***As noted last week, this post will be the final to appear in Redux as I have decided to put aside my editorial duties. Archives will be maintained, and a guide to the more-than-250 authors published here appears below, to your right.
~This
story previously appeared in New York
Stories (2001)
My boyfriend Andy had been watching
Stanley Cup hockey play-offs all weekend, so when I told him Monday morning
that I’d had a dream about Mark Messier, he said, “Was he playing for Edmonton
or New York?” and I said, “I don’t know,” and he said, “Was he on the Oilers or
the Rangers?”, and I said, “I don’t know,” and he got kind of ticked: “Well, what color was his shirt?”, and I
said, “Coral,” and then he got really mad—“No team jerseys are coral, not even
expansion teams would pick coral. What
the hell is coral, anyway?”
Actually, Mark Messier hadn’t been
wearing a shirt, because what’s the point of dreaming of a muscley hockey
player if he’s got on his shirt the whole time?
But that wasn’t anything you’d say to your boyfriend, not when you were
talking around the edges about getting married and no one was getting any
younger and there were biological clocks going off all over the place.
“Well, what else, Lynne?” he asked.
“It was just a dream,” I said. “So who cares?” We were going to be late for work; he was driving,
and there was some crash miles ahead of us on the highway. Whenever he drove there was some crash. When I drove, we had green lights and clear
lanes and no commercials on the radio.
Right now, we were absolutely still.
Every car in every lane was still.
I watched drivers around us whip out their phones to scream at people
already at work.
“I have to know if the Rangers are
going to win the Cup,” he said.
“Not unless their defense steps up,”
I said, repeating what I’d heard on the radio in the shower this morning. I wouldn’t know defense from picket fence.
“This traffic sucks,” he said. “The Rangers’ defense sucks.”
It was our first hockey play-off
season together; we’d been dating since October, now it was almost May, which
isn’t the time of year you’d expect to discover the man you’d introduced to
your mother was a hockey fan. I mean,
you think hockey, you think winter.
That’s what I thought. But the
hockey that mattered was play-off hockey which was apparently something
different than all the other hockey games that had been won and lost all those
winter months. You even called it
something else; everyone said, “Play-off hockey” like it was a diamond
rattling their mouth, and the players stopped shaving because it was play-off
hockey and everyone, absolutely everyone—even the boyfriend who’d once awakened
you late at night worried because he’d always planned to be married with two
kids by now—started screaming things like “take the body, not the puck, you
idiot,” as if that were something normal and comprehensible to scream at a T.V.
set.
I turned on the radio, he turned it
off. It wasn’t anything personal, just
bad traffic, just Monday morningness.
“You don’t even know what Mark
Messier looks like,” Andy said. “You
never even heard his name until Sunday.”
Sunday was Sports Bar Sunday. Seven hours of play-off hockey. What kind of good girlfriend was I? At the bar, I read magazines, drank six Diet
Cokes, and drove his beer-soaked friends home after the last overtime goal. They all kept talking about how pumped they
were, how the Rangers dominated the ice.
“We’re going all the way, baby,” they said again and again; they were
crammed in the backseat like children on a school bus; Andy kept twisting from
the front seat to high-five someone’s hand or the air, it didn’t seem to matter
which. I dropped them off one by one at
their houses and townhouses, long quiet streets leading to porch lights left on
by wives; “Let’s-go-Ran-gers!” they chanted before leaving the car, but they
fell immediately silent as they trudged up the walk, fumbled their keys at the
door, and then disappeared inside like a stone sinking into a pond. When it was just me and Andy left in the car
on our way home, he said, “You gotta love the Rangers. They’ve got heart,” and why was it that men
saved their best compliments for teams, for sports, when with every next game,
they ran the risk of being let down so instantly and so totally? Why was it the players could change, the uniforms
could change—even the rules could change—and the men would still cheer every
point, goal, hit, and basket? Then Andy
said, “You’re not a fan, so you’ll never understand what it means for your team
to win,” and I could’ve made something of it, but I guess he was right, I
wasn’t a fan, I didn’t understand what it meant to have a team, for it to win,
and anyway, Sunday was a day of me being good, me scoring girlfriend points
with him, with his friends. As payback
there’d be an antiquing weekend in my future, a foot massage, a dozen roses arriving
at my office, someone agreeing to accompany me and my mother to the ballet,
maybe more. Suddenly he said, “My dad
used to take me to Rangers games, so if we had a boy, I could road-trip him up
to New York, couldn’t I, Lynne? I could
make him a Rangers fan, don’t you think?” and I nodded and kept driving. It wasn’t like I’d never thought about a
daughter taking dance lessons and the exact shade of pink tutu she’d wear at
her first recital. So that was Sports
Bar Sunday.
