Small People on High Horses - Kat Lewis
Don’t fucking call me Tina. The name’s Tena. TEH-nuh. Like Jenna but with a “T”. I was lucky enough to be born to a seventeen-year-old who kept her legs open like she had something to dry. Not only was I terribly lucky, I was also an asshole. “Fifty-five hours!” Natalie cried out whenever she could make a conversation appropriate enough to talk about childbirth. “Fifty-five hours that little shit over there,” she’d always point at me with a poorly self-manicured finger, “sat where the sun don’t shine, taking her sweet ass time to make an entrance.” Ma would then say something about how the sun shined there all too often. Apparently in the delivery room, Dad made some comment about how “tenacious” of a baby I was, and whatever bone or organ that gave a person a bad idea churned in Natalie and she said, “That’s it. That’s the name of my first-born child.”
So here I am, nineteen years later on the eve of my first figure skating gold medal with a chip on my shoulder over a goddamn name. Tenacity. I started skating when I was five, and I was fucking terrible. Many athletes grew up with raw, natural-born talent. They were hunks of marble, sparkling and waiting to be carved into David. They were the unpainted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, unchiseled Venus de Milos, the light sources of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, the sketch of Mona Lisa’s smile. While the prodigies glided through their spiral and effortlessly landed their first waltz jumps, I fell on the ice, bruised on the ice, and cried on the ice. I was Holofernes’ sawed-off head – the head of Goliath, Jean the Baptist. But over the years, I worked hard. I fell, I bruised, I cried, until I made something of myself. It wasn’t so much that I was determined or resilient as it was that I was afraid. I owe my success to Ma’s belt, and how she always made sure to use the end with the buckle.
Ma liked to compare my story to the Williams sisters. Probably because they were black. She always threw in a snide remark about how they were blacker than us. They were poor, underprivileged, Compton black whereas we were country club, I’ll-put-it-on-Daddy’s-American-Express-card black. My dad was a surgeon who owned three horses and spent more time practicing dressage than he did with us. When Ma wasn’t screaming at me about my sloppy sit spins, she was watching tennis. Every flat screen in our house was permanently tuned to The Tennis Channel. No matter which room you were in, you could always hear the echo of Sharapova’s fucking forehand grunts. Whenever I had friends over, I spent an unnecessary amount of time convincing them that my mom wasn’t watching porn. And then there was Natalie. My parent made a deal with her boarding school to let her finish the first semester of senior year at home. Then after she squeezed me out, slapped a shitty name on my birth certificate, and left me with what are really my grandparents, she ran off to Yale to binge drink and indiscriminately fuck.
In the end though, I don’t think my experiences varied that much from the Williams sisters. In 2001, an American crowd at Indian Wells shouted racial slurs at Serena and her family, and I grew up in North Carolina. Even though I started skating in the late nineties, every practice I saw The Look on their faces. I saw The Look in the thousand-yard stare of my fellow kindergarteners and their parents. I saw it on the face of my first few couches and on the lady who gave out wristbands for the public skate. I swear I even saw it on Mackenzie Haas’ Golden Retriever that sat in the back of her mother’s Range Rover every Thursday after practice. The Look was disapproval, dissatisfaction, and disdain. But most of all, it was racist. Of course, I didn’t realize it was racist until I moved up north and never felt uncomfortable by virtue of existing in a room with others.
The night before the U.S. Championship, I was in the locker room, untying my skates when I felt that familiar gaze burrowing into my back. As I slid my foot out of its skate, I saw Mackenzie Haas glaring at me the way I imagined Tonya Harding looked at Nancy Kerrigan. “Can I help you?” I said, wiping down the skate’s blade with a towel.
Mackenzie slipped her soakers onto her skates and said, “You know, you have a little wobble on your triple axel’s landing. I think you’re coming down on too flat a blade.”
“Thanks, Kenzie,” I said, dead smile on my face. “By the way, your take off on your triple is . . . wait, you haven’t landed a triple axel in competition, have you? That’s okay, I guess you can still take bronze with a high execution score.”
Mackenzie’s overly groomed eyebrows twitched as she stuffed her skates into her bag. “No need to be nasty, Tina. I’m just trying to give you some friendly advice.”
