A group of Finnish telecom workers have expressed an interest in forming a women’s hockey team to play in the local league. Unfortunately there is no senior women’s league in town. “We’ll form one!” declares the Mayor, and the wheels are set in motion, top gear. After an intense recruiting drive unofficially named “Let’s Do Whatever the Finns Ask!” a group of players large enough to stock four teams is rounded up. Preliminary meetings are held with the rink authorities, who must reassign ice times, team sponsors come forward with money for equipment, and the campus radio station offers play-by-play coverage. Everything is progressing to plan when the whole thing comes to a crash tinkle against Mrs Estabrooks.
“This player, Hanne Raikannen. She played semi-pro hockey in Switzerland.”
The Mayor: “Meaning she’s too good for the other players?”
“Meaning she’s a professional.” She says it like it means typhoid carrier. “I have nothing against professional sport, in its place. But she cannot be allowed to mix with amateurs. If she plays, she will infect her team, her team will infect the other team, both teams will infect the league and put a quarantine on the rink. No one from Sackville with aspirations to compete in a provincial, national or international competition in either hockey or ice skating will be free of the stain. Do you want to go down as the mayor who lost the town an Olympic gold medal?”
He doesn’t. He straightens his tie crooked and retreats to an emergency meeting of council.
Agnes, who is present as Mrs Estabrooks’ aide-de-camp, makes a fist and mutters, “Foolishness! Foolishness!”
Jacinthe is reading The Kalevala for her world mythology class. Turns out Louhi is like this major league Nordic witch goddess. Her kids too.
Agnes pounds on the door and enters. “Jacinthe, I think my brain is about to explode. They’re going to disqualify the Finns from the women’s league because one of them got a housing allowance to play in Switzerland. The whole reason for having the league was to accommodate the Finns. What kind of message does that put out? Let’s scare your foreign investment out of the province! Why don’t you relocate to the Dartmouth Industrial Park? They’ll play hockey with cats and dogs there!”
“What are you going to do about it?” Agnes stops and stares into the distance with her hands in her hair.
“It’s up to me, isn’t it? Those people don’t have two clues to rub together. This is where I start to put things right.”
If she had a sword she’d draw it.
“Jacinthe, you’re the smartest friend a person ever had. From here on, wherever I go, you go. We’re a great team the pair of us, I’ve always said that. Between the two of us there’s no amount of foolish nonsense we can’t end. Mark your calendar. The tide of common sense begins right now, and you’re on hand to see the bore.”
Possibly a weak metaphor but she’ll rephrase it in her memoirs. She heads out the door with dragons to slay.
Jacinthe shifts around in her seat. “Uh. Okay.”
November 21, 2006
Dear diary,
The campaign to save the telecom jobs is begun, with my former roommate Jacinthe on board as my personal assistant. Could there be a more loyal and intelligent supporter? I don’t think so! I’m so lucky to have her as a friend! Though her advice on boys has always been a little iffy, and she’ll never get one for herself dressed like that. (Cargo pants.) We’ll work on her looks once this hockey fiasco is put right. For now I have to depend on her to act as go-between with the Finns. I’ll get her to approach this Hanne Reikannen. Working as closely as I do to Mrs Estabrooks I can’t be seen to be acting against the interests of the new women’s league. On the other hand this linesman job has me ideally situated to keep on top of developments. I’m glad Dwa- I thought of it.
Dwayne comes across Jake in the dining hall. From the empty plates in front of Jake he would seem to be working on his third helping of stew.
“So, how are things coming along with you and Scrumptious?”
“She’s a gymnast, Dwayne. A gymnast!”
A week later, Jake and Janice are in bed, Jake on the bottom and Janice bouncing blissfully on top. He says, “You have the loveliest breasts, Jacinthe.”
Janice freezes, climbs off him, pulls on her clothes, and doesn’t speak to him again for twenty-eight years.
Jacinthe learns that Hanne Raikannen and three other Louhi women are renting a place near Silver Lake. Saturday morning she looks out her window at the grey clouds scouring the horizon and begins to load on the layers. Like most university students Jacinthe trusts in the insulating power of hoodies and tube socks. She wraps her Mt A scarf around her head babushka-style and pulls on a pair of maroon and yellow thrummed mitts. Ready for anything!
