Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

She pulls her knees up to her chest. She looks so thin.

“Have you not been eating, Zo? Is that what this all is?”

“No, it’s not, I promise.”

“Because it’s normal, you know. Lots of young girls—”

“Mmooomm, I’m not some stupid ana girl, okay? That’s so dumb.”

“Then what?”

She looks down at the floor. One of her earliest notebooks is open in front of her, from when she was maybe six or seven. Her green period, we called it, because so many of her poems were about grass and trees and the soil they suck up through their roots.

“You’re going to think it’s stupid.”

“I could never think that.”

She hesitates, a few tears still falling, wetting the slightly yellowed pages.

“It was the people.”

“The people in the audience?”

“In the cameras. All those faces I couldn’t see…” She shudders.

“Will you tell me?”

“If you mess up where you can see the people, you can make it all right again, because of that connection? Like, when I’m up there, in the lights, onstage, I can feel the people in the room. Especially when I’m speaking. There’s this, I dunno, link, between me and them, and I can make them feel things. What I want them to feel. Like magic.”

“Is that why you love it?”

She nods.

“What was different this time?”

“I don’t know, but I could tell, when I saw the cameras on either side of the stage with their red lights blinking, that something was wrong. And I was right. In the earlier round, the semis, it was awful.”

“But Dad said you did well. You scored the highest score.”

“Maybe, but it didn’t feel good. It felt like…you know how when you go into a room that you’ve lived in and everything’s packed away and it’s all echoey?”

I thought about it. “Like at Grandpa’s house, you mean?”

When my father died a few years ago, we’d all gone to the house I grew up in to pack everything away. As we were leaving, Zoey’s hand slipped from mine and she ran from room to room, shouting her name at herself as it bounced off the empty walls. When we got in the car to drive home, she was quiet. Sad. Grandpa was really gone, she said when we pressed her. The house had told her.

“Yeah, like that. Only, it felt like that in my heart. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. And when it was my turn in the finals, I looked into the camera and it was so black in there, I couldn’t see anything but me. A tiny little me. And that’s the last thing I remember.”

“So it was a kind of stage fright?”

“I guess.”

“But, if that’s what caused it, then what happened when you were on the phone with Ethan?”

She flushes. “Don’t be mad, okay?”

“I won’t.”

“I kind of…freaked out when he told me the video was online, and I tripped on the sideboard and hit my head. I was so embarrassed, but when I was lying there on the floor and you and Dad thought I’d fainted again, I thought…I thought that if I had fainted again, when the cameras weren’t there, then I could say it was some medical thing, like low blood sugar or something, and Ethan and everyone wouldn’t have to know the truth. No one would know it was because I was scared.”

This truth pulls me from the bed to the floor, the precious notebooks be damned. I take her into my arms, holding her close, holding her up.

“Thank you for telling me, sweetheart. That couldn’t have been easy.”

“You won’t tell Dad?”

“Oh, honey, he’s been so worried. He’ll be relieved. Not mad.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Of course not.”

“How come? I caused so much trouble.”

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

An hour later, Zoey and I are standing between the peeling white pickets of our local driving range. A hundred chipped and dirty range balls sit in a wire basket waiting for us to hit them. The course is mostly deserted (it opened only a few days ago) and the grass is barely green. Giant oak trees line the range. A few birds twitter and screech from their still-bare branches. Where is everyone? maybe they’re asking. Did I get to the party too early?

Zoey’s holding one of my old clubs in her hand clumsily, like she doesn’t quite know what to do with it. I offered to teach her a few times before, but she never showed any interest, and even today I had to insist.

I set a ball on a tee, narrating my actions for Zoey. Hold the club like this, swing back slowly, arc down through the ball like you’re scooping something off the ground, follow through, follow through, turn your hips, let your wrists snap so the club is over your shoulder.

The club feels heavy and raw in my hands. They haven’t healed properly from the other day, but I make good contact anyway, and the ball arcs away and up and lands within feet of the flag a hundred and fifty yards away.

I breathe in the scent of new grass and warming air and feel a piece of satisfaction, deep inside. I try not to think about the last time I was on a golf course. Or the time before that, either.

“That’s awesome, Mom. You’re good,” Zoey says when I’ve repeated the exercise a few times with the same result.

“Thanks. Now you try it.”

She looks skeptical but turns gamely to her own ball, perched on its tee. She brings the club back too quickly and stabs at the ball. She’s not looking where she should, and I know what will happen a second before it does. Thunk. Her club stutters into the ground behind the ball and stops. The ball teeters, then falls over in defeat.

“I missed.”

“That’s okay. Happens all the time. Let’s try again.”

I spend the next twenty minutes breaking her stroke down. The backswing. The follow through. Showing her how to keep her eyes on the ball. On the thirtieth try she makes pretty good contact, though her shot slices badly and lands in the tall, dead grass left over from last year.

“Nice one, Zo.”

“It didn’t even go near the flag,” she says, feigning disappointment, though I can tell she’s pleased to have made contact at all.

“No, you’re doing really well. It usually takes much longer than that to make good contact.”

