Headshot

by Rita Bullwinkel

Artemis Victor always thinks she is going to win. It’s not a bad habit to get in. If one is capable of throwing self-doubt out the window, this power can be a beneficial weapon to deploy.

Artemis Victor has no idea what it takes to own a house, but she knows what it takes to beat other people, which is what owning property seems like, beating other people at owning a piece of the earth and making that piece of earth yours, not to be shared with other people, because the owning of the property is a product of your victory over other humans, as in, you won more dollars than them so now this slice of land is yours for keeps.

She wished she had a black eye from a winning fight to wear around, to show people she was fighting, to show people her body was doing something that was hard.

There is a glorification, in the world outside of boxing, of desperation and wildness while fighting—this notion that desire and scrappiness can and will conquer experience. No boxing coach has ever asked their athlete to be more desperate. Control and restraint are much more valuable than wild punches.

They were both young girls who grew up being treated as young women, which unified their lived experiences more greatly than any family (or witnessed) tragedy.

Artemis and Andi, and all the girls of the Daughters of America tournament, wish their coaches weren’t here with them, that they were allowed to fight each other without these embarrassing, know-nothing attachments.

This imagined winning in front of people who will never see her win, even if she does win, is symptomatic of the fact that Artemis Victor, like Andi Taylor, is, more than anything, delusional. Their desired audiences will never see them win. Even if they were to go and box professionally, hit some women in bikinis in the basement of a casino in Las Vegas, they wouldn’t impress the people who they encounter in their lives outside of boxing. They would only impress each other: other women who are trying to touch someone with their fists.

Nobody can ever possibly know what a specific body is good at unless they’re inside it.

Andi Taylor will be a pharmacist. She will have enough money to buy a piece of property. She will be loved by no one as thoroughly as her mother loved her younger half brother, and that will make Andi desperate and dogged for the entirety of her life. If desperation won boxing matches, Andi would be the victor by pounds and liters.

Rachel had a theory about other humans: people are the most scared by what makes zero sense to them but that they cannot, no matter how they try, avoid. Because of this, Rachel tried to live her life in as frightening a way as possible, dressing like a man and an animal. She had a Daniel Boone–style raccoon hat that she wore everywhere, which worked quite well. It is amazing the power that a strange hat will give you.

Her uncle taught her how to do this. He told her it was easier to remember images than words and that’s why, if something is happening that she knows means a great deal to her, she must hang on to the brightest thing she sees, instant by instant, and then file the things she sees away in her memory of the day.

Rachel laughs out loud when people call her pretty. It’s always older or middle-aged women who say it. The women say it in the type of way that conveys that they have nothing else to offer—no specifics. It comes out ragged and awful, always, not because Rachel doesn’t believe she is capable of some kind of beauty, but because she knows she doesn’t have the beauty that these middle-aged women want, and that they are lying through their teeth.

That’s the thing with children. So often what they do, or what they think they should do, or what they think they are good at is just some product of something someone told them that they would be good at.

Kate Heffer likes being good at things because she has delusions of grandeur. Kate Heffer imagines life-or-death scenarios where she is the only one with the right answer. Kate Heffer imagines herself saving everyone, everyone singing her praises, everyone crying.

Nothing makes you believe that the world is meaningless like seeing things burn in a fire. A wolf kills a dog but doesn’t eat it. A baby chokes on a piece of plastic. A deer gets hit by a car.

What a sad thing, to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. God, how I hate the sound of it. Good girl, thinks Rachel, is mountains and mountains worse than good boy. All a good boy has to do to be good is put on a clean shirt. Nobody wants to be a good girl, thinks Rachel. There can’t be a single girl in here who wants to be just fine.

The desire to please people is the desire to not be singular.

Kate Heffer has discerned, in the middle of this fight, that this moment, this match, which she thought was the moment around which other moments circled, actually has absolutely no meaning in her life.