She‘s never walked out to Middle Sackville before. A third of the way there she thinks, ‘I must be nearly there by now.’ Halfway there she resolves to buy a pair of boots the next time she’s in Moncton. Two thirds of the way there a blast of wind goes through her like a harpoon and she huddles with her back to it on the side of the road, cursing and blinking.
A van pulls up.
“Do you want a ride?”
She climbs in, buries her frozen face in her mitts for a minute, then looks around, red-cheeked and runny-nosed. Four Finns are smiling at her.
“For a northern people you Canadians don’t dress so smart.”
They take her to their house where by the time they get there she explains she was going. They decamp from the van and Jacinthe gets her first good look at Silver Lake. The ice is already forming around the edge of it. An idea starts to form too.
In the house they give her coffee and a couple of them even rub her arms briskly to get the blood moving. They’re all between 23 and 33, not all of them stereotypically blonde, and, from the amount of fun they seem to be having, all on a big adventure. Jacinthe likes them almost instantly.
She apologizes for the hockey snafu, and tries to explain it in terms of how some people sometimes take a little bit of power and build it into a fiefdom, but they all laugh and treat it as a big joke. “We’re Europeans. We invented that!”
They ask her when she thinks the lake will freeze.
She asks them how many hockey players they have.
They ask her if anyone would like to play them.
She asks them to keep it under their hat.
The Sackville Senior Women’s Hockey League is launched at the start of December with three teams: the Lions, the Tigers, and Midgic Gravel and Cartage, and without the Finns. Agnes continues as Mrs Estabrooks’ number two, to serve as linesman for each of thirty scheduled league games, plus the playoffs, every Tuesday and Friday evening through to the end of March. One unforeseen outcome of this is that by the end of that time Agnes has thighs on her like tree trunks. In a one ref, one linesman system like the one used by the SSWHL the one linesman does a lot of skating. File that fact away.
Jacinthe is sitting in her room late one evening, trying to figure out where to find a team of uncommitted female hockey players. She hears somebody in the hall say, “Fuckin’ next time, girls. Those thumb-sucking Windsor bitches don’t know what’s waiting for them. Bunny-slipper-housecoat-wearing-coffee-travel-mug-drinking little princesses.”
She looks out her door and sees several members of the Hunton women’s intramural hockey team in hockey equipment and snowmobile boots standing outside their room doors. She realizes she doesn’t even know their names.
“Hey. What was the score?”
“Oh, like you care. Do you even know how to skate?”
In fact she doesn’t. Her first impulse is to go back in her room, but instead she says, “I need eleven players to take on the Finns.”
The biggest of the players comes down the hall toward her. She’s a head taller than Jacinthe, with orange-red hair sticking up in dried-sweat tufts like licks of flame, and a big-bridged hockey nose. She shakes Jacinthe by the hand.
“I’m Josey. Sign me on. I don’t care when or where. I’ll kick their ass.” She calls over her shoulder, “You sucky babies going to bed or something?”
In no time Jacinthe has six names: Josey, Jodi, Laura, Lindsay, Kirsten, and Courtney. Five to go.
Saturday she goes to the rink to scope out the Mt A vs St FX game. There’s no way she’s going to get any of the varsity players; in fact she’s under strict orders from Agnes to stay clear of that whole organization, but maybe she can scoop up a few cut players, if she can just find out who they are somehow. She sits near by a group of hockey moms, scrutinizes the Xeroxed program for clues, and tries to figure out how icing works. She’s never been the biggest hockey fan, has always found somewhere else to be on Saturday nights, leaving the TV to her brother and dad. Hockey to her is about two teams digging endlessly for the puck along the boards, a kind of trench warfare. She watches the players fly by, though, and thinks, ‘This is aerial combat.’ She can almost see the arrows on the coach’s white board as St FX swoop through the Mt A zone and loop around the net. It’s Pearl Harbour. She notices that the Mounties seem to be spending much of the period skating in reverse, or forming a box around the net and sweeping their sticks in front of them and occasionally knocking the puck across the line and breaking for the other end. The thought dawns, ‘Hey, they’re beating us!’ The hockey moms know it already and are yelling, “Way to go, Kimmy! Hustle! Hustle! Nice transition, girls! Jesus, Brianna! Stupid penalty!”
