Yesterday, I went to the ice rink at Alexandra Palace, in north London, with my friend Bob. I started to write about Bob almost two months ago, for what was meant to be a blog post (my first in almost a decade) about the Tate Modern’s exhibition “Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory,” which we attended together on the first Saturday in February (a day we had earmarked for birding, but which we decided was too windy and cold to stand outside), and about the following Saturday, which we spent traipsing through Elmley National Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. Bonnard’s paintings reminded me of photos I had taken of people I loved in quiet, sleepy moments, and his work evoked an imitative urge to pull out my paints and revisit with oils the limbs and folds of fabric that were stored as pixels in my phone’s memory. Our day at the nature reserve seemed like art even as we were living it, our bodies and the birds painting color against a gesso sky. The connection between the two days seemed obvious to me, but I couldn’t say why. Sitting in front of this screen, I looked for an articulable connection that wasn’t too forced or sentimental, but nothing came.
Instead of creating, I collected: books about Bonnard, reviews of the exhibition, postcards with prints of the paintings that gave me that inner-vibrating feeling that reminds me I’m alive, birding journals and maps of the Isle of Sheppey. I tried to keep my mind’s eye open to spot any deeper meanings that might emerge, but nothing came, and my blog post remained a photo and an ellipsis.
From upper left: Pierre Bonnard: The Violet Fence (1923); Dining Room in the Country (1913); Coffee (1915); Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-5); Nude in an Interior (1935); Mirror Above a Washstand (1908); Bathing Woman, Seen from the Back (1919); The Bath (1925); and Nude in the Bath (1925)
As a little girl, the main thing I took away from the film “Bambi” was the imperative “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It would be even better, I remember my dad saying, if people kept their mouths shut until they had something smart to say, as well.
The point of this blog is to force myself to write, and to share my writing, even when I’m not so sure it’s smart or nice or figured-out.
Almost five years ago, I started a low-residency MFA program at Goddard College’s Port Townsend, Washington campus, where I set about trying to write a book about my relationships with my three mothers. Each residency was a week-and-a-half-long flurry of panels, workshops, adviser meetings, formal readings and informal, wine-fueled salons, to which people turned up early to squeeze their names onto the lists of readers. Coming off a stifling few years of legal training and a short-lived career as a lawyer in a large firm, my creative confidence was at an all-time low. I scribbled things in my notebook in response to writing prompts, submitted pages to be workshopped and spent a few hours each evening tapping out assignments to share with my adviser, but I was terrified of reading what I wrote in front of people. When I did finally get the nerve to put my name down and stand up in front of people, my voice quaked and the paper in my hands trembled.
I grew up under spotlights, performing and competing alone on the ice in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from the time I was six until I went to university, so it seems strange, at first, that a small, dimly-lit room full of writers would give me stage fright. For almost as long as I have known how to skate, I have loved to write, and when my parents told me I needed a back-up plan in case I didn’t make it to the Olympics (I didn’t), my first idea was to be an artist, a writer. People’s names were lined up on shelves all around our house, and I didn’t see why mine shouldn’t be included.
In the sixth grade, when I was ten, I achieved one of my other life-long goals of playing the lead in a play (a role which required singing) at our 800-seat church. Around the same time, my best friend and I wrote ten songs and used my parents’ tape recorder to capture our voices singing them. We wore matching Lee Pipes jeans and yellow hoodies and took photos of each other for our album cover. When we felt satisfied with what we had created, we made copies of the tape and gave them to our mothers, suggesting they play them for their friends and offering to sell the other women their own copies if they couldn't get enough of our voices.
Where did that brazen girl go?
I think the shame appeared, as it does for many girls, around the onset of puberty. My period came two months after my twelfth birthday and my parents took me out to the restaurant of my choice (a Chinese buffet in Kirkwood Mall) to celebrate, so looking back, it seems we were on track for a healthy embrace of womanhood. I bled a few times, once leaving a rusty stain in the white lycra crotch of the sequined skating dress a designer had made for me to wear for my “Last of the Mohicans” long program, and then the bleeding stopped. My mom said it was probably because I exercised so much, skating at least four hours a day, six days a week, plus running and lifting weights. She said I should feel lucky, and I was grateful not to have to worry about embarrassing stains anymore. Then my chest started growing, and my hips widened. My weight spiked and my mom took me to Marshall Fields to pick out clothes from the Misses section, reasoning that if we bought ugly things I didn’t want to wear, I would feel motivated to eat more carefully and lose the weight. With my center of gravity shifted, I lost some of the jumps I had long before mastered. My skating coach mentioned that one of the older girls in the club had undergone a breast reduction surgery, and I begged my parents to let me at least speak with a plastic surgeon. I kept performing and competing, because skating was easier than walking, because I didn’t know who I was without my feet on the ice and because I thought I needed the affirmation winning gave me. But even though I didn’t abandon the ice, my jumps inched closer to the boards as I tried to hide who I was becoming, a dangerous as well as aesthetically unappealing trend which mystified my mom and my coach.
