Читать книгу The Hopeful - Tracy O'Neill - Страница 8

SESSION II.

THE Matthew Thornton Medical Center is the only hospital in southern New Hampshire with psych facilities. The inmates are called patients and the food would turn any sane person into a dieter. I’d like to say the selection process is selective, but some people here are not even legitimate crazies. Narcoleptics and delinquents, schizoids and depressives: they admit the gamut.

I wake up in a solo room, trudge rounds through the inaptly named rec room, nauseate in the cafeteria, turn back to my very own abode, three-oh-two, and then, of course, to the good doctor’s office.

Right where I left you, and if we’re going to do this again, there’s something I’ve got to know. Are you of a school? I ask.

Where did I get my degree, you mean?

Of course that isn’t what I mean. On the wall her diplomas hang, this itinerary of hard work and accomplishment: Williams College, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, bachelors, doctorate, masters.

I mean Gestalt, ink blots, it’s all daddy, I say.

Do you want to talk about your father?

Will you only answer in questions?

Will you answer them if I continue? she says. And I’ve got to acknowledge she’s good.

Haven’t I already? I ask. Because good isn’t sufficient.

Indeed, she says.

In deeds I trust. It’s thoughts I don’t.

Let me qualify my statement, she says, unwilling to let me get away with wordplay. You have indeed answered the question of why you’re here, but only to the extent that you’ve noted the most recent incident. We both know that this was not an isolated incident of abnormal cognition, however. This was an incident within a pattern, and there is a history that you cannot deny.

She sounds like Mark: a history that you cannot deny. How much he wanted me to be of my birth instead of my choices. I was born Shawnee yet lived in the culture of myself. But the doctor doesn’t know who Mark is. Mark: a stain, a target, an imprint.

So you admit my file is not so incomplete.

A file is merely a snapshot, she says.

Did you know, Doctor, that cliché translates literally to mean “a snapshot” in French? I eye a brown hanging folder on her desk. Though I’ve lived my entire life with myself just like anyone else, I want to see what my life looks like on paper. Because I’ve always been curious in the manner of the killed cat. Anyway in the end, this is how I’ll be remembered: a date of birth, vaccinations, address, then most importantly, emergency contact.

Well certainly you must know you are not a cliché. You are only a cliché as long as you allow yourself to be the bare bones of a file. I’d like to hear your side of the story. I’d like to hear the details of what makes you you.

You could be anyone, I think. It was something my mother told me once. I was in preschool, and parents were bringing home the younger versions of themselves. When I grow up will I look just like you? My mother stopped in the middle of the parking lot. I don’t know. That’s when she told me I was adopted. Then who will I be like? It occurred to me that I was to become an uncertainty, a stranger. You could be anyone, my mother said. That’s even better to be than to be like me. You could be anyone in the world, anyone.

Miss Doyle? Did you hear me? I want to hear your side of the story.

My side begins with death and ends with birth. It’s life turned backwards, I say.

Your perspective is what matters to me. You needn’t feel self-conscious.

Oh but isn’t that the reason I’m here?

The doctor is quiet a moment. She’s younger than I’d noticed. Maybe she’s never had a patient before she didn’t like, doesn’t know what to do with one. She puts her pencil down.

And what, in your words, are the deeds that brought you here?

Wastes of life.

You feel that we’re wasting your time? she asks.

Time I’ve got all of in the world. My time is all spare, in the sense of extra not the opposite. Nor the saving kind. I look at the clock. It’s better not to look at the clock. It’s better not to wait for someone to sign you out of the mental hospital.

Why don’t we talk about what you did with your time before our sessions? As in before the most recent incident, which led to your hospitalization and our sessions. I need the entire story.

And yet, Doctor, is it not also true that your process as a mental health professional is comprised of me relating a swath of story only so that you can repackage it neatly into a diagnosis? I can see it clearly. An assemblage of symptoms. Checked off warning signs. Everything I say can and will be used against me. In this court, she, the doctor, is judge, jury, witness. I stand accused.

Miss Doyle, our approach entails both patient and doctor processing the raw data, that is, the data you provide so that you can consider it in a way that will be more useful. Let’s start at the beginning, and move on from there.

I think about the beginning. Then, I choreographed every second so there never was one left. After I broke my back, it was like hearing the beats, without knowing any movements, tabula rasa in the dinging dongs.

In the beginning was skating, and skating was everything, I say.

You loved skating, the doctor says.

I still do.

When I first showed skill at skating, my mother said I was sick. She wrote notes to the principal saying that I had signs of inner ear infections or strep throat when I begged her to let me skate extra sessions during the day. Once the frequency of my ear infections became suspicious, she told the principal that I had contracted impetigo from an exercise mat. Impetigo bought me an entire month of extra skating. It wasn’t until Boston that my mother pulled me from school, where I had spent most of my time jiggling my legs beneath my desk and drawing skating diagrams in the margins of books.

The parents at the rink in New Hampshire had advised that if I was going to be a real competitor, I go to Boston where the coaches were costly and worth it. They said things about big fish in little ponds and bigger ponds, where, if you had any logical ability, the inference was that I’d be the little fish. My father noted that their daughters were the ones always pretending to blow their noses by the tape machine so that they had a reason to take a break. I, however, had the double Salchow and toe loop. What were left were the loop, flip, Lutz, and axel. I was first one on the ice and last one off. I recorded my program tape to play twice in a row for stamina. Those parents called me the hardest working little girl at the rink to my face. Behind my back they called me a rink rat. But when my father brought me to train at the Skating Club of Boston, I wasn’t a little fish.

The drive was ninety minutes, and when I thought of the Boston girls—SCOB snobs they were called— the tiniest, fiercest little girls at every competition, I worried: little fish. I remembered during warm-up at the Cranberry Open in Cape Cod seeing a SCOB named Mariana skate right into a girl from Worcester because she wanted to warm up her Lutz. There were only six of us on the ice, but as she looked over her shoulder and saw a pink dress spinning, she extended her leg back anyway. Her blade cleared right through the girl’s knee. You could see the yellow fat layer slop off the muscle like a melting candle. They had to send the Zamboni out to sop up the blood, and when someone told Mariana that the girl, whose name was Mary or Annie or something like that, was going to the hospital for stitches, she said maybe now she’d understand what was meant by “right of way.” Mariana won the gold, I the silver, and Mary or Annie from Worcester got anterior cruciate ligament replacement surgery. They called us the ladies division.

I didn’t see Mariana when I arrived in Boston. Later, I’d learn that she had finally seen her mother’s genes kick in. Thirteen years old, weighing in at one hundred-twenty pounds, she’d had nowhere to turn but field hockey. At least she didn’t go synchro, the SCOBs would say. It was less embarrassing to disappear than to become a synchronized skater. When the synchro girls showed up at the rink for practice, Ryan would say, “Fat camp’s in session.” We watched them circle through basic maneuvers gripping each others’ arms. “And they call that skating!” he said.

