I might have cried on my way home from the veterinary clinic had I not planned to ask Max if I could fill in again or possibly work there permanently. My husband appreciated my enthusiasm and understood how much I liked the job. He enjoyed having me around, as did his partners. However, one of them had commented on how efficiently the place ran while Kate occupied the front desk. The other employees made fewer personal phone calls and spent less time engaged in idle chatter. The other doctor agreed wholeheartedly. Max smiled and nodded, filing the information for future reference. When I expressed an interest in returning to the clinic, he dissuaded me. “You do not need to be a policeman,” Max had said.
Silly me, I did not even realize my marriage to Dr. Svenssen might have influenced my relationship with my coworkers. I enjoyed their company, and they apparently liked me, but they also felt watched when I was in the room. I had a direct line to the boss’s ear and any misbehavior might become our casual dinner conversation. The office staff probably breathed a collective sigh of relief when Dr. Svenssen’s wife went back to the rink and the new mommy returned after birthing a healthy baby boy.
Since I knew my tenure at the clinic would be temporary, I had begun to formulate alternative activities for myself. While working in a vet’s office suited me, I did not want to apply for jobs with other practices. Maxwell agreed that might constitute a conflict of interest. Instead, I enrolled in a summer course at the state college. I wanted to fill the gaps in my interdisciplinary mismatched education with the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in psychology. I had not decided what to do with that background yet, but I only lacked a few core courses. Then I might earn a masters degree in counseling or become a school psychologist. While attending my summer class in abnormal psychology, I wrote a paper on eating disorders in women’s sports and read a book on sports psychology. While none of these notions had gelled into fully formed goals, the class basically kept my mind sharp and consumed excess free time.
I had not skated at Hansie’s for about a year when I returned to meet Georgeanne for a morning freestyle session. Georgeanne was still coaching and had raised her hourly fee. She managed a timetable replete with students and earned a respectable living for a semi-retired person in a second career. We had not seen each other since my final encounter with Hans Koenig when he resolved to correct my flip jump technique. Georgeanne and I spoke over the telephone a couple of times, and I looked forward to recapturing some of the leisurely summertime fun we enjoyed the previous year having lunch together after a morning skate.
I returned to Hansie’s a different skater. I was faster, stronger, and more physically fit. Overall, I was a significantly better skater. As my skating itself became bigger, the Ice Chalet consequentially seemed smaller. Never a commodious facility, the ceiling seemed lower, and the walls had closed in, further shrinking the already minimal ice surface. The lobby looked tackier and seedier, a little bit more worn and shabby, in desperate need of an update. The soft poorly maintained ice melted under my blades. It was not the hard slick stuff that spoiled Chestnut Valley athletes. As I pushed off, my edges stuck in the substance, and I had to recover from an unexpected lunged forward due to unanticipated friction grabbing my feet.
Forcing moves in the field patterns to conform to the limited space required severe truncation. As I warmed up and adjusted to the texture of the ice, I had to cut the corners sharply or my modest speed would have splattered my carcass against the rear wall. The power of my skating (which was unremarkable in absolute terms) when compared to the scale of the rink made me look like a senior lady tearing up the warm up period at a regional competition. My remedial lutz started at the front corner of the rink and concluded in the diagonally opposite back corner. The proportion of the element versus the size of the arena, made it look like a far better jump than it really was. Apparently, I had outgrown Hansie’s.
A few years before, I struggled to fill Hans Koenig’s under-populated summer ice with blade marks and movement. Now, I felt like a trout in a goldfish bowl. During that slow-paced summer season, I went home to California to visit my father and drove passed my old high school. My former French teacher, who had originally inspired me to declare a foreign language major during my first year of college, had become an administrator. I stopped at the campus to see her for the first time in many years. We walked through the halls together, and although a new addition had been constructed since my graduation, the reality of the place dwarfed its memory. Those halls seemed so wide and intimidating when I was a teenager. The buildings were massive and packed with faces of children who seemed very mature. The banks of lockers that had been a central focus of our individuality now appeared small, battered, and unimportant. Countless coats of paint disguised graffiti, scratches, dents, and other signs of wear or vandalism.
My teacher and I no longer seemed so disparagingly separated in age. Of course, she was still twenty years my senior, but I had worked with and befriended many people at least that much older than me. Time had actually resulted in growth of the school, rather than shrinkage, but it seemed small and insignificant. While I was only a bigger person in a symbolic sense, my vast array of life experiences diminished the perceived size of Cambridge Hills High School. Similarly, my development at the Chestnut Valley Skating Club had made me a better skater, effectively shrinking Hansie’s Ice Chalet.