Skaters on an ice rink with a net hanging like a curtain in the foreground.
I was home-schooled from first grade until my junior year of high school, so there weren’t many opportunities for public speaking, but I played the flute in the nearby middle school’s band and the North Dakota Youth Symphony, as well as taking private lessons. In a group with other instrumentalists and in my teacher’s basement, I was happy to reach for high notes, but I dreaded the individual performances my teacher required of her students in recitals and juried festivals every few months. Without an audience, my timbre was clear and my vibrato was steady, but as soon as I saw people watching me open my mouth, my amygdala went into overdrive and I shook through the whole performance.
These things, like Bonnard and the birds, feel undeniably connected to me. One of the threads I think I see is that when my body began to change, I started trying to hide my voice—the one I used on the ice and the one meant to emerge from my throat and through my fingers, and I’ve been hiding behind that shame (only wearing a swimming suit when I’m under a certain weight, only writing when I’m sure I have something smart to say, only sharing what I’ve written when—well, not really sharing my writing much at all) for most of my post-pubescent life.
I flew back to the States recently to attend AWP, a big annual conference for writers, because I decided this was going to be the year my book finally left the nest. People from my program were going, and I wanted to see my friends, but I was also hoping I would wind up in some preternatural scenario in which I would somehow fall into conversation with just-the-right agent, and s/he/they would ask to read my manuscript, and I would say “I’ll get that to you right away,” and I would have something I was happy with to attach to an email and send to his/her/their inbox. Sitting in the departures lounge in Heathrow with weeks’ worth of revisions between me and that imagined draft, I knew my fantasy wasn’t going to happen on this trip, and I felt myself slipping into a bit of a shame-spiral as I pushed back my mental timeline for book-completion. Just before boarding, I checked my email, where I found a message from Bob, in which he wrote “I wish you wing strength for your flight, both in the air and on your inner journey.”
While I was in the States, another friend used a flight analogy when he told me my runway was behind me, and that now I needed to pull up, hard. It was time to stop collecting degrees and pre-essay-writing reading material and “inspiration." It was time to stop thinking about becoming and start being.
“How?”
Yesterday, I put my blade on the ice and remembered what being feels like. One stroke, even in an unfamiliar rink filled with strangers, and I know, without question, I belong. I spent the first fifteen minutes warming up and stretching muscles I never use anymore, and then, swerving around children on their spring break, I started marking out the Argentine Tango, the Rhumba and and Westminster Waltz. I did a few sit spins, laybacks and camel-change-camels in the middle of the rink. I’m not quite as familiar with my edges as I used to be, and my back-spin traveled about two feet, but the feeling of being on the ice—something I have tended to only do on my birthday in recent years—was glorious. Now that skating is no longer a load-bearing wall in the construct of my identity, I can appreciate it for what it is—a way to fly without wings. There’s a feeling of comfort that comes with mastery. Sometimes I feel hints of that when I write, when words serpentine through my mind and fall onto a page, but when I think about what it would take to reach my peak performance again on the ice, I know I’m due a lot of early mornings, hard falls and public embarrassment if I’m ever going to reach the standard I’m aiming for as a writer.
A clean stripe of ice in the wake of a Zamboni resurfacing the rink in Alexandra Palace.
When I stepped onto the rubber mats after an hour-long session, I sat on the bench in the box next to the ice and wiped the snow from my blades. I got really excited showing Bob my K-Pick, Pattern 99 blades, running my finger along the carefully engineered rocker and explaining that the triple-wide toe pick was meant to allow for more thrust on toe-assisted jumps. I continued walking him through the anatomy of my skates as I unlaced them, pausing to show him where I’d nicked the top layer of white leather off the right toe of my boot with my left toe pick, which crossed over my right foot when I wrapped myself into the tight helix necessary for fast rotations in the air. I told him about the array of blister pads I used to have to wear before getting these skates, which were molded to my feet. I’ve always thought of my skates as my friends (sort of like books), and I caught myself feeling the giddy rush of introducing two people I care about to each other.
“Maybe I should write an essay about my skates,” I said.
“You should write about everything you know and care about,” he said.
And so. A blog.
At the top, a black-and-white photo of a man in skates, leaping above the heads of women in winter hats. Below, two old-fashioned vending machines—one filled with snacks and the other with Coca-Cola.