That first Saturday, twenty skaters whirred between and around each other, inhumanly beautiful figures speeding toward perfection as the tragic drama of Bizet’s Carmen thundered through the dinge and dank of the filthy rink. Grimy light softened through the green-mildewed windows above the bleachers. Black rubber mats lay over cold cement floors to protect the sensitive radius of skaters’ blades. “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame,” Carmen trilled. “He has never known law. If you don’t love me I love you, if I love you watch yourself!”

“Twelve dollars?” my father said to the woman at the front desk. “We pay eight dollars, and a session is an entire hour in New Hampshire.”

“We charge twelve and have had twenty-three Olympians,” the woman responded.

“If she skates three is it any cheaper?” he asked. “You know, do I get a deal buying in bulk?”

“For you?” the woman said, looking through two wire rims. “No.” Thirty-six dollars later, I was skating at the Olympic factory.

It was better even than I expected. The ice, less dense than that at the rink in New Hampshire, allowed my blades to cut deeper. When I jumped, its buoyancy let me linger at the pinnacle for seconds when time seemed to stop. Everyone on ice was faster and stronger than I’d ever seen before, but I stopped thinking little fish. I put my cassette in line just like everyone else. The Godfather played. Then one girl skated to the music of Gladiator. Finally it was me: Firebird. The ballet begins with the penetration of The Immortal Kashchei’s world. Prince Ivan catches a bird in the Immortal’s garden who promises salvation for her life. When Ivan falls in love with one of thirteen sleeping princesses, he asks Kashchei to marry her, and the angered Immortal sends his band of magical creatures to kill him. The Firebird hypnotizes them with her Infernal Dance and reveals that Kashchei’s immortality is protected by a giant egg. Ivan smashes the egg until the magic is broken, and all that is left is the awakening of real beings.

My music was the Infernal Dance, and I began, hands screening my eyes, one bent leg extended forward. Somewhere in the middle of the music, I realized most of the SCOBS had stopped practice to watch by the boards. I wanted every second.

After I was done, Lauren approached my father, told him I was catching eyes right away and that she could turn my promise into a foregone conclusion. Even in skates, she stood only to my father’s chin, but her bluster unmistakably dwarfed his.

“Your daughter is very good,” she told him. “And I’m the difference between very good and great.” Three of her students had qualified for the national championships that year, and through the tough plainness of her speech, the invitation into her constellation of celebrity lit my father’s eyes.

“Great is good,” he said. “Great is what we want to do.”

I pretended not to listen, wiping the shaved ice from my blades. I had cut my hand and didn’t notice until I looked down and blood flowered onto my terrycloth blade covers, a somatic bloom messing in my hand like an omen. Lauren handed my father a business card, and she caught my eye as they shook hands.

We waited until the car to scream.

“Did you see them watching you?” my father said, grabbing my arm. “Did you notice them noticing you during your program?”

“Did you see the flying camel?”

“They couldn’t get enough of you!”

“I felt like I was in the air so long, I could have untied my laces!”

He slapped the steering wheel victoriously. “Impressed is the only word for it.”

“I wish I didn’t need to sleep in between sessions.”

“But was it as good as you imagined?” We were stopped at a red light, and I could tell that my father really wanted to know what was like to be me.

“I couldn’t imagine that good,” I said, and I didn’t know then that that would be my problem.

“Soon you won’t have to imagine,” my father said.

“That woman sounds awfully confident,” my mother said that night after dinner. I was cleaning the dishes while my parents sat in the living room. The water made the skin around my cut whiten and wrinkle like that of an ageing woman. I turned the running water to a trickle so that I could listen.

“She sounds certain,” my father said.

“One girl every four years,” my mother said, “wins the Olympics.”

“So why can’t the one in four be Ali?” It was the statistic I wanted to be. Carol Heiss. Peggy Fleming. Dorothy Hamill. Kristi Yamaguchi. Women wonders of the skating world.

“I just don’t want to set her up for disappointment,” my mother said.

“You should have seen the way the coaches were looking at her,” my father said, pausing to search for a metaphor. “Like she was a winning Powerball ticket.”

“Well she’s very good.” I heard my mother turn on the television.

“She could be the best.”

“She already is the best,” my mother said. “She’s ours.”

“So why does ours need to settle for very good?” my father asked, raising his voice above a toothpaste commercial. “Why can’t ours be very great? I would have strangled someone senseless to complete my graduate work in genetics.” Years ago, he’d applied to Harvard for a PhD and hadn’t been accepted. He knew how awful very good could feel.

“She’ll never go to college if we pull her out of school,” my mother said.

“And she’ll never be great.” In the yellow after-dinner kitchen light, the words made me shiver, though I knew my father was just making a point. Never be great.

My mother was yelling now. “What is it that’s so great about great? How about okay? How about normal? How about a social life and mixers and good grades?”

“Anyone can have a social life. She can have a social life after she’s a champion.”

“The commute alone would be three hours.” This was an exaggeration by sixty minutes at least. With my father’s eagerness, we’d made it to Boston in an hour-fifteen.

“What’s three hours for dreams?”

“You want to make yourself a widower, don’t you?” my mother asked. “You want to send me into three hours of lunatic Boston drivers to chase lunatic dreams. How would you feel if we were the victims of road rage all for figure skating lessons?”

“The odds are small,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said.

“I meant death. The odds of death are small,” he said. “Be reasonable.”

My father called Lauren a few minutes later. By Wednesday, my mother was driving me to Boston, and soon after, I had dropped out of middle school to be great.

Long before the skating days, my father had conceded to pharmaceuticals. My mother had urged pills on him in hopes it would be just like the time he had only wanted his own and she begged and begged until finally I was brought home to be their baby.

Each day, she handed him a glass of juice and an antidepressant with his breakfast. There was a waiting period for happiness, she explained. It would take some months for the efficacy to kick in. The waiting period ended. Still, a new orange bottle would appear full each month.

“Why bother?” my father asked one day.

“Because it helps,” my mother answered.

“The symptoms,” he said.

“Don’t you feel better?” she asked, rattling a bottle.

“I’m under better,” he said. “All the way up to mediocre.”

“All the way up there?” It was a gallant stab at coquettishness, and in the willful play, I could see the girl my mother must once have been.

“All the way up to docile. Happy now?” he said.

“This isn’t my fault,” she said.

“You’re right, it’s my fault.”

“Why does there have to be fault?”

“I don’t have a reason,” he said.

“I know what you need,” my mother said. “You need a day at the beach. Hampton’s only an hour’s drive.”

“What would we do there?” my father asked.

“Relax,” she said.

“That’s exactly what I don’t want to do: relax,” he said.

“Then what do you want?” she asked.

“I don’t want anything,” he answered.

“A confession. Finally,” my mother said. “You never want to do anything.” Her arms were above her head in exasperation.

“I said I don’t want anything. Nothing about doing.”

