When Samantha de Rosetis started falling again and again, and again and again and again, everyone had theories. The ladies at the Pro Shop, including Samantha’s mother and mine, had different ways of putting it, different names: they said she was getting “buxom”, that she was just filling out “up there”, nothing unusual. “Maturing.” As soon as your body gains a bit of diameter, Mrs. Garbett was fond of declaring, your turn gets heavy—it’s physics, it happens.
Davis, who worked a two-hour shift at the snack bar before hockey practice started, had his own version of this theory: Big Boobs, Bad Balance.
And it was true that Samantha was starting to grow, not only “up there” but all over, in her hips and thighs, and lengthwise too, and Mrs. de Rosetis would complain to her daughter that this process was costing a fortune in dress alterations. Samantha only owned three dresses, one for each primary color, which she’d been reusing in competition for almost two years, and the spandex stretching across the butt and shoulders was becoming threadbare and pilly. Despite Samantha’s begging before every competition, Mrs. de Rosetis refused to replace them, on the grounds that Skating is about style, not sequins, a sentiment the other girls’ mothers furtively regarded as negligent and cruel. Mrs. Garbett, who always bought her daughter Gisèle two identical new dresses for each competition—one to be hung afterward in their private shrine of competition memorabilia—demurred in private that it was the girls’ job to skate and the mothers’ job to make the girls presentable, elegant even, because after all, figure skating was primarily about elegance and grace, in all senses of the word, and maybe Samantha wouldn’t be ungracefully falling on her fanny so often if she had a little more encouragement from the parental side of things.
At any rate, Samantha’s now-frequent spills were rough on her dresses, which were becoming especially ragged along the back. When the frill of her red dress parachuted out during her spins, you could see small white moth-holes on either side of her butt where the stuffing of her crashpads were beginning to creep out. Bruises, vivid and blotchy, appeared in yellow and violet clusters on her elbows and knees. For the other girls—and me, too—commenting on Samantha’s decline was a secondary sport, and we’d decided with inquisitorial conviction that her falls were somehow her fault, that her failures were punishments. We could not allow something as likely as growth to explain her falls, because no matter how badly we wished ourselves frozen petite, we knew it could visit any of us, and that we would only be able to show ourselves as much forgiveness as we had shown one another. Which was not much.
And that’s why fat, the idea of it, was so attractive: it was easy for most of us to keep off, and it was a way to dismiss someone without accounting for it. You didn’t have to be fat to be called fat. Gisèle testified that when they had been away at the Baystate Games last January, she had seen Samantha eat five entire slices of sausage pizza all by herself, crust and everything, not even sopping it with the napkin first (“I could barely watch!”). No wonder Samantha can’t land a toe loop to save her life, we agreed, she eats like a garbage can. Buxom, then, became a sarcastic by-word—as in, “Better not eat that, you don’t want to get too buxom”—for everything we feared to become: heavy, perceptible, grown.
* * *
Renata Till, the strategist, the smartest one of us, grounded her judgments of Samantha in technique: “It’s in the way she dips her butt down before a jump. It wasn’t a problem before, but now that she’s doing the hard doubles, her bad form is coming back to haunt her. See, she never took her coach’s advice back when she was learning, so she’s kind of had this coming all along.” Renata wore her glasses even on the ice; she was considered the smart one mostly just for that reason.
“Her head’s getting as big as her ass,” Gisèle agreed, crossing her arms and craning her neck forward, one of her stock gestures, which Samantha and I once called “cobra-necking”.
Kelly Odenkirk agreed: “Yeah.”
Kelly was two years younger than us; that made her the young one. Renata was the clever one. Now Samantha was the fat one. And I was the Asian one. Really, Gisèle was the only one who fit in at all.
As for my part, I had hummed my approval—mmhmm—but I never really doubted Samantha’s ability; she would not have allowed a small decentering of gravity to ruin her. She put in twenty-six hours a week of rink-time on top of her impressive academic performance, plus supplementary ballet (ice and regular), and though she loomed at least three inches above the rest of us, her frame was still solid, not an ounce of jiggle. Even after she’d torn an ACL when Kelly accidentally sheared her on the ice two years earlier, she was only away from practice for a week before returning to rehabilitate by the side of the rink with a set of wide blue P.T. bands. She had been skating longer, learned more jumps, and boasted more gold than everyone else combined, regional, state, tri-state. I knew her: she was too exacting to let herself go, too passionate to mess up. I knew this, even though we had not spoken then for almost six months.
Even if her height was affecting her balance a little, there was still no explaining the stunning inelegance that afflicted her now, not only at practice, but in competition too. At Regionals, she took one fall after another, spreading her arms mid-jump so she would come a quarter-turn short and land shakily on one foot, the other leg way off-center—each time, the blade zoomed out from under her, and her body would swing such a long arc as it fell toward the ice that the crowd would wince before she’d even made contact, and the breath that was collectively drawn as she left the ice would subside into a moan, half-sympathetic and half-pained: Awwwooh. The other girls and I groaned along, but, as Samantha swished off the ice, faintly clutching her hip in the aftermath of injured applause, Gisèle leaned over and nudged me, but I watched Samantha as she sat gingerly on the bench by the gate and wished I could tell her one of the things she used to tell me when I would fall—Just one less fall you’ll have to worry about—but the thought was interrupted by Gisèle’s whisper at my ear: “I hate to watch this. She’s like the Charlie Brown of skating.”
So the rumors kept circling and derision mounted with each new day’s worth of Samantha’s falls and injuries. She walked stiffly by the changing benches, taking short, mincing steps to ease the stress on her knees and lower back, and our conversation would ebb as she passed us to go change by herself in the girls’ bathroom. She didn’t say hi to us anymore, which we understood as shame, and since she was usually the first one on the ice, we would have a few minutes to circulate our newest observations—did you see how her legs? The looked like they were rotting off—before following her to the ice, where we traded smirks and raised eyebrows as we anticipated another piece of obvious advice shouted out by her exasperated coach Denise:
“Bend your knees and straighten—”
“—I taught you how to do this two years ago—”
“—tuck as you fall, you’re going to kill yourself if you keep landing on your backside—Honey, you’re not even falling right! You’re going to wreck your back!”
Only once, we heard Samantha shout back, with her voice fracturing: “It’s mine to wreck!”
[End of excerpt. If you'd like to read the rest, let me know. -Tony]