It is this ability of Kate Heffer’s to rewrite the reality of her own desires that will allow her to turn every narrative of her life into a self-fulfilling truth.

Kate is old for her age bracket, and she has no intention of aging into collegiate boxing, and this was really just something she was trying, not something serious, not something she really cared about, not something that she gave the power to hurt her, or show her a glimpse of her true self in any way.

Iggy would kill people, be killed by people, or turn her body into a dog’s body just to have a statue of her in a town square that people passed and touched and looked at, and stopped and talked about, with affection and joy.

Their coach stands outside the ring, in a neutral corner. He looks like the relative everyone wished declined the obligatory invitation to Thanksgiving dinner.

On the dark dirt lane in North Platte, Iggy and Izzy walked slowly. Like siblings, they were both annoyed and comforted by each other.

The boxing world that Iggy has built for herself hangs in the room in Reno, above the bout, like a large circular discus. On top of Iggy’s world is Izzy’s, and on top of that, at the far reaches of the ceiling, are the worlds constructed by the other girl boxers. They pile up, one world after the other, like a stack of thin, scratched CDs. If you stand in the middle of the ring you can send your mind up through the hole of the worlds built by the other girl boxers. You can travel through the layers of different imagined futures, and the different ways each girl has of being.

I wouldn’t mind being a dog, said Izzy. If you’re a dog then you get older faster. Dogs are never really teenagers. They’re just babies for a few months, and then adults for the rest of their lives until they get put to sleep. It seems civil, said Izzy, to not have to be a half thing, a half human, a.k.a. a teenager, for which things are so in-between for so long that it seems impossible to understand the way things really are.

Decades into the future, when Izzy’s mother is dying, Izzy’s mother will not regret this. Thank god, Izzy’s mother will think right before she dies. Thank god Izzy has a life where she is more than this, more than just my daughter performing my every wish.

This is a sport that has a referee. The referees are stupid, but they are necessary. The sport cannot be played without them, and yet, they are always what keep the sport from being played fairly.

In girls’ hand-clapping games there are no winners. You may be chided for missing a beat, or for forgetting one of the lyrics, but there is no victory that lies ahead for just one of the participants. Hand-clapping games exist only in a state of play, or a state of rest.

The referee and the coaches and the judges, they are all so deeply separate. They think they are involved with this game, that they have power, but Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller have hoarded all the power for themselves. What is going on between Tanya Maw and Rose Mueller has nothing to do with the judges.

It can be intoxicating to play a sport that requires one to look in their opponent’s eyes. Tanya Maw wonders, while staring into the eyes of Rose Mueller, if this is why she is interested in both boxing and acting. There are so few activities that allow the intimacy of staring.

The granny roles will be easy for her because old people just get to say whatever everyone else is thinking. Like children and fools, grandmothers are not held to the same standards as the rest of society. They are given permission to wear their true feelings externally.

It’s not that all of the girls in the Daughters of America tournament are punching their way through a dead person. Tanya Maw’s winter-disappeared mother, and Andi Taylor’s dead red-truck kid, are things that hover above these girls when they box, but they will also be things that follow these girls after. These disappeared people are part of these boxers. Like viruses, they are stored in their bodies, in the spaces between the vertebrae in their spines.

There is a small, kidney-bean-sized balloon inside every girl’s head. The kidney bean is under the bone, above the nose, and between the eyes. Inside the kidney bean is a soup of everything that has happened to the girls in their lives.

Language has no place inside the gym. Inside the gym the language used is the language of animals—the language of smell and feeling and sound.

Like so many athletes who go from working out six hours a day to zero, after Rose Mueller stopped boxing, she gained loads of weight. It was then that she realized that she did not understand how to live in her body if she wasn’t using her body full force every day.

A life taken over can be wonderful. But it can also be sappy and stupid and dramatic. A play directed by God is many people’s stage of choice.

It’s not that God is a bad thing to be obsessed with. It’s just that when a group of people who believe in the same god come together things tend to tilt in particular, at times hateful, ways.