I said, “Why does it bother you that
I dreamed about Mark Messier?”
“I don’t know what it means,” he
said. “It means something.”
“Maybe it means I watched seven
hours of play-off hockey yesterday.”
“I think it means the Rangers are
going all the way,” he said.
“You’re not like this.” He wasn’t like this. He was a lawyer but not that kind of
lawyer. He mostly wrote wills for old
ladies. Once one lady left her estate to
a cat. He’d told me that on our first
date; “not even a pedigreed cat,” he’d said, as if that might make a
difference, a pedigree. Someone had
fixed us up. “You’re perfect for each
other,” she’d said, which meant: You’re
both unmarried.
“This means the Rangers are winning
the Cup,” he said. “You know, I was
there in ‘94.”
“Where?”
“New York. I was at the Garden when they won it. Messier was awesome. They called him the Messiah because during
the play-offs he guaranteed a win against New Jersey in Game Six to get to the
finals.”
“Great.”
“You don’t understand. They had to win that game or they’d be
out. He won—and got a hat trick. A hat trick!
Jesus.” Andy turned off the car. Clearly we weren’t going anywhere, traffic
was a knot. Then he went on about ‘94,
there was lots more; he described intricate details about shots on goal and
power plays and bad bounces and penalty killing and rolling pucks and beautiful
saves that would make a grown man collapse into tears (his exact words). “I was there,” he said.
If it was about sports, men
remembered it. If it was about their
wives or girlfriends or mothers, men forgot it.
“I’ve still got the ticket,” and he
pulled out his wallet and showed me the stub in one of the plastic pockets
where you were supposed to put pictures of your kids.
“Why do you carry that around?” I
asked.
“You’re just not a fan,” he said.
Okay, I wasn’t a fan, but I knew a
little piece of cardboard in a wallet when I saw it.
“So, how many goals did Mess score
in this dream of yours?” he asked.
“Um, two?” I said, but he caught the
catch in my voice. I coughed, cleared my
throat, looked out the window at a woman who was looking out her window at
me. She looked like someone who wouldn’t
know a power play from a Broadway play.
No ticket stubs in her wallet, no dreams at night even; she looked like
what people meant when they said “sensible.”
She wouldn’t turn away, so finally I looked back at Andy.
“I’m so stupid,” he said. “It wasn’t a hockey dream, was it?” The car ahead of us started up; other cars
started up. People were snapping shut
their cell phones. “Just what was Mark
Messier doing?” He did a kind of
laugh-choke to make me think everything was okay, but everything wasn’t. I mean, this wasn’t my first boyfriend; what
he was doing was trying to lure me into saying things he could use against me
forever, things to wedge into every fight we might have, whether it was a
pull-over-and-ask-for-directions fight or a
whose-mother’s-house-for-Thanksgiving fight.
I knew a mission for ammo when I saw one.
I turned on the radio in time to
hear that the accident on our road had been cleared fifteen minutes ago. Then there was a commercial for motor
oil. Then there was a sports update, and
someone mentioned that great overtime goal in the Rangers game. Then a commercial for a chain of really bad
sub shops. Finally I said, “It was a
dream.” Then I added, “I don’t
remember.” Cars were rolling ahead of
us, but Andy hadn’t even turned the ignition.
Finally I leaned over and twisted the key. “He wasn’t as good as you,” I said, and I
kissed him on the cheek, then I turned his head my way and kissed him on the
lips—full, long, and hard; added tongue--(people were practically standing on
their car horns trying to get us to move) and he asked, “Really?” and I nodded,
and he said, “Figures,” and he put the car in gear and we were on our way to
work, and that was another thing about men:
none of them ever wanted the truth, and maybe women didn’t either, come
to think of it.
The next morning it was me driving
to work. He brought the sports section
in the car, and he kept reading out headlines and scores that didn’t matter to
me—baseball, boxing, football drafts.
