Memoirs, Ink

To the Edge

by Patricia Schultheis

I step onto the ice and, still as stone, balance on my blades. Balance, I have read, is the action of not moving, and this is true. Compared to other skaters swirling past I appear inert, but, in fact, I am very active.  I am actively addressing the ice, focusing my consciousness on the soles of my feet and through them to my blades and the ice below. I am saying, praying, "Bone, blade, ice, we are all elemental: let's be kind to one another." 

During the course of sixty some years, I've been many things: daughter, sister, wife, mother, writer, widow, but never a pagophile, never a lover of ice.  Yet, for three decades I have persisted in a sport for which I have no talent.  Worse, since turning sixty, Ice and I are even less compatible. The few skills I once had, Ice has been secreting away. I can't locate my back outside edges, my power stroking, and my once decent front crossovers. When I urge "Ice be kind," I mean it.   Ice, however, remains unyielding, but, then, eventually my neural pathways waken to the task of keeping me upright, and I can stroke around the rink, never gracefully, certainly not quickly, and with only enough momentum to keep my balance. At sixty-six, an hour or so on the ice can't counterbalance the tipping scales of my life.  But, then, what can?

 

Water saved us. Like pearls encircling a dirty neck, a string of beautiful beaches draped the gritty interior of Bridgeport, Connecticut.  On summer Sunday mornings, after early Mass, my parents would take my sisters and me to the beach. The closer we got to the shore, the more the tension between my mother and father thawed, until I could see their shoulders lowering.

As we crossed the bridge, my mother would stick her head out the window, breathe deeply and turn to the three of us. "Smell that, Girls?  Smell that?  God, how clean it smells!"  She had a passion for clean.

Spot chosen, blanket spread, she'd stand at the shore's edge, watching my father swim beyond the breakers, his arms, dorsal fins slicing Long Island Sound, his head, turning for a quick grab of air before tucking under again. He'd disappear altogether for a second or two before we saw the foamy flutter of his kick. He swam with an easy rhythm, and tirelessly.  Whenever he stopped, it was because he chose to, not because he had to. I remember him hiking up his trunks with his thumbs, flicking water from his eyes and nose and walking toward shore with the inward gaze of someone who has just communed with some profound and unassailable part of himself. And then his eyes homing to my mother's, a slight smile between them, below the surface of their prickly marriage, some supporting secret shared, keeping them afloat.

For her, water was best solid. She could manage a beginner's dog paddle, but frozen water was her true element.  Ice, her remembered self, gliding over it, that was the memory she held fast. 

"All day I'd stand on the line at the GE," she'd murmur to her reflection in the kitchen window as she the washed supper dishes. "And then I'd walk home, eat a piece of bread sprinkled with sugar . . . your grandmother didn't believe in cooking, and grab my skates. The boys would build bonfires . . . I could do figure eights . . . I was that good. Sometimes we'd play crack the whip.  Or some boy would take your hand. We'd skate round and round together. We wouldn't even talk."

 Maybe those boys and bonfires were as chaste as she called.  And maybe the longing I heard in her tone was only for her girlish former self. Or maybe it wasn't.  Maybe it was for some special boy's hand.  Not until I dug into my own memory store did I consider the latter might be the case, but I don't know.  I never will. Memory, it's wily, slippery, a shabby keeper of truth.

 

A May evening and my mother's trimming the prickly shrubs beside our concrete front steps. Every snap of her clippers spritzes the cool air with the scent of fresh evergreen; I taste pine-flavored twilight on the back of my tongue.

My father is in the back yard, mowing the grass. Our house is small, but its yard is doublewide, and cutting the grass is a two-evening enterprise -  no one we know has a power mower.

Suddenly, a large car beaches itself alongside our front fence.  Our property has no sidewalk or curb, so the driver just parks on the grass - everyone does. Like his car, the driver is big and heavy, and he thuds his door shut with an easy swing. His smile is easy, too. The woman in the passenger seat gets out like an afterthought. My parents have friends, couples they've known since before they were married, but I've never seen these two before.

"Clara?" the man says.

My mother brushes away the wave of hair over her forehead with the back of one hand and holds her clippers with the other.  "Stosh?"

"Yeah, it's me, it's Stosh.  Hard to believe, huh? "

The latch on our gate flummoxes him for a moment. Then he laughs and opens it. His curly hair is the color of new pennies, and his sweater's as red as a cardinal's cap.  His face is red too.  The woman bundles herself and her bashful smile through the gate behind him, but she's on her own.  Stosh and my mother are lost in an eye-lock.

"Stosh, well, gee, Stosh . . . after all these years," my mother says.

"Yeah, well, it's me," Stosh answers.  "I've been meaning to get in touch, but you know how it goes . . . something always comes up.  But I've been meaning to get in touch."

"It's been a time. How many years?"

"Long time . . . yeah, long time."