When Tanya Maw drove by the Reno strip to get to Bob’s Boxing Palace, she slowed down. A marquee in front of the dome read “Caesars Silver Legacy Resort and Casino.” I am in a place, thinks Tanya Maw, that named its architectural centerpiece after a Roman dictator who was assassinated by his own people.

In the before times, however, in the years before her acting makes her money, she will act in a play where a mother leaves her daughters. Tanya Maw was always an acting extremist. She believed, fundamentally, that an actor need not experience a tragedy in order to act it, but then there she will be onstage, acting as her winter-disappeared mother, acting as a woman who has chosen to leave her daughters, and Tanya will know that she is not acting, but channeling something much, much stranger. In this play, Tanya will not just fit her face into the faces of others, she will fit her face into the face of her mother, and this acrobatic exercise will almost kill her.

She felt slightly sick because she knew that this was a community play that almost no one would attend, but she was drunk, still, had been drunk all her life with acting, and still felt that onstage, while trying to fit her face into the face of another, she was able to access a part of herself that no one could see. It was like the inside of her was so fragmented that it was only by acting, by consolidating her insides into the outward display of a fictional character, that she became whole, which is why this job of acting like her mother, this job of acting as a woman who had left her daughters, felt particularly terrible and awful to her, because this was not a role where she would be fitting her face into the face of another, but a role in which she would be fitting her face into the face of her mother. The drunkenness of acting, she wasn’t sure it would come to her if she tried to portray her mother, instead of portraying something already inside her, and there was no way for her to understand if her mother was inside her. It seemed shocking, and implausible, that she could ever be inside her winter-disappeared mother.

In the dead of night inside her mind Tanya Maw’s mother visits her. When you don’t have children, you can leave a place, explains Tanya Maw’s mother. When you have children, if you want to leave a place, you must consider leaving the children behind.

In this way, the Reno river walk ground is littered with discarded Carlas and Emmas and Sarahs and Claudettes. Rosalias and Sophias and Olivias and Mias cover the ground. If you walk the gauntlet of card flippers and you do not look like a man, you will not have the cards slapped directly in your face, but the cards will still be slapped, just slapped out into the air in a more indiscriminate spray. If you’re a woman and you try to make eye contact with the card flippers they won’t look away.

In mass, in work, anywhere in Dallas, really, her village of life and then death, she can get out of almost anything by looking the opposite direction.

She chugs water and sits down. She can feel the power in her body taking over her mind. Her chest and head and arms are hung perfectly on her spine.

The older sister would say, We’re not there anymore, Tanya. We’re not on the rug anymore, Tanya. But when Tanya Maw looked in the mirror, she could see the large circular kilim rug in her reflection behind her, and she knew for certain that she would, in part, live on the large circular kilim rug for the rest of her life. I’ll die on this rug, thought Tanya. And she did die on that rug.

It’s not so bad to have lived on this rug, Tanya Maw will say to her mother. It’s a beautiful rug, Tanya Maw will say to her mother. When she left, Tanya Maw’s mother wished she took the rug with her.

These girl fighters are the opposite of humans in decay. They are accelerating away from death with speed and precision. Immortality wafts off of them. Even the dullest of the judges can feel that the girls are not quite human.

Their bodies had to come from somewhere, but she’s not sure what to call the realm from which they came. Is a uterus the same as heaven?

Boxing is the opposite of being alone on a dust-filled prairie. Rose Mueller loves every girl who agrees to fight against her because they have agreed to be with her without needing to speak to her. Rose Mueller loves Tanya Maw, even as Tanya Maw lands a hit on her. It is a gift to be alive, and to be fighting each other.

I am proud of her, thinks Rose Mueller’s father. Rose Mueller’s father thinks this in the way that he commits to going to mass. It’s not complicated, thinks Rose Mueller’s father. It’s not complicated to be sure that I love my daughter.