“Nothing doing,” she said. “That’s you. I try and I try. And there you are: nothing doing.” She was jabbing a pointed finger in his direction. “This is senseless depression.”

“Better,” he said, “than senseless conversation.”

Then I started getting good at skating, and humming trailed through the house as my father opened shades and returned from the sporting goods store with bags full of therapy bands and running shoes. Sunday morning, we’d hear off-key whistling as he whisked egg whites into shiny foam. He played opera and threw an arm to the ceiling, calling, “Buongiorno, giorno! Bravissimo! Bravissima!” The pills went into the wastebasket. Endless loops of serials and commercials gave way to Olympian video recordings of hard work rewarded. My father pulled his old anatomy books from the attic and went to the library to read studies on the metabolism of carbohydrates relative to anaerobic activity. Suddenly, it seemed that the love I loved was big and strong and animating enough to take my father into its territories, to make him cross over into mine.

None of the girls at the rink spoke to me except to say heads up! or out of my way! or incoming! I was only a juvenile then, but juveniles were dangerous, more even than the advanced. Who knew what any of us might become? Everyone wished growth spurts on each other. Publicly, of course, it was the pageant treatment, waves and smiles and backhands.

The exception was Emma Closerman, who might have hit her head too many times falling on the ice. She called her mother “I” and herself “you,” just as she had heard her mother do. Her mother would say things like, “You must do what I tell you,” and Emma would do what her mother told her. Her mother said, I want you to try harder, and Emma tried harder. So Emma said, “Where am I?” when she was looking for her mother or “What am I doing?” if she was wondering what her mother was doing. During a poor training session she could be heard muttering around the rink, “I don’t know what the hell you’re doing” or “If you don’t land that double axel, I don’t know what I will do with you.” Mrs. Closerman had almost been a champion, and after marrying a rich man twenty years older than her father, had spent her widowhood screaming from bleachers. With a mother like hers, the SCOBs said, Emma would probably rather have been born six feet tall.

The boys, the few of them there were, were not ones to worry about. You could ask them to help you stretch without the fear of them jerking your hip out its socket or spraining your ankle. There was Edward, who skated pairs with his sister Breanne, Hans, who for skating had moved from Amsterdam, and of course, Ryan.

“Fresh meat, my favorite,” Ryan said the first day I showed up for practice. He was whipping a rope by the warm-up mats. “Nine-sixty-nine, nine-seventy, nine-seventy-one. Obviously, you know who I am. Now who are you?” he asked.

“Alivopro Doyle,” I said.

“Is that some sort of made-up black name?”

“It’s a Latinate abbreviation.”

“You need a Marilyn Monroe.”

“A what?” I said.

“If you want to be a star, you can’t be a Norma Jean.”

“I don’t want to be a star,” I said. “I want to skate.”

“Nine-ninety-five, nine-ninety-six, nine-ninety-seven.”

When he’d cleared a thousand, I knew he wasn’t listening anymore and the most graceful thing to do was walk away. I went into the corner and jumped until I was warm, pulling my legs in directions polar normalcy. Then I laced my skates and took to the ice, removing my rubber guards. For a second, I looked up into the bleachers for my mother. She was dog-earring pages of a chinaware catalogue towards the middle of the rink.

“Point! Point! Point!” Emma’s mother screamed a few feet away. My mother startled out of soup tureens and gave me a little wave.

Once I’d circled the rink a few times, Lauren sent me from one end of the arena to the other, jump here, jump there, once more but straighter, once more but higher, point that toe, lift those arms, bend those knees, arch that back, pick up the pace, don’t rush—you’re rushing—smile a little, smile: that’s it, now again! I looked at the red lump of her jacket approximating movements. I made toe pick holes gaping like skull sockets in the ice. “Show me what you’ve got,” she said, inserting my tape in the player. “Then we’ll make it better.” The panic of Stravinsky staccato-snapped through the speakers. I flew through notes like a bursting seam. I spun to a stop as the final crescendo climaxed. By the boards a red shape was clapping.

After it was done, I felt something cold hit my back.

“You there,” Ryan said, tossing a bit of snow that had been caked to his blade towards me. “Shaniqua, Babushka, Muhammad, whatever your name is.”

“Alivopro,” I said. “And yes?”

“Actually, you’re pretty fabulous, I thought you should know,” he said. “Not as fabulous as M-O-I moi, of course. But fabulous nonetheless. That’s a compliment if you were wondering. Be pleased. Not as fabulous as me is still really really fabulous.”

“Give me a couple years,” I said.

“Sassy, I like that,” Ryan said. “Now sassy-ass, what do you think of my shadow? Glammy or tranny?” He closed his eyes to reveal lavender shimmering from his lids.

“Glammy and tranny?” I said.

“You pass the test,” he said, “You’re in.” Then he spanked my bottom into the locker room.

My new life had begun.

My routine was now two alarms, three egg whites, a sixty mile drive south, and stretching. Ryan would be there, girls would glare, and then there were hours of darting around trying to break the routine, trying to finally do it right. I looked over at the violet silhouette of Lauren’s jacket. I heard Mrs. Closerman scream “Straighter! Higher!” at Emma. I beat myself blue, flew and curled through the reps until my mother said she was going to leave me to freeze overnight. Through it all, I was regardless of the world. I’d vowed for better or worse, and I took the worse because it was the only way to get better.

Lauren drilled what I’d mastered to allow more time to try for what I hadn’t. Girls lost jumps all the time, and it was best to treat them like dishes. I did them every day so that I wouldn’t wake up to a mess a week later. I wrote my vocabulary of movements into the ice, little commas and periods punctured with pointed toes.

“See the double loop with your mind’s eye first,” Lauren told me once it was time to try to have what I hadn’t. I closed my eyes.

“My mind’s I did it,” I said.

“Now it’s up to you,” she said. “Remember, all you need to do is master momentum. Do not be deceived. Do not let it pull you off your axis. Momentum follows you.”

I took a lap and talked to myself. Follow me, I told myself. Follow me. Do not be deceived. I bent and sprung. I hung, topping air, whipping twice. And then I had done it, and I saw two purple arms flung up to the fluorescents approach, screaming. A white wave of ice sprayed up from Lauren’s blade. “Now again,” she said. “While it’s still in your legs!” A minute later: my first again of the loop.

“That can’t possibly be enough. One turn can’t possibly be the only difference,” my father said. He was sitting in front of the computer researching rules from the United States Figure Skating Association and couldn’t believe that the only difference in the flying spin requirement for the novice and junior level tests was a single rotation. His fingers scurried over the keyboard letters in cross reference over cross reference. “Who decides? Where would they get such a figure? How can one rotation make the difference between the middle and the upper reaches?”

“Just accept it,” my mother said.

“Arbitrary, don’t you see? There’s got to be a reason, Lou. I’m getting to the bottom of this number. I’m getting to the bottom of the reasons for minimal requirements.”

“Why do you need to know more than the minimum requirements?” my mother said. “Minimums are minimal. That’s the reason.”

