Ice Castles
by Alta Ifland
When the US skating championship started in mid-February, Ben’s presence in our house was so common that we were left alone on the brown suede couch in front of the TV with a huge bowl of popcorn between us, and more than once, when he went home, it was close to midnight. Usually, Mother sat with us until about ten, joining me in my kibitzing. The greatest pleasure for me, even more than watching the skaters, consisted in evaluating and commenting on their performance, and in using for this purpose all the technical vocabulary I had mastered, all the more so since I had a novice spectator by my side who didn’t fail to be deeply impressed by my knowledge. Mother added her own contribution to the commentary—it wasn’t for nothing that she’d witnessed so many training sessions all these years—but her scholarly examination of the skaters didn’t stop her, however, from getting emotionally involved, and whenever someone fell, she invariably produced the same shriek of surprise and brought her hand to her chest. As for Ben, he lay comfortably with his back propped up against a cushion and his legs spread apart, reaching for some popcorn every now and then, and slurping lazily from a can of Coke. Shortly after Mother went to bed, Lorand stopped by to kiss me good-night and shake Ben’s hand, as he urged us, winking, to “be good.” Both of us pretended we had no idea what Lorand’s winking and words meant. Good, we were—mostly.
On the last night of the championship I decided that we had to celebrate Linda Fratianne’s gold title and the ending of the event by opening a bottle of red wine from the pantry. There were enough bottles to obscure the disappearance of the one I took, I thought, and in order to make it real, I also brought the tall wine glasses Mother and Lorand used. By then, they were already in bed, probably asleep. We clinked our glasses and took a sip as we watched a commercial for tampons with the sound off. Save for the colorful, shifting light coming from the TV, the room was dark, yet I could tell—feel—how Ben’s cheeks were getting redder and hotter. Or was it because my own face, teased by the wine, was getting hotter, as was my entire body? We sipped our wine in silence, and when we finished our glasses, I poured some more. The large bowl of popcorn separating our bodies was almost empty, so I grabbed it and placed it on the floor. Now, the only thing between us was air and an unending sensation of inevitability. When Ben’s glass was empty again, he placed it slowly on the coffee table in front of us, and leaned back, waiting. I still had about a finger of wine left in mine and took five long minutes to finish it. One slow sip—pause—another sip—pause. Ben turned his head to face mine and watched me with lowered eyes. Through the alcohol vapors that were now clouding my vision he looked hazy, and I couldn’t tell what his face expressed. When my own glass was finally empty, I placed it next to Ben’s and, like him, leaned back, my gaze straight ahead. But I didn’t have time to form even a thought because in the next instant I felt his lips crushing mine.
We were scared enough not to do more than kiss that night, but the kiss lasted forever, and its alimentary intensity, which surprised me at first, lingered on my lips long after it ended. Later that night, alone in bed, I called back the scene, trying to remember every detail, but already the details were muddled in my foggy memory, and all I remembered with certainty was darkness, wetness and an enjoyable pressure. So this is what kissing was like. I also recalled, laughing in the dark at my own previous naiveté, how concerned I used to be about the nose. What was one supposed to do with the nose while kissing? Now I knew that in some mysterious but natural way, the nose disappears in the process, leaving the space of maneuvering entirely to the mouth. I knew something that most of my classmates still ignored, and when I stepped into our classroom the next morning, I felt elevated by this secret knowledge.
Each time Ben and I met after classes we waited for the moment no one was around to pursue our newly discovered game, and the more we did it, the more enjoyable it became. We never spoke or looked at each other, we just rushed into each other’s arms, eager to resume a pleasurable act that for the time being seemed enough in itself. After minutes of such kissing, we would briefly pause to take a gulp of air, then begin anew. And then, when an hour had passed, we’d realize with a start that we were late and Mother must have been worried, and composing ourselves, we’d quickly run our fingers through our hair and ask each other if we looked OK. My lips were constantly swollen and burning, so I avoided meeting Mother’s eyes, knowing that it took much less than that for her to notice when something was amiss.
It was another two weeks until Ben dared to make his next move, and it happened, once again, in our living room on the brown couch facing the TV. True, I had done everything I could to embolden him, starting with the very tight turquoise blouse I was wearing. At first, he touched my breasts over the blouse, then, seeing that I put up no resistance, he quickly reached under it. Initially, his touch—a rough squeeze, as if he was handling a rubber ball—was painful, but within minutes he made impressive progress.
