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,”