“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