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.