The next day we changed our position during study time, and instead of sitting at my desk, we now sat next to each other on the loveseat, with the textbook on my lap and the notebook in his, two hopeless witnesses as we kissed and fondled, and only when we heard an approaching sound did we untangle ourselves from each other’s embrace. Mother must have sensed something because it was she who was now avoiding my gaze, and when our eyes did meet, a flicker of worry showed in hers. Once or twice I caught her and Lorand whispering to each other with that concern on their faces people have when a crisis is in the air. But by that time it was too late: Ben and I were inseparable. As the Romanian song goes, we were glued to each other like a stamp on a letter. If we had been older, we might have had certain expectations of each other, but the way things were, neither of us seemed concerned with the future. We lived only in the present—we were the present. It never even crossed my mind to ask myself if I “loved” him or if he “loved” me. All I knew was that I needed him the way I needed some essential nutrient, and if something interfered with our dates I flew into uncontrollable rage.
But maybe it would be more accurate to say that because I expected nothing from Ben, I assumed that he too felt the same. The day I was proved wrong came as a big surprise. We had watched Le Bonheur in our French class, a movie in which the protagonist is passionately in love with a woman with whom the audience is led to believe he will live happily ever after. But one day he meets another woman, and suddenly, he is just as passionately in love with her as he’d been with the previous woman. Eventually, he divorces the first woman and marries the second one, and at the end of the movie he is just as happy as at the beginning, as if nothing had changed. I thought it was a charming enough movie, if a bit boring, like all French films, but Ben reacted with surprising irritation, as if someone had stepped on his toes.
“You think it’s normal for someone to be in love, and then for them to stop loving that person and fall in love with someone else? You think that’s normal?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, cautiously. “I don’t know if it’s normal, but it happens all the time.”
“Well, it won’t happen to me! I will love the same person all my life.”
I looked at him, suddenly aware that we had reached a crisis point. The funny thing is I wasn’t sure how to interpret his words: was he saying that he was going to love me for the rest of his life (in which case, that must have been the most morose declaration of love in history)? Or, on the contrary, that he will be in love with someone else for the rest of his life (which amounted to a declaration of non-love for me)? I couldn’t ask him, of course, so I kept silent, and he went on with the same defiant tone:
“If you love someone and then stop loving them it means that your love was a lie to begin with. The only true love is eternal love.”
I wanted to ask, What if that person changes, or you change, can love still be eternal? But I kept my mouth shut. The truth is I wasn’t really interested in his cogitations about love, whether love was eternal or the briefest thing; my sole preoccupation was not to make him upset because I didn’t want to lose him. From then on, I lived with the fear that one day he might leave me, one day when he’d realize that I had no intention to spend the rest of my life with him. I was too young to realize the paradox of my situation: the fear of being abandoned by someone whom I intended to abandon myself sooner or later. But if someone had pointed it out to me, I would have probably said that those were two different things, and for me they truly were. When one is fifteen, the future (that is, a time when I will no longer be young, and Ben will be out of my life) is a faraway galaxy where other people live—parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors—but not us.
I lived in the present and Ben was my present. So, when he began to talk about “getting our own place” after high school and working for one or two years to make some money before going to college, I continued to keep my mouth shut. For him, the future was like a red carpet unrolled before his eyes. As for myself, I had no clear idea what I expected from the future, but I knew that marriage was not among my priorities. I also knew that skating had to be part of it in some way or another. I wanted to see the world and to be seen, I wanted to seduce and be admired, and with Ben next to me, well, that would have been a major drawback. And yet, the more I betrayed him in the distant future, the more attached I was to him in the present. When we were together, our lips and bodies were instantaneously drawn to each other, and in the secluded semi-darkness of my room we kept exploring each other’s body with the math textbook watching over us. By mid-April there was only one thing left to explore, and the roles had reversed: while until then Ben had been the shy one and I had to nudge him on, now that the only thing left was it, I found myself having to stop him and to invent reasons for postponing it.
A few more weeks passed until it finally happened. I was two weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday, and in the diary in which I had recorded the dates of our first kiss and the first touching of various parts of my body, I wrote “May 30, 1979: DID IT.”