“Because it’s exciting to find reasons.”

“Not for me,” she said. “I just want to eat a meal.” She had put their name in at The Common Man Restaurant so they wouldn’t have to wait on their anniversary, and now she was waiting for him.

“Go ahead without me. Order an appetizer,” my father said. “I’ll turn up.”

“This figure skating thing is a midlife crisis,” she said. “Figure skating is a convertible, a bimbo, guns and a gym in one. And I’ve been trying to let you have little hobby, but what am I supposed to do? Eat shrimp cocktail alone? On our anniversary?”

“Lou, you know that can’t possibly be true. The average life expectancy in the United States is 75.9 years of age and I’m forty-nine. Plus, with my family history, I’d be an anomaly with another fifteen years anyway.”

“What am I supposed to do with myself? What am I supposed to do with you? It’s almost nine, Alvin.”

“I’m seizing the day,” he said.

“Well seize and desist!”

“That’s ‘cease.’ Cease to stop, not seize to take. I’m seizing not ceasing.”

“Jesus H. Christ, Alvin. You’re not in college anymore. You’re not going to earn a good grade. You’re here, in our house, on our anniversary, and I, your wife, am hungry, and you’re correcting my grammar? Stop with the skating, and answer the question. Are you coming now or not?” She put her purse down. She looked over his shoulder. When he didn’t answer: “Are you sleeping with Lauren?”

“I would never jeopardize Ali’s career, Lou.”

“Career! She’s a little girl!”

“She’s fourteen years old! Comparatively geriatric! Tara Lipinski was fourteen when she won the World Championships.”

“I don’t know who the hell that is or what you’ve done with my husband. But I need you to stop talking about little twirling freaks right now.”

“Calm down, Lou. Ali can still beat the freaks.”

“Dad,” I said finally. “Researching skating statistics is not going to help me beat anyone. Can’t you just celebrate for mom’s sake? Skating will still be here tomorrow.”

“Success waits for no one,” he said. “Especially in the skating world. I’m surprised at you.”

I didn’t have an answer to this. His assessment of the sport was correct, but he wanted so to believe that he could help me win—that number crunching and research and analysis could glean victories of the body—and he couldn’t. What he could do was give my mother this one night for all the days she’d tried to make him happy.

“I could understand if you’d bought a motorcycle,” she said. “Bankrupted us. Blown half a year’s salary at the casinos. But this is not normal.” Peanuts would have been enough for my mother. She wasn’t above Red Sox spectatorship. Peanuts and a big warm arm around her neck as a stadium full of fans stood to scream for a man running home.

“For better or for worse. For better or for worse is what I have to remind myself,” she said when he stared at the computer screen and said nothing. I suppose what she was thinking was that she ought to have said, “How about for better or for best?” It didn’t matter. Through the world-mute of his obsession, my father didn’t hear her.

According to my mother, the horror of Boston traffic was why she’d married a man in New Hampshire, but now she was back in the thick of it, getting the middle finger every weekday as she drove me to the rink, her only rest the weekends when my father took me. She bought books that taught how to breathe through stress, books about how to empty the mind, but one thing we could agree on was that emptying the mind shouldn’t be done while navigating Boston traffic. “A vegetable patch, a fence—not even picket—and no more of this place. Is that so much to ask?” she would say, strangling the steering wheel with her hands. “I didn’t even get an inside reception. We danced the first dance under an umbrella. I thought I’d escaped this rotten Boston fate.”

Usually, she stayed in the running car when we arrived at the rink, studying how to help herself. She would help herself whatever way a book said for a couple of weeks until she didn’t feel the instructions had helped her help herself at all.

One day I opened the sedan door, and she was pounding a cloth doll with a magnetic mallet. There was a hardback true crime book on the floor of the car, the name Donnie O’Donnell embossed in shiny letters on the cover.

“Good book?” I asked.

“I know the man who wrote it,” she said.

“What are you doing?” I asked, and she said she was beating life into her body with a Tong Ren hammer.

“Do you want to come inside?”

“I can’t feel my feet in there,” she said. “Do you want your mother to catch emphysema in the cold?”

“No, I don’t want you to catch any disease,” I answered.

When she did bother to come inside, it was for the outfits. My mother sewed every skating dress I had ever worn, and she liked to see what the other girls were wearing. It was this that made her buy yards of crushed velvet: red for good luck, pink for girls, green because it was a color she had always wanted to wear but made her look like a leukemia patient. She perused years of costumes in coffee table books, the spangly history of figure skating shimmering by. She couldn’t name the skaters, but she knew whether their costumes were lycra or jersey knit. I told her that costumes had been more important when skating was still on the six-point system, and judges could make arbitrary decisions on what made a 5.8 or a 5.9. At the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, after it was revealed that Judge Marie Reine La Gougne had given the Russian pair Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikhauralidze the gold over the Canadians Jamie Sale and David Pelletier because she was coerced by Russian skating officials, the International Skating Union moved to make the scoring system less penetrable to corruption, ruling that domination would come less through artistry than the accumulation of perfect moves. Now that every movement had been given a particular point value, what mattered most was performance, not appearance. But she sewed tiny pearls to a dress for me anyway.

The afternoon she realized her work was too subtle to be seen from the bleachers, my mother went out to the car to empty her mind.

“It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them as long as you can see me,” I told her because I thought it would lessen the pain.

“Everything isn’t about you,” she said, and she never sewed subtly again. Instead, she made a shiny silver dress for me. Sequined every inch, when I wore it, I looked scaled as a fish.

“That thing is so shiny I need sunglasses just to look at you,” Ryan said when I went to practice one day. “If I wasn’t so damn handsome, I’d want to be you right now.”

“I’d trade this dress for your triple flip any day,” I said, though I knew talent wasn’t of the barter system.

“What can I say, it’s like breathing to me.”

“Like necessary,” I said. “Like you can’t live without it.”

“Like easy,” he said. He straddled into a split.

“How do you make it easy?” I asked.

A young guy in a dark jacket boot-thudded towards the Zamboni garage and waved at me as he walked by. His top half perfectly resembled an inverted triangle, and the blue of his eyes brightened against one of those faces that look permanently dusty.

“Bon voyage! Have a nice ride! Have a nice ass!” Ryan called. The guy looked over his shoulder and shook his head.

“Not his type,” I said. The truth was I was fourteen and didn’t know anything about sex except that it was a risk if you wanted to do anything beyond a baby with your body.

“My God! Are you kidding? Who’d have thought? You must have won some sort of award with a head on you like that!” Ryan turned to split in the other direction. “I wouldn’t even consider anyway. Can you imagine these pearly whites up in his filthy grundle? I have tight hamstrings, and I have standards, and they are this: you don’t want a job that smells or someone who smells like their job. Fish monger: smells like fish. Janitor: smells like trash. Kindergarten teacher: smells like children. Homemaker: smells like home. No and no and no, and you guessed it: no!”

