On the Ice

by Beth Konkoski


She climbed out of the pickup and her skate blades banged against her chest. Cold pressed at her cheeks, and the tall lights above the rink glowed through frost like the particles on her window in the morning.  The door was heavy and hard to close with the thickness of her hands in double mittens.

“See you at 8:30,” her father said between the small space where heat almost lived and then the bang of metal.  He pulled away in his truck.  Her boots crunched, and the noise moved up through her body and jaws.   It was a short, uncertain walk across icy gravel to reach the skate room crouched between two rectangles of ice: The Town Rink.  To her left she saw the swirl of hockey players, the crash of boys against boards and the puck she could never quite keep an eye on when she tried to watch them, especially Robbie, play.  A whistle sounded over the noise of her boots and then the clacking of sticks and the scrabbling of blades as the bodies swept down the ice together.  To her right, beneath a string of yellow lights that glowed weakly in the January sky, groups of skaters circled and wove, some fast and alone, others hand in hand; a long connected line of them swung by playing pop the tail.  The lead skater stopped and forced the circle around a center until the final skater gained momentum and screamed while shooting out in a circle faster than anyone could skate alone.  She had been that tail and felt the rattling of her teeth as she shot out like a bullet, trying to keep her legs in line and her feet beneath her.  

In the shed she tightened her skates the best she could and looked up as two girls sauntered in whispering together; their skates chunked on the black mats that crisscrossed the room to keep the blades sharp.  As they passed her, their bodies gave off cold, pressed it like a layer of skin out into the room.  They were older, probably high school and did not notice her as they huddled in line for hot chocolate.  But she was pretty sure she had seen Debbie’s green coat pass by the boards as she came in.  It was important to her that someone moved with her in circles, to cut the cold and hold it between them as she waited.  Hockey practice ended at eight, and she had insisted her dad drop her off by a little after seven so she could be there, involved and on her own, skating not just waiting, when he finished. Her breath caught a little as she stood to test her ankles, see if she could possibly be straight enough. She wanted to look like a better skater than she was, wanted the grace of someone who has worn skates a long time, has moved across ice as if it were walking.  In her mind she could feel it, could see the straight glide, the turning backwards and letting the wind of her own making shift her hair to the front, as it did Debbie’s.  In truth, to make herself move backwards, she had to be at a full stop and carefully step her feet, getting almost no glide and then a little pushing and wiggling of the hips to generate motion.

“You’re getting it,” Debbie told her each time and then skated off at her actual speed.  She was a good friend, returning and returning, taking her by the hands to give her a sense of greater speed than Margaret could generate on her own.  And so she worked at it, this new skill, important in this new town, in this new season called winter.  The Florida girl in her wanted to stay huddled in her room in these cold months that shouldn’t involve the outdoors.  But she was in seventh grade and the thought of nights alone, stretching to spring because she could not skate, was a picture she would not accept.  Her parents bought her the skates before she asked for them.  Both of them had grown up in this world of endless winter and seemed to love its glare and promise.  They even showed up at the rink with her to teach her the first night, until she told them she would never go back unless they let her go alone.  

She knew she was making progress when Robbie finally spoke to her; it was three weeks after she got her skates.  In math class he paused near her desk and bent over just seconds before the bell rang and Mrs. Griffin settled them all for attendance.  “I’ll be around after practice tonight if you wanna skate.”  She had nodded and then focused on the homework sheet in her folder, the pencil marks across her page appearing as the arcs and angles of blades on ice.  

Begging her ankles to hold straight, she maneuvered herself out of the shed.  The night’s cold was a wall she had to push herself into.  There would be a storm by morning the weather man had declared; the clouds above her, hiding the stars as she stepped toward the ice, seemed to agree.  The green coat was not her friend Debbie, so she had to make her slow way around the rink alone, her arms outstretched to keep her balance, much younger kids slipping in and around her.   It took five or six trips around the circle before she was warmed up and steady.  The other skaters were the picture of how she wanted to look as she tried to imitate their ease.  And then there were hands at her waist that spun her and sent her arms flailing.  It was Robbie, set free early from practice; he was quick and bouncy in small circles around her.  His blades moved like the knives of chefs, carving the ice with their silver speed.   He made quick cuts and angles back to her, dropping her hand and then picking it up again as she pushed each skate forward and begged herself not to fall, not to look afraid of each swerve he made in her direction.  

Lifting both of her hands, he shifted himself backwards and began to circle faster, pulling her with him. The bumps in the ice rattled her from her knees up through her shoulders, but she held on, stayed upright.  They circled the ice again and again, Robbie swerving backwards in and out of other skaters, making her hair whip in the wind as she had longed for it to do.   

They were still moving nearly an hour later when the lights went out.  She had been ignoring the numbness in her toes, the sharp ache in her calves where the top of the skate cut in.  Her hands were clenched in his through mittens so thick they could be holding wooden sticks.  As the rink shut down and the skaters drifted off the ice, he guided her in a final circle, through the sudden black, and snowplowed in the far corner. Pulling her into the shadows, he pressed her against the wood.  Across the ice she could see other small groups, darker than the night, huddled on the perimeter of the rink.

There was something else this ice had to teach her as it settled into its silence.   Its cuts and tracks did not speak, but contained the story of each night carved on a silent face.  Her back leaned away from Robbie as he trapped her between the boards and his chest; she felt the urge to struggle, like a small animal caged by a pressure that could collapse even as it admired.  The blades of her skates shifted forward until she was slipping, but his hands were there, under her arms, to set her up straight again. “Easy,” he whispered as they resettled, his voice deeper than she had ever noticed.  She was afraid to breathe and afraid of falling, afraid of her own heart that battered at her ribs and her eyes that looked anyplace but into the face before her.  Still holding her under the arms, he lowered his head toward hers. Their freezing lips touched and she drew in a surprised breath. The salt and sweet of bubble gum and long hours on the ice mingled on the rim of his mouth as they made warmth, a match striking flame and fear, kissing away the cold of a January night.