“You’re about as friendly as hepatitis. Look, why don’t we both stay out of each other’s business and I’ll see you on the podium tomorrow, right below me. Deal?”
Mackenzie rolled her eyes and zipped up her bag. “Fair enough,” she said, slinging the strap onto her shoulder. The locker room door swung open, and Ma sauntered in with shower puddles squelching under her red-bottomed heels. Mackenzie acknowledged Ma with a respectful but smug nod as she passed. At the door, Mackenzie paused and said over her shoulder, “Just trying to give you a fair warning.” Although her voice was polite, it seemed to toll in the air.
Outside of the locker room, Mackenzie’s eleven-year-old brother waited for her with an eager smile. As the door craned shut, I caught a glimpse of her tossing her bag into his barely-ready arms. Ma scoffed at the sight. “Small people feel so tall on their high horses.” She shook her head and turned back to me, handing me her iPad. On the screen was a video still of me mid-spin. “Today’s practice,” she said as I took the tablet, “Study it tonight so you can kick Kenzie’s condescending ass tomorrow.”
The next day, I hobbled on my blade guards to the water fountain in the rink’s lobby. On the way, I passed Mackenzie’s brother who was chatting up a group of girls that collect the flowers after each performance. He leaned against the wall with pseudo-confidence and gave me “the nod” as I passed. Laughing, I walked up to the fountain. As I filled up the bottle, the herd of girls approached with Mackenzie’s brother in tow. “Excuse me?” one of them said in high voice. “You’re Tena Parker, right? Could we get a picture?”
Screwing on the cap, I grinned. She said my name right. How could I say no? “Of course,” I replied, balancing the bottle on the water fountain and stepping away for the picture. Mackenzie’s brother wandered off as the skaters gathered around. A flash burst from an iPhone and the girls threw out a few thank yous before taking their leave. I picked up my water bottle and went to drink from it when the cap fell off. Water dribbled down the front of my sweatshirt and I blinked. I could have sworn I screwed the cap on all the way.
Minutes before I was to take the ice, my mother and coach stood with me next to the rink. They ran through all the things I needed to focus on, my footwork, the flying change, and, of course, the landing of my triple axel. “It tastes like vinegar to say,” I said after my coach ran through my landing, “But Kenzie’s right. There’s a wobble.” The only thing that was stranger than agreeing with that cretin was that the words really did take like vinegar. Something foul sat in the back of my throat, thick like mucus and stirring my stomach like carsickness. Hand on my chest, I paused. Ma’s brow creased.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shook my head, forcing the nausea from my mind. “Nothing. Just nerves, I guess.”
She held my gaze a moment, but the announcer called out my name before she could say anything.
I skated into my starting position, feeling more like I was on a boat at sea than a skating rink. Ignoring the temptation to toddle side to side, I took a deep breath and the music started. The first few steps of the choreography were effortless, but as I gained speed with back cross cuts, my stomach sloshed. Jumping into my triple axel with perfect height, I came down on my edge with a wobble. Damn Mackenzie, I thought as I prepared for my triple flip. I made the turn and the room when slanted. The stadium toppled onto its side like a collapsing dream. I half-expected the spectators to fall from their seats. But out of routine, determination, or idiocy, I went into the jump anyway.
The stands whirred around me, and I hit the ice with a crack. In that moment, I felt my arm separated from my shoulder and my dreams from reality. My head tapped the ground, and I bit the inside of my cheek. With the taste of blood and copper filling my mouth, I stared at the beam-crossed ceiling. The florescent lights burned purple spots into my vision. A cocktail of hate and disappointment boiled in my stomach. It clawed its way up my throat with burning fingers as I heard the medics shuffle across the ice. A cloud of voices hung over me, sounding distant and indistinct like cafeteria chatter. I heard nothing in the clump of noise. My mind was too busying thinking of my water bottle as Mackenzie’s brother walked by it. As a shadow cast over me, my eyes flitted away from the lights, and I saw my mother’s silhouette – her face eclipsed by a violet splotch.
“Jesus Christ, is she okay?” she asked a medic who replied with unintelligible syllables.
My lips, chapped and split, let out a soundless stuttered. Ma crouched down besides me, her knee cracking as she went. The hate crawled out of my mouth, and released itself in the hush of one single word, “Mackenzie.”