It happened on a Saturday afternoon when Ben’s father was out of town. We pushed open their screened door, like two thieves about to commit a robbery, crossed the dark hall and the sedated living-room with its dust-covered furniture, and entered Ben’s tiny, disorderly room. We undressed in silence, awkwardly and, in my case, with no more desire to do it than to have a tooth pulled out.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked, stupidly, as I lay down in bed.
“Um…hmm,” Ben mumbled, covering my mouth with a kiss, and my body with his.
He pressed against my body with all his strength, trying to place his erect member in the right spot, but the unruly thing kept bouncing out of place. I helped him as much as I could, but, to be honest—and in retrospect this seems rather funny—I wasn’t really sure where the right spot was. Sure, I had attended sex ed classes, talked about sex with other girls, read salacious pages in a few novels and watched a couple of R-rated movies, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t sure at all about the mechanics of the act. And now, there we were, Ben panting and struggling, and I watching, helpless and embarrassed. I could tell Ben wasn’t particularly pleased with the way things were going, and all I wanted was for the whole thing to end. He moved my body this way and that, and when that didn’t work either, he asked, his face red and sweaty, if I could crouch on all fours.
“What?” I wasn’t sure I’d understood correctly.
“You know…Doggy style.”
“Keep dreaming!”
We kept at it for a few more minutes, and I began to wonder whether I was built in the right way. Maybe there was something wrong with my body. As I considered this possibility, I felt a stinging sensation and then a sharp pain between my legs, so sharp that I began to hit Ben, yelling, “Stop it! Stop it right now!”
“But we finally managed to do it.”
“Stop it, I’m telling you!”
He pulled out and we both lay next to each other, breathing heavily and avoiding each other’s eyes. We didn’t repeat the experiment for another month, which was fine by me. And although we kept kissing and touching in my room, it seemed as if a spell had been broken, and the need that my body had acquired in the past months of being together with Ben’s began to dwindle. For months I had been neglecting my skating practice, and my coach, Irina—the same Russian woman I’d seen training other girls when I first stepped on the ice, and who was now my own coach—was cross with me. A year earlier I had been number eight at the Regionals—not good enough to qualify for the Sectionals—and I’d sworn that this year I’d do it. This year I’d be in the top four and I’d qualify. I had trained very hard until early February when the fantasies I used to have before falling asleep—me in a gauzy dress skating before a mesmerized audience, moving my limbs with the tantalizing eroticism of a nymph and the mysterious grace of a swan—were replaced by images of me and Ben having a picnic in a poppy field, me with my hair swept away from my face by a light breeze, and Ben watching me with dark intensity and slowly moving in my direction. The fantasies always ended with him kissing me—never more than that.
Now, I was angry with myself for having lost valuable time from my training, and I vowed to make up for it. The first time I told Ben that we couldn’t meet because I had to practice, he didn’t utter a word, but frowned and stared silently at me with the look of someone who had been subjected to a serious offense. The second time, he gave me the same sulking look and no words, though I could tell that they were seething inside him. But the third time he exploded:
“Yeah, why should you make time for me when you can go and ‘practice’?” (He made a grimace and used his hands to indicate quotation marks.)
“What the hell are you saying?”
“Showing your panties for everybody to see! ‘Practice’!”
I began to laugh spitefully:
“I only show my panties during competitions. For training we wear thick leggings. Poor baby, he’s bothered by my panties! That’s all he understands from it.”
This was the first in a series of many fights that followed, all on the same theme, but it was decisive in bringing clarity to my (until then) muddy feelings. From then on, a thick layer of spite settled at the bottom of my feelings for Ben, and even in the moments when I felt affectionate toward him I remembered those words, or at least, I remembered that they were the reason why sooner or later I had to get away from him. What for him was a trivial showing (of panties, of legs, of skills) for me was the distillation of what the greatest life could amount to, a life dedicated to Art, which in this case meant transforming one’s body into a beautiful thing. When we read in class Keats’s “A Thing of Beauty,” the image it instantaneously brought before my eyes was a skater’s body. Ben’s objections to my practice and my spite for his objections filled me with a new energy and a desire to outperform all the other girls. I stepped on the ice full of this new desire, channeling it into my limbs and my skates, as if I wanted to turn myself into a single line that kept changing shape, from straight to oval to square to rhomboid to a circle, as if I wanted to shed any human heaviness from my body and turn it into a glorious, heavenly Sign.
