but I was desperate to watch as much of the action as I could to make up for my lack of knowledge. I was already making mental notes and taking inventory on the type of equipment and apparel the skaters were wearing. I was also imagining how it would feel to slam into another person like that. I knew what it felt like on the receiving end: my mother had once done it to me when I was in elementary school. We had been out on a snowy walk with my sister, and Cam and I had been fighting. She kept running up to me and prodding me in the back and giggling as I stumbled forward. Finally, I turned around and shoved her.

  “You seem like you want to know what it’s like to get pushed around by someone bigger than you,” my mother had said. Then, she wound up and slammed into my body with the full force of her own. I hadn’t had time to brace myself. Even if there had been time, I doubt I would’ve been able to stop her momentum. The hit sent me flying. I landed a few feet away from Cam, who immediately started laughing.

  “Don’t forget this,” my mother had said. Then she continued walking.

  I didn’t cry, because I thought my mother’s hit had been justified. I knew that using my size against Cam was wrong, and I shouldn’t have been pushing her in the first place. But I also couldn’t pick myself up. I couldn’t unfeel my mother’s big body hurling into my little one, or the stinging in my ribs and hip bone as I lay sprawled in the snow.

  I scanned the track for skaters who looked like me—though it was hard to explain exactly what that meant. I had always been small; when I was swimming, I had been very lean, but over time had developed a thickness that my mother had called “a fat woman trying to get out.” Most skaters weren’t twigs; in fact, it looked like the heftier skaters were a bit more successful—especially at moving other bodies and creating space on the track. That gave me hope I could find my place in this sport too.

  “What do you think?” I asked Kelly, checking my watch again.

  “It’s very rough,” she said. As if on cue, two skaters collided so hard that one fell backward onto her head. Whistles were blown and the action stopped. One of the refs knelt to check on the downed skater. I could see him waving his fingers in front of her eyes: a concussion test. How many concussions happened in this sport, I wondered? More than football? And, more important, why didn’t that scare me? The worst I’d gotten hurt in swimming was a black eye from smacking into another girl right as I pushed off the wall. I had been oddly proud of that injury at school the next day. Would I feel the same way about my derby bruises? What about the potential for even worse injuries? Was I willing to take that risk?

  “We should probably head out soon,” I said. In our relationship, it always fell to me to find a way to disentangle us from social situations. Even in moments like this when we had a legitimate reason to leave—I had to be back on campus in half an hour—Kelly usually floundered. I never felt especially adept at social interactions, but Kelly’s awkwardness forced me into the role and made me realize I was better at it than I thought.

  “Wait!” Soup Beans said. “Before you go, let’s take a group photo!”

  Kelly and I put our bags back down as Soup Beans stood to snap a picture. It was difficult not to imagine what the camera was seeing: me, with my closed-lip smile (self-conscious about my crooked teeth), shaggy bob, and hoop earrings, my flowy pants and jean jacket. Kelly once called my style quasi-hipster—quasi probably because of all the athletic apparel. Her style, a fusion of butch and femme, was more cautious. Even her hair, which was dirty blond and curly, seemed more timid than mine.

  “Will we see you in a few days for On-Skates Meetup?” Soup Beans asked. “I’ll message you about it.”

  It was a simple enough question, but it still sent me spiraling. I didn’t want to make a verbal commitment to roller derby right away, but I also didn’t want to let down this badass woman in cheetah-print hot pants and gold glitter eyeshadow. I needed time to think about it—to puzzle out if I was putting too much pressure on a sport I barely knew about to fill the deficits in my life. That struck me as obviously true from the way my heart beat faster when I looked out at the track. I worried that my motives weren’t pure; I was looking for a community, but I also wanted to feel pain. I wanted to hit and be hit. The unpredictability and violence of the sport were magnetic in their appeal—it was an arena I already understood.

  I settled for a thumbs-up, which felt immediately humiliating. As I was turning, I said, “I think that sounds good. I mean, I might be there,” and Kelly and I walked back out into the crisp fall air.

  2/

  RITUAL

  The morning after Recruit Night, I awoke to an email from my mother. Are you dead? Haven’t heard from you in a while. I put my head into my pillow and groaned, and Kelly stirred beside me. I scrolled through my texts and emails to find our last correspondence. She was right; I hadn’t communicated with anyone in my family for over two weeks. We hadn’t spoken on the phone in over a month.

  It wasn’t unusual for us to go long periods of time without speaking, especially since I’d finally left home a year ago. I had graduated from college a year early and spent the summer nannying for a well-known artist couple in New York. I went home for the last time at the end of that September, two weeks that had been filled with accusations and yelling and slamming doors. I left for Kelly’s in Ohio when my parents were both at work and Cam was at school, leaving a note on my sister’s pillow that said, I know you won’t understand this right now, but you know how bad it is for me here. I can’t survive here.

  I wasn’t so sure that my sister did know the reality of my situation at home. She certainly knew my mother was not happy to find out I was dating a woman, but maybe she thought it had been a somewhat typical parent response. I had tried to shield her from as much of the worst parts as possible, so maybe my exodus came as a complete shock. She never told me. All she said, when she found the note on her bed after swim practice, was “Mom just wrote you out of the will.” Her tone was joking, but we both felt the gravity behind her words. I had left her with a shitstorm to deal with, and we both knew it.

  I swung my legs out of bed and put my running clothes on in the dark. Our dog, Lady, crawled out from under the covers and shook loudly, which I always feared would wake up Kelly but never did. She followed me into the bathroom while I brushed my teeth, racking my brain for ways to respond to my mother. For years she had said, “Don’t you dare talk to me about Kelly,” and while some of that tension seemed to have lifted, she still hadn’t revoked that initial warning. She didn’t seem to like hearing about Lady, who she called a “spindly lizard freak.” And I certainly couldn’t talk about grad school, which she said I was only pursuing because I couldn’t find a job.

  In the living room, which doubled as the dining room, I rolled out my yoga mat and held a plank until my arms started to shake. Then I flipped onto my back and did one hundred crunches. Ever since varsity swimming in high school I would do exercises like these before my main workout. It gave me such a rush—a sense of control over my unruly body.

  “How long should we run today?” I asked Lady, leashing her up. “Four miles? Five?” My stomach growled and I thought about grabbing a banana, but that was ninety calories I didn’t necessarily need. When I was a child, my mother often made us go on long walks before eating, especially on holidays. On Christmas, our route was eight miles, and by the end my hips and feet would ache. “Just think,” she would say. “If we work out now, we can stuff our faces later.” My mother stuffed her face often, which is probably why she struggled so much to lose weight despite being seemingly obsessed with it. “This is the last Snickers bar I am ever going to consume,” she once told me. The way she restricted herself was disciplined and militaristic—until it wasn’t. Over the years, I saw her binge on candy and cereal and other sweet things: all the foods that inevitably led me, in the years to come, to purging.

  For years, my mother was a Weight Watchers leader. She was a charismatic and impassioned speaker. People loved her; she had a devoted following of women who signed up for her sessions week after week. My sister and I would watch from the back of the room, glowing with pride as my mother mobilized an army of women. One of the skills she developed over years of weighing women was the ability to predict with remarkable accuracy what a stranger weighed. It was a game we played together in public spaces—the grocery store, the park, a crowded restaurant. “She’s probably around 165,” she would say, scanning the woman at a nearby table. “And over there, by that window? She’s around 192.” It always awed me even though there was no way of telling if she was right. That was, until she used the technique on me.