But we were pretty chipper; I mean, in the morning you tell your
boyfriend he’s good in bed and by night I promise he’ll try proving it to
you. And traffic was somewhere above
stop-and-go and just below cruising. So
why would I tell him I dreamed about Mark Messier again? I mean, I liked having a boyfriend
more than not having one and I liked this boyfriend in particular. We talked about getting married, we talked about
the two kids we’d have, names for the dog we’d get, whether a Cape Cod was
better than a rambler, how important good gas mileage was in a car, no-load
mutual funds versus playing the market, keeping ketchup in the cupboard rather
than the fridge. There was a lot we
agreed on, even personal things like the toilet seat always being down.
He said, “What do these idiots
know?”
“Which idiots, honey?”
“These idiots who think the Rangers
don’t have what it takes this year.” He
thrust the paper towards me, and there was a picture of Mark Messier looking
like a poster of what every mother warned you to stay away from. But when I tilted my head, I’d have to say
Mark Messier also looked a lot like the guy in your high school who takes six
woodshop classes a semester that he doesn’t bother going to because he’s
hanging out in the far corner of the parking lot smoking whatever and whose
jeans fade just so and fit just so and who looks at you in this one way so you
feel the blood suddenly fast in your veins, and you know you’re not supposed to
like it (because you’ve been told you’re not supposed to like it), but, come
on, of course you do, and damn-sure he knows it.
Okay, there was that, but all I
really knew about this Mark Messier was hockey, was Rangers. Like, would he carpool with his girlfriend to
save money on parking? How did he feel
about no-load mutual funds? He probably
littered and had bad breath. He could be
anything.
Andy said, “Is everyone who writes
for this paper an absolute idiot?” He
jabbed his finger at another article then dropped the paper in his lap.
“Do you think Mark Messier has bad
breath?” I asked.
“Hockey players barely have teeth,”
he said. “Do I have bad breath?” He went “hua-hua” into one hand. It’s one thing to do that in private, like in
a bathroom or in your office with the door closed before a meeting, but not in
a car with your girlfriend.
“You’re fine,” I said, but he
unzipped my purse, rooted around for gum.
Men going through women’s purses were always awkward, like they’re
terrified of what they’ll find in there.
Like if their fingers graze a tampon wrapper, they think they’ll lose
the ability to grow hair on their faces.
I reached for the purse—my eyes totally watching the road—and pulled out
a pack of gum within one tiny fraction of one second.
“How do you always do that?” he
asked.
I did a Mona Lisa—“I’ve got my
ways.” I felt like maybe we were being
cute, but then he said:
“The Rangers are on T.V.
tonight.” He dropped his gum wrapper on
the floor of my car. “Game three. Whoever wins this, wins the series.”
“I thought it was seven games.”
“Metaphorically,” he said.
“That’s not a metaphor,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“But it’s not a metaphor,” I said.
“Okay, it’s not a metaphor, so what?” He picked up his newspaper, folded back the
pages, made a lot of noise doing it. He
snapped his gum.
Everyone knew you were supposed to
be married by now. My mother knew. My sisters.
All my friends except for the new single friends I’d made lately, all
younger, all no-kids and long hours at work.
I merged into the fast lane. I dreamed of Mark Messier last night. I didn’t say the words. But I drove as if I had said them, and
finally, ten minutes later, after I’d cut off two people who didn’t deserve to
be driving, flashed the finger once, and gunned up to 75 for a too-short
stretch, Andy said, “Something’s different.
You’re different,” and I said, “Do you really think so?”
“You’ve got an edge,” he said.
“I’ve got an edge,” I repeated.
He put his hand on my leg and I let
him leave it there, but all it felt was heavy and sweaty, like some dork in
high school who doesn’t make his move in the theater until the final credits
roll. I hadn’t thought about that kind
of guy for quite a while, the kind of guy who thinks he’s good at talking to
your parents and whose change rattles around in his pants pocket when you’re
walking together in the mall.
“It’s kind of sexy how you are,” he
said. “Dangerous.” He slid his hand half a millimeter higher up
my thigh. “Like last night.”
I flipped on the blinker and crossed
four lanes of traffic flawlessly, in a groove.
The car bounced and skidded a bit as I pulled onto the shoulder, slid
into “park,” and turned off the engine.
He pulled his hand off my leg, folded his arms together. He looked shocked, like something had just
exploded into tiny pieces in front of him.
Traffic whizzed by.
“What’s this?” he asked. He gripped one hand around the car door
handle.
I unbuttoned my blouse, taking my
time. “What do you think it is?”
