Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“Or how about this one?”

“More feeling, Mark! Emote! Emote!”

“I’m emoting!” he wailed, squashing his face into clownish agony.

“Do you know why it was that after, and in spite of, a fawn-awkward double Axel-double toe loop Oksana Baiul edged out Nancy Kerrigan for the Olympic gold?” I was doing my best Sam impression, hands fluttering with my words, chest pressed out mannishly. “I can tell you it wasn’t the East German judge. No, it was because Nancy Kerrigan skated like a WASP that night. She was competent. She was clean. Graceful even. But all the heart she had was an organ. Figure skating is not just a sport. Done beyond properly, it can be an elaboration on the love that makes you more than lump parts. It can be a cross-examination of the loveless losers who have never dared to be different past the point of vegetarian.”

“Hey, I’m a vegetarian!” Mark said, feigning hurt.

I continued imitating Sam. “This is how in one year Michelle Kwan went from a little girl with all the jumps of a senior lady to a senior lady that made the competition look like battery-operated monkeys. Of course then along came Tara Lipinski, but don’t even talk to me about that prepubescent troll! Before there were string bean automatons there were women, and these women were artists. Peggy Flemming. Janet Lynn. Katarina Witt. These were women with stories in their bodies. The worst thing that ever could’ve happened to figure skating is this new judging system. You can’t quantify quality piecemeal: a few points for utilization of the ice surface here! A few points for transitions there! What we’re talking about is soul.”

“And now my soul is emoting, while my body is just that of a winded vegetarian.” Mark collapsed on the floor dramatically. He smiled up at me as the song banged obstinately through the stereo. There was a rush in my chest. It wasn’t the music. I looked at this pile of man on the floor, all golden legs and arms, dimples, sweet joking desperation. “Help, Ali! Help! You’re the only one,” he cried, “who can save me!” Though my hand was damp, he took it in his and pulled himself to his feet. My arm went tense with the weight of him, and I felt the strength of his long, smooth fingers. When he was standing, he drew me into a hug. He was thin, but his chest was firm and warm against my neck, and I could smell a musty metallic dampness through his T-shirt. “Thanks, partner. Virtuosos have to stick together, you know?” For a moment, I considered if we really were a virtuoso duo, instead of a tutor and a pupil. We’d thrash and beat and crescendo through songs, heat rising off bodies in shimmery mist, as I narrated the fleeting crests of my history.

“We have math to do,” I said finally.

“Oh,” he mumbled, dropping his arms.

That night, before supper, my cousin Lucy called. According to her, what I needed besides a good lay was memory. “You know when that last fucker left me, I told myself, ‘You lived twenty-some years without him, you’ll live another.’”

“You only think you’ll live to middle age?” I asked.

“No, VoVo. But the point is, if you lived before, you’ll live again.” I tried to remember what my life had been like before, but it all seemed vague, as though I wasn’t even a person yet. I’d been a regular, forgettable girl. Remembering the sweet sickening rush I’d felt at the clasp of Mark’s hand, the expanse of him circling around me, I shook my head, as though it would negate the pathetic electricity. It had been an embarrassing tumble toward the humble cliché of romance, but it wasn’t too late to correct.

“Dinner!” my mother called.

In the living room, the activity was mostly elbows moving from obtuse to acute, obtuse to acute, food on the plate, food to the mouth. My father turned on a reality television program about two wealthy young girls named Mitzy and Lulu whose Bloomingdale’s charge cards were racked up to the net worth of a private sector law firm partner. They ran around the New York City grid swiping plastic and accruing disposable bags.

“Isn’t there something better than this?” I asked him. In a way, my mother and I were as we’d always been. She gave me face creams that hadn’t worked for her, and I tried to like them. We could have conversations about nail varnish colors or fishtail braids, and she would tell me the techniques of wearing makeup so that it didn’t look like you were wearing any at all. I would wander out of the room when she went back to her magazine or began chopping onions, knowing that I would still do anything to skate and that she’d rather see her daughter in a prom dress. My father, however, had been my skating co-conspirator, and part of that was homeschooling. Every night when he had returned from the office, he had looked over my shoulder at some book and told me to put him to work. It was the best time of his life, college, and for every geometry problem there was some oddity of a professor, for every rock a half-life to place it in time. I learned that lines of even the acutest of angles might extend infinitely. I learned my father’s sleepless nights of study. But after the doctor told me I was lucky even to be able to walk, he stopped taking out the books.

“Not really,” he said. Obtuse, acute, obtuse, acute.

“Maybe nothing is better than some things,” I said. Then again, I hated the silence of dinners without television. It wasn’t like the quiet of an early Sunday morning at the rink, where you could hear the rip of blades searing the ice with intention.

“Why don’t you ask Ali how her tutoring is going?” my mother suggested. “Mark is a very nice young man. I think he really enjoys spending time with Ali.” She grinned.

Obtuse. My father put his fork down. “Your mother would like me to ask you how your tutoring is going, Ali. How is your tutoring going?”

“Alvin,” my mother said.

“What? I’m tired.”

“From sitting all day?”

“You have no idea,” my father said. That he was a programmer and so worked in zeroes and ones comprised most of my knowledge of his professional life. Also, that carpal tunnel was an occupational hazard and that he called his boss der Fuhrer. Forty hours a week over eighteen years and limp wrists the only climax in sight. I didn’t want this for either of us.

“Tomorrow is another day,” my mother said and reached to touch his hand. I think this was exactly his fear.

“Did you hear the one about the self-help group?” I asked my father. “They met at a buffet.” He raised a glass from the easy chair and nodded. “Did you hear what happened when they posted a sign for Buffetoholics Anonymous?” I asked. “They got a bunch of guys in Hawaiian shirts humming ‘Margaritaville.’” He stared at me and said nothing. I never did learn how to quit while I was ahead.

My mother picked up the remote and turned to the end of a movie about two teenagers who loved each other so much they killed themselves. “To be young and in love is the best feeling in the world,” she said as the telephone rang.

“Doyle residence,” my father said. “No she can’t come to the phone.”

My mother turned up the volume on the television, but my father just got louder. “The doctor says taste is an unlikely miracle. He can’t figure out how the hell her taste survives, and you feel bad ?”

A new show began, and the doctor on television explained how he had made his name boldly critiquing and augmenting women. His cosmetic surgery facility specialized in breasts. Spherical-shaped, he said, are not natural. Teardrops were the shape most natural to women.

“If she wants to appear natural, why bother?” I asked loudly to drown out my father. The doctor traced a dotted outline around a patient’s breast before the camera panned to a before and after photo.