The Hockey Sister

When I was a kid, in the late nineteen-seventies, my older brother played in a Pee Wee hockey league. Getting to his games involved long drives every weekend from our house in western Massachusetts to towns all over New England. My father woke us up at dawn, and we ate in shifts, standing over the grate heaters in our drafty kitchen. Then we got into our Chevy Suburban, with its udders of dirty ice. Sometimes we ate lunch in the car from a cooler. One day, I got excited because we were going to Wethersfield, Connecticut, where the Witch of Blackbird Pond lived. But she was not there. In her place were angry people in parkas.

We drove on dull highways; we crossed foamy brown rivers on green metal bridges. On the way to wherever we were going, the car smelled of the oxidizing cores of McIntosh apples. On the way home, it smelled of dirty hockey equipment. I sprinkled Jean Naté or Florida Water on the insides of my turtlenecks and pulled them up all the way to my eyes. My brother always sat up front with my parents, and I rode alone in the back, because my brother got carsick and I didn’t. I could catch the odd word from their conversations, but never enough to participate. As my weight was “a concern,” my parents discouraged me from eating between meals, so I was bored and also hungry. Occasionally, the sun came out, bobbing along behind the clouds and above the tree line, the color of a yellow Tums.

For the first few years, I found my only entertainment in the names of places: “What if someone’s name was Al Bany?” or “Burlington, Bennington, Castleton, Springfield, Pittsfield, Greenfield—why is everything a ‘ton’ in Vermont and a ‘field’ in Massachusetts?” I remember the day I realized Boston was a grand exception, and how this almost felt like human interaction, like Boston and I had figured this out together.

The Suburban had an eight-track. My parents had the Bay City Rollers’s “Greatest Hits,” ABBA’s “Arrival,” “Elton John’s Greatest Hits,” and some K-Tel disco collections. Then, in the winter of 1977, we got the first Eagles greatest-hits album. I liked the whole album, but Side 1, track three spread before me like I was in an airplane flying over the landscape of adulthood at sunrise. It’s the story of a young trophy girlfriend (or maybe wife) who “is headed for the cheatin’ side of town.” Love, failure, heartache, longing, drinking: it was all there. One day, after I had heard it maybe thirty times, on maybe ten hockey trips, I decided to embark upon a project that would end up lasting over three years, from age eight to eleven: creating, entirely inside my head, an R-rated story adapted from the lyrics of the song “Lyin’ Eyes.”

The first words of the song are “City girls just seem to find out early / how to open doors with just a smile.” My story began like this: “Everywhere Trish Bennington went, it seemed like there was a man to notice her, to try to help her. Surely, one day, the right one would appear.”

Trish was the name of my prettiest babysitter, and Bennington was the most glamorous-sounding town within a fifty-mile radius. We drove past this exit at least once a month. I may have known it was home to a fancy college, the kind of place Babysitter Trish might have gone in real life, and the kind of place that Story Trish might have gone if she’d been born with money in New England rather than without it in central Texas. All I knew about Texas was that it was a place a beautiful person might move away from in a story. Trish Bennington was twenty-two and had sad, sexy eyes and long, silky brown hair. She wore faded bell-bottoms with red mushrooms embroidered on the back pockets. In the first lines of my story, she meets Tom Crane, a wealthy older guy, in a bar in Los Angeles, where she has gone to become an actress.

The best thing about “Lyin’ Eyes” is the way it slowly tells a sad secret. As a kid, I loved secrets so much that I couldn’t believe you didn’t have to pay for them. I lived for overhearing my parents talk shit about other adults. They did it a lot, and when they were done, they warned us that these conversations were “entre nous,” although they didn’t speak French. When I was seven or eight, a friend of my parents cheated on her husband with the husband of another couple they knew. My brother and I hid on the back stairs and listened to my parents talk about it. One night, after a juicy revelation in this story, my brother turned to me, teeth gleaming in the darkness, and whispered, “This is the best.” I remember having trouble reconciling that he was so into hockey but also so into hearing terrible things about people. I wished that I, too, could enjoy something that wouldn’t just happen to me, that I could actually do.