When I finished, Irina burst into enthusiastic applause, saying that I’d never skated that well, and if I trained with the same seriousness as in the past, I would definitely make it to the Sectionals and, who knows, maybe even the Nationals. Her words merely confirmed what I already knew: that I was destined for great things, and that in order to achieve them I had to be single. Free of any familial obligations, whining children and a demanding husband. Greatness demands the courage to be alone, I thought, and not to let oneself be dragged to the ground by prosaic needs and feelings.
The next time I saw Ben I behaved with the appropriate aloofness, and I could tell that he, like an animal sniffing a trap, knew that something was afoot as soon as he lay eyes on me. Whenever he sensed that I was distant—which, lately, was most of the time—he retreated into a shell that kept hardening for the duration of our date, but never had the power to remain inside it. Before we said good-bye, he invariably exploded, blaming me for this and that, accusing me of having no feelings, that I had only used him in order to get a passing grade in math. The school year had just ended, and I had gotten, indeed, a C- in math, which may have been, I granted him that, because he’d let me copy his homework—although, if he hadn’t done that, somebody else would have, so there was no need for him to act like a Savior.
The Regionals were scheduled for October, and every time Ben asked me on a date my answer was, “Impossible. Irina would kill me. I have to focus on this thing.” When the phone rang, I had instructed Mother to say I was at the rink, which she did with such reluctance it was obvious she was lying.
“What’s going on between you and Ben?” she asked.
“Nothing is going on,” I answered, annoyed. “He just can’t understand that I have more important things in my life than seeing him.”
“Why don’t you ask him to come with you to the rink?” she suggested, but when she saw my horrified face, she gave up:
“OK, OK, I didn’t say anything. What do I know?”
Maybe it was her, maybe it was his idea, I don’t know, the fact is that one afternoon, as I was pausing on the ice for a few seconds after a series of spins, I noticed a familiar figure in the stands. It can’t be, I thought. It can’t. But it was. He waved, smiling. That moment was the closest I’d gotten to feeling violated. The rink was my sacred kingdom, a space where no one from the outside was allowed (except, of course, Mother, who was driving me there). I turned my gaze away and breathed in to avoid getting enraged. I continued my routine, but I had lost the power to concentrate and kept falling, which only made me angrier. At the end, I walked straight up to him and, ignoring his candid face which displayed an idiotic smile, I began to yell:
“How dare you come here? Here!”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand that this is…this is serious?”
“I know it’s serious. I just wanted…”
“I don’t care what you wanted! This is my space! My space! Don’t you dare come here again!”
The next day Ben didn’t show up to class, nor the following day either. I went from being relieved at not seeing him to being worried about what could have possibly happened, and back again to being relieved. But the third day he returned sniffing, with what appeared to be a cold, big violet circles under his eyes, and a frown across his forehead that said, “Don’t come near me!” Well, I had no intention of going anywhere near him. We didn’t speak for a full week, and it was the most productive week I had in a long time. My skating program, which I intended to perform at the Regionals, was close to perfect: spiral sequence, combination jump, double Axel, layback spin, combination spin, double toe loop, footwork sequence, flying sit spin. I was finally able to absorb the music in a way that made each movement a natural extension of it, a phrase that led up to a magnificent, explosive sentence! In the turmoil of the preparations, between practice at the club and visits to the seamstress who was sewing my dress—a shimmering turquoise dress with sequins at the neckline, which Mother and I had designed together—, I almost forgot about Ben. In fact, I would have forgotten entirely about him if the night before my departure he hadn’t called to wish me luck. He kept it short—“I just called to wish you luck”—and, although his voice had that sulking undertone I found so annoying, I thought that maybe he’d finally come to his senses.
I still can’t talk with detachment about those days in Cincinnati, dreamlike as they were on the one hand, foggy and filled with unbearable tension, on the other. It was the closest I’d come to qualifying for the Sectionals, and Irina was happy—“You’ll make it next year, you’ll see!” Sure, she was pleased, she had one skater who qualified—Lara, beaming with nauseating pride and arrogance. Mother too seemed glad: “Fifth place is very good,” she kept reassuring me.
I returned, as usual, to a warm welcome from my classmates—a card congratulating me, signed by all of them, and a pink balloon inscribed with the words “Way to go!” Ben was there too, but I avoided him, and after classes, when someone proposed we all go out to celebrate, I accepted without even glancing in his direction. Come to think of it, that day was the last time he came to class. It was a good ten days into his absence that Mother came to me with a worried face—no, not merely worried; grave, rather, the kind of expression one has when something serious has happened.
