Broken Nose by Helen Terndrup

“The good thing about these summer storms,” Mr. Swanson is saying, “is that they never last long.” Outside the Gladdings’ kitchen the rain is roaring. “The harder they hit, the sooner they’ll empty themselves out.” He smiles at his wife. “Remember that storm in Bear Harbor?” Mrs. Swanson looks up from the tines of her fork and nods.

“It was quite something,” she says.

“Have you developed your photos yet?” Mrs. Gladding asks. “Everyone says Maine is so beautiful.” There are four of them at the table, surrounding baked chicken and glistening green beans. It is August and the windows are open. Mr. Swanson tells the Gladdings about their twentieth anniversary trip to Maine, while Mrs. Swanson stares out the window, across the front porch and into the night. In the rain the streetlights look like old movie footage, streaking and speckling with spots of darkness. Like a silent film, and she imagines that the rushing rain is ruined audio. The sound is comfortingly heavy, and Mrs. Swanson hopes it will be a long time before the storm breaks and the sky dries up, although she knows her husband is right; this kind of weather cannot last long. She listens for slackening, for quieting. When she hears the surrender begin, she turns her attention back to the table.

“Yesterday all I wanted was rice pudding,” Mrs. Gladding is saying. “Bob wanted to go to the steakhouse on Woodland, but I knew they wouldn’t have any. So we went to the Indian restaurant downtown, and then I ordered two servings of rice pudding for dinner.” She giggles. “I know it’s silly, but sometimes you just want something so badly, and you can’t help it, even if it’s childish.” She smiles around the table, twisting her cloth napkin, and then looks down at her lap.

“I know what you mean. On Tuesday I was just craving pizza. I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Mrs. Swanson laughs, holding her hands up and spreading her fingers wide to show how simple and urgent her desire was. When she laughs she tilts her head back and the garnet earrings she wears tremble like hooked fish. Mr. Swanson smiles back at her, pleased by her easy words of longing, and places his hand on her knee. He leaves it there as he tells the Gladdings about a case he is working on.

Mr. Swanson likes women who live close to the surface, and Mrs. Swanson tries to be that once in a while. Often she must force it, as she has cold hands and reads too much. This was a false confession of hunger. Mrs. Swanson didn’t want pizza on Tuesday. She hasn’t wanted pizza since she was in college.

The next day is Sunday. Mrs. Swanson sits at the kitchen table for most of the morning, amidst pottery filled with sugar and flour, reviewing lesson plans on Robert Frost and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Mr. Swanson works in his office, among the leather bindings and brass fixtures and the dry voices of the people on NPR. The day is bright and hot, and they are still running the air conditioner at 7:00 when they leave to go to the community center.

Mr. Swanson is the advisor for the Bailey High mock trial team. He does this because he is an attorney, and because Mrs. Swanson begged him to. It is not much of a time commitment, just two hours on Sunday nights during the school year. Some years one of the partners has a kid on the team, which always makes for good water-cooler talk. Plus, as he likes to joke, it’s never too early to scout out new talent for the firm.

Mrs. Swanson is not officially an advisor, but she helps with Sunday practices, and she runs the Tuesday and Thursday afternoon practices by herself. Most of the mock trial team members are in her honors English classes. Whenever a new student hands in an especially good essay, she writes on the paper: Very clear and well-argued. Have you thought about joining the mock trial team? It is a relatively recent passion for her. She did not appreciate law or philosophy when she was in college, or when she first started teaching English. It was only in her thirties that she realized the beauty of such things, the clear, pure impartiality of such mental systems. Lately she has been wondering if she focused on the wrong things in school. She still loves literature, but sometimes she wonders what she is missing.

This is their first meeting of the school year, and Mrs. Swanson carries a yellow lined pad for her notes. She follows Mr. Swanson into the community center, which has low ceilings and smells of pine spray. The room they use is off the main hallway. Several students are already there, bodies draped across the flimsy plastic chairs: Andrew and Kevin, both taller and louder than ever, their teeth very white against the tan of their faces; Bethany, painfully awkward, her thick glasses pearled with the air conditioning; Caroline, tightly crossed legs and a permanent, anxious smile. Mr. Swanson takes a seat at the head of the table, and Mrs. Swanson sits to his left. He inquires dutifully about the students’ summers, and their voices overlap, giddy and exaggerated. Mrs. Swanson records the names of the students on yellow paper.

