new books make everything better

scene of me yesterday: i'm sitting outside of visionary eye care professionals at clark and foster. i kind of want to cry. i had an appointment for 5:30pm. i biked down and filled out the new patient form. when i brought it up to the front desk, i handed them my insurance card as well and asked if they accepted blue cross. he played around on his computer and told me i wasn't in their system. i asked how much an appointment would be and he told me $100 if the doctor had to dilate my eyes, and more if he wanted to see me again. i asked if that would be necessary. he answered with a blank stare, (slash didn't). i told him i just wanted to buy contacts. i don't even need him to look at me. i'm sure i sounded dramatic, and it's not this dude's fault, but what the f? i hate dealing with this sort of stuff, (p.s.). clearly, because the contacts i have in right now i should have thrown out a couple months ago. anyway, i cancel my appointment and walk outside and i'm frustrated with the whole impossible medical/insurance bullshit system and even more frustrated with myself for always being such a baby about dealing with this stuff. fortunately my favorite bookstore is across the street. i figure as long as i'm down here with the afternoon free now, i may as well stop in, and ultimately spend money i don't have to spend. which i do. i have three books in my hand after wandering the store, but i talk myself down to two: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago by Robert McDonald and Kathie Bergquist. the one that gets put back is The Rivals by Johnette Howard. all three of these books have been on the constantly growing list in my head. my friend marian told me about bechdel's graphic memoir over breakfast one morning last spring. marian and i have some stuff in common with bechdel: we're homos, we went to oberlin, we're creative (marian makes pretty postcards and is entering a master's program in book and paper arts at columbia college in the fall, i'm hoping to get into a master's program at northwestern for creative nonfiction writing). i was pretty excited to find it yesterday. it took me awhile to track it down because i was looking too hard--it wasn't in the mix of other comicesq books, it actually had it's own table and a sign with a picture of ms. bechdel herself, to let us know she was stopping by to say hi and sign books in a couple weeks. the field guide i read about in the reader last week. i think the woman author of it actually works in the bookstore i was wandering around in. she may have actually checked me out. it seemed like a book i should own, loving the gays and exploring this city as much as i do. a small part of me is against guide books though. i worry that the great places they describe will suck once they are populated by people following a guide book to their entrance. and i'd kind of like to discover them on my own. anyway, i caved. the rivals has been on my list since it came out. i try to read everything on women and sports, especially with a queer edge, as research for my own project/future and because i can't get enough of it. but i also need to branch out, hence the decision to postpone my purchase.

i bike home and decide to do laundry so my day can still feel somewhat productive. mostly, i'm just excited to sit down on the curb and start reading fun home while i wait to move my clothes to the dryer. my girlfriend meets me at the laundromat with the same look of frustration that painted my face earlier. she has spent the whole day working on a finance assignment. she expected to be done hours ago, and instead feels she still has hours to go. i tell her it's okay because i have a new pretty book to distract me. which is the truth. she is sitting over my laptop at the kitchen table. i am propped up in my bed, the next room over. i have twenty pages left when she finally decides to quit. she tells me she wanted to take a break a while ago, that she was staring at me waiting for me to look up and tell her to take a break, but i was absorbed in my book. i shrug and smile. 'i would have looked up if you said something,' i say. 'i know,' she replies.

rugby

April and I needed rugby. We didn’t keep the team going so that Davi and Jenny and Buster would have rugby at Oberlin, we kept the team going so that we would have rugby at Oberlin. If there was someone else to do it, we would have gladly let them. It was in the last couple weeks of my freshman year at Oberlin when I walked into that rugby meeting. I wasn’t sure of my role on the team yet, having only played a season, but I knew I wanted to at least voice my passion for this sport and this team and its existence. In electing officers, and namely a president, I was going to vote for the person that would build the program back up, get us the numbers to play a full game without having to borrow players from the other team, make sure we had cars lined up to travel, and jerseys and balls packed, that there would be more than five people at practice and that when we were at practice we would do something more than gossip and toss the ball in a circle. I was quiet for the first part of the meeting, listening to the discussions among the upperclassmen about who was going abroad next year and who had too many other commitments, a couple people threw out names of people that weren’t at the meeting, “Maybe Chris would come back. What’s Flinch up to next year? Is he graduating?” April and I shot worried glances back and forth to each other. The lack of commitment in the current season had been frustrating, but I couldn’t stand the idea of no rugby at all.

“We just need to recruit more—update the website, put flyers up in the fall. April and I will be here during preseason/orientation week. We can try to get the freshman before Frisbee gets to them.”