“Zambonis don’t smell. What’s a grundle?”

“God, are you dyslexic or something? It’s a metaphor,” Ryan said. “I’m the prettiest bitch in this entire rink, and if you weren’t almost as fabulous as me, I wouldn’t even still be having this conversation.”

“Lucky me,” I said.

“Yes, lucky you,” he said. “Now give me a compliment before I pull a Tonya Harding and have your knee whacked.”

Emma padded onto the mats and turned her hips into a butterfly stretch.

“Hi Emma,” I said.

“I’m waiting,” Ryan said. “Clock’s ticking.”

“I hate you,” Emma said.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Her mother hates her,” Ryan said.

“Ryan!” I don’t know why I was surprised. “No she doesn’t, Emma.”

“You’ve got three seconds. Whack! Whack! Whack!”

“You flip like you breathe,” I said. I glittered towards the locker room in my new dress.

I began skipping out on God for practice, since Sunday morning ice sessions were cheaper and less full and my father, too, forewent church to witness progress. I speculated that I needed another 3.3 points to get out of New England. At juvenile the top four in each regional competition went to the Junior Olympics, and the only way I had a chance was increasing my technical elements score. That meant I had to land the double Axel by the fall. All I needed, I told myself, was an astounding act of addition. While my mother crossed herself and took the body and the blood of Christ, I threw myself into the air and banked on making miracles. It wasn’t until I had fallen many hours that I resorted to God. I prayed in laps around the rink—God I want to land this, God I want to be perfect—but really, I was only ever praying to myself.

One Sunday afternoon, my mother came home from church reciting news of the town. Did I hear that Becky Sanders and Owen Mills were going to the prom? Did I know the high school quarterback was accepted to UNH? The town was one more of trees than people, and to even eat at a restaurant meant driving over borders. Families dawdled after mass over donuts and juice just for face time with people they hadn’t married or given birth to. There was bingo once a month. I tried to pay attention to what she said, but without realizing it, I fell asleep in front of her. I was practicing seven hours a day.

“If you can’t stay awake through a sentence, you’re working too hard,” she said, poking me awake.

“See Spot,” I said. “See, I’m fine.”

“You didn’t even complete it,” she said. “See Spot run,” she said.

“It’s still a sentence.”

“Take a day off,” she said. “We could go to the mall. You could choose a birthday present. We could go to the salon.”

Ever since landing the double loop, I’d been refusing to cut my hair, even as she complained that I looked like someone who hadn’t ever seen civilization. This was the hair with which I’d landed the jump, and even a few ounces off could change the aerodynamics. A few ounces lighter, and the same force might over-rotate the jump, or else my head might turn faster than my body, pulling me from my rotational axis. I didn’t think the hair had landed the jump, but I wasn’t about to change anything.

“I’ll like anything you give me,” I said. “Except that.”

“What am I supposed to do with anything?” she said. “Anything? I need some direction.”

“I’d take extra lessons.”

“A lesson is not a gift,” she said. “A present you can keep. I want to give you something to keep, a thing. Why won’t you take a thing from me?”

But I did take something from her. I cost her bingo later that week all the way from the rink. Friday, she drove me right up to the door, and the plan was my father would pick me up so she could make it to church on time. She had tiptoed in slippers the night before to keep the three-layer lemon cake baked especially for the occasion from falling. “Quiet! The cake is rising,” she said. We couldn’t even break a whisper, as the egg whites would surely collapse.

It was one of those March days that could make you reconsider the phrase in with the lion, out with the lamb. The streets were slick with sleet, and the black rubber mats in the arena were littered with snow packed in the shape of boot bottoms. I saw a series of two prints, one small and girl-sized and one giant, curve in the direction of the locker rooms. My own feet deviated towards the warm-up mats.

“What did you do yesterday?” I asked Ryan.

He held his knee to chest, and looked up through the violet powder of two lids. A grade school aged girl whacked her rope by his head.

“Fidget,” he answered. He’d read an article about fidgeting off fat. You could shimmy your knee to 350 calories skinnier, said one doctor, and Ryan had twiddled his thumbs furiously for five hours after his ice sessions and weight training. “And there’s no risk of injury. Zero, zip, thank the lordy-me nothing. It’s completely low impact.”

“Risk yields the greatest reward,” I said.

“Have you been reading poetry or something?” Ryan asked.

“Of course not,” I said.

“Give her a push,” Ryan said, putting his leg into my arm to stretch behind his head. “Be careful with these babies; they’re the only goodies this old bag of tricks has got.”

“You aren’t, are you?” I said. I rested his foot on my shoulder. “Old, I mean.”

“Honey, I remember when we were still on the six point system.”

“So that makes you?”

“Ancient and fabulous. Now let go.” He extended his left leg for me to lift. I tried to envision Ryan at forty. He was so exceptional, he seemed begotten not made, timeless, ever young and jumping and flaring an arm above head to the drama of Bizet. I couldn’t imagine him after skating. There were tours, of course. Retired skaters might delude the country into thinking skating theater. They stopped in major cities, skated easy flash routines, twirled and grinned through neon spotlights. It was a way of not having to start over.

I laced my skates and lapped the rink. Lauren clapped her hands to regulate the tempo of my crossovers, one two, faster and faster, until finally I reached unclappable speed. Camel! Layback! Sit! Back sit! came her call from the edge of the ice. As soon as one movement was over, another. There would be no waste. The New England Regional Championships had been a year away when I began in Boston. Then eleven months, and now only two seasons. My birthday would happen sooner than I’d like. Forty-one minutes left. Forty-minutes left. I pulled my arms in to draw me faster and faster through the spin. I felt my toe pick catch. I saw a flash of green light. My face hit the ice.

It was rare to fall on a spin already mastered, and I’d been doing this one for six months. The fluorescents overhead snapped in and out like lightning, to the pulse pounding my head. It felt like something happened, not done, which was of course impossible. Origin didn’t matter. I’d have to do it again. I stood and stepped into a crossover, wound my body up and threw myself once more into the spin. A prickle skimmed my chin, and I heard Mrs. Closerman shriek. When I extended my leg in completion, I knew the spin had been perfect.

“Stop! Stop right there!” Lauren yelled. Perhaps it had not been perfect after all. I looked down to see the spin carving. The science of skating is violence. It is steel scarring frozen water. A perfect spin scratches the eyeball white surface with a small circular storm. And it was a perfect storm when I saw my work, a storm reddened and spiraling splattered blood through the pattern of my turns.

I touched my face and felt something hard and wet and uncovered. Skin curled up like pencil shavings around the wound. I tried to pull it down back around the bone, but it wouldn’t stay. I couldn’t get a grip on the slipperiness of my chin. It was like squeezing the inside of an uncooked egg.

“A band aid, and then the toe loop,” I told Lauren, skating towards the ice entrance.

“There will be no toe loops today. You’re losing too much blood.” I looked at the dark trickle through my front. I was falling out of my face.

