~This story previously appeared in Arroyo Literary Review (2014).
~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor for Fiction
He isn’t bothering anybody. He’s just sitting in his car in the parking
lot by the freshly mown soccer fields, waiting for his daughter to be done with
practice. He isn’t looking at anything in particular, just gazing out in the
direction of his pony-tailed daughter and her friends, running forward and back
across the field, their cheeks flushed and their toothpick legs like pinwheels
in their high rainbow socks.
But he isn’t really watching them,
nor is he particularly aware of the pigeons squatting along the telephone wire
in the distance, clumped together like old ladies gossiping, nor of the acute blue
of the sky behind them, so blue it almost seems artificial. He gazes towards
all of these things but he doesn’t really see them, in the way one stares off
vacantly into space when deep in thought or daydreaming.
He isn’t daydreaming or deep in
thought, but the opposite. His mind is blank, blissfully blank, like the clear
blue bowl of a sky above them, only an occasional cloud-thought skittering
past, dissipating before it wakes him from peaceful emptiness.
It is a shadow that finally rouses
him, falling across his face like a summons. He glances up through the
dirt-streaked windshield, expecting to see the shiny red face of his daughter,
but instead he is met with the round, shapely behind of a young woman. Tight
Lycra shorts grip her perfect, tan thighs. He takes in the smooth-shaven backs
of her knees, her slender calves tapering down to exquisite ankles, her running
shoes edged in pink trim.
Quickly he looks away, out at the
blue sky, the telephone poles, the gray brick restrooms huddled in the midst of
green expanse of soccer fields—but immediately his eyes itch to return to her.
She is, after all, standing right in front of his car. Her curvaceous lower
half directly at his eye level. Where else is he supposed to look?
He looks.
She is stretching against a
lamppost, still turned away from him, one leg extended far behind the other,
leaning forward so her calf muscles stand out hard and tight as knots. He can’t
see her upper half, her face or hair or the curve of her breasts, but he can
imagine. And he does. She would be one of those young girls, still in high
school or just out of it, with shiny silken hair pulled back in a high
ponytail, a tan glow on her cheeks. Her breasts tight swells against the fabric
of her pink sportsbra. She would have one of those smiles both knowing and
unknowing. Like Bridget Fitzgerald.
He never touched her. He’d been
given the opportunity and he’d wanted to, but he restrained himself. That
should count for something. All he did was look, and it was only natural for a
man to look.
He tried explaining that to his
wife, but she was so busy fussing around, making a big show of packing her
suitcase, that she wasn’t listening to anything he said. That was the last
thing she told him, actually, before she took the kids and the car and left: “I
don’t believe a word that comes out of your sorry rotten mouth!”
After the charges were dropped, she
came back. Things were strained between them for a while—it was four months
before they had sex again—but now, six years later, the whole ordeal has all
but been forgotten. Or, if not forgotten, at least it is never brought up. Even
when they argue she doesn’t bring it up, which he is grateful for. It all seems
like a long time ago.
Bridget herself would be out of
college by now. She went to college out of state—Colorado, maybe, or New Mexico—and
he guesses she is still out that way. He never hears from her, and he doesn’t
dare ask around. He hopes she is well. He hopes she is a veterinarian like she
had wanted to be. He’d never met anyone who loved animals as much as she did.
Wouldn’t even dissect a frog. He had given her an alternate assignment. That
was part of the “evidence” they had against him—that he gave her special
treatment. It wasn’t true, that part. He would have given anyone an alternate
assignment. She was just the only student who asked.
Even after the charges were dropped,
he stepped down as soccer coach so as not to cause any more problems. And they
transferred Bridget out of his Biology class and into Mrs. Henderson’s fifth
period. Just like that, she was out of his life. He saw her once, in early
spring, when he was walking to his car after a late afternoon of grading lab
reports and she was waiting for a ride home from practice. She looked down
sharply at her feet and he walked straight on past as if he didn’t see her. It
pained him more than he imagined it would. When he got to his car, he had to
sit there for a few minutes to calm his breathing.
Outside his car window, the young
woman bends over at the waist, stretching her hamstrings. Lycra stretches taut.
It happened on a blustery day in
late October. Bridget stayed late after practice, helping him pick up cones.
She said her mom was sick with the flu and asked him for a ride home. As they
headed to his car, she walked so close beside him their arms brushed. He could
smell the musky sweat of her. The sun plunged behind the mountains, casting the
clouds with soft pink light. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, smiling up at him
with that knowing yet unknowing smile. “Don’t you think?” He just nodded,
wondering if his face gave away his desire. He grabbed the cones from her and
said, “I’ll meet you in the car. It’s unlocked.”
