“And what’s wrong with that? This is a hockey town!” Peter says, taken aback.
“Yeah, but life doesn’t only have to be about stupid hockey because of that,” Maya can’t help retorting, and considers opening the door while the car is in motion and rolling out; the snow is still deep and she doesn’t think she’d break anything. It feels like it might be worth the risk.
“Why do you say that? Why’s she saying that, Leo?” her dad demands.
“Can you just stop the car? Or just slow down, you don’t even have to stop,” Maya pleads.
Ana taps Leo on the shoulder.
“Okay, Leo, try this one: Never play hockey again, or never play computer games again?”
Leo glances at his dad. Emits a rather shamefaced little cough. Starts to undo his seatbelt and fumbles for the door handle. Peter shakes his head in despair.
“Don’t you dare answer that, Leo. Don’t you dare.”
*
Kira is sitting in the Volvo, heading away from Beartown. She heard Peter throwing up in the bathroom this morning. If that’s what hockey does to grown men in this town, what on earth must it be doing to the seventeen-year-old juniors who are playing in the game tomorrow? There’s an old joke among the women of Beartown: “I just wish my husband would look at me the way he watches hockey.” It’s never made Kira laugh, because she understands it all too well.
She knows what the men of the town say about her, knows she’s a long way from the loyal GM’s wife they were hoping for when they appointed Peter. They don’t think of the club as an employer, but as an army: the soldiers need to fall in whenever they’re summoned, their families standing proudly in the doorways, waving them off. The first time Kira met the club’s president was at a golf tournament organized by the sponsors, and while they were milling about having drinks before dinner he handed her his empty glass. So few women existed in his hockey world that when he saw one he didn’t recognize, he took it for granted that she must be a waitress.
When he realized his mistake he just laughed, as if Kira ought to find the situation funny too. When she didn’t, he sighed and said: “You mustn’t take things too seriously, eh?” When he heard that she was thinking of carrying on with her career in parallel with Peter’s, he exclaimed in surprise: “But who’s going to take care of the kids?” She really did try to keep quiet. Well, maybe not really, but in hindsight she thinks she did try, at least. Eventually she turned to the president and pointed at his greasy, sausagelike fingers, which were clutching a prawn sandwich, then at his stomach, which was straining against the buttons of his shirt, and said, “I thought maybe you could take care of them. You have got bigger breasts than me, after all.”
The next time a golf tournament was organized, “plus one” had been removed from the invitations. The men’s hockey world expanded, the women’s shrank, and there has never been greater proof of Kira’s love for Peter than the fact that she didn’t go down to the rink that day and punch someone. She learned that you have to be thick-skinned in Beartown. That helps you deal with both the cold and the insults.
Ten years have passed since then, and she has come to realize that things feel a whole lot better if you have a really good stereo in the car. So she turns up the volume. Plays Maya and Leo’s “louder-louder list,” not because she likes the music but because it makes her feel close to them. When children are young you think it will pass, the guilty feeling you get in your stomach when you leave home each morning. But it never does, it just gets worse. So she has their music collections on her phone, lists of songs that have been selected because each is the sort that makes one of the children shout “LOUDER! LOUDER!” when it comes on the radio. She plays them so loud that the bass makes the door panels vibrate, because sometimes the silence of the forest drives her mad. The early-afternoon sky hovers just above the trees almost all year round in these parts, and that can be hard to get used to for someone who grew up in a big city where nature was something used primarily as a screensaver.
Naturally, everyone in Beartown hates the capital, and they’ve developed a permanent sense of resentment at the fact that the forest contains all the natural resources but all the money ends up somewhere else. Sometimes it feels as if the people of Beartown love the fact that the climate is so inhospitable, because not everyone can handle it: that reminds them of their own strength and resilience. The first local saying Peter taught Kira was: “Bears shit in the woods, but everyone else shits on Beartown, so forest people have learned to take care of themselves!”
She’s gotten used to a lot, living here, but there are some things she’ll never understand. Such as how a community where everyone fishes has precisely zero sushi restaurants. Or why people who are tough enough to live in a place with a climate wild animals can barely endure can never quite bring themselves to say what they mean. In Beartown silence always goes hand in hand with shame. Kira recalls how Peter explained it when she asked him why everyone seemed to hate people from the big cities so much: “People in the big cities don’t feel enough shame.” He’s always been worried about what people think. Whenever they get asked out to dinner, he goes to pieces if Kira buys a bottle of wine that’s too expensive. That’s why he refuses to live in one of the expensive houses in the Heights, even though Kira’s salary would allow them to. They carry on living in their little house in the middle of town out of sheer politeness. Peter wouldn’t budge, even when Kira tried to entice him saying, “More space for your record collection.”
Ten years, and Kira still hasn’t learned to live with the town yet, only to coexist with it. And the silence still makes her want to buy a drum and march around the streets banging it. She turns the stereo up again. Drums the steering wheel. Sings along so animatedly to each song that she almost drives off the road when her hair gets caught on the rearview mirror.
Why does Kira care about hockey? She doesn’t. She cares about a person who cares about hockey. And because she dreams of a summer—just one—when her husband can look his town in the eye without lowering his gaze.
*