Summer's End (3 page)

But no one would have to guess about why Amy left. They would all know. She wasn't good enough. She had failed.

She knew what her parents would say. She should finish the year, the money didn't matter, the important thing was not to be a quitter.
I'm not a quitter
, her heart shrieked.
No one works harder than me. I'm just not good enough. I'll never get these stupid jumps
.

She couldn't go back to Delaware, not as seventeenth place, not as Amy the Afterthought. “Your flight is this
afternoon, isn't it?” her father asked. “Do you want us to meet you in Delaware?”

“It won't do any good.” She was still crying. “Nothing will help.”

“It may not help you,” he said firmly, “but it will help us, make us feel that we are doing something. I have an eight
A.M.
class tomorrow morning. I can't cancel it, but the minute it's over, I'll be on my way.”

Her parents hadn't seen her skate in more than a year. They rarely came to tournaments, and Amy didn't really expect them to. They were so different from all the other skating families. Nonetheless, by the time she got back to Delaware after the tournament, she heard that her father had called the front office. Her coaches were rearranging ice time, and the next morning he was there, a tall, lean man with thick, dark hair. She supposed he had flown to Philadelphia and rented a car there.

“Amy's a very nice little skater,” she heard her coach say to him. “She has such wonderfully long arms and legs, her line is so lovely, and she carries herself so well. We have developed a very aristocratic look for her.”

Amy didn't want to be a “very nice little skater.” She wanted to be the best. She wanted to win.

“Let me watch her skate,” her father said.

He stood at the boards, resting lightly on his elbows, his hands linked. He was wearing a tweed jacket, a pale blue shirt, and a navy blue knitted tie. It was strange to see a father at practice. Figure skating was a world of mothers. Even in the family she lived with, none of them saw the father very much. He worked two jobs to pay for his daughter's training.

The air in the rink was thin, the light pale and artificial with a meat locker chill. Amy skated her short program
for her father, then her long program. When she came back to the boards, his expression was gentle, but she couldn't tell what he was thinking.

He touched her face. “You are so very lovely.”

People said that to her all the time, how lucky she was to be pretty. “That's not enough, Dad.”

“I know. Now tell me, who chose your music?” he asked.

“The coaches.”

“What about this ‘aristocratic' look that you are supposed to have?”

“I think it has to do with my not being any good at the jumps.”

He smiled. “Is that what ‘aristocratic' means? Not being able to jump?”

“They talk about elegance, coolness, serenity, things like that.”

“Well, sweetheart, I'm willing to bet that these people here don't know any aristocrats, which gives you and me a leg up because we do.”

“We do?” She was confused for a moment. “Oh, you mean Mother?”

Mother's grandfather had been an earl, and when she wrote letters to her own mother, she addressed the envelopes to “Lady Phoebe Cooke.” Amy didn't really know what that meant—Mother never seemed to think it important—but it did sound aristocratic.

“Now, do you really think you should try to skate like your mother?” her father asked.

Amy's laugh was a little thin and watery, but it was a laugh. “No.” All the other skating mothers drove gleamingly clean cars and dressed carefully; even when they came to watch the earliest morning practice, they wore
makeup and their blouses were neatly ironed. Her own mother drove a battered station wagon. Her jewelry was all inherited—strange Art Deco pieces which she wore without much thought of how they looked with her clothes. Amy couldn't imagine trying to skate like her.

“So let's lose this ‘aristocratic look,'” Amy's father said. “Your mother may be an aristocrat, but you are a red-blooded, bouncy American kid. Now, let me watch some of these other girls so I know what I am looking at.”

Amy slipped her skate guards on and came around to sit with him in the bleachers. For the next hour they watched her friends. She knew some of their programs almost as well as she knew her own. She told her father what to watch for.

“Now, watch the height she gets on her jumps…see how tight she is in her rotations…how clean her landing is.”

“Amy, please,” he said, “stop talking about the jumps. I'm tired of hearing about jumps.”

“But the jumps are everything, Dad. They're what counts.”

He motioned her to be quiet.

She couldn't remember when they had ever sat like this, just the two of them. The family often watched slides on Sunday evening, and if Phoebe or Ian wanted to work the projector, then Dad would pull her into his lap because she was the littlest, the only one who was still cuddly. But if Phoebe or Ian needed help with the projector, he would have to move her off his lap and go help the older one.

He wasn't liking what he was seeing on the ice. Amy could tell that. His lips were tight, and his head was pulled back, his neck angling sharply away from his shoul
ders and spine. She had seen him like that before—when she was little and would be struggling with her spelling words or trying to read something aloud. He would glance at Mother, and Mother would lift her hand—
this is Amy
, the hand would seem to be saying,
there's nothing we can do about it. She's not like the others
.

At the end of the session, he sat quietly for a moment, looking down at his hands, his lips tight. Then he spoke. “Why do you want to quit?”

This was a test. Amy knew that instantly. There was a right answer.

And she had no idea what it was. “Because I'm not good enough?”

He shook his head. “No. We have no idea how good you are. Every one of these girls is exactly alike. They are little robots. Your coach is very controlling. Do you know what I mean by that?”

Sort of. “But, Dad, she's the coach. We have to do what she says.”

“No, you don't. You have to
listen
to what she says. You have to
try
it, give it your best shot, but if it doesn't work for you, you don't have to do it.” He lifted his arm around her shoulders. “You know that your mother doesn't really enjoy watching you skate. Do you know why?”

Amy looked down at her hands. Of course she knew why. She wasn't Phoebe or Ian, she wasn't smart like Phoebe and Ian. That's what counted to her parents, being smart, not being able to skate. But Dad wouldn't say that. It was true, but no one would say it. “She'd rather be watching ballet.” That seemed like a safe answer.