Something that Mrs. Swanson has never told Mr. Swanson is that when they were first married—when she still had breasts and the name Mrs. Swanson had hung off her like a borrowed coat—she would sit each morning on the edge of their claw-footed bathtub and trace her pink razor down along the vein in her forearm. She only did this after Mr. Swanson left for work, and she was careful each time to just graze the skin, never pressing hard enough to draw blood. At the time it was comforting in some strange way, but now she knows that she wasn’t being serious when she did this. It was a histrionic ritual, the meaningless pout of a childish woman. It was a game that she outgrew, and gave up many years ago. Since then she plays with starvation, which is infinitely richer and more satisfying. In the twenty years of their marriage she has gone from 131 to 106. Mr. Swanson has never commented upon this.

Their practice room has full-length tinted windows that look out into the parking lot, and Mrs. Swanson is watching as a dark green Jeep pulls up to the curb. The girl in the passenger seat leans over to kiss the blond boy behind the wheel before jumping out and running inside, her maple hair rippling out like a banner behind her. Mrs. Swanson adds Maya’s name to the list and watches the Jeep drive away. Summer boyfriend, she thinks absently, rolling the pen underneath her fingers. Not a virgin anymore. She hears the sharp little voice in her head, spiteful and high, and is startled by it. She looks down at the yellow lined pad on the table, the black pen poised between her fingers, the four curving letters, Maya. Where did that awful thought come from? Sometimes she is a little distressed by how mean her brain can be.

Maya rushes into the room, her lips and cheeks flushed pink with the evening’s warmth. Her jeans flash bronze through the rips at the knees, and with her enters the late-summer scent of slow-cooked grass clippings. Her breath is loud; she is very alive. She smiles at everyone and flops into the chair next to Mrs. Swanson.

The air around Maya, Mrs. Swanson thinks, feels charged. It feels like it is special, like it is electrified. It feels that way, but Mrs. Swanson knows that it is not.

One evening last June, near the end of the school year, Mrs. Swanson had stayed late grading final papers in the teachers’ lounge. It was past five when she walked out to the parking lot, her mind scrambled by forty student essays. The breeze was so cool and fresh that she put off getting into her stuffy car; glancing around the deserted lot, she decided to smoke a cigarette in the sun before heading home. Definitely not allowed, but she would risk it. She set her briefcase on the concrete and pulled the lighter and cigarette case from her purse. Cupping her hand against the wind, she noticed suddenly how dark her veins looked under her skin, not clean blue but murky olive, cloudy and thin. They looked sickly, and she wondered how bad that was.

A few hundred yards away, the girls' soccer team was running drills on the field while the boys' team jogged laps around it. The girls were sprinting around like healthy, well-groomed ponies, wearing shiny navy shorts and white shin guards, a combination that showcases the sexually-crucial inches of bare skin above the knee. The girls screamed and laughed, calling out to each other and to individual boys, punctuating their cries with hard kicks at the net. Mrs. Swanson picked out Maya easily. Even among all of them she stood out: her clear voice, her amber ponytail, most of all the fluidity and effortlessness of her body’s movements.

Maya had just delivered her ball into the very corner of the net when another player's stray one smashed into her face. Her head jerked back, frozen for a second, before her shoulders rounded and she covered her broken nose with her hands, suddenly gentled, turned inward. Mrs. Swanson couldn't really see the accident itself—she was too far away—but there was something satisfying about imagining it: the fountain of brilliant red blood, shining stark against her skin, sticky from its slow oxidization in the cool air, the way the iron would taste against the roof of Maya’s pretty mouth. One of the male players, a blond boy, was helping her off the field, his arm around her shoulders. Standing so close, he could probably smell her blood, and Mrs. Swanson thought about how embarrassing it would be to have a stranger acquainted with your inner fluids so casually. She dropped her cigarette and crushed the ash under her shoe. Maya wasn’t electric. She was just another vulnerable body that breaks and bleeds helplessly all over a soccer uniform. The warm, expansive electromagnetic quality—it was nothing, just meat.

That was the last time she had seen Maya before the summer break. Now Mrs. Swanson studies Maya’s nose out of the corner of her eye, wondering if it had really been broken. It looks the same—or is it slightly crooked? She supposes the blond boy who helped Maya off the soccer field last spring was the boy in the Jeep just now. This bothers her a little because it seems too easy.

