Short fiction
Pain is weakness leaving the body. That’s what my high school soccer coach always used to say. We’d be wincing through the last of our sprints, or face down to the ground, inhaling dirt and grass, just trying to muster the strength to at least feign the fifth set of push-ups, and he’d shout those words as if our survival relied on him shouting them. It seemed to me that the opposite was true. Throughout three years of varsity, Coach barked all kinds of demented, coachy clichés at us, probably all shamelessly pilfered from some lame quotable, like the autobiography of Vince Lombardi, or military boot camp scenes in movies. I’ve forgotten most of them, because they meant so little to me, but this one has somehow burrowed its way into my head. Unbidden, my mind will brandish it at me in the weirdest moments — funerals, anniversaries, at the dentist getting X-ray photographs of my molars. Pain is weakness leaving the body. The meaning still fails to apply, and my reception is just as cold and disbelieving as when Coach used to say it, yet for some reason it persists, trying again and again to sucker me with the deep simplicity of its philosophy. And always, I end up thinking of Coach’s poor wife.
In our senior year we struggled against a league of teams that were not necessarily better than us, and won only two games. We were, by then, a reasonably fit and skilled group of players — most of whom had been on teams together since our tenderfoot days, when they couldn’t seem to make jerseys small enough for us and we all just followed the ball around the field, a melee of aimless kicking. (“Spread out!” our coaches and parents and siblings would yell from the sidelines — the referees too, would yell this — but in our hearts we knew the only path to glory was through kicking, kicking, kicking that ball). By senior year we’d come a long way, but, still, few of us were actually very proficient at putting the ball in the net. We could make fluent, handsome drives to the goal — deft dribbling moves strung together with wise passes — but when we arrived at that goal box our feet just lost their cool. The ball went wide, went over, or straight at the goalie. Or we dawdled there one second too long, setting ourselves up for the shot, just so, and the defenders would arrive, oafishly barreling into our private moment of grace, smothering with grunts our well-earned chance at glory. It was like some voodoo hex. Only Louis Ananio, our team captain, seemed to be exempt, and so took on most of the goal scoring by himself. But his prodigious talent alone wasn’t enough to win.
Coach would berate us for not taking the sport seriously enough, often yelling at us to shut up if we seemed too jovial on our way home after a loss. “If you can accept losing you can’t win!” he’d shout. After he sat back down we’d roll our eyes at each other and maybe mime a jerking-off gesture before picking up our conversations in lower, more tempered voices. Even though he never earned our allegiance, we still did what we could to avoid extra sprints or push-ups, or whatever other penance he might be chomping at the bit to try out at the next day’s practice.
One evening, toward the end of that final season, I happened to see Coach at Fresh Side Café, a Vietnamese restaurant in town. My parents and I walked in, and even though he sat with his back to the door, I knew immediately it was him — my eyes had spent plenty of time boring holes of contempt into the back of that head. But I’d never seen him in town before. He lived across the river, in Holyoke, which was fitting, and I guessed he just didn’t come around Amherst much because he figured it was a place for the spoiled, the faint of heart, and the quick-to-judge — if he wasn’t there to whip some of us into shape then he had no reason to be there at all. I assumed that after practices or games, when he was finished shaking his head in disbelief at our lack of fortitude, he’d get in his grey Toyota truck with a topper and head proudly back over the river for a modest meal and good night’s sleep. So I thought. Fresh Side, a restaurant that specializes in inventive fresh summer rolls and cold rice noodle salads, and serves more bean curd than it does meat, was one of the last places I would’ve expected to see him.
And Coach was eating with a woman. We knew he had a wife, but no one on the team had ever seen her. (Nevertheless — and this is probably no surprise — the bawdier boys on the team had invented a specific category of humor based on speculation of what she was like; the most popular suggestions being variations on the theme of inanimate objects with holes.) I guessed this was her — and later my guess would be confirmed. From where I sat I could watch them without Coach’s knowing, though I wasn’t close enough to hear their conversation. But it didn’t seem like I was missing much. Half-heartedly they focused on their food and spoke only occasionally. What little talking there was, it seemed to be coming mostly from Coach, as his wife idly nodded, sometimes raising her eyebrows with a tired and forced interest.
She was actually quite pretty — in a down-home, girlish way — but there was something off about her, and it took me a few minutes to figure it out. The short brown hair on her head did not seem to be her own. The chocolaty color, and even the style — perfect, flippant little cowlicks everywhere — just didn’t match her face, which was ashen and unhappy. It didn’t have the luster of real hair at all; was sort of dead in the light. It wasn’t her hair. She was wearing a wig. When I realized, I stopped chewing, stopped with my spoon and chopsticks, hands suspended over my steaming bowl of noodle soup.