Everyone in the room nodded at my suggestion, looking a little more hopeful. I fed off that hope, and fell into a motivating speech listing what we already had and what would be easy to acquire, the same sort of speech I had made time and again when my high school soccer team was not only lacking varsity status, but sometimes enough players to field a team, a coach, a smooth grassy field with lines and regulation size goals, and even a bus to our away games.

I didn’t intend for my speech that day to be an election speech. I wasn’t trying to be president. I’d been playing wing for a season. I had just started to get a handle on what everyone in the backline is supposed to be doing. I was clueless about the pack. They were that mess of people that smushed their bodies together and drove over the ball, so that we could get it out and run with it. I was also only going to be a sophomore and I planned to play varsity soccer again in the fall. The other committed upcoming sophomores were voted in as treasurer and match secretary, and then Sarah Cole nominated April and I for president. April could head things in the fall while I was playing soccer, and then I could take over in the spring when April would be occupied with varsity softball. We had no choice but to accept.

We started in right away. I made a new flashy rugby website as my final project in my web design class. I wanted to have an opening page that would stream some sort of ode to rugby across it. I requested April’s help in composing it. A couple of nights later, my roommate and I were up chatting after going to bed, when April burst into the room clearing her voice and reciting from a crumpled sheet of paper:

Rugby?

Isn’t that like football, they ask.

Yeah, but without the pads, I respond.

Before any other game I wonder if I’ll win.

Before a rugby game I wonder if I’ll survive.

But with each successive tackle I am able to forget

the paper that was due four days ago,

the fight with my ex-girlfriend,

and the bloodstain on my shorts from my overflowing keeper.

I laugh through my mouth guard and let all the bullshit slip away

because I can say ‘Saturday’s a rugby day!

April found a book on rugby rules and drills and we put more time into studying it than we did studying in any of our classes. Another night she ran into my dorm room at two in the morning with a rugby ball and pulled me out into the hall. “When you played basketball, could you make a behind the back pass, right? Can you do it with the rugby ball? Do you think that would be obstruction?” We practiced our behind the back rugby passes in the hall for a little while and then moved out to the grass in front of the dorm, yelling at a friend walking past and asking if she would come run at us while we ran our play.

April and I talked about rugby so much that my roommate developed a hand signal to indicate when she was annoyed with us for “talking rugby” as she called it. "Talking rugby" included reminiscing about past games and practices, dreaming up rosters, plays, and drills for future games and practices, drooling over new balls, uniforms and ruck-pads, and listing the people we knew that would make good rugby players and strategizing how we would get them to join the team.

Fall semester, we arrived on campus two weeks before classes started. I had preseason training for soccer and April was working as a dorm R.A. We taped signs in every stall in every women’s bathroom and on the tampon dispensers too that read “bleed more than once a month, play women’s rugby” and had the website address printed on little tear off strips at the bottom. We had a ton of freshman trying out for the soccer team that year. At the first meeting, we went around the circle making introductions. When it was my turn I said, “My name is Magdalen. I’m a sophomore, from Wisconsin. I play rugby. You should too. In the spring. (Or if you get cut, I thought.) Soccer players make great rugby players.” My coach shot me a look from across the room. She had tolerated me playing rugby. I think she knew that if she made me choose, I wouldn’t be playing for her anymore. But she wasn’t too keen on the rest of the team dump tackling, rucking, and mauling for their off-season work outs. More than the risk of injury, I think she feared the risk that players wouldn’t come back to soccer. I didn’t care. Soccer would always exist. Soccer didn’t need to fight. It was Varsity. Varsity was fresh jerseys, different colors for here and away, clean and folded and laid out in front of our lockers on game days. Varsity was a coach bus parked outside of the gym half an hour before the scheduled departure, stocked with bagels and water and granola bars and movies playing on mini TVs above the seats. Varsity was game stats posted online so when you scored a goal everyone knew it and congratulated you in the cafeteria lines at dinner. With Varsity, I didn’t need to worry about anything but myself. Everything else was taken care of. Out of my hands.

It was also out of my hands when I sat on the bench knowing I could contribute so much more if given the chance, when my teammates told me the same, when I stayed after practice to practice my cross and finish and the only coach that stayed after with me was my best friend on the team who had all the technical skills I lacked, seeing as she had been playing since she was five and I hadn’t started playing until my sophomore year in high school. Just as it was out of my hands when my high school wouldn’t let my soccer coach give out a MVP award at the athletic banquet because soccer wasn’t a varsity sport, even when he said he would buy the plaque himself.

