The Hopeful. Tracy O'Neill

corset to form my spine properly. Cruelly called an immobilizer, it pitched me erect, and because it extended over the tops of my thighs, I couldn’t sit. Nor could I walk so much as waddle side to side like a metronome, my torso swinging in the sweat-drenched synthetics.

      “If sitting was a Salchow, you’d find a way,” my mother said.

      “If sitting was a Salchow, I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it,” I said. “I just want to finish my coffee in bed.”

      Mark rushed into the conversation. “Coffee is how I got through grad school.” He didn’t speak so much as blurt, and immediately I liked his awkward valor.

      “Coffee is how I got through starving,” I returned. To be afraid or to laugh? he looked to wonder. “To getting through,” I said, and he raised his paper cup as though we were celebrating.

      “To getting through.”

      My mother departed quickly—“I’d better be leaving for my permanent then”—and I knew I’d embarrassed her. Replacing my coffee cup on the bedside table, I watched her wilting curls shrink in the doorway.

      Mark took his hand in and out of his pockets, then sat at the end of my bed.

      “I’m Mark,” he said. He held one hand above my body.

      “I’m pathetic,” I said.

      “And self-effacing,” he said. “A virtuoso.” When he smiled his cheeks wrinkled like disturbed pond water.

      He started talking about himself, about graduate school, about not being in graduate school, about Leonard Leonards, about communism. All I knew of communism, I told Mark, were unfair advantages. Until the Soviet Union dissolved, communist countries churned out some of the best skaters in the world, while only moneyed families could afford the expense of figure skating in the United States. Soviet skaters were fed caviar, trained, and professionally massaged with government funding. The Eastern Bloc had had an advantage, and even now for an American to take lessons from a former Soviet was somewhere between chic and treacherous.

      “Figure skating,” Mark said smiling, “is not much different than American politics.”

      But figure skating was much fairer than American democracy, I thought. In rinks, the justice of corporeality trumped patriotism. At one point, I had been between Filthy Phil and The Russian. Lauren had been my coach for years, but sometimes I wanted that Salchow more than I wanted not to hurt her. Filthy Phil got his name from his five o’clock shadow and the way he touched his girls’ butts. All the coaches touched their students’ butts; it was the only way to make us feel how our bodies should be positioned for certain skating movements. They grabbed and pulled our pelvises forward. They called this being beneath ourselves, and being beneath ourselves was the only way to turn correctly in the air. But parents said that for Filthy Phil, butts weren’t just business. That left the Russian. “Better dead than red to some, but he does get results,” my father had said. “The judges couldn’t argue with the Salchow.”

      “So you went with The Russian?” Mark asked.

      “No,” I said. In the end I stayed with Lauren, maybe because I loved her. She had drilled me until I landed double loops, scratched out odd-bodied spins. There was genius to her methods, the innovations that flipped pain into the appearance of ease. I remembered when I was breaking in new skates, my feet bloody-pus blistered, and how she sent me running barefoot on a trail of broken seashells in the parking lot. “You want to know pain?” she called. “Pain is not cutting it. Pain is falling short. Pain is not making it. Are you in pain, Ali? Are you in pain?” I pounded over the seashells—no no no, no no no pain—until nothing could hurt me except the things I thought, the mistakes all my doing, like the one that broke my back and made me a normal girl, wallowing through summer tutoring.

      “Tell me more,” Mark said, and I did, though for him it was just a blip in the Cold War. For me, it was the only thing worth fighting for.

      A few weeks after I began my tutoring sessions with Mark, I didn’t need to immobilize anymore. The physical therapist prescribed abdominal exercises for my recovery, and I enjoyed the sit-ups, even if their only objective was that I could function regularly. It was nice to be behind—it meant there was somewhere left to go, even if that somewhere was, as my father once said, all the way up to mediocre. It was a better way to exhaust my moroseness than imagining windmill sails slicing synapses between sadness and the everyday.

      “This is excessive therapy,” my mother told me one afternoon. I’d been at it on the floor, pulling rubber cords colored like primary school crayons and rolling my spine against an oversized Styrofoam log. “There are reps and sets for a reason. There’s the expression ‘too much of a good thing’ for a reason.”