Girl in the Arena - Lise Haines [58]
Most of the time I tell Allison I’m still salting fries when I’m already in gear—building strength, not burgers. She mentions the change in my physique, and I tell her I’m doing more weights and less cardio when I work out, because I read something about osteoporosis and don’t want to get it. She gives me a funny look and then goes off to find Thad.
I had to tell Lloyd what I’m up to—that I’m trying to see if I could compete—so he’d agree to train me. Always one to promote the women’s leagues, Lloyd loves the whole concept. He dug up this beautiful silver and copper breastplate for me to train in and promised not to tell Julie. On the first evening, Lloyd tears up, saying he wants to see that moment when the daughter of seven gladiators steps into the arena. Later, Mark said it was like watching DeNiro’s La Motta in Raging Bull, to see his father carry on like that.
I wanted to say, This is about survival, Lloyd, that’s it, nothing more. But after a while, standing there watching him choke up, I felt pretty awkward and said maybe we should start and he said, Yeah, okay sure. And I went straight for the dummy’s small intestines, not because I was angry at Lloyd, just at a lot of stuff that Lloyd wouldn’t understand.
When I get down to the subway platform, I stop being Avon. I pull off the wig and sunglasses, get my Glad boots on, and throw my leather jacket around my shoulders. The minute I get on the Red Line, people begin to stare. Some people always stare, a lot of them at my boots because they have as many straps as the sandals, and are therefore undeniably Glad.
The air rushes hard now where I sit and there’s a Ring Bearer at the far end of the car working away with his blowtorch—one of those people who practices complete nonviolence, except to subway cars, I guess, and has 108 piercings on their bodies that they fill with tiny rings.
A couple of years ago when the city got sick of all the graffiti, they got really efficient at stopping taggers. But then it became a fiscally unsound policy as we entered our current epoch, to spend all that money on sandpaper and baking soda and labor to keep the graffiti off. So the cleanup slowed and they pulled back to study the problem, and the bogus report that came out—I believe it was as streamlined as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman—stated that Ring Bearers do most of the tagging. So the next guy who was hauled in for tagging around the city—who just happened to be a Ring Bearer—was actually ordered by a judge to remove all of his rings for one year. No one could quite match the punishment with the crime, and I remember Allison saying how crazy that was, paying a probation officer to check a guy’s empty piercings. —They should be checking for empty stomachs, she said.
Allison has a legitimate thing about hunger. She was really poor when she was growing up—I mean barely-any-food poor—which explains a lot of things.
Right after his probation ended, the rings that guy removed, all 108, were found in a glass display case in the judge’s house. The way a museum might exhibit amulets wrapped up with a mummy, he had this mannequin laid out in a case, complete with every piercing in just the right place. It was like showing off a collection of Third Reich glassware or Saddam Hussein’s pistol. And I think this made some people take a step back from any vague respect they might have held for the court system, while the rest of us had already backed up so far we had long since dropped off the edge.
But you can’t put a good virus down. So the Ring Bearers who used to tag, ride the trains now with mini-torches, cutting extra windows