I’m not usually a crier. If I get hurt I play through it or come out. I always hated the girls that cried on the bus after losing basketball games in high school. I didn’t really see it as the end of the world. We lost every game. Did they really think we were going to win? Or that crying now would make anything better? Get over it. But after the last soccer game of my junior year season, I lost it. It was a frustrating game to begin with. We were capable of winning, but didn’t. We were all off of our game and playing harder, but not smarter, to make up for it. All of the seniors were sad because it was their last college game ever and it wasn’t how they wanted to end the season. In the back of my head I knew it was my last game as well. I had been frustrated all season and my heart wasn’t in it anymore. We would do sprints at the end of each soccer practice and I would rock them because I was so annoyed with everything and then I would pick up my bag and walk to the very north end of the athletic fields where the rugby team practiced and I would watch from the sidelines, cheering when there was a good play and instructing when there was confusion. After practice I would join the circle of ruggers and we’d all sing: “Rugby women are the biggest and the best, ‘cause we never need a break and we never take a rest, and we set a better ruck, and we give a better fuck, and when it comes to rugby we never get enough. Out on the pitches, out in the scrum, rugby women will make you come. We’ll build mauls, kick balls, score on you, and when it comes to tries, we’ll take two, three, four, sixty-nine.” On game days I would get back from soccer and find the rugby girls drunk and sprawled in my yard, handing me their beers so I could catch up, and filling me in on their game and the social that was held after where both teams got together and drank and sang. Even though I hadn’t decided yet that I wasn’t going to play soccer after my junior year, I knew. I came out of that last game biting my lip, trying to keep it together. My coach brought me aside, thinking I was crying because she had taken me out, or because we lost, or because I had messed up a penalty kick. I just shook my head as she searched for an answer to my sobs. She had never seen me like this. But I didn’t even have it sorted out for myself then. I just knew that soccer wasn’t right for me anymore. It was like moving on from a relationship that you know isn’t working, but you still have so many memories and attachments to. On the bus my best friend, the same one that had stayed after to coach me so many times, held my hand and tried to cheer me up by making jokes. Every time I looked up at her, I just cried harder, hers was the face I was leaving. But I knew she would be fine. I needed rugby. And rugby needed me.

It’s definitely easier to have things be “out of my hands.” Easier to not be the one in charge, not be responsible. But I get bored when things are easy. I don’t see the point. I want it to be raw, messy, real. And that’s rugby too: no pads, no time-outs, no fouls, continuous play. There are rules. You can’t tackle above the shoulders. Passes must be backwards. You can only tackle the person with the ball. You can’t play the ball on the ground. Once a ruck is formed you must drive over the ball in order for it to be playable. There is an order, but the theory of the game is simple. You hold the ball in your hands and run forward in an attempt to place it over the line. You can stiff arm. You can pass. You can kick it ahead. To defend, you tackle. Unlike soccer and basketball that have so many rules about where and how you make contact, in rugby you can never be too aggressive. The players that excel at rugby are the ones that go out full tilt. You can’t hold anything back. You’re going to come off the field muddy and bruised and bleeding. And weightless.

grandma dale

     When my dad told my grandma that I was a lesbian, she paused and then said she had always wondered about her Aunt Anna. I’ve only seen Aunt Anna in a small black and white photo, framed in a thick gold oval and resting on Grandma’s bookshelf. Her hair is short and gray and permed. She has a short string of pearls and pursed lips. She doesn’t have the soft roundness or smile to her face of an Aunt who comforts with candies and kindness; her cheekbones cut sharply, her stare is direct and firm. I think she was a schoolteacher, never married, a reader, she owned a canoe. When I picture Grandma as a girl trotting down the block to visit her Aunt Anna, she looks a lot like me running up the driveway or taking the shortcut (that was actually longer) through the woods, stretching my steps to take the stairs up her porch two at a time, knocking on the door and walking in before she had answered, kicking off my shoes, lifting the cookie jar lid more out of habit than hunger, plopping down in the easy chair and surveying the room: the full bookshelf (my books—a series of Raggedy Ann and Andy adventures and later the American Girl books—were on the bottom shelf), flowers freshly cut and centered on the table, empty vases along the top of her cabinet, birds outside her glass doors at the feeder and on the deck where seeds had spilled. We would sit and chat. I would tell her all the ways in which my brother’s had been mean to me, probably exaggerating to get more sympathy. As I sat in her lap and she read aloud, I would poke at the veins that protruded on the top of her hand, trace them and push them together under her skin. Her knuckles were thick with arthritis. She would pause in her reading to comment on how ugly they were, saying that’s what happens when you get old. I look down at my own hands now, squeeze tightly at my wrist until my veins fill and pop a little, imagine her loose pale skin over wiry veins and knotted joints. Those hands: bizarrely strong in the places they are flawed, like scars, thicker and tougher where there was once hardly any protection at all.

