Midnight Oil. Karen Kendall

the player’s pants, his socks, cleats and hands on the football. Peggy was impressed that she didn’t have to work from a photograph to get the details, proportions and angles right.

      “Why didn’t you go to art school, Marly?” she asked.

      “I did.”

      “But you do hair.”

      “You know the story about why I didn’t graduate. My dad got sick. Besides, I love what I do for women every day. I get to be creative, I make them feel better, it pays well and I’m never between jobs for longer than a couple of hours. What more could I ask for?”

      Peggy nodded.

      “And I’m able to do my art on the side.” Marly painted in the football, somehow giving it texture and dimension, too. The stitching appeared almost real.

      As Peg looked at it, the familiar wash of conflicting emotions about football rolled through her. It represented both success and failure for her, strength and weakness, power and victimization.

      A guy like Troy Barrington—great, there she went, thinking about him again—had been a natural to play on a high school team, then a college one and finally go pro. He’d been encouraged all the way.

      But her experience had been different. Suddenly, when she’d gone out for the high school team, she was resented. She’d made it because she was so good, but all the guys had looked at her funny. She’d cost one of their friends a place on the team. She had long hair and breasts and odd plumbing. She was just different with a capital D.

      Instead of the camaraderie that someone like Troy had with the team, she’d battled sexually aggressive glances and felt bad because she couldn’t share the same locker room, causing no end of logistical problems.

      But she’d stuck it out. She’d won everyone’s respect, however grudging. She could kick a decent field goal, run like the wind and would tackle anything that moved. The problem was, admittedly, that her body weight didn’t stack up to a six-foot, two-hundred-pound male’s.

      Still, by the end of her senior year, she’d been practically the team mascot, carried on their shoulders when they won the district championship with her field goal.

      Peggy would always proudly carry that moment in her heart, no matter what had happened later when she’d fought her way onto her college team. Nobody could take the district win away from her, not even her father’s absence from the stands at the crucial moment.

      Impulse struck again. “Marly, you’re going to kill me, but I promise you a deep-tissue massage if you’ll change the image on the screen.”

      “You’re right, I am going to kill you.” Marly straightened and glared at Peg.

      “Please can you paint over the man butt and put a kick-ass woman there, instead? She’s triumphant. She just kicked a field goal that won a big game.”

      “Why do I have a feeling that this kick-ass woman should have long red hair?” Resigned, Marly was already whiting out the other picture. “Get me a hair dryer, will you? It’ll speed us up. I’m not staying here all night.”

      “Even if I make whiskey sours?”

      “Okay, I’m staying all night. But you have to give me dinner, too.”

      “Deal. You know I wouldn’t ask you to do this if you weren’t so fast and so good.”

      “Yes, you would.” Marly aimed the hairdryer at the wet paint, since trying to white out the wet image had just made a nasty smear on the wall. “So, um, Peg? How’s that impulse-control thing going? I can see you’re making huge strides.”