A few more students arrive. Spencer, Terrance, a newcomer who introduces himself as Caleb. Grant, lanky and unhurried, in a grey t-shirt splashed with a picture of the Milky Way. Mrs. Swanson counts the students—ten—and tries to conceal her disappointment. It is the lowest turn-out in years, only enough for one team. She wonders how they will handle this; there have been two teams for as long as the Swansons have been coaching. Usually each team’s captain for the year was the senior who had received the team’s highest score last spring. She consults her notes: last year, on Team A, that was Maya; on Team B, it was Grant.

“Good to see all of you again,” Mr. Swanson begins. “I hope you all had enjoyable summers. As you all may have noticed, we don’t have enough participants this year to have two teams again.” He reads from a sheet of paper. “Luther, Bridget and Riley graduated last spring, Becca transferred to South Valley, and Tom moved to Indiana.” The students around the table mutter about bad luck. “So we have…” he counts, “ten kids. Could you guys split up into your teams from last year so that we can see where we are?”

They line up on opposite sides of the room. Grant’s side has five people, down by three. Maya’s has been halved to four. The new recruit, a dark-haired sophomore with shy eyes and freckles, stays in the far corner.

Mrs. Swanson waits with her pen ready. Ten kids—only eight per team. Two will not get to participate. The newcomer is an obvious elimination, but who else? Her eyes fall onto Bethany. The girl is awkward and unlikable, with no charisma and a plodding speaking style. Dead weight. She also considers Spencer; he is unreliable and has an obvious drug problem.

Mrs. Swanson is more interested in how the captainship will be assigned. This is both Maya’s and Grant’s fourth year on the team; they have each worked toward this for a long time. Maya is outstanding, well-spoken and self-possessed as a lawyer, never betraying the slightest hint of frustration or annoyance even with the most hostile witnesses. But Grant is also excellent. Although his scores are never quite as high as Maya’s, Mrs. Swanson privately thinks him the more brilliant student. She knows that her husband thinks so. Whenever they are driving home after a practice, Mr. Swanson says, “Grant has got quite the head on his shoulders. Lucky to have a boy like that on our side. He was born to be a lawyer…” and he trails off and has a little distant smile on his face, and Mrs. Swanson knows that he is thinking about himself at Grant’s age.

She isn’t quite as passionate about Grant as her husband is. She still remembers the scathing essay on Toni Morrison he’d written in her honors class last year. It had been so critical that Mrs. Swanson had actually felt a little hurt after reading it. Toni Morrison has been one of her favorite authors for years, and she was distressed that a smart boy like Grant could have so much animosity toward a great American writer. She’d had to remind herself sternly that students should be free to take whatever position they liked on a topic, and that teachers were to grade for effectiveness of argument, style, and grammar, not proximity to their own opinions. Whether or not she agreed with him, Grant’s essay had been an objectively skillful piece of writing. She’d given him an A. And, she had reflected, it was exactly that bold willingness to challenge sacred cows that made Grant such a good lawyer in the first place. In court he was ruthless and effective, silver-tongued, relentlessly logical, and better than anyone else at making his witnesses look foolish. These were important skills in the legal world.

The two teams split up, and Mr. Swanson assesses the groups. “Okay, Team A, with Maya as captain, has four members. Team B, with Grant as captain, has five members. B is more complete, so it will remain intact with Grant as captain for this year.” The other students glance at Maya, whose expression does not change. “Now, obviously, Grant’s team needs three more people. I’m afraid two of you won’t be able to do mock trial this year. Sorry, but the logistics dictate.” He shrugs. “I think the easiest way to finalize the team is to let our new captain choose the remaining members. If you don’t make it this year, I strongly encourage you to come out again next fall.”

The kids that are already on Grant’s team fall into the chairs along their side of the table, except for Grant, who remains standing, leaning against the wallpaper, his arms folded across the solar system. His eyes dart over the remains of Team A: Maya, Andrew, Kevin, and Bethany. Mrs. Swanson is ready with her black pen.

“Kevin.” His voice is blunt and unhurried. “Andrew.” He looks at Maya for a long, still moment, and she looks back at him steadily. “And Bethany.”

Mrs. Swanson carefully writes the three names down on her yellow paper. There is silence in the room. She keeps her eyes focused on the pen in her hand. If one of them has to go, Grant or Maya, she reasons, it’s better that it is Maya because…because Maya can handle it. Mrs. Swanson knows what will happen. Her boyfriend will give her a ride home in his Jeep, and she will cry to him, and then cry to her mother when she gets home, and then lock herself in her room and cry by herself while writing in her diary. The next day she will glare at Mrs. Swanson all through honors English, but soon she will forget about it and get swept up in volleyball and orchestra and schoolwork, and her life will go on.