Don’t fucking call me Tina. The name’s Tena. TEH-nuh. Like Jenna but with a “T”. I was lucky enough to be born to a seventeen-year-old who kept her legs open like she had something to dry. Not only was I terribly lucky, I was also an asshole. “Fifty-five hours!” Natalie cried out whenever she could make a conversation appropriate enough to talk about childbirth. “Fifty-five hours that little shit over there,” she’d always point at me with a poorly self-manicured finger, “sat where the sun don’t shine, taking her sweet ass time to make an entrance.” Ma would then say something about how the sun shined there all too often. Apparently in the delivery room, Dad made some comment about how “tenacious” of a baby I was, and whatever bone or organ that gave a person a bad idea churned in Natalie and she said, “That’s it. That’s the name of my first-born child.”
So here I am, nineteen years later on the eve of my first figure skating gold medal with a chip on my shoulder over a goddamn name. Tenacity. I started skating when I was five, and I was fucking terrible. Many athletes grew up with raw, natural-born talent. They were hunks of marble, sparkling and waiting to be carved into David. They were the unpainted ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, unchiseled Venus de Milos, the light sources of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, the sketch of Mona Lisa’s smile. While the prodigies glided through their spiral and effortlessly landed their first waltz jumps, I fell on the ice, bruised on the ice, and cried on the ice. I was Holofernes’ sawed-off head – the head of Goliath, Jean the Baptist. But over the years, I worked hard. I fell, I bruised, I cried, until I made something of myself. It wasn’t so much that I was determined or resilient as it was that I was afraid. I owe my success to Ma’s belt, and how she always made sure to use the end with the buckle.
Ma liked to compare my story to the Williams sisters. Probably because they were black. She always threw in a snide remark about how they were blacker than us. They were poor, underprivileged, Compton black whereas we were country club, I’ll-put-it-on-Daddy’s-American-Express-card black. My dad was a surgeon who owned three horses and spent more time practicing dressage than he did with us. When Ma wasn’t screaming at me about my sloppy sit spins, she was watching tennis. Every flat screen in our house was permanently tuned to The Tennis Channel. No matter which room you were in, you could always hear the echo of Sharapova’s fucking forehand grunts. Whenever I had friends over, I spent an unnecessary amount of time convincing them that my mom wasn’t watching porn. And then there was Natalie. My parent made a deal with her boarding school to let her finish the first semester of senior year at home. Then after she squeezed me out, slapped a shitty name on my birth certificate, and left me with what are really my grandparents, she ran off to Yale to binge drink and indiscriminately fuck.
In the end though, I don’t think my experiences varied that much from the Williams sisters. In 2001, an American crowd at Indian Wells shouted racial slurs at Serena and her family, and I grew up in North Carolina. Even though I started skating in the late nineties, every practice I saw The Look on their faces. I saw The Look in the thousand-yard stare of my fellow kindergarteners and their parents. I saw it on the face of my first few couches and on the lady who gave out wristbands for the public skate. I swear I even saw it on Mackenzie Haas’ Golden Retriever that sat in the back of her mother’s Range Rover every Thursday after practice. The Look was disapproval, dissatisfaction, and disdain. But most of all, it was racist. Of course, I didn’t realize it was racist until I moved up north and never felt uncomfortable by virtue of existing in a room with others.
The night before the U.S. Championship, I was in the locker room, untying my skates when I felt that familiar gaze burrowing into my back. As I slid my foot out of its skate, I saw Mackenzie Haas glaring at me the way I imagined Tonya Harding looked at Nancy Kerrigan. “Can I help you?” I said, wiping down the skate’s blade with a towel.
Mackenzie slipped her soakers onto her skates and said, “You know, you have a little wobble on your triple axel’s landing. I think you’re coming down on too flat a blade.”
“Thanks, Kenzie,” I said, dead smile on my face. “By the way, your take off on your triple is . . . wait, you haven’t landed a triple axel in competition, have you? That’s okay, I guess you can still take bronze with a high execution score.”
Mackenzie’s overly groomed eyebrows twitched as she stuffed her skates into her bag. “No need to be nasty, Tina. I’m just trying to give you some friendly advice.”
