Kira looks at the time, pulls some papers from her briefcase, and hurries off to a meeting, then straight on to another one. She’s running late as usual as she hurries back to her office, already behind schedule. There’s a label she used to love but which she loathes when it’s pronounced in a Beartown accent: “career woman.” Peter’s friends call her that, some in admiration and some with distaste, but no one calls Peter a “career man.” It strikes a nerve because Kira recognizes the insinuation: you have a “job” so you can provide for your family, whereas a “career” is selfish. You have one of those for your own sake. So now she’s dangling somewhere between two worlds, and feels just as guilty when she’s in the office as she does when she’s at home.
Everything has become a compromise. When she was young, she used to dream about criminal trials and dramatic courtroom showdowns, but the reality now is agreements, contracts, settlements, meetings, and emails, emails, emails. “You’ve overqualified for this,” her boss told her when she got the job, as if she had any choice. Her qualifications and skills could have given her a six-figure salary in plenty of places around the world, but this is the only major law firm within commuting distance of Beartown. Their clients are forestry companies and council-run partnerships; the work is often monotonous, rarely stimulating, yet always stressful. Sometimes she thinks to their time in Canada and what all the hockey coaches there kept banging on about: they wanted “the right kind of guy” for their team. Not just someone who could play, but someone who fit into the locker room, who didn’t cause problems, who did his job. Someone who played hard and kept quiet. She wonders what it would take for a woman to be the right kind of guy.
Her train of thought is interrupted by a colleague—Kira’s best work friend and the antidote to the sickness of boredom:
“I’ve never been so hungover. My mouth tastes like an ashtray. You didn’t see me lick one last night, did you?”
“I wasn’t with you last night,” Kira says with a smile.
“Weren’t you? Are you sure? After-work drinks. You were, weren’t you? It was after-work drinks, wasn’t it?” her colleague mutters, dropping onto a chair.
She’s over six feet tall and carries every inch with pride. Instead of trying to shrink when faced with insecure men in the office, she shows up in bloodred shoes with heels as sharp as army knives and the height of Cuban cigars. She’s a comic-book artist’s fantasy—no one dominates a room the way she does. Or a party.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Work. What are you doing?” Kira counters.
Her colleague waves one hand and holds the other over her eyes, as if trying to pretend it’s a chilled towel.
“I’ll do some work in a minute.”
“I need to get this finished before lunch,” Kira sighs, bending over her papers.
Her colleague leans forward and scans the documents.
“It would have taken a normal person a month to grasp all that. You’re too good for this firm, you know that, don’t you?”
She always says she envies Kira’s brain. In return, Kira is envious of her colleague’s middle finger, which gets regular use. Kira smiles wearily.
“What is it you usually say?”
“Stop whining, shut up, and send the invoice,” her colleague says with a grin.
“Stop whining, shut up, and send the invoice,” Kira repeats.
The two women lean across the table and high-five each other.
*
A teacher is standing in a classroom, trying to get a group of seventeen-year-old boys to be quiet. Jeanette is having one of those mornings when she asks herself why she puts herself through this—not just teaching, but Beartown itself. She raises her voice, but the boys at the back aren’t even ignoring her on purpose; she’s quite convinced that they genuinely haven’t noticed she’s there. There are other pupils in the class who want more than this, but they’re invisible, inaudible. They just lower their heads and close their eyes tightly and hope that the hockey season will soon be over.
One of the plainest truths about both towns and individuals is that they usually don’t turn into what we tell them to be, but what they are told they are. The teacher has always been told she’s too young for this. Too attractive. That they won’t respect her. Those boys have been told that they’re bears, winners, immortal.
Hockey wants them that way. Needs them that way. Their coach teaches them to go hard into close combat on the ice. No one stops to think about how to switch that attitude off when they leave the locker room. It’s easier to pin the blame on her: She’s too young. Too attractive. Too easily offended. Too difficult to respect.
In a final attempt to get control of the situation, the teacher turns to the team captain; he’s sitting in a corner tapping at his phone. She says his name. He doesn’t react.
“Kevin!” she repeats. He raises an eyebrow.
“Yes? How can I help you, my lovely?”
The juniors around him laugh as if on command.
“Are you actually following what I’m teaching you here? It’s going to be on the exam,” she says.
“I already know it,” Kevin replies.
It irritates her intensely that he doesn’t say this provocatively or aggressively. His voice is as neutral as a weather forecaster’s.
“Really? You already know it?” she snorts.
“I’ve read the book. You’re just telling us the same things it says there. My phone could do your job.”
The juniors roar with laughter so loudly that the windows rattle, and then of course Bobo sees his chance, the biggest and most predictable boy in the school, always ready to kick someone who’s already down.
“Just calm down, sweet cheeks!” he yells.
“What did you call me?” she snaps, then realizes that’s exactly the response he wants.
“It’s a compliment. I love sweets.”
Howls of laughter wash over her. “Sit down!”
“Just calm down, now, sweet cheeks. I said you should be proud.”
“Proud?”
“Yes. In a couple of weeks’ time you’ll be able to go around telling everyone you meet that you once taught the legendary junior team who brought the gold back to Beartown!”
A large part of the class roars its approval, hands banging radiators, feet stamping the floor. She knows it’s too late even to try to raise her voice now, she’s already lost. Bobo stands up on his desk like a cheerleader and sings, “We are the bears! We are the bears! We are the bears, the bears from BEARTOWN!” The other juniors leap up onto their desks and join in. By the time the teacher leaves the classroom they’re all standing bare-chested, chanting, “THE BEARS FROM BEARTOWN!” All apart from Kevin, who just sits there quietly looking at his phone, as calm as if he were alone in a dimly lit room.
*
In Kira’s office, her colleague runs her tongue back and forth across her teeth in disgust.
“Seriously, it feels like I’ve eaten someone’s toupee. You don’t think I could have ended up sleeping with that guy in accounting, do you? I was planning to sleep with the other one. Whatever his job is. The one with the tight buns and scruffy hair.”
Kira laughs. Her colleague is single to the extreme, whereas Kira is fanatically monogamous. The lone she-wolf and the mother hen, doomed to envy each other. Her colleague lowers her voice to ask:
“Okay. Who would you pick from the office? If you had to pick one?”
“Not this again.”
“I know, I know, you’re married. But if your husband was dead.”
“HELLO?”
“Christ, it’s hardly that sensitive! Okay, if he was sick. Or in a coma. Better? Who would you sleep with if your husband was in a coma?”