Circus (12 page)

Don’t get me wrong: we’ve always been an athletic family. My dad was a champion hammer-thrower in his day, and my mum is still freakishly good at cartwheels and handsprings from her time as a high-school cheerleader. We went to all the sporting events we could and cheered just as hard for the six-year-olds competing in the potato sack race at the fall fair as we did for the sweepers at the provincial curling championships. So it was just another family outing when my parents, grandparents, and fourteen-year-old me piled into our van and drove to an elementary school in the next town to see my ten-year-old cousin, Jessie, perform in a fundraiser for her Jump Rope Demonstration Team. We cheered her on as we watched her master the double-under, skip backwards with her eyes closed, and kneel atop a human pyramid while turning two ropes in opposite directions. There were little girls bouncing all around, chattering like wind-up toys. They were barely listening to their coach, an older lady who was head-to-toe Eighties in her neon pink, blue, and white tracksuit, with her hair gathered into a voluminous side ponytail. She seemed to be chewing an entire pack of gum with her back molars, which didn’t stop her from hollering tips from the sidelines: “Smile, Becky! It wouldn’t kill you to grin a little!” The gym was enormous, and the basketball hoops, volleyball nets, and gymnastics equipment were all folded against the walls as if to give centre stage
to the event of the moment, the other sports tucking themselves away, quiet as moths. “Baby Love” by the Supremes seemed to be playing on a loop. The girls were performing in small groups all around the gym while their families followed the skippers from station to station. It was like a workout circuit for supportive parenthood.

My cousin’s show-off move was “The Wounded Duck,” and I whistled as she started jumping with her toes together and then clicked her heels back and forth as the rope swung over her head. It was a wonky, sped-up version of the Charleston, and it was somehow graceless and miraculous at the same time. Jump rope was like that: all about the bravura gesture, the one trick that no one else on the team could perform. One tiny red-headed girl did a somersault into the double-dutch set-up and skipped while sitting on the floor, bouncing her bum over the rope while two other skippers turned the long ropes for her. No matter where you were in the room she was the one you couldn’t help watching, the one who held your attention even in a crowd of twenty-odd teammates popping up and down around her. At the end of her routine, she pulled herself up into a perfect bridge position (still skipping), then pushed into a one-handed handstand (still skipping). The crowd stamped their feet and shouted their love, and I found myself spontaneously hollering enthusiasm for her along with everyone else. She couldn’t have been older than eleven, but already she must have known that she would always be the best at these tricks. I guess it must have been the same for my dad when his hammer hit the dust way ahead of everyone else’s, or for my mum when she stretched out her arms to make
her body into a perfect letter
K
. What did it feel like to be so skilled? Would I ever be that good at anything?

While the red-haired girl took a break after her routine to greet her adoring fans, I lined up to make a donation at the pledge table, which was manned by volunteers from the grade five boys’ basketball team. They were drawing tattoos on each other’s biceps in ballpoint pen and taking turns throwing their empty juice boxes into a distant garbage can as if they were shooting three-pointers. A boy my own age joined me in line and we signed $1 pledges for heart health and received red skipping ropes for our contributions.

“What are you going to do with yours?” he asked, flicking me playfully on the shoulder with the coiled jump rope he’d just been given.

I told him I’d read that boxers use them to stay agile on their feet. I was trying to sound tough, even though my arm was still stinging from where he’d hit me. “And Floyd Mayweather is the best skipper of all time,” he said. “True story.” He grinned at me as he unfurled his rope and started to skip, first on one foot and then the other, boxer-style. Although he was still a little lanky, he had the swagger of a champion fighter, and his feet danced quick and light as the rope fluttered faster and faster around him like a blur of tiny wings. The way he skipped, his triceps flexing as he pulled the rope over his head nonchalantly, had all the grace and ease and finesse that the little girls lacked. He was literally jumping for joy, which made me want to join in. The more I watched him, the more I felt as though my own feet were hovering just slightly above the ground. Eventually, he twirled the rope to a stop, slung it over his shoulder, and as he
gave me a gentle punch on the arm, he said he was glad he’d come to the demonstration.

He said it as if we’d had a choice, but if you knew any eight-year-old girl in the whole Peace River region, even simply by name, who could skip double dutch or cross her arms over or do the grapevine, you were there. Them’s the rules. It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that I could have said that to him. Made the conversation last a little longer. Still, if I hadn’t tagged along with my family for a day of Razzle Dazzles and Turning Rodeos, I wouldn’t have met him that first time.

Of course, I’m not the first to question my vocation. There are newspaper editorials all the time attacking the Winter Olympics and questioning what they mean as an institution. Sports like two-man luge, or “doubles luge,” as it’s sometimes called, get the wrong end of the stick in pieces like this. “Luge: A Death Trap for Dummies?” is my latest favourite headline. “Luge is the fastest and most dangerous of the Olympic sliding sports,” the journalist writes, “with athletes travelling at speeds close to 160 km per hour and experiencing centrifugal forces of up to 3Gs – equivalent to those faced by NASCAR drivers – on tight corners. Common injuries include broken bones and concussions. Accidents resulting from poor track maintenance can be fatal. In light of the sport’s dangers, we have to ask ourselves: Why are we spending millions of taxpayer dollars so that athletes can slide down icy man-made tracks at ridiculously fast speeds?”

