Tracy O'Neill - The Hopeful

One: Transfer the body’s burden from left to the right. Two: Cross the arms like a body in a casket. Three: Spin one thousand eighty degrees. An object in motion will stay in motion. And I did. It was the only time I’d ever gone beyond three rotations. One half turn past sufficient, my toe was put in its place. All I saw was the sign of death, this flash of white light that was really the imminent ice. I was still clutching my arms to myself at the moment I fell like the needle of a broken metronome.

The disaster wasn’t real until I touched my own spillage. I reached towards the dark spreading splatter and felt the warm, wet roots of my teeth cooling. A spray of ice from Lauren’s rimed skated blade fluttered in a wave onto my face and I heard someone say, You’re okay, Ali. You’re okay. But when I felt hands in my armpits, the same voice was saying not to move me; I could still be hurt worse. And I knew I couldn’t because there wouldn’t be another day.

When I returned home from AA, my mother stood festooning the mantle, fallen pine needles glittering through the busy brown curls of her hair. Christmas lights cast a series of expectant little glows on her face, this electricity of the season. And this too was what I was feeling, this sparkling artificial renewal. Against the wood of the mantle, the lights reflected little colored stars — pink, red, orange, blue — and in my chest swelled the jittery engine of progress: two pills. No, I was not making a mistake.

Mark and Lucy had already arrived, and they sat scooping and crunching potato chips at the kitchen table. At the sight of me, Lucy waved a newspaper.

“We’re asking the stars,” she said. She’d been reading the same horoscope since the time she started liking boys.

“What’s your birthday, Ali?” Mark asked. Normally, I thought of horoscopes as a danger to my own thinking, but I felt so powerful, powerful enough to break federal guidelines, to double my cycling, to halve my meals.

“February eighth,” I said.

“Okay here goes,” Lucy said. “’This week for Aquarius: Mars leaves Leo and enters the seventh house, which may signify sexual tension. Aquarians must remember that great loves are not only fantasy and romance, but also practicality. Stay cool, Aquarius, and learn to compromise in matters of the heart. Mercury rules your house of love, and when Saturn moves over Mercury on Thursday, you will see a relationship more clearly than ever before.’ Did you hear that, Mark?”

He ignored her in favor of the meticulous distribution of dip on his chip. “How was the meeting?” he said, still not looking up and red all the way up his neck.

“Anonymous,” I said.

The phone chimed and Lucy shrugged helplessly. “This fat ass will never make it to the phone in time.”

“Hello?” I picked the receiver up from the cradle. There was no answer except an exhale. And then, an inhale. I couldn’t tell if the breathing I heard was my own or the person on the other line.

“Hello?” I said again. Nothing. “Who is it?”

“Can’t you guess?” the voice finally said.

“If I thought I could guess, I wouldn’t ask.”

The voice on the phone belonged to a woman, but somehow I thought John Doe must be involved. Maybe he had a female flunky.

“An inkling even? I know your breath: Alivopro Doyle.”

“Who is this?”

“I won’t let you go,” the voice said. And then she hung up. I put the receiver down slowly.

“Who was that?” Lucy asked.

“Didn’t say,” I said. “Probably a prank.” It hadn’t felt like a prank, but I didn’t have an explanation.

“Or some lonely old creep who’s been watching you undress at night,” Lucy said. “Didn’t I tell you to pull down the curtain when you’re changing?”

“Have you been undressing with the shade up?” Mark asked.

“You may be intellectual,” Lucy said. “But you’re still a man.”

“I just don’t think we should leap to perversion,” Mark said. “This is a matter of evidence. Or the lack thereof.”

“And the dog ate your penis,” Lucy said.

Mark ignored her. “What did this person say?”

“‘I won’t let you go,’” I admitted.

“Some sicko,” Lucy said. “I told you VoVo. Maybe we should call the police.”

“The police have more important things to deal with,” I said. I’d bought drugs twice in the last month. I didn’t want anything to do with the police.

“What’s more important than you?” Mark said. Lucy looked at him as though he’d been caught.

“Drop it.” This was a command I’d tried and failed to master for myself many times, and it didn’t work any better now.

“Some freak is exploding sperm over you at night, and you don’t even care, VoVo? Will you care when he’s waving a knife over you in bed? Did they give a name?”

“What’s in a name?” I said.

“‘That which we call a rose would smell as sweet,’” Mark said.

“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” I returned, joining in the play.

“You two,” Lucy said. “A stalker is not a joke, you know.”

“No, it’s poetry,” Mark and I said at once. We looked at each other and laughed at the coincidence, something in my chest ballooning with the knowledge that the concert was soon.

The following Saturday, while my mother was at bingo, I crushed pills with a nutcracker. Increasing my dosage had renewed me, and I’d stayed up two days straight pumping iron. My father re-hired Mark to tutor me for college entrance exams, and I didn’t even mind I was so high. When he left, I watched a video of the 1997 National Championships. Until then, you still saw twenty-two-year-old women win, but Tara Lipinski made the female skating lifetime top out at hints of pubescence that year. When she won the title, she was fourteen. She weighed seventy-five pounds.

You watch the competition video, and there it is, a battle of age, the mature woman at sixteen, Kwan, and the fourteen-year-old child technocrat. After Kwan’s third fall, Dick Button comments, “Everybody is behind her, nipping at her heels. It’s no longer that she’s nipping at other people’s heels. Different world, isn’t it?” Then Lipinski: a brisk little girl with brisk little jumps, her history-making triple loop-triple loop combination. The audience rises to its feet. “What have we wrought on the world?” Dick Button asks. And that was it: skating had been invaded by girls who stalled puberty. The only way to respond was arranging lines of speed. But just as I was about to enjoy my work, the telephone rang.

“Perhaps I frightened you last time, and I apologize,” the voice said when I picked up.

“You again,” I said. “I’m not afraid, you know.”

“I was.”

“Why?” I said, looking at my lines. This person was a distraction from my work.

“Because this is your mother.”

It took me a moment to register: I had two mothers, a familiar mother and a stranger mother. The familiar was playing bingo at church right now, the stranger was saying again, “This is your mother.” She then asked what was new, as though everything wouldn’t be new to her, my entire life. All I could say was nothing.

“Are you still there?” she asked finally.

“Present,” I said. Like she was taking attendance.

“I didn’t practice this,” she explained. “I had this fantasy that I would call, and the magic of the mother-child bond would make everything clear. It was ridiculous — as if you’d just say, ‘Oh hello, Dorothy. I was expecting your call.’ To want to be recognized by my child so badly, it made me believe the unreasonable. You see, I’m a chef. I love my work. I love my life. But I thought at some point, I have so much, but why not have it all? And now that you’re eighteen, you can choose. I don’t have to work around other people or the legal system. You’re an adult. I thought it was finally an appropriate time to let you know that I still want to be a part of your life.”