Carry

by Toni Jensen

  My whole life this will be what I want from friendship, from love: movement in sync with language, language in sync with movement and laughter. My whole life I will want these pieces unified, together, a trinity most holy in its ordinary magic.

  II.

  According to Webster’s, the word shooter, first used in the thirteenth century, is defined as “one that shoots, such as a: a person who fires a missile-discharging device (such as a rifle or bow), b: the person who is shooting or whose turn it is to shoot, c: Photographer.”

  The first time someone shoots me, she’s aiming at a frog. My best girlfriend and I are under a bridge, wading our way around a creek after school. We’re right around twelve years old, and the day we shoot the frog, I am wearing new brown suede loafers that I have entirely forgotten, despite their soft presence on my feet.

  We have another friend along, and we splash and talk and take turns with the BB gun. My best girlfriend unsurprisingly is the best shot, and I unsurprisingly am the worst.

  When the BB ricochets off a creek rock near the frog, it finds its spot in the flesh above my left ankle. The frog executes a jump-dive move that frees it from our sight. We’d all been following it and now are following the BB’s trajectory to its spot above my anklebone. It doesn’t hurt that much, and I answer, “It’s fine” and “Really” to the chorus of “I’m so sorry” and “Damn frog.”

  We are all in the back of our minds thinking that we shouldn’t be shooting at frogs anyway. I, in particular, have been thinking this. I’ve been taught by my father, my uncles, my grandmother that you only shoot what you’re going to eat. None of us has any intention of eating this frog—though I’ve eaten frog legs before that my cousins have shot.

  I could not bring home a frog we’d shot and present it to my mother without explaining we were out shooting by ourselves. At twelve, I was still somewhat under my sister’s supervision, at least technically, and I also did not want to drag her into the trouble. Even though it was only a BB gun, I would be grounded for weeks, maybe even from practice.

  According to Webster’s, the second definition of shooter is “something that is used in shooting: such as a: a marble shot from the hand” or “b: REVOLVER—usually used in combination // six-shooter.”

  Though marbles themselves have an earlier history among the pre-Columbians and in ancient Egypt, Rome, and Crete, marbles began as a sport in Germany. Nuremberg town officials are on record as limiting the playing of marbles in 1503, well after shooter came into the lexicon. So there were shooters in Nuremberg in early days.

  In North America, people generally trace the origin of basketball to Canadian James Naismith’s childhood game “duck on a rock.” Naismith grew up to be credited for founding basketball, for making its rules, inspired by the childhood game, which involved players trying to knock a large stone off a tree stump. Naismith worked at a YMCA in 1891 where he perfected his rulebook before taking it to the University of Kansas. So perhaps the first North American basketball shooters began in Naismith’s gym.

  If all of the Americas are included, though, the shooters begin with Mayan players of pok-ta-pok or pokolpok. The game featured players, two hoops, and a five-pound rubber ball. The winners sometimes lost their heads as sacrifice.

  Walking home from the creek, my suede loafers soaked and beginning to chafe, I’m not thinking of winning or even of shooting or getting shot. I’m thinking of nothing other than making it home before my mother. But it begins to rain and as I begin to hurry, a car honks its horn, and I see my mother has pulled our car alongside me.

  She’s picked up my baby brother from the sitter’s, and I think his presence in the back might save me. But she swings open the passenger side door in the front, and so I climb in.

  At the start of the day, the suede loafers had held a color somewhere between tan and brown, a rich color with some red to it. They were lovely, and they fit my feet, and they held a new suede smell, along with what I remember best—the soft nap, how I could not stop reaching down to touch it.

  My hands on the door handle are cold.

  “Those are new shoes,” my mother says. “You’re grounded.”

  But she does not mention practice.

  That night, late, after dinner, after everyone’s in bed, my ankle throbs like it’s gained its own heartbeat. My bedroom has its own connecting door to the bathroom, but it’s a squeaking door. I open it and close it behind me with exceptional care. In the bathroom, I use the fingernail scissors to dig the BB from under my skin, a procedure that is surprisingly uncomplicated. I cover the hole with rubbing alcohol. Then after the bleeding slows, I lay two Band-Aids crossways like X marks the spot.

  My mother’s last words to me before bed had been: “What were you thinking?”

  I tuck myself back into bed, my heartbeat moved back to my actual heart. I’m thinking no one’s said anything about practice. I’m thinking, This is not much different than a splinter.

  III.

  In high school, with other friends, my best girlfriend and I both start drinking like it’s at least a part-time job. At Monday practice, sometimes the beer smell overwhelms the air as we sweat out the weekend. But for her, the weekend bleeds into the rest of the week. She comes to school in the mornings sometimes already a little drunk. After school, practice then includes a hangover.

  One crisp fall night, during halftime of a football game, we girls take the field for a game of flag football. My best girlfriend and a few others have been drinking throughout the day. Even so, there, under the bright lights, she’s faster than any of the boys were during the actual game.

  In the eighth grade, my best girlfriend had tried out for the football team, was faster and stronger than the boys, was not allowed to play. Now we are on the field for fifteen minutes, and she scores three touchdowns. I block for her on two of them by grabbing the ankles of other girls and pulling them toward the ground.

