“He still has it.” Dad’s coach and choreographer, Ludmila, shakes her head as she watches him out on the ice.
I’m not sure what she’s talking about. Does she mean he’s had it? Or that he’s got it? “Yes,” I say, stupidly.
“Your father. It is so amazing. His agility, his strength.” Ludmila kisses her fingers. “He might be twenty, not forty.”
“He’s thirty-nine, actually,” I tell her.
She ignores my correction. “He is a young man when he takes the ice,” she says.
Dad found Ludmila about six months ago through an ad in a skating magazine. She takes on students from about a two-hundred-mile radius. He only gets to see her once a week, so today is important for him. He ate three energy bars in the car on the drive here just so he would be ready. He has three hours of ice time with her this morning, and then he has to rush back for an open house, while Mom covers someone’s Saturday shift and I once again hang out with Dorothy, Torvill, and Dean until I go to work at three.
“So he’s doing that well?” I ask. “I mean, he looks polished to me, but he always did. And he’s so critical of himself.”
Ludmila shakes her head. “You cannot listen to him. He is crazy. He is insane.”
“He is?” I ask. “I mean, I’d sort of suspected.” My joke is lost on Ludmila.
“If he makes just one mistake, he does the entire program over,” she goes on. “Entire! Entire thing! He is so demanding.”
And she isn’t even in debt to him. “Tell me about it,” I say.
I was only being sarcastic, but Ludmila takes me literally and starts to tell me how my father has the strength of a bull and the grace of a large bird. I think she means a swan. “Very unique,” she says. “One of a kind.”
“So does he have a shot at making the masters tour?” I ask.
“Oh, yes. A shot,” she says. “Yes, he does. He has very good shot. Only . . .”
“What?” I ask.
“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” Ludmila says.
I wait a minute, hoping she will explain this.
“That is how these tours work. They want Olympic gold, they want world champions. They call on the telephone, please join us. Your father . . .”
“No gold medal, no cereal box,” I say.
She nods. “He needs to find a sponsor. To pay his way, to get him more lessons, more ice,” she says. “Then it will be a pinch.”
“A cinch?” I ask.
But she doesn’t hear me. She is calling to my father, something about his takeoff for his combination triple jump.
I can’t imagine how my father will find a sponsor in Lindville, but maybe he will. Could he skate with “Gabe’s Auto World” stitched onto the back of his shirt?
I watch as he stops his program to work on his triple Axel with Ludmila. He’s been doubling it today because he can’t quite triple it, which makes sense to me because the Axel is the hardest jump there is. Ludmila shouts instructions to him. I can’t understand half of what she says because of her accent.
Dad looks tired, like he’d rather be leafing through an interior design magazine or composing a new house-for-sale listing.
The rink smells like old, wet socks—sort of musty and mothball-like. I don’t miss skating at all, I think.
But then I remember skating at the town rink in Lindville one winter, when I was about eight. It was around Christmas, and there were a lot of people skating there, even though it’s an outdoor rink and it was freezing cold. Dad and I hadn’t skated there very often, because we usually skated here, at the arena.
First we were skating on our own, but then we started skating together. Everyone was watching us and looking sort of amazed. Dad and I did jumps at the same time—totally synchronized—and people started applauding. It wasn’t even embarrassing, it was just fun. We improvised this program, on the spot. Dad told me what to do out of the corner of his mouth, and I did it. We totally ate it up. We were absolute hams. We posed for a picture. And after that, we did it occasionally, whenever we wanted to unwind and have fun.
It’s something I can’t even conceive of doing now. The last time I skated in public was such a disaster. It was like I could hear these imaginary commentators saying, “that’ll be another point-four deduction,” every time I fell or stepped out of a landing. When I finally finished my program, I skipped the so-called Kiss and Cry area, walked right past my dad, and went straight to “Kiss and Despair.”
Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually left.