At the end of the period she watches the players file off. The Zamboni and the net-shepherd come out on the ice and begin their routine. Jacinthe puts her chin on her palm and tries to think of her next move.
“I like your mitts. Where did you get them?”
She turns and sees the hockey moms looking at her. She moves up closer to them.
“My Aunt Melba.”
“May I?”
She pulls one off and hands it up. The hockey mom turns it over, inspects the thumb gusset, then deftly turns it inside out. The other hockey mom smiles and says to Jacinthe, “Industrial espionage.”
The first one pulls the mitten right side out and hands it back, saying, “Nicely done. Your aunt’s a good knitter.”
“Do you come to all these games?” she asks them.
They react as if it’s an odd question. They’re hockey moms.
“I haven’t seen you before,” says the first one. “Are you a … roommate?”
“I’m a scout, actually.”
This sets them back.
“I’m looking to sign five players for a new senior league team.”
They exchange a look. Just then there’s a ruckus as a group of students arrive yelling, “Wooooo!! Fans are in the house now! Uh huh! Uh huh! F5 are on the scene!” The latecomers claim a block of seats. Then one of them stands up, pounds on a pot with a serving spoon, and yells, “Where are those Xs? Hidin’ in their room? You go tell ’em we got their boyfriends out here! You won’t see them no more! They’re your exs now! We’re just gonna sit in their laps and watch the game, and afterwards go clean out the candy machine! If you catch my innuendo!”
The hockey moms rear back, curling their lips, and point. “Them!”
Jacinthe knows them, actually. They’re the girls from Dartmouth she mentioned to Zinck. She gets up to go join them but seeing one of them make an exit she follows the train of thought and goes out to the candy machine.
“Yo, Lou’Eaze!”
Lou’Eaze is loading chocolate bars into the pockets of her ancient shawl-collared sweater. That and a cloth cap over her short afro give her a look that says retro chic, or else too tired to think about clothes. She says,
“Just Louise will do, thanks.”
Jacinthe gears down to cautious.
“So you come out to all the games? The hockey moms seem to recognize you.”
“They hate us. I don’t blame them either, the way we swear and curse.”
“You sound kind of unhappy with it.”
“I think the gangsta thing’s a little played. I was kind of hoping to move on to something new this year. In a couple years I’ll be applying to do post-grad. How is Can stand on one hand going to help with that? That’s why I went after the rest of them to go out for varsity hockey this fall.”
“You’re all that good?”
“Hells yes! Shit. Dartmouth Midget Boys League. We practically grew up on Lake Banook.”
“Sorry!”
“Just don’t get me going. We were good enough for those Mounties, but we got the axe because of ‘attitude’. That’s exactly what I want written on the corner of my application to Saskatchewan. ‘Attitude.’ You can be sure they don’t lend out their particle accelerator to folks with ‘attitude’ written on the corner of their application. So now instead of playing, we heckle.”
“What do the others think about all this?”
“Irene is leaning the same way as me, toward calling it quits. Henrietta idolizes Emily. She’ll follow her anywhere. Nellz is a total party beast. She’ll side with the most beer.”
“So what about Emily?”
“That’s it, isn’t it? Emily wants to keep the old crew going forever. And why not? She’s the MC. I mean, I love her like a sister, but she does go on. It gets kind of high school after a while, you know what I’m saying? Sure, I’m as up for ménage à dix as the next girl, as long as there’s a maxi box of condoms in the middle of the floor, but does she have to yell about it at every game? They all think we’re sluts!”
Jacinthe makes some noises to suggest she’s been there too and sympathizes, but she hasn’t, at all. She says, “I’m recruiting players for a hockey team to take on the Finnish phone workers. Do you think you’d like to join? You could bring along the rest of them. It’d be a way to keep F5 going and still make a change.”
“I don’t know. I’m just tired of everything.” She leans against the candy machine.
Jacinthe: “I like your sweater. It’s very Forties.”
Louise closes her hands on the cuffs and turns the worn sleeves one way and another, inspecting them.
“Yep. This is all that’s left of my grandpa.”
Nothing gets said for a minute.
Jacinthe: “Well, there’s you.”
Louise considers that, then smiles. “That was a friend thing to say.”
“I just don’t like the way everybody’s flying apart.”
“No, you’re right. It’s a good plan. Let’s go put F5 to use.”
They head back to the stands.