“Wow,” he said, “oh, wow,” and
that’s what he said again and again, over and over, like if he stopped saying
it, everything would disappear, like what was happening was something he didn’t
even know to dream of.
The next morning it was his turn to
drive. “I had a dream about you,” he
said, unlocking the car door. “It was
incredible. We were in a swimming pool. Water was everywhere.”
The thing about water was...it was
wet. Sloppy. Everywhere.
What you look at and think, Someone needs to clean up this mess. The thing about ice was...that it was exactly
the opposite of those things, that a skate blade could cut sharp across it,
leaving behind a thin line.
I said, “I dreamed of Mark Messier.”
He slammed the car door so hard I thought
an air bag might pop open. “What’s that
supposed to mean?”
“Aren’t we talking about dreams?”
“Is that what this is all
about?” He backed out, drove down the
block, just missed the left arrow at the corner. “It’s not me, it’s some asshole hockey player
you don’t even know? Some guy you’ll
never meet? Is that what this is all
about? A dream?”
I was wearing brand new hose
today. Brand new hose fit your legs like
once-worn hose never could. It was just
something to think about while he went on:
“It’s sick. Mark Messier might as well not exist—do you
get it? not exist—for the chance
you have of ever meeting him. He’s a
superstar. Superstars match up with
models and actresses. That’s how it is. So stop it.
Stop dreaming about him.”
“It’s just a dream,” I said. The light was still red, still red, still
red. It was the longest light in the
city; it had to be. “The light’s broken,”
I said. “Just turn. We’re late.”
“The light’s not broken,” he said.
“You’re scared to turn,” I
said. “Just turn.”
“It’s against the law,” he said.
There was a stretched-out moment
where all I thought about was that the light had never been this long. Then it changed, and Andy turned, spinning
the steering wheel with one hand, letting it slide back through his fingers,
the way you drive when you’re trying that hard to look cool. I felt exhausted, like I’d already been
through this day once, but here it was again.
The Rangers had won last night, so
they were up 3-0 in the series. I’d
noticed that Mark Messier was number 11 and that he always seemed to be where
the puck went which seemed like a good thing because he scored one goal and
made two assists for a three-point night.
I’d noticed all this while I was reading a magazine at the sports bar,
drinking Diet Cokes. Andy had said I
didn’t have to go, but I told him I didn’t mind, that I could be the designated
driver again. I was the only woman
watching hockey at the sports bar; all his friends’ wives were home with kids
or at power networking events for their jobs.
One guy said his wife was on the phone ordering summer clothes from mail
order catalogs stacked higher than a beer bottle. Between periods, they talked about ‘94 and
how much they hated the Islanders and whether some guy Keenan coached like a
psycho, schizo, savant, or genius. I
noticed that the Rangers jerseys they wore looked too big, the sleeves too far
down their hands, the necklines saggy; and did wanting your team to win mean
drinking beer by the pitcher and eating three baskets of fried mozzarella
sticks? Did it mean high-fives across a
sticky table? “You don’t understand,”
Andy told me on the way home, “it’s my team, and they won,” and I said, “What
if they lost?” and he said, “But they didn’t.”
Like when I went to my little sister’s
wedding three years ago. When I asked if
she loved him, she said she did, so I asked, “How do you know?” and she
snapped, “Of course I do.”
Another light we just missed. Andy said, “Am I boring? Is that why you’re all of a sudden dreaming
about big stud hockey players?”
“You’re not boring,” but what wasn’t
boring—traffic, what I was going to eat for lunch, the e-mail I’d read at work,
anything that came on T.V. that night, the dress I was wearing, the light
turning green, the yellow flowers along the road, everything. It was all boring. “Of course you’re not boring,” I said
again. “Am I boring?”
“Just because I’m a lawyer,” he
said. “Just because we live in a
three-bedroom, two-bath townhome in the suburbs.”
“This is what people want,” I said. “This, exactly.”
“Don’t marry me if you think I’m
boring.” He headed onto the ramp to the
highway, merged into traffic. I would
swear it was the same car ahead of us today as yesterday, something blue and
boxy. The car we’d buy after we got
married. The salesman would shake our
hands too hard, say, “How’re you folks doing today?” and the dealership would
be passing out free hot dogs and balloons, and we’d drive around and around the
block on our test drive and later brag to everyone about what a great deal we’d
gotten, secretly sure we’d been massively ripped off.
I said, “I love you.”
“I love you,” he said right back,
like a slap.