I knew that my parents, especially my mother, felt guilty about dragging me to my brother’s hockey games. They recognized the unfairness of the situation, down to my brother getting to sit up front all the time. I don’t have children, but I have come to understand that parenthood is mostly about getting through the day. I can see now that it wouldn’t have made any sense for my parents to force my brother to get sick in the back so I could sit in front.

Once I had Trish and Tom, I stopped feeling left out. (“Trish laughed. Wow. Maybe she could ‘open doors with just a smile.’ And come to think of it, she did think she’d learned that early on. But she had the feeling this guy might like her better innocent.”) Trish Bennington, who wanted so much and had so little idea how to get it—how I loved to keep her secrets, to be alone with her, make her do things, put on different outfits. How lucky she was that Glenn Frey had found her. How lucky I was to be able to transform my solitude into something not merely bearable but wondrous.

I couldn’t continue with Trish’s story during the hockey games themselves, because they were too loud—a Yankee wall of sound: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Mark, get your hustle on!” “Andrew, yer gonna give me a freakin’ heart attack!” “Michael, for the love of God, keep yer hee-ands to yourself!” It is a misconception that everyone in Massachusetts talks like the Kennedys or Fake Ben Affleck talking to Fake Matt Damon. R’s totally exist in western Mass. The accent combines under-pronounced T’s and nasal A’s; e.g., “Meery Ellen, he-yow he-yard is ih fer you to remember yer mih-ens?” But my family didn’t talk like that because we weren’t from there.

I asked my brother once if it was possible that we also had accents, like, in relation to other people. “No,” he said.

“But how do you know?” I asked.

“We talk like the people on TV,” he said.

Hockey rinks smell like the insides of old refrigerators. At a certain point during every hockey game there was nothing to do but go under the bleachers. Any unathletic person from an athletic family has spent a lot of time underneath bleachers wondering why they were born. The world under the bleachers was a quiet, still landscape of clean, scattered trash: paper clips, receipts, tea bags, sugar and Sweet’NLow wrappers, pennies, sometimes even a pay stub, which was kind of like a secret, if a boring one.

I grouped the items according to size, color, and material. When this was done, I counted: I counted the number of plexiglass panels around the rink, I counted the people on each team, I counted the ceiling tiles, the number of garbage cans, the number of people in the stands, the number of women, the number of men. I counted the number of people I liked and didn’t like, the number of people who had called me fat, the number of people who had been especially nice to me, the number of people my mother had called dumb, the number of people who had hated my father, who was a public official. I counted Republicans: one, two, that’s it.

I was allowed two quarters for pinball. The idea was that I would wait five minutes into the second period and then allow myself to go play. Then there would only be the rest of the second period and the third left. It made things more bearable. The only problem was that the older, better hockey teams played first, so when my brother’s team was starting, the older teams would be emerging from the locker room and begin to cluster around the pinball machine. I was bad at pinball. They would laugh at me. I would have to relinquish the machine. Most of the time, when I walked away, one of them would say, “You’re fat,” or, more helpfully, “Do you know you’re fat?”

My mother didn’t smoke Virginia Slims with the other mothers, or yell at refs like they did. When the other mothers’ sons got hurt, they marched down from the bleachers and shouted through the plexiglass; my mother always stayed in her seat, knitting. My brother never got in fights. One time, he said, “What? No way!” to a ref, which was nothing, but he never heard the end of it from my parents. “We do not yell at referees in this family!” When I asked, “How come he doesn’t get in trouble for yelling at me?” my parents said it was different, although they didn’t say how.

Whenever I paid attention to the game, I saw that my brother was really good at hockey. His legs were so powerful. The determined set of his head underneath the white helmet was so adult. I didn’t understand how my brother could just make his body do whatever he wanted it to.