“I just got off the phone with Ben’s father,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me that he’s been absent from school for so long?”
“I didn’t know you’d be interested.”
“Aren’t you interested? His father said you never called. Ben is very sick, you know.”
“Sick with what?”
“I don’t know, but you’d better go see him right now!”
I was embarrassed and afraid of seeing Mr. Gelner, thinking that he might blame me for his son’s condition, so I was reluctant to go, but what could I do? But, to my surprise, Mr. Gelner seemed happy to see me. He led me to Ben’s room, which was forever linked in my mind to our several awkward sessions of lovemaking, then he left us alone. Ben lay in bed, showing a pale, emaciated face from under the covers, and enormous dark circles under his eyes. He stared straight ahead and continued to do so even after I entered the room, his eyes and body seemingly unaware of my presence. I figured that he was just pretending and I began to talk to him, giving him news about school, exaggerating the concern our math teacher had showed for his health, asking—stupidly—if he needed anything, but he remained in the same comatose position. I moved closer and looked at his face. It was empty of any expression, frighteningly blank.
“Ben,” I said, suddenly afraid. “Ben, say something.”
Eventually, I walked out of the room and found Mr. Gelner in a rocking chair in the dark, perennially dusty living room. His eyes were closed, so I tried to slip by, unnoticed, but he opened them, and then I said, “I’ll come by again tomorrow.” He gave a nod with his head, and in that moment, he seemed very old.
I came back to the same scene for three days in a row, attempting to elicit some kind of response from Ben, but nothing. Sometimes his body moved, tired, no doubt, of the same position, and then his head tagged along, like that of a puppet, but his features were always expressionless. I tried to look him straight in the eye, and then he blinked rapidly, but his eyes were unfocused, fixed on something in space beyond me.
The fourth day, Mother accompanied me with a pot of matzo ball soup. Before we entered Ben’s room, we sat, at Mr. Gelner’s request, on the living-room couch, with the pot on the floor in front of us.
“He cried for a whole week,” Mr. Gelner said, “and then he stopped talking. The doctor said that he couldn’t find anything wrong with him, that he must have had some emotional trauma, and all he needs is rest and food. But he refuses to eat.”
“Well, he has to eat!” Mother declared emphatically, and then, picking up the pot from the floor, demanded to be led to the kitchen. She returned with a bowl of soup, a spoon and a napkin, and asked me to follow her to Ben’s room. My stomach tightened into a knot: I knew that if Mother couldn’t make him eat, no one could. I closed my eyes and thought, God, please, don’t let him die! I’ll give up my qualification for the Sectionals next year if you make him act normal.
Ben was lying in the same posture as previously, but when Mother said, “Hello, Ben,” from the clutter of pillows and covers a weak voice rose, “Hello, Mrs. Lang.” “Hi, Ben,” I said in turn, but he ignored me and followed Mother with his gaze, as she sat on the bed near him and placed the dish on the bedside table. She caressed his unwashed hair and said, “I brought you something really good. You’ll feel much better after you eat it.” He didn’t answer, but when Mother lifted the bowl and brought a spoonful to his lips, he opened his mouth, slowly at first, and more and more eager the more he ate. He devoured the whole thing, then closed his eyes and gave a tired sigh. Mother wiped his mouth with the napkin, caressed his hair once more, and he gave her a thankful smile with his eyes still closed.
Mother returned and fed Ben for a whole week, once with me, then by herself. He was gaining strength, she said, but was still emotionally vulnerable. At the end of a week I went to see him alone. Mr. Gelner asked me to sit down on the couch in a rather ceremonious way that made me nervous, then said:
“Ben is asleep. But I have something for you.”
He returned with a sealed envelope:
“He asked me to give you this.”
I took the envelope and left, relieved that I didn’t have to see Ben. I tore it open and found a sheet of paper with these works in the middle of the page: “You’ll never know.”
“You’ll never know?” What kind of a riddle was this?
Whatever it was, I didn’t dwell much on it. I was glad that he was recovering, but I wasn’t interested in pursuing any kind of discoveries—riddled or not—with him.
Ben never returned that term, and when the New Year started, he went back to school in his old neighborhood.
Photo cover by Julia Dragan