“There's some element of truth in that,” he admitted, “but the important thing is that she doesn't feel like she's watching you.” His voice was gentle. “It seems as if it's
someone else out there. And I think, as usual, she's right. I don't know as much about figure skating as perhaps I should, but I do know a thing or two about performance.”

Amy looked at him blankly. Oh, he was a music professor. That's what he was talking about, musical performances.

“The one thing that separates the great musicians from the very good ones is not technique; they all have that. The great musicians love every note that they play, they become the piece of music. That's not happening when you skate. It's closest to happening with the girl in the blue. I almost have a sense of her personality, of who she is when she skates.”

The girl in the blue was the two-time Junior National champion. “Did you see how many triples she has in her program?”

A look of impatience flashed across her father's face. “No, I didn't. Amy, you're obsessed with these jumps. It's all you can think about. All that matters to you is the thing that you're worst at. Let's concentrate on what you're good at. Now, what is your favorite piece of music?”

Another test. Her favorite piece of music. She wasn't prepared. She knew that she ought to name something from the classics, Liszt or Brahms or someone like that. He would approve of that, but for the life of her, she couldn't think of anything.

She blurted out the name of a song currently playing on the radio. Then hated herself. Why had she said something so dopey? Now he was going to think that she was stupid.

Although of course he already knew that.

But his expression didn't change. His voice was even. “Fine. Let's get a tape of it.”

“For a program? But it has lyrics. We can't use things with lyrics.”

“Then we will rerecord it.”

He stayed for three days, and for the first time in the two and a half years Amy had been there, she felt like she had the full attention of her coach and the choreographer.

He borrowed a pair of skates and came out on the ice.

“I didn't know you could skate, Dad.”

“By the standards of everyone around here, I'm sure I can't,” he answered. “But I played hockey constantly as a kid. As soon as the farm ponds froze, that's what we did.”

“I didn't know that.”

“You didn't?” He shook his head. “That's what got me the Rhodes scholarship, being able to play hockey—you had to be athletic as well as smart. If I hadn't skated, I wouldn't have gone to Oxford and I wouldn't have met your mother and then where would you be?”

Amy shrugged. This was weird, her not knowing that he could skate when skating was her whole life.

But ice hockey was nothing like competitive figure skating, and she resisted his ideas at first. He didn't understand how important the jumps were. “But, Dad,” she kept saying, “the judges look for those jumps.”

All the other families knew about the jumps. It was starting to make her mad. The other families came to watch competitions; some mothers were at every practice, every single one. She understood that her family wasn't like that, that they were different, but Dad had no business acting like he knew what he was talking about. He didn't.

He must have sensed her mood. He stopped and gathered up her hands in his, pulling her close. “I know you don't agree with me, but could you humor me for a bit? The minute I'm gone, you can go back to doing it the old way.”

She could feel the tweed of his jacket along her forearms. The tweed was made of twists of blue and green, and the suede patches at the elbow were a soft brown. His hands were slender for a man's, but they were warm.

He and Ian had learned calculus together. It had been during her last year at home. Ian, who seemed to be able to learn languages faster than Amy could read English, was actually having trouble in a subject. “Well, it won't hurt me,” their father had laughed, and night after night they sat in the book-filled living room, moaning and making faces. But Ian had gotten an A.

Now her father—her father who had skated during his own childhood—was here, helping her.

She wanted to believe him, she really did. She didn't want to be mad, not when he had gone to so much trouble to get here, but what did he know about the sport? She looked over her shoulder at her coach.

That was a mistake. She knew it the instant that she did it. She was saying to him that her coach's opinion mattered more to her than his did.

Well, maybe it did.

Surprisingly the coach supported him. “Pretend that you're a professional, in an ice show,” she suggested. “In an ice show you don't have to worry about judges.”

No one had ever talked to Amy about a professional career. The best girls were already getting flowers from the ice shows and the management agencies, but not Amy.

“Can you think like that?” Her father's voice was gentle.

“Yes.”

She was the most important element of the program, he said. Not the music, not the costume, not even the jumps, but she herself. He preached sincerity, absolute
sincerity. “Do you love that move? You can't do it if you don't love it. No one will believe in you unless you believe in yourself.” He talked about emotion and getting the audience to feel what she was feeling. “Reach out to them.”

And above all, she had to be herself. “Maybe it would be easier, even better, if you were a jumper, but you aren't. Pretending to be won't work.”

He helped her understand that she liked the Top 40 tune because it was so cheerful, so full of bouncy anticipation. The first evening he found a piano and started playing a rough medley of three medieval German folk songs. Amy instantly fell in love with the songs. Hal played and replayed them, trying all sorts of different arrangements. Amy listened and listened.

After an hour he stopped playing. “You have a marvelous ear,” he said, shaking his head. “I don't know why I hadn't noticed it before. I thought Ian was the only one of you who had it.”

All her life she had heard that Ian was so good at languages because he had a nearly genius-level ability to remember and recreate a sound. It was strange, it was incomprehensible, to hear her ear compared to his.

They made a tape of the German songs, and the next morning they took everything they had worked on the day before and put it to the new music. Then he rearranged the music so the jumps made sense. She came to understand what she had hated about jumps was that they never seemed to have anything to do with the music. But now her music seemed to be lifting her and turning her on its own.

“What makes a jump work?” her father asked. “What makes you go around? What are the physics involved?”

Physics? Amy knew nothing about physics. Ian was the one who understood physics, not her.

Dad talked to the coaches. They gave him articles to read. “The latest research on jumps,” he said to Amy afterward, “argues for importance of upper body strength, and that can be improved.”