     When Grandma was a girl she wanted to be a schoolteacher like her Aunt Anna. It was the depression and her dad was drunk and then gone. It was her and her sister and her brother and her mom. She did what she needed to do to keep going, found refuge in the bookcases that walled her aunt’s cramped apartment, saved the money she made working at the local movie theatre and babysitting in a bank account that she had opened herself. She was going to be a schoolteacher like Anna. She would wall her apartment in books like Anna. She would get out, get away from her mom and sister that pretended as if things hadn’t changed, that bought new clothes and dainty shoes that were too small. She couldn’t leave them completely like her dad had. She was still subject to their pleas, they were still her family, but she knew she was better. She was like Anna. She finished high school and went to collect the money she had been saving, dreaming of college and escape; instead she found that the account was empty. That was when she learned how her mother and sister had been able to keep pretending. It was needed to get by, her mother responded nonchalantly when confronted. It was used for the family. How else could they do it with their father gone? What does she need school for anyway? A husband is what you need. And you won’t get a husband looking like that, that’s for sure. I’m just looking out for you. I am your mother remember.
     Grandma signed up for nursing school. It didn’t cost anything, as long as she committed to work. She didn’t particularly like taking care of people, but she was good at it, practiced at it, she’d done it most of her life, and it was the closest she could get to independence. She left home and lived in the dorms, practiced sticking needles in oranges, worked as an aid, changed sheets and bed pans, and handed out little paper cups of pills. Every morning she would get up early to swim. In the summer some of the other girls would come down with her to the river, they would all pile in a cab and split the fare. In the fall and spring the other girls complained the water was too cold, and Grandma would get up earlier and walk. In the winter she went to the Y. She liked swimming she told me. She laughed when she described her suit, one piece and rubber.
     She married too and raised four kids. My dad was the third. She kept nursing, picking up night shifts and putting away the money she earned. Checking it weekly to make sure it was still all there. She put all four of her kids through college, starting with Judy, the eldest and only girl, who became a schoolteacher. When dad was a kid they moved a lot. Grandpa would get a new job or lose the one he had and they would up and leave, always in the middle of the year and always to the protests of Grandma and the kids. After one particularly bad period when they moved four times in three years, Grandma finally said no, that he could leave but that they were not leaving with him.
     I never met my Grandpa Dale. He died of a heart attack, soon after my parents wedding. After the kids had grown and Grandpa had passed, my Grandma started traveling. She went to Europe and Australia. She gardened, she read, she owned a camper van. When my parents bought the farm and built their house, she had hers built just up the driveway, tucked away in the woods. She woke up early and did her stretching exercises, made coffee, and visited with my dad before he started his day working between the blueberry rows. Sometimes, I would wake up early and run up the driveway and join them. This is how I know her: in a house walled with books, alone but not lonely.
     It has been this way for as long as I can remember—a constant. The garden has fewer and fewer annuals each year, the cookie jar is more often filled with cookies bought at the store, conversation becomes more disjointed, but she is still always there in her house with her books and her vases and her birds and her strong knobby hands gripping her coffee cup. I pick a book up off of her coffee table and ask her how it is. She wrinkles her nose with slight disgust, oh that’s just something Judy sent me, it’s okay, and she goes on to tell me about how much she really likes reading biographies and how she read this great biography on Truman, and what a good president he was, what a good person really, down to earth and honest. We talk about this book every time I visit.
     This is the memory I keep anyway, because really I know that she has since had to move out of her house into assisted living and then into the nursing home. Her house is still there, just up the driveway from my parents, and the cookie jar, but they are empty now. In her room at the nursing home, the framed picture of Aunt Anna is propped on her dresser, next to a vase of fresh flowers. She is ready to die. She has been ready for awhile. She is content to live each day and go when she is supposed to. I am surprised, and not, with each day that she keeps on living. When I go to visit her and the confused look on her face doesn’t match the confident look I remember, I worry she’s not even really there anymore, that she doesn’t know who I am, or what’s going on at all, but then she squeezes my hand, those same firm fingers gripping my own, and she smiles. She asks me how I am. Her face is blank as I respond, telling her about Chicago and work and rugby. I know there is nowhere for her to store new information any more. It won’t be kept straight. She won’t remember. But then so clearly, so confidently she looks at me, and tells me I’ve done well, I’m doing well, I will do well. I don’t remember the exact tense and really it seems as if all three tenses were used and implied at once, that I’ve got it together, always have and always will, that she is confident in that, that I have that strength, that she continues to pass it on to me as she presses my palm in her own.