I cartwheel to the side, back to my feet, then pause just long enough to catch a single breath. Bracing my hands on the edge of the suede and wood of the beam, I push back, then up into a handstand. I waver for a moment, my left leg thrashing out as I feel myself begin to fall. So then I right myself, balance restored, no problem.
But a wave of uncertainty that begins in my arms rolls up through my chest and tips me forward. I rock my hips back to correct it, but I overcompensate and now my legs tip too far in the other direction. My right arm quakes, and I see the world around me bend and tilt. I try to kick my legs around to break the fall, but it’s too late. I smash into the mat chest first and my rib cage slams into my lungs, blasting all the air inside me out through my mouth.
A boy who was practicing on the rings—a Ukrainian kid from Brooklyn I’ve seen a few times—drops to the ground and scrambles over to me. “You hurt maybe? Handstand maybe too much hard.” He helps me to my feet, hands me a towel. I close my eyes and breathe into it. “Is okay,” he says, and places a hand on my trembling shoulder.
I thank him and stagger away like a drunk. My body is spent and it feels like someone has injected Drano into my muscles. When I get to the locker room, I throw a towel over my head and collapse onto a bench, elbows on knees, breathing so ragged the air whistles when it goes in and out, leaving a faint taste of blood on my tongue. It sounds strange, but I like this—the pain, the ragged breathing, the little taste of blood. It reminds me I have a body, that I am a body. That I’m something real, instead of just the thoughts in my head.
I drop the towel to the floor and strip out of my leotard. When I reach the showers, it takes a minute for the water to come out hot, but I stand under the cold rain anyway. It’s harsh water that smells like chlorine and rust, and it comes out hard. It beats against my skin, billions of little stinging needles.
*
I started gymnastics after my mom was killed. I was seven years old, and for a month or two afterward, all I did was lie in bed rolled up in a ball, rolled up inside myself, screaming as loud as I could into a pillow saturated with tears and snot. My dad would hold me, of course, but then he would cry, too. We fed off each other like this for a while until we both dried out. That was right after moving from Algiers to Washington.
One Saturday, we drove to an electronics store because my dad knocked his cell phone into the sink while he was shaving and he needed a new one. Next to the store was a gymnastics studio. We stood there at the window watching a boy on a pommel horse, swinging around like gravity didn’t apply to him, like he had been exempted from the rule that eventually everything goes crashing down to the ground. A teacher came out, an Asian woman. I thought she was going to tell us to go away, but instead she asked if we wanted to come inside and take a look.
The addiction was born, and when we left for our next post, I discovered that most countries have Olympic training centers in their capital cities, where my dad would be stationed with the embassy. The best coaches were always willing to take on a new American student, especially if the new American student paid in American dollars.
No one ever pretended I was Olympics material. Too tall, too big, they all said, and no grace at all. I was all gangly raw power, like a thick chain instead of a whip. But getting to the Olympics, or even competing at all, wasn’t why I started and it wasn’t why I continued. I chased those bits of seconds spent in the air, those moments cheating gravity, for the drug called freedom. So what if the high of not having to think about anything else only lasted a tenth of a second? So what if the bullies and the loneliness and the memories were waiting for me on the ground? I could always get back on the beam.
*
Back in the city, the rain has stopped, and in the dark of early evening, the streets feel clean. Surfaces glimmer, and Manhattan smells of cold, clean water instead of garbage and gasoline for the first time in months. I make my way across Third Avenue and down to Second, where I turn left. My first stop is the bakery on the corner, where I take ten minutes to choose just two cupcakes: one chocolate with red icing, the other lemon with pink icing. The shopkeeper wraps them up in a little box.
A few doors down, the lights are still on inside Atzmon’s Stationers. I press the doorbell and see a figure shuffling slowly at the back of the shop. Then the door buzzes for me to enter.
“Guten Abend, Rotschuhe!” says Bela Atzmon loudly from the back of the shop. Good evening, Red Shoes, is how he greets me because of my red boots. He’s Hungarian by birth, but spoke German in school.
I make my way through the dark wood shelves lined with stacks and stacks of writing paper in every possible color and texture. Brass lamps with green shades cast everything in a warm, old-fashioned kind of light, as if the store had been here, unchanged, for a hundred years. I hope this place never has to close, but who writes letters anymore?
At the front of the shop is a glass display cabinet full of pens, and it’s here that Bela meets me, peering at me over the top of his glasses.
He’s somewhere north of eighty, maybe even ninety, but he’s still thick and strong. He was a farm boy, he told me once, from a little village far from anything anyone would call a big city. “Is today the day, Red Shoes?” he asks, his accent thick as peanut butter.
In addition to the stationery store, Bela and his wife, Lili, own the apartments above it. My dad and I live on the fourth floor, and the Atzmons on the fifth. We became friends with them almost as soon as we moved in, and we go to their apartment at least twice a week for dinner. Afterward, Bela always forces a Hungarian fruit brandy called palinka on my dad, and the four of us sit and talk. Politics. Religion. The lives they’d led—first in Hungary, then in Israel, where they’d made their home for thirty years before coming to the States. Bela waves his fourth or fifth or sixth brandy of the night around like a conductor’s baton as the stories get darker. Then Lili scolds him and he stops. After a while, I usually go downstairs to do my homework, and as I leave, Bela and Lili always squeeze my hand and give me a little kiss on the cheek. It’s the kind of thing I imagine grandparents do. Always looking at me like I’m treasure.
It takes me a minute to dig through the pockets of my jacket and find the thin envelope I put there this morning. I take it out and remove the contents—ten twenty-dollar bills—and spread them out on the counter.
Bela clicks his tongue and shakes his head. “Too much, little one. Didn’t you see the sign in the window? Today only, fifty percent discount for any young woman wearing red shoes.”
“That’s not fair to you.”