Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

But if I didn’t try? I remembered last year, after my disastrous regionals competition, how the rink had become a nightmare. I’d skate past Lauren and hear her humming “Pop Goes the Weasel,” her way to torture me for popping. Popping was worse than falling. It was when you did only one rotation of a double or triple jump. It was a yellow error. It was fearing instead of trying. Ryan warned me: “One is the loneliest number.” My father told me to breathe into a paper bag.

“This streak isn’t hiccups,” I said.

When I wasn’t wimping through popped jumps, my mind intervened, gravity pulling me to failure. The issue was chicken or the egg. Was I chicken because I was always falling or was I always falling because I was chicken? The best I can explain it is Boston traffic. When you are bumper to bumper, you can’t find a way out. You beep and you curse and you pray, and sometimes it speeds to a crawl and back down to static, but always you’re surrounded.

“You’ll break your butt!” my mother called from the bleachers.

“Just two out of ten!” I’d call back, trying to maneuver statistics.

“You’ve only got one out of one not to break!” she’d say. By the time I was done each day, my one body out of one felt like a fraction.

I was yellow through jumps, blue through the butt, and green with Fruit Loops. I’d be leaving when she still had two sessions more, two sessions paid for with the smoothie fortune she’d inherited and the genes of lifelong pre-pubescence. People gaped in deference around the rink: “She’s a machine.” And to this is what I had to return. Figure skating was a woman’s sport to the public but one which would not allow a woman’s body. So I had to keep trying to destroy this woman’s body. There had to be a way. As Dr. Ogden said, “You don’t have it until you do.”

I turned on the computer in the living room to look into little girls. If I was going to return, I needed to at least know who were the ones to beat. Fruit Loops had taken gold at the Cranberry Open, the Boston Open, and the regionals at the senior level. I’d only been gone a period of months, and somehow she’d tested through novice and junior to the top. According to the Boston Globe, she was a “pixie daredevil” and a favorite to make it to the national medal stand after landing a history-making triple Salchow-half loop-triple Salchow combination. What the paper didn’t mention was that this was practically inconceivable. Here you have a jump whose counterclockwise rotation is nearly impossible to control, you add in the innocuous-sounding but Murphy’s Law-taunting half loop, and then muster up the fire power from one leg to complete the triple again. The first jump has to be shot for distance over height, the second is controlling the rotation, and the final is a test of strength and height. With every jump in the sequence, the speed would decrease, the muscles would fatigue, the body would fight to maintain the stability of a volatile axis, and even to have a fighting chance, you’d have to master inertia completely to stop the rotation at exactly the moment before landing. Returning to the rink meant going up against this, up against twice what I’d broken my back trying to land only once. History had been revving without me the entire time.

I slouched in the chair and closed my eyes. There was this fallacy I could inflict on myself where I’d believe time wasn’t passing if I wasn’t doing anything. I stayed still as possible and listened to Aunt Dina hack through cigarettes in the adjacent room. My mother was singing along with a carol tape—“It’s the hap-happiest time!”—and it was obvious that I’d been reduced to that cliché of movie cowardice: I wanted my mother.

I went to the kitchen and tried to insert myself into her preparations.

“Like a three-legged race,” I explained. “You hold left, I scrub right, everybody wins.”

“Wouldn’t you rather eat a cookie or something?” she said.

“Or something,” I said.

“Well good, because I’ve told Mo to come pick you up tonight to go to AA. I’m trying to prepare a Christmas, and you’ll just be under my feet all day. I need space to decorate. Your father is going to be gone until Monday, and I’m too busy to bring you, but Mo will be here in a few hours.”

“Where’s Alvin today?” Aunt Dina billowed a big round of smoke.

“He’s on his boy’s weekend,” my mother said, the boy’s weekend being the yearly fishing trip he took with his old friends from college who he ignored the rest of the year.

“I don’t want to go,” I said. I had no use for John Doe or his placebos anymore.

“I need you to go.”

“Why?”

“Do you want to be code yellow?”

“That wasn’t my decision.

“Well you are. The decision has been made. Mo will be here at five to pick you up. Here. Take forty dollars from my wallet.”

“For what?”

“So you and Mo can go out to dinner after.”

“I don’t want to eat with Mo.”

“Well you’re the only one who feels that way in this kitchen.”

“There’s only three of us.”

“One,” she said. “There’s only one of you.”

A deal was a deal, so I packed my painkillers for John Doe. This time it was me who mouthed “bathroom” across the circle, and he met my eyes easily, spread his lips: five. I was tired, but there was the edge of imminent repercussions tickling beneath the surface. Three, I mimed, resting my chin behind three fingers. “I guess I always knew I drank a lot,” a woman said. “But I figured I could handle a lot.”

John Doe waited for me down the hall at our transaction point. It occurred to me that if it weren’t for our routine, I wouldn’t recognize him. He looked like everyone and he looked like no one. I couldn’t tell if he was blond or brunette.

“Have you got the good stuff?”

“I do, and not as a consequence of your efforts at all,” I said.

“I haven’t any clue what you’re saying, and I pride myself on being an excellent reader of subtext.”

“You know exactly what I mean. You sold me placebos.”

“The optimist swears by them.”

“This is not funny. I’ve had my entire life taken away from me before and I’m not going to be gypped of it again. Those pills didn’t do anything. I was exhausted.”

“You really are an amateur, aren’t you? Have you no concept of tolerance?” He took himself out of his pants and began spraying a yellow liquid gyre over the wall and urinal. “Oh you nymph! Nymphet, as Nabokov would say. You’ve built tolerance. It’s a normal necessary evil. You take the drug, you get used to it, you need more for the same effect. It’s true of everything in life, but it’s especially true of pills.” He put the pink poking out of his pants zipper back in. “Let me take an educated guess. You feel tired but ready to pop. You feel like you’re carrying the load of the world and you feel like nothing more than a broken butterfly wing, jerking on a dying insect. Sound familiar?”

“Yes.”

“So take more. Take two pills at once. Take two pills at once twice a day. Stick it up your nose whole for all I care. Just don’t come to me and tell me my ‘mines haven’t got veritas. My uppers are bona fide bumblebees, authentic dominoes, real deal Dexies,” he said. “And by the way, you still owe me thirty Hydrocodone.”

“Not until I test out doubling up.”

“We think we get to take a tasty pre-payment, do we? That’s not the rules of the game. Hell, maybe I should be the one wondering if I’m getting placebos.”

“These are not placebos. Look at the bottle.” I pointed out the prescribing doctor’s name, my own, dosage, but I kept the bottle in my hand.

“And yet, you could have replaced them with vitamin C for all I know. See this is how it goes, little girl. Drug acquisition is a goddamn romantic comedy; we keep going hoping it’s all going to culminate in a happy ending.”