Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

“I like that he believes so much in so little,” I said, thinking of the way Mark quoted Marx and Leonards, the way his obsession almost reached the asymptote of my own. I opened the medicine cabinet and removed a jar of Youthful Revival, gave it to Lucy.

“I love it when your mom creams my face,” she said, massaging the cream into her skin, over her eye parting two fingers between which she gave me a wink. She looked into the mirror at our reflections. “God, you are adopted, odd VoVo,” she said, turning from the mirror. “Be thankful.” She pulled my hair back off my face, raveling it into a bun. “Remember when I used to babysit you, and you’d make up dance routines for me? You were just a little fucking girl, a little stick in cutoffs, and you’d be saying, five six seven eight, and shimmy Lucy, shimmy shimmy twist. You built a brontosaurus out of lollipop sticks. God, I knew you’d be something even then. And now look at you. Best tits this side of the Massachusetts border.”

“I don’t want them.”

“Well the shit misfortune is you can’t give them to someone who’d appreciate those puppies.” Lucy disheveled my hair with her hands so that it pouffed up.

“There’s no checkbox on drivers’ licenses for boob donors,” I said.

“Otherwise I’d take them.” Lucy grabbed at my bra straps and pulled me to her chest. She wrapped her arms around me.

“If you weren’t my cousin I’d call you a pervert,” I said.

“ Because I’m your cousin you should call me a pervert,” she said. “But VoVo, you’ve got to eat something once in a while. I feel like I’m hugging a fossil. A fossil with tits. And anyway, your mother loves you. More even than if you were hers naturally. You were a miracle after those miscarriages. Can you imagine losing two babies, finally getting one, and then seeing it waste away? It scares the bejesus out of her.”

“I don’t want to scare her, but it’s my body,” I said.

“Then get an abortion, don’t be selfish,” she said, letting go.

“I know that sounded worse than you meant.”

“Didn’t it?” Lucy smacked her lips in a sticky smear on my check. “Now how do I look? Like a million bucks?” She puckered her lips and batted her lashes fast.

“Like a winning lottery ticket,” I said.

“Lordy me, you sure do know how to compliment a girl, VoVo!” She pretended to swoon, took my hand in hers, and swung it as we returned to the party. My mother was pony-dancing, while my father sat sulking at the table, a half-finished drink in front of him.

Lucy asked Mark if he’d missed us, how he possibly had lived a quarter century without me.

“Of course,” he said, then blushed. “I don’t know,” he said and looked at his shoes.

“I’m tired, I’m going to bed,” I said.

“Mark will miss you,” Lucy teased.

But of course I was going to the bike, not to bed. As I pedaled, I recalled my father and I watching the television with hanging mouths after we had purchased the 1996–1997 season of women’s figure skating on video. Just the year before, Michelle Kwan had seemed like a young girl with jumps and promise, but little in the way of artistry. Then she appeared that season transformed by her work with the choreographer Lori Nichols. In the video, as she glides toward the center of the ice, Kwan looks like she is about to cry, like the fifteen year old she is. There is no turning back. But then her music, “Salome,” descends like a humid heat onto the spectators. The music connotes the desperate sensuality of a woman who danced so that her mother could collect the head of John the Baptist, and Kwan takes a beautifully smooth half circumference around the rink before vaulting into the air for a triple Lutz-double toe loop jump combination. She lands another triple-double, then the triple flip, as one of the commentators says, “If she keeps up this kind of jumping with this kind of wonderful choreography, this could be a gold medal performance.” It’s a reminder: this is only the beginning of her program. When she lands her double Axel, Kwan extends the landing for a few seconds in a show of mastery, from the classic landing position arching her arm like a weeping willow before a pivot. The music then slows to rich stringed instrumentation and Kwan’s movements appear to reach with the pain that comes with wanting something so badly. Two more triple jumps and the music chimes frenetically as she spins, signaling the last third of her program. She takes the length of the rink with such speed she appears frictionless, and with the landing of a triple Lutz, she is: there are no triple jumps left; the obvious dangers of her program are gone. But then a high note sounds and she rips her hands past her face with ferocity and there is something in that motion as she reaches to the lights above that would make anyone’s skin prickle. It is a moment as strange and frightening as a Hitchcock film. She prepares to enter her last jump, the double Axel, but at the last moment changes her mind and tries for another triple. She jabs her left pick. It’s a gamble, the move of someone who will risk a mistake for a chance at greatness. She lands the jump as the music crashes to an end. And then there she is crying, a fifteen-year-old again, knowing she’s done her best and that that might mean the best in the world. She can barely keep it together to bow.

When I looked over at my father, he was crying, right along with Michelle Kwan. In the video, the scores come up for technical merit, 5.9s and 5.8s. Then for artistic merit there are two 6.0s, two nods of perfection, one from Bulgaria and the other from Poland. The camera pans to her parents in the stands, and the commentator says, “Danny Kwan: so completely excited for his daughter.”

The next afternoon, I ran home from school, and for the first time appreciated the number of required books we were to read — it meant more weight in my backpack to haul, muscle earned. Once home, I clipped through stretches as quickly as possible to get to my calisthenics, but my mother had her own plan, deciding that today was the day to begin a Thanksgiving tradition: father and daughter acquiring the bird fresh-slaughtered from the farm. “I’m not even asking you to parent,” she told my father. “But you made her antisocial, now you could stand to bond with her.” She was putting the groceries away huffily, shoving deli meat into the refrigerator and cramming cracker boxes in the cabinet. I went into the living room and lay on the couch to listen. Her complaint about my shortcoming had been uttered as though I wasn’t even present, and somehow, it was less terrible to hear how disappointing I was if I was spying rather than disregarded.

“Solitary endeavors never hurt anyone,” my father answered.

“Her only endeavor these days is sleeping. She never wants to do anything.” Obviously, she hadn’t noticed the biking.

“She wants to do something.”

“Something that’s made her not want to do anything,” my mother said. Sometimes I felt sorry for my mother, worrying and wanting, nagging and lugging our sagging, sulking selves toward cheerful composure. The life she wanted seemed so small— haircuts and school dances, boy-girl romances, comfort food dinners lolling around suburban gossip — yet when she asked it of us, it seemed like too much.

“And that’s my fault?”

“It’s your example.”

“And what’s your example?” my father said. It wasn’t a question. It was an accusation.

“It’s like I’m not even here half the time. No, it’s like you’re not here half the time.”

“Obviously we are here.” The cold sound of a glass hitting the counter. Ice cube tinkle.

“Obviously! Obviously! You know what’s obvious? That we have a little girl you only raise when you feel like it.”