Just then, she excused herself and went to the bathroom. I watched the back of Coach’s head, the stiff set of his shoulders. Suddenly, I was flooded with a crushing awareness of his vulnerability; his humanness. It was almost unbearable to see him sitting there alone. His head began to turn, self-consciously scanning the restaurant. When it seemed like he might turn far enough to spot me, I averted my eyes toward my bowl and pretended to be actively concerned with the spooning of my soup.
After his wife returned to the table she clearly declined to have any more of her only half-eaten meal, making a disgusted face and quickly shaking her head with a shiver. From then on she sat with her hands in her lap and looked through glazed eyes around the restaurant while Coach quickly finished up his food.
It was only on their way out that he saw me. He did a double-take that started out sour, then lightened to a smile when he registered that I was with my parents.
“Hi, Coach.”
“Well, look who it is! One of my star players!” He theatrically put his hands on his hips, as if to distract from the transparency of his insincerity. We smiled politely and one of us might have pushed out a chuckle.
“And I recognize you two from the bleachers!” he continued, “Where would we be without our loyal fans?!”
“We do our best to make it out and show our team spirit,” my mom said.
“I know it. I know it.” Coach nodded, “And it sure is appreciated.”
“We don’t really care if they win or lose, we just have fun watching them play,” my mom said.
Coach twisted his torso to one side, as if he’d been nudged in the shoulder or had a sudden stiffness in his lower back.
“Yeah, well, that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Fun.” In his weak smile I could see that the words left a bad taste in his mouth. He recovered with a gulp and said, “Even more fun when you win though, right?! Maybe we’ll get one this Friday against Minnechaug. What do you say, guy?” It was like he didn’t even know my name, or couldn’t bear to say it.
“Maybe,” I said, with a thin layer of counterfeit hope on the second syllable.
I smiled toward his wife, expecting to be introduced. She looked back at me with a superficial smile and what I took to be meaningful eyes — glowing blue with apology and sadness. Without thinking, I mirrored the sentiment with mine — No. I’m sorry.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to your dinner now,” Coach said, “And I’ll see you at practice tomorrow. I think I’ve got a few good ideas that ought to help you guys score some goals, so rest up and be ready.” I didn’t want to speak to him, didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to face the reality of him. But I nodded, looking past his head at nothing in particular, as my parents took on the duty of saying cursory goodbyes. Before they walked away, I took one last glance at Coach’s wife. I felt a strange pang of shame as I noticed her shapely breasts, and yearned to draw my fingers down her smooth neck.
After they were gone my mom let out a squawking scoff. “He didn’t even introduce us to his wife!”
“There’s something wrong with that guy,” my dad said, shaking his head and twirling a forkful of noodles. “It’s like he can’t really see past the end of his own arms.”
“She didn’t look well at all,” I said.
“No,” said my mom, “she didn’t.”
That night I lay awake in bed and pictured Coach and his wife at home, in their bedroom. Coach was in bed, sitting up, absorbed in some thick book about athletic discipline and its glorious rewards, bushy brow furrowed above non-prescription reading glasses. The door from the bathroom opened inward and there, a dark, soft-edged shape against yellow light, stood Coach’s wife. The flippant wig was no longer on her head — instead a short, downy fuzz of hopeful, light brown hair. Her cheeks were flushed now with color, fresh from washing. Her eyelashes were still wet. She was more natural, even more pretty than she had been in the restaurant. There was nothing off about her anymore. A light, white nightgown hung from her smooth shoulders, the neckline traversing the ridgeline of her collarbone. She lingered for a moment, perhaps waiting for Coach to look up from his fat book, to look at her. But he only continued to furrow, absent-mindedly chewing at the insides of his mouth and flaring his nostrils at a particularly arousing example of endurance and victory. She switched off the bathroom light, padded across the carpet, and crawled into her side of the bed. She faced Coach and watched as he vigorously rabbit-eared the page he was on, grinning and shaking his head with disbelieving self-satisfaction, and then, instead of closing the book, kept on reading. She asked him: “Why don’t you turn off the light, Steve? Hold me.”
“Hold on, honey,” Coach said, “this is good stuff… I’m gonna use this on my guys tomorrow.”
Your guys, she thought, as she sighed and turned and pulled the covers over her bare shoulder, don’t even like you.
Naturally, I began to envision myself in that bed, replacing Coach and his blowhard book with my own, feeling body and hands. I moved in behind her and matched the warm curves of her soft body with mine. I placed my hand on the hill of her hip. I let my hand slide forward, down onto the round of her belly. My lips kissed once the nape of her neck. I lay my ear against her back, and listened to the sighing, grateful moan, swelling from within.
The next day, before practice, while we were all still splayed out on the sidelines going through the motions — pulling high socks over shin guards, jamming feet into our tired cleats, wrapping layers of chalky white tape around ankles — I told Louis Ananio about seeing Coach at the restaurant. I sensed that if anyone on the team could confirm my curiosity about his wife, it would be Louis.