  On the flag football field, that night, she is all motion, all shoulders and churning legs, turning sharp. That night, on the field, she is the one in control of everything.

  IV.

  More than twenty years later, we’ll be in a church, not our own, in the back pew, solid oak, and I’ll be hanging on to it with both hands to correct my vertigo. I’ll have driven more than fourteen hours to be here, in my hometown, to sit next to my mother, to memorialize my best girlfriend who has overdosed this winter on pills washed down with wine.

  My high school classmates will be at the bar on Main Street having a pre-funeral drink. “Can you imagine?” my mother will say, and “This is not a class reunion,” and “What are they thinking?”

  I’m thinking about my father, how he is at a gun show in Des Moines. I’m thinking I’m grateful the family has chosen this larger, less familiar church. I’m grateful we’re not in my childhood church kitty-corner from the elementary school, where the gym once was. Instead of tearing down the school, a few years ago, the town burned it as part of a firefighting exercise. The lot now holds a Dollar General. This is rural America. This is where I’m from: a place that burns down its elementary school, asbestos and all; a place that memorializes an overdosed friend by pre-gaming her funeral.

  Our funeral attire instructions include a note about wearing our team colors, our football jerseys, to honor how our friend was a Denver Broncos fan. I’m wearing a black dress at the funeral, am sober yet still dizzy, am home yet so very far out of place.

  The return began in the rain, which persisted, state upon state, and it ends winding on Highway 71 past the once-levitated house, which each year sinks and slumps further into its frame.

  In the longest stretch of rain, the end seemingly never coming, I stop over for the night at a hotel. The night before my best girlfriend’s funeral, the Oklahoma City Thunder played the Pistons. Russell Westbrook triple-doubled, tying LeBron James’s r
ecord. Though most Americans seem to prefer Kevin Durant with his long, loose limbs and beautiful jump shot, I have long been following Westbrook. He is all compact rage, all wide-shouldered motion. His body, in this, our America, is deemed less acceptable—the rage, the power, the sneer—the complete absence of apology. And I love him for all of it.

  At the hotel, I prop myself up with all the room’s pillows and watch the highlights—Westbrook’s rebounding like gravity is myth only. I am sorry to have missed the game. I am sorry to be making this drive. I am sorry for how many years have passed since I heard my best girlfriend’s voice, her laughter, for how many years there will be now without.

  I am sorry our last interaction was so stupid and sad. On social media, she’d posted a comment on an article I shared about violence against Indigenous women. She wrote: “You know, I’m part Kiowa.” And I liked it, then unliked it, then liked it again. Of course, I knew she was Kiowa. Of course, I objected to the language, the “part.” Which part? The back of the left knee? The curve of the right ankle? The crook of an elbow? How many ways do we carve ourselves up and portion out our parts, our bodies for other people’s comfort? How can a body such as hers—once all flight, all power and motion—be reduced to the language of the partial?

  Westbrook will go on this season to surpass LeBron and everyone else. He’ll take the triple-double record from Oscar Robertson with a last-second three-point shot against the Denver Nuggets. The shot is from thirty-six feet. The farthest curve of the three-point line is set at just under twenty-four feet. So Westbrook shoots from more than twelve feet past the line. I don’t miss this game. His face, as soon as he releases the shot: all sneer and focus that turns to roar and smile. But the sneer comes before the shot hits the net. He knows its trajectory. He knows who he is and what he’s done.

  Khelcey Barrs was Westbrook’s childhood best friend, and Barrs died suddenly at sixteen of an enlarged heart. Westbrook was only fifteen years old. They were at practice. They spent every day together, walking to school, to practice, back.

  Of the two, Westbrook then had the smaller frame and thus the smaller prospects. He grew five inches between junior and senior year. He transformed; he levitated. On Westbrook’s levitating feet, on his shoes, each night, each game, he memorializes his friend with his initials.

  Who I am is someone working toward a memorial. Who I am is sorry for how this working includes my shame and my lack, how I let the parsing of language get in the way of friendship. My childhood best girlfriend was Kiowa, and I am Métis, and we grew up together in a mostly white town, and I never came back, and she was the best of us, and she came back this season for good.

  V.

  In the last pew, my mother is talking about our childhood church, about my best girlfriend and others from our Sunday School class who’ve died, how many have died and so young, and “You girls,” she keeps saying, “you girls are supposed to outlive us,” and then she dabs at her eyes with her wrinkled Kleenex.

  “You sang at her wedding,” my mother says.

  “No,” I say, laughing a little.

  “You did,” she says.

  “No,” I say again, not laughing.

  “ ‘Wind Beneath My Wings,’ ” she says.

  “God,” I say, “I hate that song.”

  “Well, you sang it,” she says. She sighs like what is wrong with me, why am I so difficult, so I stop talking and start trying to remember.

  The teenage years are like this—full of gaps—some of which have developed into chasms. Webster’s first defines dissociation as “the process by which a chemical combination breaks up into simpler constituents.” It asks if I want to see dissociant in medical. I do.

