Required Elements: Part 1
Authors' note: This work has been reviewed and approved by the International Skating Union's Committee on Erotic Works, which attests that no person under the age of 18 appearing in the narrative engaged in sexual acts therein. In addition, the ISUCEW has granted the author a blanket indulgence in regard to any errors the author may have made in descriptions of the sport or its administration.
In the event that a reader has a quibble with any of the details presented here, they are invited to visit the International Skating Union website. Clicking on the CEW link there will direct them to a form where they may register their complaints and file for a refund. The Union wishes to affirm here that readers will be refunded in full if they are not aroused by talk of figure skating and/or ice hockey.
The ISUCEW has determined that the following account might just be true - if the possibility that the author has changed names, dates, continents, and planets is taken into account.
Thank you.
**********
"Oh dear," Hannah Turner said to her grandson. "Whyever not?"
Sidney had just informed his grandmother that he no longer wanted to play hockey, and that he had not brought his skates with him on this visit, and he had broken his stick against the garden wall at his house and never wanted another. This seemed to Hannah an impulsive reaction. But he was five years old, and this mercurial behavior was probably normal.
"Shame," she said. "Your Pops just freshened up the surface."
Sidney turned to look out the kitchen window. Behind an evergreen hedge, past an ancient swing set and a firepit, the pond lay looking smooth and inviting. His grandfather had plowed the snow from most of the surface and groomed it with his homemade rig, a 55-gallon barrel mounted on a welded steel frame attached to two car tires. On the barrel someone with a talented brush had written: SHAMBONI, which word Sidney had managed to first sound out last year and appreciate the joke this year.
He had watched the operation since he was old enough to propel his little snowsuit-clad legs through the backyard drifts. The filling of the barrel with hot water, his Pops pushing the apparatus around the pond while the steaming water dribbled out and was smoothed by a wide flap of heavy canvas.
Sidney had learned to skate when he was three. He loved the sliding hardness of the ice and looked forward to his visits to the farm. He would skate for hours, an old wooden Sherwood cutdown to toddler size, a dozen pucks on the ice, and his Pops feeding him soft passes to shoot into an imaginary goal.
"No," Sidney now said petulantly, crossing his arms on his chest. "I quit."
His grandmother said nothing, waiting him out, until at last he said, "I stink. They skate past me. Coach put me on the last line left wing. I quit."
"Well," she said. "I can't help you with your wrister or your slapper. That's your Pops' area."
Sidney looked back from the ice to his grandmother, wondering how she knew about these things. He had never heard her talk hockey before and just assumed in his five-year-old database that she had no overlap with it.
She rose from her chair and put on her glasses. "But skating... that we can work on." She went into another room and returned with a pair of white skates. These were not hockey skates. These blades were less round and had teeth on the front edge. Figure skates, he knew. The kind of skates little kids and girls wore. The kind of skates that marked the owner as not in the fraternity of hockey players. His grandmother's pair looked well broken in, their leather creased and worn in spots. She removed the blade guards and ran a fingertip over the steel, then gave a nod of approval.
He followed her silently out the back door. The sun was just breaking though the last of the clouds tailing yesterday's storm and the revealed sky was a brilliant perfect blue. The air was still and frosty. They sat on a green wooden bench so close to the ice that her feet were on the pond, and she began to put her skates on.
Sidney watched with intense interest. These boots were different from his skates, which were all lace holes from toe to ankle. These boots had holes down by the toe, but higher up the laces fitted into hooks. She finished, stood, glided to the center of the ice sheet and skated with strong strides in a small circle. Then in a larger circle, then back the other direction. Then she repeated her path skating backwards.
Sidney was rapt. Her motions were fluid, not what he expected of an ancient. The sound of steel on ice was like a sheet ripping. It filled the calm air. He began to regret not bringing his skates.
Without warning, she did something he had seen only on television, and that from the corner of an uninterested eye, because it wasn't hockey. Skating backwards, she accelerated. She spun forward, and back, and seemed to kick the ice and rise into the air.
Sidney's breath stopped. His grey-haired grandmother had left the ice. Risen above it to at least two feet, spinning what to him seemed a hundred times. She seemed to float in midair, descending gracefully to her landing. Knee bent and arms out without a wobble.
She sprinted to the edge and stopped hard, sideways, spraying ice shavings over him.
She giggled like a little girl at her prank, but Sidney just wiped the melting chips from his face thinking that if he could only skate like that he would be first line center in no time.