Once, the teams were neck and neck, and my brother got a breakaway and scored. A few minutes later, he did it again. As he raised his gloved hand in victory, I jumped up onto the bleacher seat, raised my arms over my head, and shouted, “Eric Miller, you saved the team!”

Finding myself standing there, hearing my voice echo through the rink and realizing that everyone was looking at me, I thought, Oh, God, this is all wrong, this is not me at all, what have I done. Everyone else thought it was hilarious—and adorable, probably. All the moms howled. My father turned around and whooped, the giant overhead lights flashing in his glasses. My brother was laughing, lying down face first in the ice, pawing at it with his puffy gloves. I was at once happy that I could make such an impact on him and annoyed at my spontaneous outburst of hero worship. He got enough attention—he didn’t need mine! And he was so mean to me sometimes—why should I let him know that I was proud of him? I didn’t know what to do, so I just face-planted sobbing into my mother’s lap, which just made everyone laugh harder.

I was always very happy to get back in the Chevy Suburban. My parents and my brother would talk about the game, and it was easy to tune them out while I played my secret story in my head like a movie. Sometimes I advanced the action forward, with Trish becoming increasingly wary of Tom. Sometimes I played the beginning of the story over and over again, through the entire car trip. I could spend a lot of time selecting and then reselecting Trish’s outfit for the bar. She had a lot of different outfits: a denim lace-up peasant shirt, a white sundress with cherries, pink satin pants like I saw on Peter Frampton at my first-ever star-sighting, when he was standing outside the porta potties at Lime Rock racetrack, in Connecticut.

If I got stuck, I might ask my parents to play “the lying people song” again, and they almost always said yes. It was the least they could do. One day, my mother turned around to see if I was all right, and although I wanted her attention, I refused it. I realized you could make people feel bad very easily by saying you didn’t want things they had to offer, even if you did. I was pleased with myself at that moment, because I was just like the people in the song.

We didn’t have a totally awful relationship, my brother and I. When I was around ten, my parents told him to stop telling me I was fat, and he actually did, which was good. Also good: we invented a game that involved one person pushing the other person as far as they could across a room, using only their legs. For reasons completely unknown, we called this game “On the Job.” We watched a lot of “Three’s Company” and “The Odd Couple” together.

When my brother was not being nice, he would come into my room and lie down on top of me and refuse to get up. It wasn’t sexual, just brute force. Or he would repeat everything I said until I cried. Sometimes my parents got mad at him; mostly, they just demanded that we get along. Our entire life, our whole family was about him. One night, I stood in front of the refrigerator and looked at a hockey schedule with its list of away games: St. Johnsbury, Vermont; Wayland, Massachusetts; Poughkeepsie, New York; Fairfax, Virginia; Kingston, Rhode Island. Ten teams. Ten kids per team. How many hours was that, for each sister, for each parent? How many collective years, how many lifetimes?

One day, I was sitting under the bleachers being bored with another hockey sister. I told her I had just gotten second place in a flower-arranging contest at the Berkshire Garden Center. I think only four people entered but I was still excited. “Imagine if your parents just spent like billions of hours driving you around to flower-arranging competitions?” my friend said. We had a good laugh about this.

Every summer, my brother’s hockey team had a pool party at the coach’s house. I always worried about going because I didn’t want anyone to see me in a bathing suit. But I lived for any opportunity to visit a pool, and I was very good at putting on my bathing suit at home and taking my clothes off close to the pool, and then just getting in.

But, one year, maybe when I was eleven, I had to change at the party. After I changed, I realized I’d left my towel downstairs. I didn’t think there was anyone in the house, so I figured I could walk downstairs really fast and wrap myself in my towel and get myself outside and into the pool, and everything would be fine. Everyone would ignore me, and soon I would be alone in the water doing somersaults in the corner by myself.

The minute I walked out of the bedroom, one of the better players on the team, who scored goals like he was buttering toast, who people whispered could have a professional career—was standing right there. He smiled at me. I thought, Oh, my God, he’s going to talk to me, and he did. He said, “Wow, you’re even fatter than I thought you were.”