He introduces the woman as his wife.  Like Stosh, she's big; her good-natured smile never stops.  My father, wiping his hands on a bandana, comes around the corner of the house.  He knows Stosh, too. The three of them, my parents and Stosh, went to St. Michael's Elementary School on Bridgeport's East Side, so they talk about the Franciscan nuns and priests, and about learning every subject twice: once in Polish, once in English.  They talk about the Polish homework.  The English homework.  And about Father Charles, the parish's tyrannical pastor. Stosh and my parents toss memories in a game of three-way catch, but Stosh's wife can't play - she didn't go to St. Michael's.

With every cycle around the triangle, the memories of the threesome grow more luminous, more vibrant, until suddenly there are no more.

To fill the void, my mother says, "You want to come in? I can't offer you anything . . . I didn't get a chance to bake today." She's still holding her clippers.

"No, thanks," says Stosh.  "I just wanted to stop by.  Like I said, I've been meaning to get in touch . . .  say hello, but there's always something." Then Stosh looks hard at my mother and says what he's come for. Says what's really on his mind, maybe been on his mind for years, until the convergence of memory and time has finally driven him to our little house on this particular May evening.

"Clara," he asks, "remember skating?"

 My mother doesn't answer, doesn't look at him.  Instead, her middle-distance gaze threads the gap between his big shoulders and his wife's and then into the garden of our neighbors, the Blascos.  The Blascos' property ends at the base of a hill, and against the darkening hillside the approaching night has turned the blossoms on Blascos' apple trees into stars. Fleet as a single snowflake, a little smile brushes across my mother's lips.  "Oh, yeah, I remember skating."

"Me, too," says Stosh.  "Skating . . . it was something. Really something.  You remember holding hands?"

She smiles. "Yeah, I remember holding hands."

"And the bonfires?"

"Gosh, where you guys ever got the wood, I don't know."

"Oh we got it, we got it, don't you worry about that . . . we got it.  And making out, remember making out, Clara?"

I'm eleven. I know the term "making out," but I've never heard it spoken by an adult, so boldly, so unashamedly.  Stosh says "making out" without cruelty, says it as if he really wants to know.  As if the pressure of not knowing was what had propelled him to her.

"I never made out with you, Stosh," my mother says.

"No?"

"Oh, Stosh," his wife half-laughs. Maybe she's a little embarrassed for him, but not upset.  Her husband's past doesn't diminish what she has of him in the present. To her the past is a changeling cube bouncing around in a glassful of memory, its edges growing less defined.

"You sure you and me didn't make out, Clara?"

"I never made out with you, Stosh.  We just held hands.  That's all.  We just held hands and skated . . . I'm positive."

"Well, if you say so, then I guess that's the way it was."

"That's the way it was, Stosh."

Whatever disturbance Stosh has caused isn't great.  When he and his wife get into their car, the good-byes are seasoned with "thanks for stopping by," and  "get together soon."   These said as if my parents mean them.

 But they never get together with Stosh again.  

 The next week, my mother, her potatoes peeled and boiling, has a few minutes before setting out the plates for supper.  The evening paper is spread on the table before her.  When I come out of the bedroom her eyes have the same middle-distance stare that they had when they looked into the Blascos' garden. Some time between peeling her potatoes and my coming into the hallway, a breach has split her world. She talks over my head to the Blessed Virgin statue in the little shrine at our hallway's end. She talks as if the virgin with her downcast gaze also sees a world without mercy.

"Stosh is dead," my mother says, her voice hollow, unable to reconcile the sound of her words with their meaning.  "Two days ago . . . he died . . . Stosh."

Thinking back to that night, I hear her echoing thoughts: "I was good at it.  I could do figure eights. . . I was that good.  Some boy would take your hand," and imagine her, sylph-small, soft brown eyes, heart-shaped mouth, free and floating.  And Stosh racing to catch her, to take her hand and skate. The two of them, wordless, moving in one rhythm over the ice and beneath the stars. The two of them, young and speechless at their own easy syncopation. Where to go, then? Oh, where to go, when the wonder of speed and stars burns too hot?  When their blades were slicing through ice and their blood was on fire?  Did they find the circle of darkness just beyond the bonfire's light? Did she lose herself in the big boy's arms?  And he envelop the delicacy of her bones?

In the Catholic cosmos of mid-century Bridgeport, every girl knew about  danger. She'd heard the whispered kitchen conversations, been sent to her room out of earshot, but not before she'd registered a threat so unthinkable none dared not speak its name. In those days girls got in "trouble," but never "pregnant."

The year I enter it, Notre Dame High School is virgin territory.  Built by the diocese to proclaim the arrival of second-generation Catholics, no student has ever stepped foot into the building. Like an angel, it has two wings, one for boys, one for girls. Perhaps in blueprint the concept appeared inspired, but in actuality, it's hellish. Only two areas are common to both sexes: the library and the chapel. The stiff curtain slicing down its middle makes the cafeteria quasi-common. At lunchtime we girls hear the boys, even smell them, but if we see one? . . . oh if we see one, we'd freeze into pillars of salt.  If God doesn't do that to us, the good nuns will. 