Later, when I returned from the hospital with a bandage over an embroidered chin, my mother carried her cake to the kitchen table, brought a slice to my father, and threw the rest away. From upstairs I heard games on the television—Big money! Big money! Big money!—and the cranking of a wheel. I lay a towel on my bedroom floor for crunches and prayed—two hundred two, two hundred three, one more, one more. Thank God it was only my face. I thought of boys, who were fewer in the skating world, with a quicker climb to the top, and I thought of Anna Lee. We called her Fruit Loops because her father was a millionaire from Razzle Apple raspberry apple juice and O-Mango Tang orange mango sparkling water. She had showed up at SCOB with three triple jumps at age twelve. She was Asian. We hated her for the hips she’d probably never get. We hated her when we saw her mother, this middle aged woman with a pre-teen body. I couldn’t afford recovery time.

I slept cross-armed that night. That way, I wouldn’t go to bed empty-handed. I crossed my left leg over my right in the position of jump rotation and imagined myself at a pinnacle. In this way I could make the next day come before it came.

The scar settled into a puckered pink worm, and I was back to skating the next day.

That spring, I wished away nights. I woke up before alarms sounded. I dissected chicken breasts into ideal sizes, clipping nicks of finger in the knife flurry over a red pepper while my mother emoted into casseroles I wouldn’t eat: green bean and fried onion, cream of mushroom with golden cracker crumble, tuna-macaroni with cheese. She’d decided everything that was bad for your heart was good for your heart, and everything that was good for your heart was just bad. The measured shreds of cheddar, the level spoons of salt—you knew what would come of them immediately, and the best thing was to let the genes figure out the rest. I stuck with what I made. I didn’t trust chromosomes as much as myself. You could be anyone.

My chopping was quicker than a casserole, and when I was finished, my father would condense a school day into the hour before dinner. He had always wanted to be a professor, and my truancy allowed him to educate. Seventy-five minutes was the length of a college class, he reasoned, so an hour should suffice for junior high school.

The night my mother made shepherd’s pie, though, my father went on college length, letting centrifugal force spill right into dinner.

“You would feel it most clearly in the scratch,” he said. “But even the camel or the layback or any of them, it isn’t really there.”

“Bon appétit,” my mother said. Her big-mitted hand gripped a casserole dish stained with burnt brown bouillon. She set layers of coiled ground meat and potatoes at the center of the table.

“It probably feels like a force is pulling everything apart,” he said. “But it doesn’t exist. There isn’t something in the universe pulling everything away from the center.”

“Doesn’t this casserole just smell like home?” my mother said.

“It’s inertia,” my father said.

“Like momentum?” I asked.

“Roasted corn makes this a special shepherd,” my mother said.

“Resistance to change in movement or rest,” said my father.

“Inertia could be your head is going the wrong direction and the rest of your body following, then?”

“Your head wants to stay moving, and your body follows it blindly away from itself; precisely.”

“I can’t let inertia get the best of me,” I said. Clanking came from a serving spoon striking a plate. A layer of potatoes fell off coils of ground beef.

With one hand my father ate my mother’s food, while with the other he wrote, “distance divided by distance times time times mass times velocity” on a piece of loose pepper. I wiggled a ring of pepper in the tines of my fork.

“Am I mass?” I asked.

“One bite, Ali. Come on,” my mother said to me. “Open up the hangar for the airplane,” she said, flying casserole in a downward spiral toward my mouth.

“Mom.”

“Lou,” my father said to my mother. “We’ve got homework here.”

“Homework?” my mother said. “You two have got homework. And what do I have? I have been working to make a good meal and a good home and a good family dinner, and you people don’t even care.”

“I do care. It just doesn’t matter,” I said, “to me.”

“Don’t you care about me? Don’t you care even enough to take one bite?” she asked. “When I was a girl, I could only wish that my mother would make me a meal like this.”

“If you knew me at all, you’d know I can only wish I could. I can only do anything to death. I worry to death. I love to death. I train to death.” And wasn’t it true, I thought, that we said a perfect jump or a spin was executed? Weren’t we killing something when we stabbed our toes and cut curlicues to the operatic pitch of Bizet, Stravinsky, and the deaf pounding of Beethoven?

“It’s true,” my father said. “She’s training to death.”

“Anything to death is not healthy,” my mother said. “Why can’t you just smoke cigarettes in the bathroom like other kids?”

“You want our daughter to smoke cigarettes?”

“Why can’t you fall in love with a bad boy? Fall out of love with a bad boy? What’s so wrong with size six? I was a size six when I was your age, and look at me now! I’m happy enough!”

“Happy enough is not enough,” I said.

“Enough should be enough. Enough is enough!”

“You don’t understand.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? I can’t understand you because I’m not your real mother?” It wasn’t what I’d meant at all. “I raised you. But I guess enough isn’t enough. I didn’t give birth to you so now I’ll never understand you? Well maybe you’ll never be an Olympic champion. Who will love you then?” I saw the shepherd’s pie overhead and then scattered on the floor. I saw cabinet doors swing hard so hard they bounced back closed and snack crackers falling from my mother’s hands over the table like wedding confetti. She ran upstairs to her bedroom, leaving us in animal cracker crumbles. It seemed, sitting in the mess of the kitchen, that my mother would never forgive me. But the next morning when I went downstairs, the kitchen was a masterpiece of elbow grease, and my mother was swinging at an inert doll with a hammer. “Your father is waiting in the car for you,” she said. “I’ll see you after your skate.” Life was still happening. I got in the car to go to the rink.

On our car rides, my father and I would talk about the future. I’d say, “In three weeks I will master the spin.” He would say, “In three years, you’ll qualify for the national championships.” In time that hadn’t passed yet, we choreographed sequences of triumph, whirling away from todays, accenting time signatures with arrhythmic feats and perfect crescendos.

My father’s vocabulary circulated in the ellipses of my own. The death drop, he could tell the uninformed, is a flying spin in which the legs split apart and weight shifts at the pinnacle of flight to form a sideways cross. The counter is a serpentine figure traced on one edge with a swift flip to the reverse edge. Above overpasses and beneath tunnels, through interstates and around bending roads, he dreamt constellations of brilliant movements connected by the etchings of my feet. All the while, little houses and groceries looked to be pulling away, but really we were hurtling forward.

When we ran out of things to say, there was the Long Distance Dedication radio show. Our favorites were what we called the long long distance dedications. Those were the ones made to dead people. Sometimes the dead people were dogs, but mostly they were young people wrenched too early from life by drunk driving accidents or rare diseases that ravaged their immune systems but not their spirits. The dedications happened every ten songs during the Top Forty Countdown program and they came from small towns like ours, from people we thought were nothing like us. Never happy, the songs were requested in letters most would be embarrassed to speak out loud. “Pipe up!” I would say, and my father would turn the volume knob on the car radio until maudlin strains of piano tinkled through the speakers behind the voice of the radio personality reading the letters.