I didn’t say anything. I got into the warm pool and did somersaults.

That was a Saturday. The next day, I ripped a two-week diet out of Mademoiselle and gave it to my father, who got everything on the list—melba toast and cottage cheese and ham slices and apples—at the Price Chopper on Pittsfield Road. Every morning, I got up and rode my three-speed bike in a two-mile loop three times. Within four months, I had lost thirty pounds. What a relief, I thought when I finally saw the number I wanted on the scale, no boys will ever be mean to me again.

After having been a fat young girl, I found being a relatively thin young woman delightful. For example, if a boy, or even a man, was mean to me, all I had to do was say something like “You’re an idiot” or “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” and I could make them feel terrible. I could watch their faces collapse and know that I had made it happen—me—and I just loved it so much. I would try not to do it, but opportunities just seemed to keep coming up.

I did this for many years, when it seemed appropriate. I especially enjoyed doing it to my brother. I had always gotten straight A’s. I knew answers to many questions. Then I got my name printed in things and moved to a big city, then another one. He was just a jock who used to get whatever he wanted before I had made myself useful. Now it was my turn. Now I was the one my parents bragged about. It seemed like a victory, possibly even a feminist one. When people asked how I became a writer, I said that I started making up stories in the back of my parents’ car to pass the time: “My brother played Pee Wee hockey, and my parents treated him like a Fabergé egg and had no idea I existed.” I thought it was a good story, quite moving. What a little fighter I was.

When I was a sophomore in college and my brother was a senior—we went to the same college—I dressed like him for Halloween. I put on our school sweatshirt and a baseball cap, and when people asked who I was supposed to be, I said, “I’m my brother.” Then and in the years that followed, the mixed feelings of closeness and resentment I felt toward him hardened into simple hostility, even though he was softening, becoming less arrogant. I wanted to feel more charitably toward him, but something in my mind and body wouldn’t let me. It seemed impossible to become myself without hating him.

When we were in our late twenties, my brother and I got into a physical fight. We both incurred minor injuries. We managed to repair our relationship years later, which was fortunate, because we both hit middle age around the time of the 2008 financial crash and would need to commiserate over losing our careers and homes along with our youth and reconciling ourselves to not working at all, and then—victory?—working more and making less. We would need to help each other recognize the great lie of our upbringing: that achievement was our reward for being good and doing right, and not some semi-automated outcome of being born into a certain class and color. Conversely, we needed to convince each other not to hate ourselves for having failed. We had not suddenly become bad. We’d believed the exciting battle we were fighting was jock vs. bookworm, extrovert vs. introvert, favored older son vs. ignored younger daughter. Really it was just me vs. all the Eckhart Tolle books my brother was reading that told him yet another lie—that if he just had a better attitude, he would be happy.

Some weeks ago, I went to see my brother play adult-league hockey in suburban San Diego. He was still really good and scored a bunch of goals and had many assists. Afterward, as he walked toward me in the parking lot, rubbing his wet head and shouting to his friends, “Good game, Bobby” and “Good game, Ed.” I thought that I would gladly give up most anything if, in return, my brother could play hockey all day rather than go to work.

We drove down Paseo Del Norte, looking for a good place to eat, past an outlet mall and car dealerships and Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt. I asked him if he could play “Lyin’ Eyes” on his phone. He did. He sang Frey’s part, the melody, and I took Don Henley’s harmony. By the last verse of the song, we really hit our stride:

My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things.

You set it up so well, so carefully.

Ain’t it funny how your new life didn’t change things.

You’re still the same old girl you used to be.

I told him I was writing an essay about this song and his Pee Wee hockey career. “Really?” he said. “Is it good?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s going to be my big break. I can feel it.”

We laughed at this for a long time. Then we went to a BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, because there was nowhere else to go.

I texted my brother a few days ago to let him know that this essay was more revealing of our childhood than I had planned. He replied:

I’ll be fine

I’m a hockey player.