My mum often asks the same kinds of questions. She wouldn’t let me play rugby when I was in grade ten because she objected to any sport where you have to tape your ears to your head so they don’t get ripped right off. But in luge we keep our chins tucked in to minimize resistance, which doesn’t seem so different. There are helmets to protect our noggins, so that’s something. I’ve never been hurt badly, but bruises are part of any athlete’s job. For us they blossom in the smalls of our backs, right where the body meets the sled. Of course, there are occupational hazards in any job. I’ve been lucky; my injuries have been relatively minor, but you never know what’s going to happen when you push yourself to be that split second faster. That’s the goal, to subtract more and more time from every run so you’re speedier than you think you can be. Sure, there’s always the chance that you might push it too far, might fly off the track, but you have to take risks if you want a shot at that one great run.

The next time I met the jump-a-thon boy was at a regional track meet three years later. We were both seventeen, nearly through high school by then, and running the 1500m. I loved running long distances on my own. It was a way to test the borders of myself, to see where the ground beneath my feet ended and I began. Eventually, I found it hard to think without the thud of my running shoes striking the track. I liked running until my legs were numb and my body felt as though it were a sort of watermill, moving of its own accord. I liked
varying my speed and distances and testing out my legs to see what they were good for. I liked going until I was past my limits and my whole body gave up and I had to throw up in the bushes and stagger home. I even liked circuit training at six in the morning, doing crunches with a twenty-pound weight in each hand, holding the plank position until I buckled, and, yes, skipping rope. I disliked homework, house parties, and snow shovels, which were the other things I spent a lot of time with. I was bad at saying no.

I had no idea how I would do at regionals because I ran by myself every day after school, with just Coach Bradley, his stopwatch, and an enormous bag of Jujubes waiting for me at the finish (though Coach would eat most of the candy, leaving just the black ones for me). The meet took place on a blue asphalt track with the lanes newly painted in white. All the teams were warming up in the soccer pitch in the middle, some wearing matching warm-up suits with their last names embroidered on the sleeves. I wasn’t even wearing a school jersey for the race, just a Canucks T-shirt and some old soccer shorts. “I Get Knocked Down (But I Get Up Again)” was playing on a wheezy megaphone, and families were setting up picnic blankets and portable cushions on the bleachers. I could see my mum and dad, sitting beside a Tupperware bin of orange slices that was large enough to fuel a whole team.

I heard him before I saw him, could almost hear the grin in his voice: “True story.” He was telling his teammates about a flavour of ice cream that combined bacon and cinnamon, and the eight of them were swinging their legs in circles or bouncing up and down, doing what I would later discover
was a plyometric warm-up. My warm-up consisted of a series of static stretches I’d memorized from a handout Coach had photocopied out of an old military fitness book. I sat on the cold ground with my feet sole to sole and my knees pointing outward like French quotation marks, then leaned forward until my nose touched my sneakers. I bobbed up and down a little to intensify the stretch. I know now that my butterfly stretch was disturbingly outdated, exercise science–wise, but I did what I was told. I was wondering if the jump-a-thon boy would remember me when Coach came up behind me and pressed his palm in the small of my back, pushing me deeper into the stretch. “You’ve got this, buddy. Don’t worry about the Eastcreek High jumping beans over there. You’ve got it.” I’m lucky I never tore a hip flexor.

When it was time for the 1500m, the motivational music cut off abruptly and the megaphone crackled our names and schools. The eight of us approached our starting lanes and stood waiting for the horn to sound. The start was my favourite part because the race was all still ahead of you. As soon as you take that first step, the whole sky is in your lungs and you’re the one making the world turn under your feet.

He was four lanes away in slot number two. I could just barely see him lean forward, his fingertips on the ground, as we took our marks, poised like jungle beasts ready to pounce. When the horn sounded, I was off. The scraggly groups of parents and coaches and spectators dropped away. The air felt clean and full in my lungs and my breathing was even. All the other runners eventually fell back and grew small in the distance, leaving just the two of us out in front. We were alone,
and going so fast there was no visible landscape at all beyond the asphalt surface of the track. In the last few metres he was so close I could hear his heavy breath and actually feel him right behind me. As we crossed the finish line together, they announced our results, first place for me, second for Paresh Banarjee. During the ribbon ceremony, we shook hands and he grabbed my elbow for extra emphasis, like he was happy I’d won instead of him. But I still couldn’t tell if he remembered me. I wanted to say something. But what? “Hey, remember me? We met three years ago when we watched those jump-ropers doing the Caboose Shuffle?” Before I could think of something less embarrassing to say, he walked away, and I could only watch dejectedly as he headed back to the bosom of his team. I’d turned to make my way slowly towards my mum, Coach, and the Jujubes when I heard an exuberant, clear voice start to sing “Baby Love.” When I looked back, Paresh’s whole team had gathered in a huddle around him and joined in as he kept singing, thinking the song was for his second-place ribbon. I nodded back at him, and hummed the saxophone line in response. Then, once again, we went our separate ways.