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any kind of actual injury .”
    â€œA knocked-out tooth is an injury , Lou-Lou. Don’t be ridiculous.”
    In his anxiety Dad began to berate the referee for
allowing “all hell to break loose” on the hockey field, and his daughter’s tooth
knocked out in a “brutal scuffle.”
    T.R. was startled by my father’s vehemence.
Possibly, she knew who he was. (I’d intended to introduce them after the game.)
Yet she didn’t apologize profusely, she didn’t defer to an angry parent so much
as try to placate him, and assure him that his daughter would get the very best
medical treatment available in Rye.
    So, despite my protests, an ambulance was called.
An emergency medical crew took me to a local ER for a dozen stitches in my gums
and lower lip, a tetanus shot, painkillers. I was furious and crying—the last
thing I’d wanted was to be expelled from the hockey game. I’d hoped only to be
praised by my father, and a few others; my teammates, for sure; and our coach
T.R. Naively I’d seemed to think that I might have been allowed to continue, for
what was a silly lost tooth compared to the exhilaration of the game? (Win or
lose didn’t matter to me, it was the game, the girl-team , that mattered.)
    In my ER bed surrounded by tacky curtains I shut my
eyes to suppress tears seeing my teammates rushing down the field oblivious of
Lou-Lou Marks’s absence, having forgotten their valiant teammate already,
wielding hockey sticks with fierce pleasure and rushing away into the gathering
dusk.
    Wait, wait for me! Come back! I am one of you.
    But they ignore me. They are gone.
    Long I would recall—more than thirty years later I
am still recalling—how quickly my fortunes had changed on that November
afternoon in Rye, Connecticut. A single misstep! Not ducking to avoid a wildly
swung hockey stick! And a knocked-out tooth! Dad would pay for fancy orthodontic
surgery as he’d promised, and the new, synthetic tooth was—is—indistinguishable
from my other lower front teeth: that isn’t the point. What I was struck by was
the swift and unanticipated change of fortune: one minute you’re in the game
rushing down the field wielding your hockey stick—(a light rain beginning to
fall, threaded with snowflakes that melted on my fevered cheeks)—exhilarated,
thrilled—yes, frankly showing off to Roland Marks in a way that was desperate and
reckless if not adroit and skilled like the better field-hockey players that
afternoon whom I so badly wanted to emulate, but could not: for they were agile
on their feet even if their feet were large as mine—one minute in the game and the next, out .
    It was a revelation worthy of Roland Marks’s
fiction. One minute in the game and the next, out .
    For intense periods of time—years, months, weeks—he
loved his women. Then, by degrees or with stunning swiftness, he did not .
    In the hospital my father paced about my bedside
excited and distracted.
    â€œOh, Lou-Lou. Poor Lou-Lou! This is so,
so . . .”
    So unexpected, probably Dad meant. When you
considered that he’d done his daughter a favor by driving to Rye, Connecticut,
from New York City—when (as the daughter had to know, even in her adolescent
myopia) there were so many more far more interesting people craving Roland
Marks’s attention in New York City than she. But this generous gesture had
turned out badly, and who was to blame?
    Also, being stuck in the ER with me, groggy with
codeine and awaiting the results of X-ray tests, and the game continuing without
us, or, by this time, having ended— so boring .
    Partly I’d dreaded being taken to the ER for this
reason. I worried that my father would become impatient and annoyed with me—his
instinct was to blame the victim. He wasn’t one to “coddle” weakness in others,
though weakness in himself was an occasion for lyric self-pity of a