Photograph by Amy Hart
“You gotta feel the blues, turn the rhythm on its head,” my partner Ronnie barks at dance practice. He’s been grumpy lately, especially when I fail to get the Choctaw turn’s off-beat syncopation. “Be bluesy. Get down and dirty. Think of a bad situation,” he advises, as Mother watches from the bleachers. Passing this pre-gold ice dance test might get me out of her doghouse, where I’ve landed after failing the fifth-figure test yet again.
At the session’s end, my hopes for redemption are dashed. Walking to the lobby, Mother and I overhear the judge in the mink coat talking to her colleague: “Ten-year-olds don’t get the blues. And with that partner, just ridiculous.”
Ronnie and I are kind of silly. He’s twenty-two and six-foot-three, and I’m ten and a four-foot-seven, flat-chested, sixty-pounder. But dance partners are hard to come by, and Ronnie is an experienced dancer and pair skater. Mother’s convinced with a makeover I can change the judge’s mind. Meantime, I should watch Nancy, Ronnie’s sexy girlfriend and pairs partner.
During the next session, the two practice their hand-to-hand press lift where Ronnie suspends Nancy above him, turns her on her head, then rights her before guiding her to touch down. Today, however, after sailing high over his shoulders, Nancy splays over the ice like Silly Putty. They do the lift again and again, and she crashes so many times I think she’s going to break. But she gets up, shoots him a nasty look, and skates on. By the fifth time I realize, just as she reaches the lift’s highest point, that he’s letting go of her hand, letting her fall eight feet to the ice below.
When I ask an older skater why he’s dropping her, she says it’s to get rid of the baby. I don’t know about any baby or how crashing makes one disappear, but it sounds like a bad situation. How can I keep dancing with Ronnie, not talk to him about it? When I ask Mother, she changes the subject. Probably she doesn’t want to upset him before the test. She’s already bought him a tie clasp as a thank you. So, I find no voice to beg him to stop.
Over a hundred skaters sign up for the evening test session. By ten p.m. I’ve fallen asleep against Mother’s shoulder. Just before one a.m. she shakes me awake to reapply lipstick, touch up eyeshadow, and press out the wrinkles in the dress that resembles Nancy’s.
Ronnie does a double take as he leads me to center ice. He doesn’t have to remind to think of bad situations, because I now know what ails him and I think he knows what ails me. When the music starts, I count the six bars of intro—one and two and three—mentally rehearsing the Choctaw’s syncopated back outside edge. Then we’re off, getting down and dirty, turning the rhythm on its head, conveying life’s blues.
Lorraine Hanlon Comanor: This piece is part of a memoir in linked essays of the lifetime ramifications of the 1961 crash of Sabena Airlines 548—a flight for which I held a ticket but by quirk of fate was not on—that decimated the U.S. figure skating team. A former U.S. figure skating champion and later an anesthesiologist and pharmaceutical physician, I wrote medical articles and chemistry before getting an MFA at Bennington. My essays—earning two notables in Best American Essays, three Pushcart and one Best of the Net nominations—have appeared in New England Review, Boulevard, New Letters, and The Rumpus, among 27 others. Today I write, hike, kayak, and enjoy family.