The next day it was raining, a hard
day to wake up into. Anyone with any
sense would trade it all in to be a cat and doze through the next 20
hours. My turn to drive. I wanted to do it with my eyes closed, I was
that annoyed, that bored.
Halfway there he asked, “Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Dream about him?”
“Who?” I knew who exactly.
“Mark Messier.”
“He’s a thug,” I said. There’d been something in the paper this
morning, some dirty hit Messier had done in the game the other night; someone’s
ribs were cracked or a concussion, maybe both.
There was controversy, complaining, two coaches screaming at each
other. “Anyway, it’s just a dream; it’s
not like I actually slept with him.”
“Oh, Christ!” he said. The windshield wipers flapped back and forth,
pushing the same line of rain from side to side. You could get hypnotized. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You asked me.”
“Because you’re supposed to say
no. No more dreams, no Mark Messier,
nothing.” He spoke in rhythm with the
wipers, the same back-and-forthness.
“I don’t even like hockey.” I’d never played hockey, never lifted a stick
or smelled a puck or put on a glove. I
could tell you maybe three rules at most, I could name two players, four
teams. I could say Stanley Cup, but what
did you win when you won it? What did it
mean? Like being married—I knew the
white dress and the ring and the Cape Cod (or rambler) in a nice neighborhood
with good schools and the two kids and the dog that everyone’s too busy to walk
and the joint tax return and bills addressed Mr. & Mrs. and side-by-side
burial plots—but what was the rest? Mark
Messier was nothing but a man on the ice on T.V., Mark Messier was nothing.
The rain suddenly downshifted, more
of a drizzle, a mist, something that wanted to be a fog but wasn’t quite. There was a meeting today at 11 with a group
of people I hated. How many more times
could I be nice to people I hated? Did
anyone else ever think things like that?
“This isn’t about hockey,” Andy
said. “Is it.” He didn’t say it like a question.
The wipers squeaked against the dry
glass and squeaked again before I thought to turn them off.
In the silence, I thought someone
might cry. Then he said, “Look, it’s
just a dream. I know a dream doesn’t
mean anything.”
I thought I might cry.
“Neither does a hockey game,” I
said. “But a marriage does mean
something. Anyway, it should.”
That’s where we were when we got to
our exit. There would be more to get
through, later, and it would be awful and it would be boring; it would be worse
than rush hour traffic, it would be rush hour traffic with a crash every
half-mile, rush hour traffic when you have to pee real bad. And after we’d gotten through it all, maybe
that’s when I would worry that I’d never meet another man who was better,
nicer, kinder, cuter. And maybe he’d get
married to someone and maybe I’d get married to someone or maybe we’d never get
married to anyone, exactly as we feared.
And maybe I’d never again dream of
Mark Messier, and certainly I’d never meet him—but maybe if I did, it would
turn out that he was just a really nice, really sweet guy who wants a dog and
two kids he can take to Rangers games.
Like I said, I think Mark Messier
plays for another team now. Or maybe he
did once, but he left that team. Maybe
he even came back. I don’t know. Sometimes I look for his picture in the
newspaper, but I never see it. I should
ask someone what happened, what exactly happened, but no one I know follows
hockey.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
As noted in last week’s post,
this is the story that essentially gave me the idea for Redux: I longed for a
place where I could resurrect a story that was a personal favorite of mine but
that I most likely wouldn’t include in a collection. The genesis of this story
is pretty simple. I wrote it the year that I became a hockey fan, so much of a
fan that I watched play-off hockey every single night, my team (Washington
Capitals), the west coast teams that played the late games, and essentially any
team that showed up on (I believe) ESPN during the two months of post-season,
over-time hockey. I read a bunch of hockey books. I inhaled hockey. After my
team lost, I rooted for the Rangers. And, I dreamed about Mark
Messier*….
*Rangers Messier, post-Cup victory
*****
ABOUT LESLIE PIETRZYK
Leslie Pietrzyk is the founder of
Redux, on online journal that features previously published work, not available
elsewhere on the internet. She has published four books, most recently Silver Girl (Unnamed Press, 2018). This Angel on My Chest, her collection
of unconventionally linked short stories, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
Short fiction and essays have appeared/are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, Arts
& Letters, Cincinnati Review, The Sun, The Collagist, Salon, Washington
Post Magazine, and many more. She is a member of the core fiction faculty
at the Converse low-residency MFA program. For more information: www.lesliepietrzyk.com
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