“I’m pretty sure she was wearing a wig,” I told him. “Is she sick?”
“Hey — ” he said, curtly. I turned from tying my laces to look at his face. His eyes were telling me to shut up, and with a quick, rigid shake of the head.
Automatically, I nodded and said no more.
I stumbled through the practice in a constant state of distraction. Compulsively, I watched Coach and thought about his wife — a maddening mixture of pity and anger, fueled by a self-embarrassment at allowing my mind to keep flashing up imaginations of her naked body; my hands, my tongue, all over her.
Retroactively, the new knowledge recast certain memories in a cold, guilty light. Only a few weeks earlier, on a return bus trip from an away game, one of the boys, on a dare, had presented Coach with what appeared to be a used condom, claiming he’d found it on a seat in the back of the bus and thought it must have been used by the driver while we were playing. The condom — which had come directly from a package, from one of our hopeful adolescent wallets, and was filled with a couple of spit loogies — dangled in the boy’s hand, held out insistently toward Coach as if it were his duty to take care of it. From the back of the bus we couldn’t hear what Coach was saying, but we watched his face and neck turning red, and then after an unbearable few more seconds of dangling, he reached out and took the condom, nodding his head with reluctant thanks, then turned to face forward, ending the conversation and sending our teammate back our way. The hilarity that gurgled in our throats was barely containable. We writhed and doubled over, eventually wheezing, out of breath from trying to laugh as silently as possible. In the remaining twenty-minute ride back to school Coach never got up to throw the condom away, so we could only assume it was still in his hand. We shook our heads at each other in ecstatic disbelief, our eyes watering with joy. Reverently, we offered our hands to the brave boy over the seat backs, squeezing harder than usual, trying to convey the sincerity of our immense gratitude.
Autumn came quicker and colder that year, and toward the end of the season we were all practicing in sweats or warm-up suits and regularly blowing hot breath into our cupped hands to temper the sting of cold — to hold a little bit of warmth. Coach still had us doing push-ups and the balding ground of the practice field felt as hard as stone under our bloodless hands. Along one side of the field was forest, and the leaves had long since turned and fallen, leaving only the naked gray of cold bark, the clacks of branches sparring in the wind.
“Pain is weakness leaving the body!” Coach barked, with extra furor, as we pushed and pushed against the hard ground. Our final game of the season — of high school soccer altogether — was only a few days away. It was a home night game against Ludlow, a team made mostly of short, quick, and scrappy Portuguese-American boys that we’d been losing to for years — even back when we were better at winning. The game would be played under lights on the school’s nicest field — which was otherwise reserved for the football team. There were proper bleachers, an announcer’s tower, and even a concessions stand. Our friends and girlfriends and families would be there and, maybe almost just as much as Coach, we ached for one final, proud win. So we pushed against the ground with some fury of our own, and it was one of a few rare instances when our intensity, as a team, might have actually lined up with Coach’s. These 20 push-ups were our last duty of the day.
Louis led the counting-out like a Marine, brought us through the last push, then popped up with typical Louis aplomb, while most of the rest of us straggled — shakily transferring our weight from our arms to our knees, heaving, heaving, then one leg up, then a slow rise to standing. It would have taken a hell of a lot more than just being pumped-up to win to turn us into Louises. “Shake it out guys,” he advised, and we listened — walking around slowly, shaking out our arms, and our whole bodies, puffing steam from our mouths. We were feeling proud and maybe even half looking forward to our usual parting words from Coach. If ever Coach said decent, encouraging things to us, it was during these post-practice talks. But when my eyes focused, I saw that he was already halfway to his gray Toyota. Louis seemed to be taking the reins.
“We got this,” he said, brimming with genuine confidence. “We can do this! We’re better than Ludlow, man! And it’s about fucking time we showed them! Bring it in!”
We huddled around Louis, arms around each other’s shoulders, heads hung down into the back of whoever was in front of us, sharing our exhaustion across a communal structure — heaving, steaming. Through each other’s bodies we heard Louis, speaking from the core. His voice bore a tone of whole-heartedness, of dedication,
“Alright guys. Coach had to take off a little early… But we can do this! For many of us this will be our last game. This time next year we’ll be getting stoned with our hot new girlfriends.” The huddle teemed with laughter, all of us laughing forward, inward, onto each other, pooling our excitement for our open futures, swirling in our nostalgia for the end of an era. Someone hailed a reverent “Amen!” and the laughter surged again, some sounding almost like wet sobs. My own eyes teared up, as the push and pull of our lives pulsated through our still-growing frames, alternately warming and squeezing our hearts. As Louis spoke on I had a vision of Coach beside his wife’s hospital bed, after all the hope was gone — the ultimate defeat. Finally he would say something right. She would open her eyes, slowly — weakness the only thing that remained. He would look into them and melt away. “No. I’m sorry,” he would say. “I’m the one who should be sorry.”