Dear Casey, the requests began.

“So they’re on a first name basis?” I asked.

“No, Casey’s just gotten so big he’s only got room for a one-word name like Madonna,” my father said.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Christ,” he said.

We listened for clues as to what kind of letter it would be. For as long as I can remember, my next door neighbor Sally was my best friend in the world. Even after she received the diagnosis she made every day alive. Or, I was just a regular teenage girl until three days before homecoming I was diagnosed with mononucleosis.

“Is that a joke?” my father asked.

“No, that’s a teenager,” I said. The song was “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You,” and we postulated gruesome literal interpretations even after Casey had progressed to the nineteenth and eighteenth most requested song of the day. We laughed at other people’s misfortune because it seemed then it could never be our own.

My mother treated the New England Regional Championships like a prom. She figured I’d never have one for her to photograph, but at least there would be an affair of a dress. Lauren recommended a skating seamstress named Kasia and sent her five pages of notes on Firebird. God-defying was the main point, hypnotic the second, but my mother pulled pages from teen magazines. I hadn’t seen her so excited since she ordered the fourteen-inch Porcelain “Heritage” Gratins the year before, so even though the magazine dresses looked like Easter baskets, I turned my mouth to an admiring O. Before the seamstress’s mirror, I looked at a pale yellow puff that raised left with my right. I was God-defying alright.

I had the entire day planned as a scientific experiment. Two hours before the competition, I would drink eight ounces of protein shake. An hour before I would begin to jump rope and stretch. Thirty minutes before I would urinate. Twenty-five minutes before I would wash my hands vigorously. Twenty minutes before I would change into the horrible dress, lace my skates, and bend my knees ten times to check the tightness of my lacing. Then I would make fate.

“How do you know you’ll have to go then?” my mother asked over dinner the night before. A spinach soufflé sank in the middle of the table.

“I know because I’ll make myself,” I said.

“You can do that?”

“I make myself all the time,” I said. “Skating is no time for accidents.”

“Unless it’s the other girl,” my father said.

“Alvin,” my mother scolded.

I kept my mouth working on a boiled egg. I wanted nothing to do with accidents. A forgotten kitchen alarm sounded.

“I was always almost peeing my pants when I was pregnant,” my mother said, ignoring the alarm.

“Lou.” My father got up and turned off the alarm.

“It’s true,” she said. “But I forgot: we don’t talk about failure in this household. We’re champions in this household.”

“You aren’t a failure, Mom.” I spooned some soufflé onto my plate. “And this is absolutely to die for! Genius! Brilliant! Delicious!” A spoon of soufflé in my mouth, I smiled as best I could.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is why I should keep a journal. I’d be a better mother if I just wrote these things in a journal. That’s what they advise in the books: you write down the ugly feeling, you crumple it up, you throw it away, it never comes back. Done. Solved. Health. Release.”

“Genius! Brilliant! Delicious!” I said, taking another bite. “You don’t need a journal. You’re great.” I looked at the clock. “But I’m going to bed. I’ve got to stay on schedule.” She kissed the hair at the top of my head goodnight.

“Dream victorious,” my father said. I took the stairs in twos to wait for tomorrow.

The next morning, I woke up and hung my competition dress on a hanger and with the whiz of the garment bag closure, it was as though I was sealing the transition between every day and today, the day, competition day, the day my year would be justified or a sad little joke.

I went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and threw up in the sink not even on purpose. I interpreted the vomit as a bonus and gargled a mint rinse. I pulled my hair so tight into a bun that my face stretched. I, I, I, it was my day, I thought, but then I threw up on the way downstairs again.

“You’re sick,” my mother said. “You can’t go.”

“I am and I can,” I said. Green feathers of spinach bunched between the cracks of the kitchen tiles.

“Ali, you do look a little puce,” my father said. “Do you feel puce?”

“I feel like we have seven minutes to get in the car to make it to the competition early enough to be on-time.”

And so we left, my mother glancing back at me every few minutes.

“We’ll be proud of you even if you’re vomiting too much to skate,” she said.

“I won’t,” I said. I jumped imaginary, perfect jumps and watched the clock.

When we arrived at the rink, I hung my dress in the locker room and went to jump rope by the bleachers. I could all see my breath whiten and fade in the frigid interior, and the place was buzzing with a cold electricity. “You have a right to be sick,” my mother said. “Whatever you decide, right?” I kissed her cheek and slapped the rope in circles against the grounding.

I’d gotten through bouncing three hundred times without anything coming up when Ryan swept down the cascading steps, glinting like a blade, to wish me perfect jumps.

“Have you been vomiting?” he whispered.

“Three times,” I said.

“Good girl,” he said. “Light as a feather, thin as a board.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him the sickness wasn’t intentional. Instead, I grabbed a trash barrel, feeling a thrust inside. “Let’s not be overeager now, sassy-ass,” he said, patting my back. “You’ve still got six years of that ahead of you.”

“Six?”

“Oh for the days when six was perfect,” he said. “But that was then and now you’re more than almost fabulous. Now get out there and ex-e-cute.”

“It’s going to be a blood bath,” I swallowed.

“Ah, sportsmanship!” Ryan sighed. He turned and ran back up the bleachers.

Lauren stood by the locker room. She wore a red coat and had pulled her hair back into a bun like when she herself had been a competitor. There are some habits that stay after their purpose is finished, like the woman who won’t smoke even after her pregnancy is over or the atheist who says “God bless” to a sneeze. A sneer passed over her teeth when she looked at me.

I found the order on a white paper taped to the same wall where results from completed divisions hung. I would skate third after the warm-up. “Third is practically perfect,” Lauren said. “Your muscles will be warm but you’ll have a chance to rest. And besides, they say lucky things come in threes.” I looked up and the clock said it was time to go to the mats. Lauren stretched my leg up behind my head. “Did you hear me?” she asked. “I said lucky things come in threes.” I thought of my mother, the first of three lives to be born and the only one not to bear life at all. She miscarried twice before she adopted, so would that make me the third or the first? I was the third plan and the first that lived. I was the first who walked and the third who wasn’t what she’d hoped. Vomit pushed up, and I pushed down.

“I don’t need luck,” I said. “I’ve got me.”

“You’ll kill it,” Lauren smiled. I looked at my watch. It was time to make myself pee.

I stopped the thrust in my throat from coming up and forced my pee in a brisk stream into the toilet. A girl was screaming in the locker room about a lacing. She said someone had cut her skate lace, and I gave her one of my three spares. The smart among us never left our skates out of sight because the smart and dumb both had heard the stories: blades scraped on cement to ruin the sharpening radius, razors stuck in the boot to filet the foot, nails loosened to unhinge the blade from the boot, and all the other ways fate could be pilfered.

“The regionals are no place to make friends,” Lauren told me.

“I’m not,” I said, stretching. “I’m just making sure there’s one more person to beat.”