When he opened the door and slid
into the driver’s seat, she had taken off her
T-shirt and sports
bra. Her breasts were pale and full in the gathering dark. The moment felt ripe
with inevitability. All he had to do was reach out towards her. They were
parked in the empty back lot, tucked away behind the fields. He sat there,
silent, taking her in. All he had to do was reach out and touch her face and he
knew his restraint would leave him.
“Coach Blake,” she said, and she was
no longer a woman at all but a girl, eyes wide and cheeks flushed, goosepimples
covering her naked arms.
He turned away, ashamed. “Bridget,
put your clothes back on. I’m taking you home.” When he started the car the air
conditioner whooshed to life. He didn’t reach over to turn it down because he
didn’t trust himself. Bridget cried quietly the entire drive, knees pulled up like
a shield for her now-covered breasts. When he stopped the car in front of her
house, she wiped her face and met his eyes. “I thought you liked me,” she said.
“Bridget, you’re my student. Nothing
more.”
She got out and slammed the car
door. His hands shook on the steering wheel.
A week later, Principal Jones called
him in and the questioning began. It was only his word against hers. If she
hadn’t dropped the charges, he would have surely lost his job. And his family.
Maybe even gone to jail. As it was, Principal Jones seemed relieved when he
left at the end of the school year to “pursue other interests.” His wife was
relieved, too. She was the one who signed him up for online classes. Now he
worked as a lab technician. Picked his daughter up from soccer practice and
cheered her on at games. His son played ice hockey, which he didn’t know much
about, but he went to all those games, too. Both his kids had been too young to
understand what was going on during the whole mess. They probably barely
remembered it. Just thought their parents went through a rocky time. Lots of
parents did nowadays. They hadn’t gotten divorced, that was what really
mattered.
The last time he saw Bridget
Fitzgerald was on graduation day. Her light blonde hair glowed against the black
of her robes. She was resplendent. He only saw her from a distance, one face in
the wide sea of graduating faces, but during the entire ceremony she was the
one he watched. When she walked across the stage to get her diploma, he
applauded. He applauded for all the graduates.
Outside his windshield, the young
woman finishes stretching and walks away from him, towards the other end of the
parking lot. She is wearing a baggy T-shirt and her hair is light brown,
hanging in one long braid down her back. He watches her walk farther and
farther away.
“Dad! Dad!” His daughter knocks her
fist against the passenger window. The door is locked. He fumbles to unlock it.
His daughter opens the door and plops down into the seat. The hair around her
face is darkened with sweat and there is a streak of dirt on her forehead.
“Did you have a good practice?” he
asks.
“Yeah,” she says. “I almost scored a
goal during the scrimmage.”
“Wow!” He notices goosepimples
rising up on her arms. He reaches over to turn up the heater. “Here,” he says,
handing her a sweatshirt from the backseat. “Put this on. You don’t want to catch
cold.”
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
During the year after I graduated
from college and before I moved to Indiana for graduate school, I moved back to
my California hometown and lived with my parents. Down the street from their
house there’s a big sports park with a huge grassy field, and I would often run
loops around the circumference. Afterwards, I would stretch against a lamppost
by the parking lot. One day, after I finished stretching, I noticed there was a
man in what I thought had been an empty car parked right behind me. He was
watching me; when our eyes met, he looked away quickly. It was an experience
that lingered with me and I decided to write an imagined story of that man. At
the same time, a family friend was graduating from high school, and at her
graduation party I was struck by the tightrope she walked: both a girl and a
woman, innocent yet also sophisticated. When I wrote this story, as a
22-year-old, I didn’t see myself that way; but now, looking back on it from the
vantage point of my 30s, I see that I was walking that same tightrope. Perhaps
I still am; perhaps we all are.
*****
ABOUT DALLAS WOODBURN
Dallas Woodburn was a
Steinbeck Fellow in Creative Writing at San Jose State University and received
her MFA in Fiction from Purdue University. She has
published work in Zyzzyva, Fourth River,
The Nashville Review, The Los Angeles Times, North Dakota Quarterly, and Monkeybicycle,
among many others. A three-time Pushcart
Prize nominee, she won first place in the international
Glass Woman Prize and second place in the American Fiction Prize. She is the founder of Write On! Books, an organization that empowers young
people through reading and writing
endeavors: www.writeonbooks.org.
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