“You’re about as friendly as hepatitis. Look, why don’t we both stay out of each other’s business and I’ll see you on the podium tomorrow, right below me. Deal?”
Mackenzie rolled her eyes and zipped up her bag. “Fair enough,” she said, slinging the strap onto her shoulder. The locker room door swung open, and Ma sauntered in with shower puddles squelching under her red-bottomed heels. Mackenzie acknowledged Ma with a respectful but smug nod as she passed. At the door, Mackenzie paused and said over her shoulder, “Just trying to give you a fair warning.” Although her voice was polite, it seemed to toll in the air.
Outside of the locker room, Mackenzie’s eleven-year-old brother waited for her with an eager smile. As the door craned shut, I caught a glimpse of her tossing her bag into his barely-ready arms. Ma scoffed at the sight. “Small people feel so tall on their high horses.” She shook her head and turned back to me, handing me her iPad. On the screen was a video still of me mid-spin. “Today’s practice,” she said as I took the tablet, “Study it tonight so you can kick Kenzie’s condescending ass tomorrow.”
The next day, I hobbled on my blade guards to the water fountain in the rink’s lobby. On the way, I passed Mackenzie’s brother who was chatting up a group of girls that collect the flowers after each performance. He leaned against the wall with pseudo-confidence and gave me “the nod” as I passed. Laughing, I walked up to the fountain. As I filled up the bottle, the herd of girls approached with Mackenzie’s brother in tow. “Excuse me?” one of them said in high voice. “You’re Tena Parker, right? Could we get a picture?”
Screwing on the cap, I grinned. She said my name right. How could I say no? “Of course,” I replied, balancing the bottle on the water fountain and stepping away for the picture. Mackenzie’s brother wandered off as the skaters gathered around. A flash burst from an iPhone and the girls threw out a few thank yous before taking their leave. I picked up my water bottle and went to drink from it when the cap fell off. Water dribbled down the front of my sweatshirt and I blinked. I could have sworn I screwed the cap on all the way.
Minutes before I was to take the ice, my mother and coach stood with me next to the rink. They ran through all the things I needed to focus on, my footwork, the flying change, and, of course, the landing of my triple axel. “It tastes like vinegar to say,” I said after my coach ran through my landing, “But Kenzie’s right. There’s a wobble.” The only thing that was stranger than agreeing with that cretin was that the words really did take like vinegar. Something foul sat in the back of my throat, thick like mucus and stirring my stomach like carsickness. Hand on my chest, I paused. Ma’s brow creased.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
I shook my head, forcing the nausea from my mind. “Nothing. Just nerves, I guess.”
She held my gaze a moment, but the announcer called out my name before she could say anything.
I skated into my starting position, feeling more like I was on a boat at sea than a skating rink. Ignoring the temptation to toddle side to side, I took a deep breath and the music started. The first few steps of the choreography were effortless, but as I gained speed with back cross cuts, my stomach sloshed. Jumping into my triple axel with perfect height, I came down on my edge with a wobble. Damn Mackenzie, I thought as I prepared for my triple flip. I made the turn and the room when slanted. The stadium toppled onto its side like a collapsing dream. I half-expected the spectators to fall from their seats. But out of routine, determination, or idiocy, I went into the jump anyway.
The stands whirred around me, and I hit the ice with a crack. In that moment, I felt my arm separated from my shoulder and my dreams from reality. My head tapped the ground, and I bit the inside of my cheek. With the taste of blood and copper filling my mouth, I stared at the beam-crossed ceiling. The florescent lights burned purple spots into my vision. A cocktail of hate and disappointment boiled in my stomach. It clawed its way up my throat with burning fingers as I heard the medics shuffle across the ice. A cloud of voices hung over me, sounding distant and indistinct like cafeteria chatter. I heard nothing in the clump of noise. My mind was too busying thinking of my water bottle as Mackenzie’s brother walked by it. As a shadow cast over me, my eyes flitted away from the lights, and I saw my mother’s silhouette – her face eclipsed by a violet splotch.
“Jesus Christ, is she okay?” she asked a medic who replied with unintelligible syllables.
My lips, chapped and split, let out a soundless stuttered. Ma crouched down besides me, her knee cracking as she went. The hate crawled out of my mouth, and released itself in the hush of one single word, “Mackenzie.”