Three Quarters Location

Gabriel Welsch

At the ice rink at North Park, I’m standing with another mom, mother of a friend of my daughter’s, watching families and teenagers take laps in the dusky light, snow just barely present, wispy as the ice shaved into the air each time a hockey skater digs to a stop. A boy’s feet kick up and he lands on his back in a puff of what air was left in his lungs. A moment of stillness, and then he laughs, rolls onto his knees, then the blades of his skates, and is off again.

My daughter is learning, grasping the wall and a friendly hand, occasionally lifting away from something firm to glide but not yet fly along with others. The teenage boys are a fine distillate of everything we loathe—skating too close to small children, garbage-mouthed and mistaking cluelessness for aloof cool.

Even at mid-ice, through mufflers, the smell of the grease at the snack counter is palpable. When the time comes for the Zamboni, skaters line up and endure the grease anyway, gritty instant hot chocolate, limp fries, stiff and metallic pretzels and oily cheese.

The first skaters back get the benefit of their reflection in the new ice with a last fading layer of water crystallizing before they make their first lap. In this crowd I lose sight of my daughter for long moments at a time, until I see her again—or, rather, the Kool-Aid blue hair of her friend, a girl in baggy black and a ballpoint pen tattoo on her right hand that says Princess in cursive—a writing that is like runes to them. She made her mother write it on a card for her to give to her tattoo artist uncle. I’ve interviewed many a kid like her over the years.

Bailey of the blue hair is a good friend, holding my daughter up, helping other little kids she sees starfishing on the ice, offering to buy the hot chocolate despite my insistence that it’s covered. Her mom works on Saturday afternoons, so if it’s not the ice rink, it’s the open basketball court, or the library classes, or youth group activity at her church, or in the worst case, the mall.

Her mom tells her to stay at the end with the Neimen Marcus, the Tesla dealer, the Louis Vuitton store. At least there, she reasons, the security is more likely to be present and actually do something. She saw a drug purchase once in the food court, but it could just have been somebody paying a friend. She doesn’t like it when I say that. But she has never had much time for what I say, which often makes me wonder how we’ve stayed friends. Friendship is still three quarters location, regardless of the internet. And she never left, with almost the same determination I had to try and leave. Now here we are.

A kid starts bawling because her glove, attached by a strand to her other glove, through the length of her jacket, is caught in the door hinge where people enter the ice. As people stop to try and help her, she shrieks and ends up kicking over, knocking her head on the ice before screaming impossibly louder. My old friend starts gnawing at her own lip so hard I can almost taste the blood she surely will draw if she doesn’t stop. She can’t stop watching the howling girl.

A woman has knelt next to her, looking like possibly her mother but just not quite attentive enough. A man roars at the little girl to get up, with such rage that he can only be the father. My friend starts to cry. Why do we do this to ourselves? she says to me. Why do we choose the most terrible places to try to learn something? I shrug—I guess because if you can learn to do it here, how good must that feel?

I’ve never learned myself. I have all the agility of a brick but without the tough exterior. I was the girl no one picked for basketball but always wanted for tug-of-war. We all know the eighties were an unmitigated disaster. And now the world is run by the people made ugly from that grunting fuck of a decade.

A knit cap of hunter orange races the perimeter like a cartoon firefly or bit of magic wand spark. It reminds me of the dot that used to bounce over words in the old Disney sing-along’s my family would watch on Sunday nights. And when my dad was between jobs, it was the only thing that brought us together, and I would sing and make plans to leave.

The orange cap kid molecules and never stops where I can see his face. I’d probably recognize it, but don’t really want to. He could hit anyone at any time. And then where would we be?

My friend is still glaring in the direction of the father who yelled at his kid, but she has stopped chewing her face. Her Steelers coat is dingy and her jeans too tight now. She asks me if I will be here tomorrow. I think to myself, I will always be here but decide not to say anything that cryptic. Yes, I say. I can watch. Any time.

Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.