The Taker's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
The hairy goalkeeper, who has a forehead like a knuckle, stands over me, saying, “You’re gonna miss, faggot,” and my teammate Rhodes Noggelsmann, a usually soft-spoken, cerebral kind of guy, steps in and says, “Back off, Australopithecus assholus,” which does not quite have the bite he might have intended. Then the ref steps in and orders both of them away, Rhodes out of the box and the keeper back to his line. I look down and see the white hash is barely visible, with divots all around, so I pick up the ball and spin it, then place it again, but it still seems to be sitting low in a hole. I pick it up and place it again, and again, and once more, until the heckles from the other team are too much to ignore. I leave it where it is, good enough, but not really. The taker of the penalty kick is expected to score, but you don’t feel the full weight of that expectation until you stand there and survey the 12 yards between the ball and the goal. Instead of taking a specific number of steps backward while staring at the ball, which is what a taker should do, which is what I’d done every time I’d taken one in the previous four years, I turn all the way around and stupidly glance at the cheerleaders on the sideline and then fixate momentarily on the several hundred pairs of eyes in the stands, mostly looking in my direction. Team captain Paulie Reinhardt tells me to focus, to forget the crowd. Forget the crowd, right. The scoreboard clock behind the goal shows less than a minute to go before halftime. The ref blows his whistle with gusto like a goddamned drum major. Everything becomes hushed. A breeze carries a whiff of burnt popcorn, so I turn back again toward the stands and see one of the cheerleaders, Cathy Jehlik, whispering something to Bruna De Luca, who laughs, they both look at me or at least I think they look at me, and I turn back around to look at the ball. Paulie again, his words are garbled, but it does not sound like encouragement. I think I know what Cathy’s whispering.
I’m sure it’s about a party the previous weekend at Lance Horner’s house, a bonfire started and fed with kerosene in their ramshackle backyard, a keg, illuminated faces, the same stupid songs by Journey or whatever, the same slurred, too loud sing-alongs, groups of boys around an invisible microphone, most off-key, girls sitting on stained couches dragged outside, kids crowded into the kitchen. I was a spectator as always, planning a discreet exit when out of nowhere Cathy Jehlik appeared directly in front of me, calling me Truman, her nickname for me after I defended In Cold Blood during a senior English elective called Non-Fiction. She hated the book, hated Capote’s so-called New Journalism, hated the other text we read about the Uruguayan rugby team who resorted to cannibalism after their plane crashed in the Andes, although I think she hated that one mostly because of the way our teacher, Mrs. Kuhn, pronounced the name of one of the survivors, Parrado, as if he were someone’s uncle from Middleburg Heights. On the first day of class, after reading the syllabus, she asked Mrs. Kuhn why it was that no women wrote non-fiction books. Over the next several weeks, I became intoxicated by her contrariness and her bravery. Our assigned seats put us next to each other, so we became “class friends,” which meant that while we would acknowledge each other outside of class, the greetings were cool and detached. She remained in a higher friend orbit containing her cheerleader pals and the better-looking football players, while I remained in a much different and separate orbit, a lower one I suppose, depending on how you looked at it.
Which was why her appearance in front of my face at the party surprised me. She asked, “Do you trust me?” I saw mischief in her smile and smelled Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill on her breath, but before I could tell her I trusted her, even if I didn’t, she took a step forward and pressed her body up against mine and started whispering in my ear. “Put your arms around me, dummy.” I did, without conviction. “Are people looking at us?” she wondered. They were. “Okay, lower your eyes a bit and put your hand on my butt and give it a squeeze. I’m going to kiss your neck.” I hesitated, and she whisper-shouted in my ear, “Do it!” I reluctantly moved my right hand down her back, maneuvering it under a small purse that she wore diagonally across her body. Once arriving at its destination, my hand gave her left cheek a squeeze. It felt firm like a Nerf ball and I could feel the muscle tense up. “Keep it there,” she whispered as I started to move it away, followed by an order to “fondle it.”
