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