A Cave of Ice: Chapter 1

“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

­—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My mother played tennis growing up in Nowhere, Texas. She would return from summer vacation three weeks earlier than her friends to attend training camp in the abusive Texas sun. While her friends laid out on the beach, my mother spent her days running sprints, hitting balls, and jumping rope. In August, the green clay would become so hot from the sun that you could fry a full Sunday breakfast. Training camp was “optional” for the girls' tennis team. Her coach, Coach Williams, could not force the girls to attend. Many of them stayed at the beach, but the serious ones, like my mother, always came back early.

The team held two practices a day—one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They spent the morning running suicides and gassers, while the afternoon was mostly skills training. Both the mornings and the afternoons began with jumping rope. Coach Williams understood the importance of footwork and would force the team to jump 500 times in a row before they could even look at their rackets. If someone tripped before 500, she would begin from zero and continue to jump until she had reached her number.

Coach Williams taught my mother and his other players that they needed to work harder when they were tired. He had developed many high school tennis stars in Nowhere and did so through sunburned skin and sore legs.

My mother spent her days in school watching the empty court from the classroom window. She dreamed of the state championship and of hoisting the silver trophy over her head. She constantly thought about the names of the other state champions in the trophy case and the idea of her name being engraved beside theirs. After class, she would run from her locker to the courts. People often laughed when she sped through the hallways, but my mother didn’t care what anyone whispered. She wanted to become a champion, and she would spend her days in the abusive Texas sun to make that a reality.

When she lost the final match her senior year of high school, she blamed a lack of discipline. She didn’t believe in the idea of talent and laughed at the idea that God handed the trophy to her rival. She blamed her discipline when she couldn’t reach the green ball as it bounced out of the court, and her opponent threw her racket in the air in victory. Coach Williams said nothing when the girl from the big city raised the trophy on the other side of the net. He and my mother both knew that it was too late for words. The day was lost, and now they could only look back with regret on the sweat-filled days on the court.

I remembered waking up earlier than usual one Sunday and going with my mother to the 7:30 am church service instead of the one at 9:00. The 7:30 service was all business and scripture readings. The elderly would come to this service so they could take their communion and read from the gospel in peace. They didn’t like the energy of the 9:00 am service, which tried to cater to a younger audience with a makeshift Christian rock band. The elderly liked church the way it had always been, and a part of me enjoyed it too, this one time we had to attend so that we could meet mother’s work friends for breakfast.

The band, which consisted of church members, would sing soft rock songs up to Jesus and take turns living out a vanilla and safe version of their past dreams of rock stardom. They slammed their drums and tried not to screw up riffs on their cloned electric guitars all while praising their lord and savior. The musicians, for the most part, remained the same, while a large variety of singers were cycled in throughout the performance. They must have thought it was fair to give every singer their chance in the spotlight. Some were much better than others, but none of the singers were any good. I know some great musicians and singers had gotten their start in church bands, but this band didn’t feature any semblance of talent.

The church band never seemed weird to me until I began my first day of Catholic school in the seventh grade. The Catholic children found it strange to have a Methodist in their midst and made sure that I knew their feelings. My mother thought that the structure and rigidity of the nuns would help make up for her shortcomings as a single mother. Not that she fell short as a mother. All single mothers face shortcomings in parenting because they can only, to a certain extent, fill the role of two parents. She felt like I needed more discipline to become a better young man when she signed my life over to the nuns.

I hated the uniform of blue pants and even darker blue sweaters that we wore over white-collared shirts. The shoes had to be black. If you wore brown, then you would spend the afternoon in detention with the sisters. A black belt had to be worn at all times, and shirts had to be tucked in. If the belt was brown–or God forbid, not present–or if the shirt was not tucked, then you would spend the afternoon in detention with the sisters. Step out of line on your way to lunch, detention; pass a note, detention; smile during class, detention. The rules were as plentiful as they were strict, but I never actually found myself with the sisters in the afternoon. I always made it onto my school bus at 3:02 pm and arrived back to my house sometime around 3:30. The time varied based on the number of kids who did not make it onto the bus and found themselves reading from the Bible from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm.

It wasn’t luck that kept me out of trouble. In those days, I subscribed to a hierarchy of fear that began with God at the top, then Jesus, and finally down to my mother and the nuns. I feared them all and learned to keep my head down as a result.