**********
Evelyn Jameson yawned a sigh and reached for her fancy coffee cup, thinking that hockey parents might be a huge chunk of their market. It was just half past six and the sky taunted the greater Boston area with a wisp of purple wiped low across the black winter morning. She had chosen to not sit in the bleachers during the practice. Other parents waited faithfully on the hard benches. Some, like Evelyn, hunkered down in their car and napped or listened to the radio or to audiobooks. Evelyn was working through Hawai'i. Fifty hours of narration -- just the thing for commuting and waiting for youth sports.
A rap on the window broke her revery. It was Sidney's coach, and behind him was Sidney lumbering under his hockey bag. Evelyn paused Michener, rolled down the window, and pressed the trunk release.
"Good morning, Mrs. Jameson," the coach said.
"Good morning, Coach," she replied. "Practice go okay?"
"Oh, sure. I wanted to tell you that Sid was invited to join the town travel team. They'll be contacting you with the details."
"Well.... Thank you."
The coach hesitated, probably expecting more enthusiasm. Sidney climbed into the passenger seat and fastened his belt.
"Yeah," the coach continued. "I know Sid has been taking power skating lessons... and they've really paid off. I'll be sorry to lose him. He's the best defenseman in Mites. It would be a waste to keep him in house league Squirts next year."
Evelyn nodded, thinking that her mother would be amused at her highly technical lessons being referred to as power skating. "Thanks again, coach. I have to run."
The coach backed away from the car as she put it in gear and eased out of the parking lot. She glanced over at her son. Eight going soon on nine. He was good on his skates, strong enough to push attackers out of the crease -- even though Mites was a no checking level -- and fast enough to take a misplaced puck up the middle of the ice and through the other team's defenders. He was, she thought, almost fast enough already to hold his own if he were to skate with her senior women's team. But though they were by rule not supposed to, the women checked. Hard. Sidney was tall enough that when she skated with him on her parents' pond she was sorely tempted by instinct to put a hip into him. For educational purposes, of course. Kids had to learn how to take a check if they wanted to go up a level.
"Sid," she said. "Do you
want
to try out for the travel team?"
He was strangely quiet. Usually after practices and games he talked a streak about plays he had made and not made, about what the other team had done and what his team had done. Not this morning.
"I guess so."
His mother sighed again without yawning. Strong coffee. "Do you want to do both? Travel and skating at the Club? Those two will take all of your time."
He nodded. "I figured. Maybe I can try them and see?"
"Okay," Evelyn said. She saw a lot more taxi mom -- and taxi dad -- in the future.
**********
Sidney stared up at the lights. They were bright. Brighter than those which hung over a hockey rink. And they seemed cleaner, newer. This whole building seamed... fresher. Though in dimensions and most other aspects it resembled a hockey rink, it was not.
This was the Charles River Skating Club. He had heard his grandmother talk about it. She had described to his parents the long process the Club had gone through, fundraising and planning to build this immense structure to replace the older facility closer to downtown Boston. Several ice surfaces, training rooms, meeting rooms, function rooms. It was huge. He knew his grandmother had been a member of the Club since long before he came along.
His grandmother came back to where he was sitting in the front row of the stands and sat next to him. A younger woman skated over to the nearest boards.
"Sidney," his grandmother said, "this is Tess Schwartz. She is going to be your new instructor."
He was too polite to speak it, but his look said: Why? You're my instructor.
Tess reached out across the red plastic top of the boards. Sidney, again polite, shook her hand.
"Your grandmother was my figure skating coach when I was about your age," Tess said.
Sidney turned his head to consider his grandmother more closely. Were the jokes about her riding dinosaurs to school actual events?
"Hannah has told me what you can do. I want you to work on your jumps first. If you join my little group, we will try out some dancing and pairs... just to see if those appeal to you."
Other kids were filtering onto the ice, gliding and crossing over to warm up. All on a sudden Sidney felt that competitive pull in his gut, the pull that always made him rush to finish putting on the pads, to get out there and start shooting pucks.
"I don't have my skates," he said resignedly.
His grandmother got up. "They're in the car. Be right back."
**********
"Where's Jojo?" Ned Turner asked, hanging up his coat. His granddaughter would usually shout blue murder and rush him for a hug. The quiet was abnormal.
"She's at a friend's," Hannah said handing her husband her jacket to be put in the closet. "Birthday party at a trampoline park."
Ned laughed. "Oh, to be seven again." He checked the room for observers. Seeing none, he wrapped his arms around Hannah and gave her a noisy smooch.
"Get off me, you old goat," she laughed just as their son-in-law entered the room.
Paul Jameson was carrying a bottle of wine, his face expressly neutral. "The Mitchells will be here any moment."