  When I click on it, though, I’m sent to mutant, so I try again, to be sent to mutant again, and a third try does not offer different results. Webster’s medical defines mutant as “a mutant individual.”

  This is my first Webster’s failure, my first Webster’s humiliation. My associative brain, my interest in Webster’s, is caused, in part, by dissociation from childhood trauma, which perhaps makes me a dissociant, which perhaps makes me a mutant, or so says Webster’s.

  In any of these cases, my best girlfriend knew the how and the why of the dissociation. She offered sleepovers and laughter, bike rides up steep hills, and the steady rhythm of the ball against the backboard and into my hands, on repeat. She offered “I’m sorry” if I was hurting, “Damn frog” if we both needed to laugh.

  Her timing, as in ball, as in shooting, was precise. I left those precise rhythms when the cost of homecoming became too great, when the cost of time in my father’s presence became too great. I saved parts of myself that I believed then and now to be necessary parts, and I left behind both necessary parts and necessary people. This leaving, too, is a carving.

  I spend my best girlfriend’s funeral gripping the solid oak of the pew and remembering her wedding day. I have to focus, to replay that time like movie stills, like Polaroids ready for the sorting. The memory comes as the funeral unfolds.

  In our childhood church basement, I help my friend into her white pumps. Her feet are swollen because she’s pregnant, and I’m saying, “You could wear your high-tops instead.” I’m saying, “We can leave right now. My car is parked by the playground.” I’m saying, “You don’t have to do this.”

  Upstairs, I sing “Wind Beneath My Wings.” I touch my hands to my collarbone like I do when I’m nervous and try to stop doing it and do it again. These are the hands that will hold her baby boy the first time a nurse needs to draw his blood. These are the hands that touch his today, that reach around his shoulders to say “I’m sorry.” He’s so tall and handsome, with his mother’s cheekbones and broad shoulders. These are the hands that put one of the first drinks into his mother’s hands.

  After the funeral, I stop my remembering and shift into the now. My mother drives home past the lot that once held the elementary school and gym, and I go to the bar with my classmates. I hold a glass in my hands.

  Webster’s third definition of shooter is: “a shot of hard liquor (such as whiskey or tequila) often diluted with something (such as soda), also: a bit of food (such as a raw oyster) served in a shot glass.”

  I have drunk down half my glass. Other people are continuing on to shots, but I have made all the small talk I know how. I am inching my way toward the door when I see my best girlfriend’s sister waving in my direction. She is having a hard time standing. She is the one who found my best girlfriend, who called for help, who got the call when it came—that my best girlfriend, that her sister, died in the helicopter, in the Life Flight, midair, in motion.

  When the sister’s hands reach for mine, I am wanting only to be anywhere but here. I am wishing for the thud and fall of feet on a trail, the thud and fall of a ball on the hardwood. She puts her hands atop mine, looks into my face, and says, “I remember you,” and I say, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry.” I stand there a little while longer, her weight resting on mine, her hands resting on mine. We’re less than a half mile from the highway, from the trucks and their Jake brakes, and I have the impulse to do what I’ve practiced my whole life—to get in my car and go. But her hands are on mine, her weight is on mine, and so I hold her like that, and I keep back my sorrys, my damn all the frogs. I hold it and I hold it, and I don’t let go.

  Carry

  I.

  In the memorial garden, my colleague Michael Heffernan bends to tend some short, once-green plants that, to my untrained eyes, remain mysterious. He is quiet and pours the water with care. He is so quiet. In this, the first week of classes, my first on this campus, I don’t yet know Michael well, but already I know quiet to be, for him, the most unnatural of states.

  The moment before, I was sitting in my office near his in our building, Kimpel Hall, and he was trying to exit the door next to my office, his hands filled with
water glasses. I said, “Thirsty?” And he said, “Do you know about the garden?”

  When I shook my head, he nodded toward the window, to a grassy patch, and I had work to do, new names to memorize, grading to finish already. Another colleague had just been in my office too, talking about a female graduate student, describing her as “a bag of snakes.” At first, I’d misunderstood. “She has a bag of snakes?” I said. “In the building?”

  On the topic of snakes, I’m surprisingly neutral. But if this student kept her snakes, say, in her office down the hall, I felt I perhaps should be prepared.

  “No, no,” said the colleague, “she is a bag of snakes.” When I presented to him my blank-faced silence, he waved his hands around in my doorway as if clearing a swarm of bees and took himself back down the hall. I understood him fine, of course. He was trying to tell me the student is difficult, is trouble, is to be avoided. But the phrase “bag of snakes” and his casual delivery made me want to defend her. I thought, if this is how her faculty are, how brave she must be to have brought with her only one bag of snakes. I thought, She needs to go home on the weekend and collect the other three bags.

  So when Michael holds out his water glasses, says “garden,” I’m still thinking snakes and more snakes, and now I’m thinking Arkansas, Bible Belt, strangeness, and I don’t want to follow. I don’t. But Michael is more than seventy years old, and how will he open the door with glasses of water in both hands? So I take one of the glasses; I follow.