“Today decides your year,” she said as the rumble of rolling suitcases introduced more hopefuls to the rink. The droves of us carried our skates in wheeled suitcases because we thought we were going places. Also they couldn’t be jerked like a shoulder bag and dislocate the scapula.

My flight for the five minute on-ice warm-up was me, Alanis Moranis, Phoebe Spiller, Rebecca Constantine, Sandra Lieberman, and Katrina Merriman. The six coaches—seven if you counted Constantine’s choreographer—stood by the gate with us. Moranis was the Russian’s girl, and he spoke close, chopping accentuation with one arm, the other on her shoulder. Spiller’s coach squeezed down her leg as though it was a tube of toothpaste to relax her hamstrings. Merriman’s coach stood looking off in the distance. It was an embarrassment to be seen with her after last year’s regionals, but the girl was her income and she was one of the few with children of her own to pay for. Lauren squeezed my shoulder, and I watched Lieberman’s coach stick her with a tiny cross pin. It didn’t matter that she was Jewish. When it came to competition, you sought whatever help you could get.

When the Zamboni had only one turn left to blank out the ice, we took off our pants. Someone somewhere had made a small fortune off our vigilance with thermal flyaway bottoms, and I knew it was time as I heard zipper whirs slipping down slender legs that had to stay warm for the snap and stretch and bending to be best. The heavy gate latch scissored up. The heavy gate latch dropped down. I let the others on first, so there’d be no toe picks coming at me from the back. Tonya Harding wasn’t the first to try to knock a leg off the competition. She was just the one that got caught.

I made an eight around and through the arena and tried not to notice the judges. See them take a note and I’d start wondering, deciphering the motion of their pens instead of executing. There was a crack to find between cognizance and consciousness, between not noticing the other girls, whether they had a new trick or had shown up as overweight disasters, all the while keeping them in the periphery of my eye so there wouldn’t be a crash. But of course trying not to notice only happens when you notice. Like Dr. Ogden would tell me one day, if you’re thinking Don’t do this, you’re thinking about what you don’t want to do, not what you do. So I tried instead to hone in on the feel of cold air going down my throat opposite of vomit. I focused on mechanics. Arm angles and pick placement and leg extension and pelvic alignment would make or negate the year.

After the warm-up, I stood in a bathroom stall bending my knees and flushing the toilet repeatedly to drown out any clues as to my competitors’ performances. If I heard applause, I’d know Alana Moranis or Phoebe Spiller had landed a jump, so I flushed ignorance through their programs. I went stall to stall because the toilets wouldn’t swallow right after a flush. It was Lauren’s job to come for me when Spiller was skating off the ice.

Cycles through, Lauren opened the door and I walked out into applause. I didn’t interpret it as much. Clapping indiscriminately was the one sportsmanlike practice you could count on in figure skating. The important thing was not to search Spiller’s butt for the damp tights that would be evidence of falls. I kept my eyes located shoulder height. My kneecaps were quivering. This must be what it felt like to take amphetamines, I thought.

When the announcer made my name reach the highest corners of the rink, I removed my guards. Lauren squeezed my hand once before I skated to the middle.

“Take your time,” she said.

“Taking,” I said.

I glided to center ice and covered my eyes. These minutes are mine, I whispered. God, these minutes must be mine. And then the bright flash of Stravinsky bore through the speakers, and I was the Firebird, vomit be damned. You cannot vomit if you aren’t human. I wasn’t human, just a whorl of arms, a jump jarring through suburban Massachusetts, spins and the airy split of a leap called a falling leaf. I stabbed gravity and saw seconds slow at the pinnacle of an Axel, amazed faces, a stilled clock, the flourish of a landing. A jump like that, maybe it was me turning through the air, but it may as well have been making the whole world whirl around me.

Alivopro Doyle, the announcer said once I’d raised my arms in an ecstatic end. Alivopro Doyle: she flies with her own wings.

The rest of the competition was hugging and my mother crying and Lauren blinking gleaming eyes fast to fan them dry. “You were the best,” my father said. “Moranis and Spiller looked like troglodytes in comparison.”

“You’re my father. You have to say that,” I said.

“That’s not true at all,” he said. “The judges have to agree with me.”

“Figure skating is a subjective sport,” Lauren told him. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

“That’s an oxymoron,” he said.

The oxymoron was the truth though. It was up to nine judges to determine whether or not I was first or just some other number. Every movement had a standard point value, but the points awarded could deviate up or down by three-tenths based on the judges perceived grade of execution. It wasn’t just another sport where as long as the ball went through the hole, you’d done enough. It was quality and quantity; there was completing an element, and there was completing it better and better and better. The best part was trying to be the best, and now it was the worst: waiting to see if your best was enough.

Suddenly, a sparkling swarm of little girls and the adults whose careers and daughters were these little girls were tearing towards a wall. The little man in glasses taping the paper up barely made it away with his toes still attached. I got the feeling that my lungs were crumpling up, and I tried to remember how to inhale. I told myself that each movement in my program had had a purpose. I hadn’t thrown one arm above on a Lutz just because I could. I hadn’t snapped my leg from behind to front, drawn myself down into a sit spin and changed feet for no reason, nor had I counter-rotated footwork inexplicably. But now it was the judges who decided if the reasons I had enumerated in stretched legs and quick spins were enough.

I didn’t even see the scores. Lauren started screaming. Alana Moranis shoved past, spitting congratulations like a wad of flavor-tired gum.

“First! First!” my father hollered.

“My baby! My baby!” my mother screamed.

There were tears on my cheek that weren’t mine. There were arms squeezing and pulling me up.

“First! First!” my father said again.

“What did I tell you?” Lauren said.

“It was all worth it,” my mother said.

“I don’t know,” I said. Because what is worth anything when everything you’ve worked for is accomplished, a thing of the past tense? And then I remembered this was only a qualifier. There was more left, so much more left. Tomorrow I would be back to practice and testing my mother’s patience in the rink basement. I would graph my statistics and record them on a calendar leading to the Junior Olympics. There would be falling and getting up and measuring diced peppers. Mornings would be waking with a hand ready to hit the alarm off and not being enough and being better and knowing there was even better, and I felt my heart start up: again! Again! Again!

Then the crowd was rushing in another direction, though it was too early for the next division’s scores. There were shouts as hysterical as those of victory, heart heard through the ears, two kin voices harmonizing broken dreams. I pushed through people as though through shower curtains. I threw open the locker room door. “You lost! You lost!” Emma was crying. Blood clung to gold sequins stitched around her neck, and her face was scored as a grilled pork chop. “You lost! You lost!” she screamed again, and where her mother’s arm hammered up and down I saw the magenta slash of her hand holding hard pink blade guards. Emma moved her arms to protect her face and her mother threw them off. She tore the glitter off her daughter’s dress, and the next smack trailed a long pink welt beneath her neck. Saliva fanned from the mother’s mouth and she was shrieking, “Everything I ever wanted is gone.”