“How long did it take you?”

I hesitate but decide to tell her the truth. “I don’t remember, really, but your grandpa said I got it on my first try.”

“Wow.”

“He thought so.”

“You were like…a child prodigy, right? Dad told me.”

“He did?”

“Sure. He said that’s where I get it from. What I do. Not just the writing, but the timing of it.”

“When’d he tell you that?”

“Dunno. More than once. He doesn’t understand why you gave it up, though.”

“Mmm. You want to know a secret?”

“Okay.”

I flick a ball into place. “I’ve never really told anyone this, but I quit because I was scared.”

“You were?”

“Yup.”

“What were you scared of?”

I swing at the ball. It hits the sweet spot on the face and curves away, landing next to the first ball I hit. Like it always does. Like it was nothing.

“Same thing you were.”

“People watching you?”

I nod. “Invisible people. You’ve seen golf on TV, right?”

“Were you on TV?”

“A couple of times. In college.” Another ball teed. Another shot at the flag. “I was there on a scholarship, a sports scholarship, and I was…good.”

“Like, how good?”

“Good enough to get to Nationals. Good enough for people to be talking about doing it for a living.”

“Cool.”

“Sure, for a while. Then my first big tournament was televised. And I totally blew up. Not cool.”

“You were probably nervous.”

“That’s what I told myself. And the next tournament I played in was a normal one, no TV, only a few spectators, and everything was fine, and I won. But then I had to go to Nationals.”

“TV again?”

“Yup.”

“Did you pass out?”

I lift my head and smile at her. “No, honey, but I played awfully. I couldn’t hit anything.” I point to the divots surrounding her tee. “It hurt when you hit the ground before, right?”

“Kind of.”

“My arms were aching by the end of the day. I almost quit.”

“But it was only twice. Maybe you could’ve gotten over it.”

“That’s what I thought, but it was the same thing every time. In practice, even in small tournaments, I was fine. I won. Everyone would talk about how I was the next big thing. But when it came time to perform for real, when anybody was looking, I tanked.”

“What do you think it was?”

“My coach thought it was a lack of ambition, that I didn’t have that killer instinct. But listening to you today, I think it was more what you said. When no one was watching, I could play for me. I connected to the ball and the course and the breeze and the birds. I hardly noticed who I was playing with. It was like magic. But when I knew people were watching, I couldn’t feel that anymore. I felt empty.”

“In your heart?”

“In my heart. So I gave it up.”

“Is that what you think I should do?”

“No, Zoey, that’s not why I told you that.”

“Why, then?”

“Because I wanted you to know that I made a mistake. What my coach thought was also true. I didn’t care enough to work through the problem. It had always been easy for me, and the minute it became hard, the minute I really had to work at it, I gave up and walked away.”

I cross into her practice zone and click my club against hers, tapping out a sound like a hollow gong.

“You’re better than that. You’re better than me. You can quit if you want. If you hate it. If it isn’t fun anymore. I’ll back you with Dad. But you can’t quit just because it’s hard. Things are hard for most people. Life is hard.”

Zoey watches me silently for a moment and then she starts to laugh.

“What is it?”

“Man, Mom, did you sign us up for some reality show without telling me?”

I almost ask her what she means before I get it. And then I’m laughing too.

“Okay, okay. I wasn’t trying to be all melodramatic. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t mean what I said, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And you’ll think about it?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I hear imagining the audience naked helps.”

“Mom!”

“Try it.”

She shrugs and squares herself to the waiting ball. Her arms swing back and for a moment I see a video of myself at eleven.

And I know the shot will be perfect, even before it is.

A couple months before the consultants issued the report that recommended that 1.2 people be eliminated from my department, they actually had a good idea. Morale was a bit low, they reported to the brass after conducting their usual round of impromptu interviews with a subset of employees. Business was going well, and yet there were always more cuts, more asked of them. All their perks had been taken away and replaced by Safety Minutes and uncertainty. Something needed to be done.

I’m sure the employees who were interviewed meant—in a coded way—to send the message that what needed to be done was to axe the consultants and their recommendations. Message not received. But they did have a simple suggestion that would wipe all the cares away.

This was reported to the board with a serious face, my boss, Gerry, told me. Could I believe it? When they were the ones responsible for the morale problem in the first place?

It was bullshit, he said, and I agreed, but still, I was curious what the solution was.

“Some fucking lottery thing.”

“Like Powerball?”

Did the consultants really think spirits were going to be lifted by tricking us into a voluntary tax on the off chance of a jackpot that couldn’t be worth it?

“Nah. Some weekend at a golf resort team-building thing. Like in the old days. Only, everyone will be eligible to go, and the participants will be chosen by lottery so there’s no grousing about why him and not me?”

“What’d you want to bet that John Scott and his cronies all end up winning?”

“Too true, my friend. Too fuckin’ true.”

But the consultants, for once, knew what they were about. The lottery was announced, and a tremor of excitement rippled through the office. The prize was a weekend in Palm Springs in early March, perfectly timed for those of us who felt that winter had dragged on too long, i.e., all of us.