Jed Wolf

“Can I get some skates before the ice melts,” I asked my mother after Peggy Fleming brought home the gold, figure skating in the ’68 winter Olympics. Mothers in my Connecticut neighborhood bought their thirteen-year old’s new bikes, flippers, polo shirts, tennis rackets and 8-track tape players, but not mine. Though she grew up poor in Canada, and cheap, I was exited on our way to the thrift store to think dreams might come true.

Long Island Sound was normally too salty and warm to freeze but ice flows clogged the estuaries and icebergs cluttered the beaches that bitter February. Reckless kids proved thin ice was thick enough to jump on and the largest pond around beckoned to have its surface etched with memories.

The former centerpiece of a crumbling estate, the pond’s banks were being bulldozed for development. Work in the salt marshes stopped that winter when solid-looking jet-black muck could swallow idle backhoes if they moved, but that didn’t stop me from pouring pebbles in their gas tanks to slow progress. I was used to having my hopes dashed, feared the future and dreaded being sent to boarding school the following year.

Once gorgeous with geese and circled by hundreds of acres of wildlife habitat, the snowless pond I’d fished and chased ducklings in, was surrounded by a barren expanse of jagged ruts. I stumbled across, in thrift store boots, to watch hockey players and families with bundled up children ice skate, then staggered back to ask my mother for a pair of skates.

Though we were not poor, my mother hated buying new things. All my school uniforms were worn by other boys and her own wardrobe was second-hand. She always looked put together in designer garments with minor stains. On the way to the thrift store, with a stranger’s extra-long crocheted scarf looped fashionably around her neck, she recounted one of the few stories she ever told from her wretched childhood near the arctic where I pictured her somewhere in Ontario, darning socks.

Every year, late winter rains melted the deep snow which flooded the surrounding woods. When temperatures plummeted back to normal, inundated forests froze, and locals could skate for miles on snowless ice. Racing and dodging among the birches taught my mother to skate beautifully, like Peggy Fleming I imagined. My mother ended her skating story with the night she got lost pirouetting by herself in the moonlight. Lucky to make it back, her furious German father, who believed she’d been out with boys, whacked her. “He was strict,” she said excusing her own hair-trigger rage as if sometimes aggression was warranted.

She’d bought me used shoulder pads at the Rummage Room that smelled like puke, but I preferred soccer where I could avoid bullies to football. Rifling through used hockey equipment, I came upon a sleek pair of black figure skates. “What about these,” I asked, pretending to not notice the difference.

Years earlier I’d been laughed at for dressing as Allison Hayes from “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman,” for Halloween, but the urge to figure skate was overwhelming.

Cocking her head, my mother looked at me wryly and I back at her. Neither of us said a word and the next thing I knew, figure skates were on my lap driving home. “They’re boy’s,” I stammered at my laughing sister who would’ve preferred playing hockey herself.

“They’re all they had,” I insisted while being teased out on the ice, teaching myself tricks not possible on hockey skates.

Sunset was the best time. Other kids headed home, and I skated in the amber glows as often as possible ‘till dusk, then stumbled home in the dark to watch the Olympics.

Peggy Fleming was a goddess, smiling gracefully, gliding backwards with her flowing brown hair. I attempted toe loops, lutze’s and axels like an Olympic hopeful, turning my head to the side and spreading my arms like her after each aborted attempt.

Practice was strenuous and far too sweaty for bulky jackets, so I wore sweaters to keep my torso ventilated, a scarf to regulate my temperature and jeans which left blue streaks on the ice. I often returned muddy from crashing into cattails and tripping to and from the construction site, but the winter Peggy brought home the gold, I brought home black muck stains and expected my mother’s wrath.

My plaid scarf bunched up with burs, lay under my bed, and without it, I’d be cold, so I grabbed my mother’s extra-long one from the coat rack. I knew she wouldn’t miss it because that afternoon she’d already taken a walk and was preparing a Vermouth-soaked pot roast for my father.

The temperature was dropping as I hiked over puddles, dangling my skates while fussing with the unwieldy scarf. I noticed a few kids crossing the hardening mud who pointed and laughed at me from a distance, but when I reached the pond, I was alone when I tied my skates and stepped onto the ice like an Olympian. I warmed up, stretched my neck and arms and was noticing the scarf under my sweater looked and felt just like boobs when I descended in slow motion through the slushy ice.

Waste deep in mud, my first thought was to keep the scarf dry, but it was too late. I leaned forward but unable to move my legs, my second thought was how sorry the kids who teased me would feel when they found me dead.

The scarf was no use except as evidence of my perverse fantasy, so I yanked it from my neck, hurled it into the open water, leaned toward the shore and began bashing. My gloved hands found just enough purchase in the deep muck to exhume my legs, then I wriggled to the shore like a mudpuppy, tried to run and immediately fell. With my fingers too numb to manage laces, I got up, left my boots by the shore, and staggered across the rutted construction site, spraining my ankles like Lois Lane in heels. Avoiding streetlights for fear of causing a scene, I clattered down the shadowy sidewalks moaning like in a horror film.

My father’s car was in the driveway. They’d be having cocktails, so I snuck in the backdoor. Tiptoeing down cement stairs was possible holding handrails and I clacked through the cellar holding walls and work benches ‘till finding somewhere to sit, I peeled off my clothes. The skates were ruined but it didn’t matter. I’d never skate again.

I could hear my parents dining above which they often did without me and my sister. My clothes were smelly and black, so I stuffed them into a cardboard box, slid it in a corner, then headed to the laundry room to search for something to wear.

Usually there’d be stuff of mine in the dryer or hanging on the rack, but finding nothing, I snuck up the cellar stairs, listening for our dog who’d make a fuss if she noticed me. Nudity always heightened my senses. It made me careful and graceful, and after peering up from the cellar, I sprang up the stairs to my bathroom and ran a tub.

My mother never noticed her scarf was missing the following day as she left the house in shorts and a blouse. Tropical winds had blown in overnight, and that balmy morning dripped with promise, as I walked barefoot into the side yard with the smelly box. Carefully removing shopping bags full of trash, I placed it on the bottom of the can and covered it back up for the garbage men to remove.

When I returned to the pond, my boots weren’t where I left them. Someone had flung them out onto the thin ice. Clearly, a curved track led to where someone had fallen through…

Back in my room, piles of clean jeans and sweaters were neatly folded in my drawers. On the top was my scarf which my mother painstakingly plucked all the burs out of, and never said a word.

Likely whoever saw me, threw my boots out there, I thought, shivering in the warm breeze.

“I think exercise tests us in so many ways, our skills, our hearts and our ability to bounce back after setbacks.” Peggy Fleming