After what felt like an eternity of inept fondling, she said, “Okay, we’re going to go inside and go upstairs, just follow my lead, don’t worry, okay?” She stepped back and grabbed my hand, and she led me around the campfire, between the crowded couches and the occupied patio furniture, in the open sliding glass door and through the hot, packed kitchen, into the living room and up the stairs, all of it accompanied by whistles, snickers, and a variety of dirty affirmations and encouragement from drunken teenage man-boys who raised their Solo cups in my honor. Once inside the upstairs bedroom, which was Horner’s parents’, I’d assumed, given the king-sized bed and mauve pile carpeting, she released my hand and sat on the corner of the bed, telling me to lock the door. The bed was unmade with the covers pulled back, a floral duvet laying on the floor. Cathy sat on the corner of the bed and straightened her top, tugging at the bottom hem, a shimmery silver v-neck. She ran her hand through both sides of her hair and shook it out. She eventually noticed me standing there, watching her.
“Relax, Truman, we’re just gonna sit in here for, what? Ten, fifteen minutes, then I’ll go back downstairs, and then you can follow, okay?”
“Okay,” I replied, trying and failing to inject as much confusion as possible into my voice.
“Oh hey, turn on the TV,” she said, pointing at the console on a dresser.
I hesitated, but turned on the large set, a Magnavox, and flipped through the channels, stopping on an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a series from the 70s about a journalist who investigates the paranormal. The Kolchak character was always shown wearing an ill-fitting suit and a little jazzy fedora, which sat high on his head.
Cathy said, “His stupid hat always bugged me.”
A commercial came on. I thought about making a comment about the importance of the fedora in terms of character development in a visual storytelling medium, or something to that effect, but instead I asked, “What are we doing?”
“Watching TV?”
“No, I mean why did you bring me up here?”
“Isn’t it obvious? You need a story. I need a story.”
It wasn’t obvious, and I must have looked confused. She let out a little laugh, apparently amused by my ignorance.
“Look, this’ll be good for both of us, don’t worry.”
“What’ll be good?”
“Geez Louise, Truman, know thyself.”
She reached out, grabbed my hand and put it on her left breast, holding it there. Then with her other hand she latched onto my crotch. Taken aback, it took me a moment, but I grabbed the crotch-hand and forcibly moved it away. She released my other hand on her breast. To someone watching the whole sequence, it would have looked like some low-energy jujitsu.
“Not the least bit excited, just like before,” she said. “It’s okay, does nothing for me either, of course.”
Of course. The show came back on and she turned her attention to the screen, and I thought about what I didn’t know about myself, which was considerable, and what I learned about her, which was still percolating from my ears to the front of my stupid head. We watched a confusing scene at a fashion show, which ended with a spy being thrown out of a penthouse window by a bunch of murderous mannequins. At another commercial break, she got up from the bed and stood at a mirror next to the dresser. She fluffed her hair, redid her lipstick, puckering up close to the mirror. She turned around and said, “Okay, I’m heading down. You stay in here, then come down in a minute or so.”
I asked why I can’t just come downstairs with her.
“No, it’s better this way, trust me. Use the bathroom or something.”
Or something. She left and closed the door behind her. I watched a few commercials, then wandered over to the window, moving a slat in the blinds to look down at the party. After a minute or so, Cathy appeared on the back patio, sipping from a plastic cup, flanked by a couple of cheerleader friends. They settled on one of the couches, with Cathy in the middle. The way they were talking to each other, it looked like whatever story Cathy was telling was both hilarious and astonishing. I moved away from the window and sat down on the bed, half-watching the Night Stalker show. At one point, Kolchak is standing, inexplicably, at a Black Mass where a goat is to be sacrificed. I got up and turned off the TV.