Elsewhere, girls are getting in trouble, but Notre Dame girls are supposed to get into good colleges.  The course of study is rigorous and wholly unimaginative.  We shoulder on, stooped under backpacks of chemistry, Latin and trigonometry books.  And some of us make it to the end.  But not all.

Three weeks before graduation, the intercom flips on. The star of our class, a girl who's won a fistful of scholarships, is called to the office.  Twenty minutes later, we see her. The whole girls' wing sees her. She's walking outside, walking down the whole length of the wing, walking because the good nuns won't let her wait inside for her mother.  It's bright noon, and as she passes the windows of one classroom after another, the girl with a fistful of scholarships has no shadow.  Like a dead person.  Schadenfreud, the good nuns couldn't get enough of it.

Senior year, when she was making out with her boyfriend, I was doing the same with mine. After years of warming the bleachers at every sock hop, I'd met a sailor who'd gotten marooned in a club basement party. He served on a nuclear submarine out of Groton, but his dangerous duty meant nothing to me. What he did and where he went when he wasn't with me didn't matter.  All I knew was that for three months I was his and then he was gone, swallowed whole. 

The year I dated him a cold snap gripped Connecticut with such ferocity that Bunnell Pond in Bridgeport's Beardsley Park froze. The deeper water is, the longer it takes to freeze, and Bunnell Pond was very, very deep. This was a singular event.

 When my boyfriend's sub had returned to its homeport in Groton, he came home to Bridgeport on weekends, and I wanted to try Bunnell Pond.

"Let's go skating," I say.

"Oh, skating," he says, "that's for silly people.  Only silly people do something that can break their legs. You want to break your legs, Patsy?"

"Oh, please."

"Okay, we'll be silly people."

But he and I never skate.  As soon as he parks beside the pond, he pulls me to him. And he kisses me. All over.  For hours.  My wildest dreams don't hold so many possibilities for pleasure.

Just about the time the girl with no shadow is called to the office, even he is afraid of the danger we're slipping toward.  He sends me a letter saying that we need to cool things down, that he needs to take responsibility, yes, but I need do the same. I'm crushed. What I love about him, isn't him at all, but the sense that whatever forbidden pleasure he gives weak, little me, I'm helpless to resist. The only thing stronger than my desire is my delusion of utter blamelessness.

My parents find the letter and in a tyranical rage my father insists that I break up with my sailor - "I'll break your legs," he threatens.  I do as he demands, but my price is icy silence. For one whole year of cold Connecticut mornings, in a second-hand car refrigerated by adolescent rage, he drives me to the train I take to a New Haven Catholic women's college. The possibility that his doing so is also an act of love, I refuse to contemplate. 

But then summer comes again, and one evening, I'm pushing the carriage of a cousin's new baby, an infant girl named Lauren, when I round a corner. And nearly collide with the girl from high school. She's pushing a baby carriage too. We laugh, embarrassed at our near miss. And for everything we cannot speak.

We never knew each other well. She and I had worked on the high school newspaper together, and we used to crack wise about the nuns, but her mind is brilliant, and mine isn't.

Still, that summer night, she and I talk a while. I tell her about college, and, yes, I like it all right. And she shows me her baby . . . her little girl.  And then Lauren starts fussing, so we say good-bye.  And the girl who had won a fistful of scholarships pushes her carriage down the street and into the shadows. 

 

First loves, their intensity propels us to very edge of ourselves.  Igniting our inner fires, they affirm our inner truth, liberate our inner eagles. Or tempting us, they taunt with treachery and draw us toward a danger so great we dare not speak its name.

My junior year in college, on a frigid, starry night, I finally got to skate on Bonnell Pond. The ice had unfurled itself over the dark water like an unblemished bolt of black satin while beneath its solid sheath the dammed Pequenock River raced to the ancient Atlantic.  How thick was the ice that night?  Three inches?  Two?  One?  How close did I skate to the dam where there was no ice at all? I'll never know.  Just as I'll never know who separates the saved from the damned. 

In the end, I didn't marry my first boyfriend.  Or the one after him.  Or after him.  In the end, I found my balance in a man who was as steady as a rock. Who picked me up whenever I fell and kept me safe from the outer darkness.

In the end, there are no right answers, only right choices. Whether we grip our first love's hand or our twenty-first's, what matters is that we take hold.  And go round and round.  Over rough patches and smooth. Together. To the very edge of our numbered days.

 

Patricia Schultheis has had several essays and nearly two dozen short stories published in national and international literary journals. Her pictorial local history Baltimore's Lexington Market was published by Arcadia Publishing of South Carolina in 2007, and.her collection of short stories about a fictional street in Baltimore named St. Bart's Way was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O'Connor Award and Snake Nation Press awards. In 2010 her short story "Downward Drifting" was included in an anthology of Baltimore writers, and she was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. .  She has served on the editorial boards of The Baltimore Review and Narrative and is a member of The Author's Guild and a voting member of The National Book Critics Circle.  Patricia holds two graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and an undergraduate degree from Albertus Magnus College. She currently teaches at McDaniel College