Break in the Action

A girl walks into a hockey game.

No, this isn't the opening line of a joke. There's no priest, no rabbi, and no bartender, although she often feels there should be a punchline to her stories.

She walks with hesitation. She's new to the town, new to the arena, new to this whole life she finds herself living. She doesn't know where her seat is, and she's late.

She finds the entrance to the section marked on her ticket, the ticket she got for free from her boss. She has two, but the one person she asked to go, the one friend she has in this new town, someone new like herself, said he was too busy. She's trying not to take it personally.

She walks up the cement ramp, emerging from a dark tunnel into a blaze of light and noise. She stands at the entrance and looks around. A man leans against the doorway.

“You might want to wait to take your seat,” he says.

She smiles and nods, doesn't understand why he said that. She doesn't know the rules here.

She steps out of the doorway and starts to walk up the steps, looking for her seat. Immediately, several people yell at her. The loudest is an old woman with an impossibly tall beehive hairdo and a voice that's saturated with decades of cigarette smoke.

“Wait for a break in the action!” the old woman yells. Her voice is raspy, harsh. “Wait for a break in the action you dumb ass!”

The girl's face turns hot. She runs up the stairs, above where anyone is sitting so she won't block anyone's view. The old woman continues to yell.

“You're supposed to wait for a break in the action!”

“Stop yelling at me!” the girl screams back.

The old woman shakes her head and turns her attention back to the game. “Come on, Ams!” she yells in her smoke-soaked voice. “Come on!”

When the action stops, the girl finds her seat number. It's right across the aisle from the old woman, and someone else is sitting there.

The girl checks her ticket again. Yes, that's her seat. And someone else is sitting there.

She takes a deep breath and walks back down the steps to her seat. She asks the woman sitting there if she can nudge past her to the open seat next to her.

The woman gets up, “Oh, I'll move. This isn't my seat. I just thought it was open.”

“No, you don't have to move. There's no one else with me,” the girl says.

But the woman moves anyway.

And all of the people sitting around her glare at the girl because the people all know each other and know the woman the girl has just displaced. They glare at the girl like the girl has done something rude in claiming her seat, in not knowing the rules, in simply existing.

The girl sits and tries to make herself small, no easy feat for the girl.

“Come on, Ams!” the old woman yells from the short distance across the aisle. Her voice makes the girl's teeth shiver. “Come on!”

The girl sinks a little lower into her seat. She watches the rink, but doesn't understand what's happening and she's afraid to ask anyone, afraid to earn more yelling and more glares.

She waits ten minutes for a break in the action and she leaves.

She drives home in the dark.

When she walks in the door to her apartment, the cat is mewling at her feet. She picks him up and hugs him to her chest, because she needs to feel the velvet soft fur against her face, because she needs to hear the low rumble of his purr, because the cat is the only one who's ever waiting for her.