“Okay, well…” Mr. Swanson begins, rifling through his notes. “So—”

“So what? I’m off the team?” Maya asks. Her voice is a tensed spring.

Mr. Swanson sighs. “We’re never able to take on everyone who comes out.”

“But, Mr. Swanson—my average last year was a 9.2. I had the highest average of all the lawyers,” she glances at Grant, “on either team.” Some of the students look uncomfortable at this; Grant looks bored.

“This isn’t about scores, Maya,” Mr. Swanson says. “It is just the way things worked out this year.” He turns back to his papers, and Maya looks around at the other students, who do not meet her gaze for very long. Bethany, who is standing next to her, stares at the knotting of the flesh-colored carpet between her sandals. Caroline looks out the window. Mrs. Swanson’s eyes are still on her lined yellow paper. It’s better that it was Maya because…because Grant needs the captainship more. He hasn’t been involved in many extra-curriculars, just tennis. And he doesn’t have Maya’s expansiveness yet. A leadership role could mellow him and give him more confidence, which would in turn make him kinder.

“So this is it?” Maya asks, her voice rising a little. Mrs. Swanson is growing embarrassed by the girl’s shocked reaction. “That’s all you’re going to say?”

Mr. Swanson tries not to lose his patience. “Calm down, Maya. Tell you what—we’ll put you and Caleb down as alternates. How about that?” He nods at Mrs. Swanson and she understands that she is being signaled to write their names down, segregated from the rest of the members’ names, under the word Alternate.

Maya turns to Mrs. Swanson. “You’re just going to let him do this?” she asks, bewildered. In her growing anger, she is starting to look ugly, her face mottling with emotional patches of red, her nostrils blanching.

For a moment Mrs. Swanson feels a sharp, sudden tightness under her ribs, and then she says, “I think you’re overreacting, Maya. I’m sorry, but this is just the way things worked out.” She tries to keep her voice low and even, and when the pressure on her lungs fades, this is easy to do

Maya stands perfectly still for a moment, and then she snatches her notebook from the table. “Fine,” she hisses, “I’ll leave.” In four long strides she is gone. Mrs. Swanson looks out the window to watch her storm across the concrete, but Maya doesn’t appear in the parking lot. She must have left by another way.

The door clicks shut behind her, and Mr. Swanson sighs. “Okay,” he says. “So let’s assign roles.” Mrs. Swanson crosses Maya’s name off her list.

Before Mrs. Swanson was Mrs. Swanson, she was Diane Coltwell of Waterloo, Iowa. She ran cross-country and played clarinet and loved Jane Austen. One warm April day in her senior year of high school, she came home to find a thick envelope in the mailbox. The smooth white paper inside promised her a full scholarship to Drake University, and she stood in the cracked driveway for five full minutes, delighting in the spring air around her and the silky texture of the expensive stationery, and then she ran all the way to her father’s gardening store. He was sorting seed packets at the counter, and she’d thrust the wonderful news into his hands without saying a word. He read the paper carefully, a grin spreading huge across his face, and then he’d hugged her tight in his flannelled arms and insisted they go celebrate immediately. He left his assistant in charge of the store, and the two of them walked down the street to Annie’s, where he bought them milkshakes and cheeseburgers. Diane and her father ate their celebration in the elementary school park, with ketchup smearing all over the wax paper and the styrofoam cups slippery with condensation.

“Make sure you sleep well tonight, Diane,” he’d said, his beard heated bronze in the afternoon light. “Sleep well so that your brain can file today away in your long-term memory. You don’t want to forget today.” That night Diane slept deeply to preserve the memory. But Mrs. Swanson has not thought of this day for years.

The students divide themselves up into lawyers and witnesses for each side of the case. Mr. Swanson goes over scheduling conflicts and other administrative issues for the next few weeks. Mrs. Swanson listens, but her mind wanders back to Maya, to her eyes and whitened nostrils, her quick exit. She is gone but she still lingers in the room. Mrs. Swanson sees the girl’s face at Grant’s words, but even more she sees Maya’s face at her own words—“this is just the way things worked out”—the words that caught the girl off-guard and smashed into her like the soccer ball had last spring. And yet it is hard, in either case, for Mrs. Swanson to feel sorry for Maya. These are the games that we play, and they are the way they are. Learning the game is not only learning the rules, but learning the realities. Maya will have to learn, as Mrs. Swanson did, to be constantly aware of the other players, to breathe quietly, to duck.