After pacing around, stewing about a situation I did not completely understand, I left the bedroom and made my way down the stairs. The party had become much more loud, and a little more crowded with some new arrivals. I saw a few friendly faces, but none of them knew anything about my earlier ascension up the stairs with Cathy, so all that was exchanged between us were ridiculous neck waves and head nods. From the bottom of the stairs, it was a mere two steps to the front door and the cool October night. I remember pausing halfway down the driveway, looking up and seeing a thin strip of clouds move across the face of the moon, slicing it momentarily in two.
In school on Monday, I was asked the same question in a variety of ways, over and over, the most direct being, “Did you bone Cathy Jehlik?” I also heard comments from passersby to the effect of, “Tripi? No way.” I was told contradictory stories of what Cathy had told other people. In some versions, we definitely did the deed, in others, we just fooled around, her refusing to “go all the way.” One particularly skeptical inquisitor said, “I didn’t think she went for men.” When faced with these questions and comments, I quickly figured out that it was better to simply hunch my shoulders, say nothing, and offer a half-smile, which very well could have been interpreted as a grimace. Ultimately, it seemed people would believe what they wanted to believe.
Trying to focus on the penalty kick, I wonder what detail of our fictional encounter Cathy’s sharing with Bruna. Or maybe it’s something else, something completely unrelated. Maybe she was confiding the truth to her best friend, probably not. I reach up to rub my forehead, just before starting my approach to the ball. Why would I do this? Arms should be at my side. I hear a farting trombone in the distance from the direction of the school parking lot. For every single penalty kick I’ve taken over the previous four years, as I approach the ball, I stare at the precise place on the ball where I’m going to strike it, and hold an image in my mind of the destination in the corner of the goal. This time, as I approach the ball, I am still thinking about the party, so I kick the ball a little to the left of the keeper, about three feet high, at just the right height for the hirsute hominid to push the ball to the side and out of danger. It’s my first penalty kick miss in four years. The half ends. Rhodes Noggelsmann pats me on the back and says, “Don’t worry, this will all be forgotten . . . in time.” He smiles, grabs my shoulder again and nods, so I thank him without knowing why. Paulie Reinhardt looks at me as if he wants to say something and then looks away. Our coach, a former South Chagrin center back named Buzo, who could be a big dildo at the best of times, is standing there waiting for me at the touchline. He’s shaking his big head and frowning when he says, “Nice shot, fuckface.”
We lost the match 1-0, which effectively ended our season and my high school soccer career. Things remained politely weird between Cathy and me. She never brought up that night at the party and neither did I. As it turned out, she was right: her little charade and the multiple stories she concocted afterward were good for me. Everyone looked at me in a different way, not better or worse, but just different. It was enough to push aside the sad end to the season and carry me through to the end of the school year, although that missed penalty kick has been my constant companion ever since.
I didn’t attend the prom in May, but I heard from friends that Cathy showed up on the arm of a well-manicured older guy with big hips and extravagant sideburns, who wore tails and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses with yellow lenses. People said he had a smooth voice, whatever that means, and may or may not have had an Irish accent. Reportedly, he and Cathy spent most of the night on the dance floor. In August, Cathy left for school. Some said she went to a small private school in Vermont, but I also heard she took off for the West Coast to learn forestry. Whichever it was, once she left South Chagrin, she never came back. Over the years I’ve resisted the temptation to look her up or ask people if they knew anything about her adult life, preferring instead to live with memories and a fiction of possibilities.
MARK DOLCE has worked for nonprofits for 20 years, as an editor, writer, copywriter, and administrator. As an English, film and media teacher, he contributed chapters to NCTE books on digital literacy and creating media-rich classrooms. “Taker’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" is a part of a recently completed linked short story collection called Running around with Boys in Short Pants. The stories are derived from kernels of lived experience growing up in the soccer culture of northeastern Ohio in the early 80s. He lives with his family in the crap part of Lake County, Illinois, north of Chicago.