While I had improved, Georgeanne’s skating had not evolved one iota. Since Georgeanne was a rather thin frail woman in her late fifties, I did not expect the same changes that might occur in a younger, stronger body. She obviously did not workout to build muscle and could stand to gain a few pounds. Georgeanne and I had the opposite problem. She was too skinny and struggled to put on weight. Regardless of her genetics, I believed training at Hansie’s Ice Chalet under Orville’s guidance presented a major obstacle for Georgeanne.
I could not publicly criticize Orville, a coach Georgeanne obviously respected, or the rink where she earned a living. However, I suggested we meet at Chestnut Valley for a low freestyle session. “Maybe we’ll do that sometime,” my friend agreed politely. She never set foot in that arena unless she did so in a professional capacity for a competition or a seminar. Georgeanne commented vaguely on my improvement, though I dared not attempt an axel at Hansie’s. My axel was still a work in progress and I preferred not to display an incomplete version for all to digest and analyze. Maybe Georgeanne felt uncomfortable talking about how far I had come; maybe my improvement was not as obvious as I thought.
“Getting a different perspective helped,” I ventured. I never condemned Orry or his teaching methods, but I did tell my friend that Preston’s approach worked for me. More room to build speed and experiment with movement did not hurt either. I could skate full moves patterns and practice long powerful strokes. Skating the rink before jumping gradually built confidence allowing increased speed into each element. All else being equal, a faster jump covered more ice and exited with better flow.
Over lunch, I suggested a time to meet at Chestnut. Georgeanne chewed and swallowed. She brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “I don’t think I can skate recreationally at another rink, Kate. Since I work at Hansie’s, I’m afraid taking my personal business somewhere else might be a conflict of interest. I don’t want to compromise my position on the Ice Chalet staff.”
Georgeanne had more at stake than trying to enrich her skating. However, better skating could only enhance her credibility as an instructor. My friend did not want to alienate Hans and Timothy Koenig. The skating world is small; news travels fast when a coach appears at another rink. Georgeanne’s personal skating life was not her own. It was entwined with her job at Hansie’s. She could not capriciously start practicing somewhere else or sign up for a random lesson with Preston Reece. Assuming Georgeanne recognized the message I subtly tried to deliver, she was not at liberty to follow my suggestion. A change of coach or venue that would benefit any other skater could make Georgeanne’s situation uncomfortable. If I felt uncomfortable confronting Orry, Georgeanne had concrete reasons to feel exponentially less comfortable.
Although Georgeanne worked as a figure skating instructor, she may have been even more tightly shackled to Hansie’s than I had been to Contessa Cosmetics. I could send out resumes, and another company would eventually hire me based on legitimate qualifications. Georgeanne may have realized her skating credentials were iffy at best, and she was lucky to have a secured a place on the staff of a small family-own rink like the Ice Chalet. Chestnut Valley would have laughed her right out of the skating school office. A vicious cycle had trapped Georgeanne in its whirlpool. She did not possess adequate credentials to further her coaching career, and she worked in a rink that forever limited her potential.
I met Georgeanne another time that summer at Hansie’s. She told me about a basic freestyle test she had taken and passed, a test that certainly did not look impressive on the resume of a professional instructor. However, as an adult skater, it was an accomplishment for my friend. Orville had apparently unlocked the mystery of moves in the field and had begun to teach Georgeanne the basics. She planned to test the beginning levels in the fall.
Georgeanne glowed as she related the conquests of some of the adult skating gang. Most of it I did not believe. I knew Orville. I knew his shtick. He called anything that left the ice and rotated somewhat more than once and landed on anything other than the skater’s backside “an axel”. Encouragement in the form of little white lies can motivate some people while preserving their self-esteem, but I prefer higher standards and truthful evaluations. The adults Georgeanne claimed could do an axel or double salchow struggled with basic singles the last time I shared the ice with them. I did not argue with Georgeanne, but I did not stifle my surprise either. Since I was not witness to the alleged axels and doubles, and did not come to a Sunday adult session to see for myself, I cannot say for certain who may have learned a legitimate multi-rotation trick from Orville.
Orry was a charlatan, and he had Georgeanne completely under his spell. He stroked his students’ egos and happily cashed their checks. He said what they wanted to hear, and they came back for more. Retired from a law career, Orville claimed mastery over language manipulation and selective speech. It worked just as well in an ice rink as during litigation. As Orry’s protégé, Georgeanne probably utilized his tactics on her own pupils. Maybe my educational travels had taught me the value of honest critique, no matter how painful. If a coach coddled me with niceties, complacency might lead to stagnation.
I continued to see Georgeanne once or twice per year, always in the summer and always at Hansie’s. Over time, she did improve, but not dramatically. Maybe she finally learned the adult version of a camel spin or could complete a few slow powerless moves in the field. Maybe she could do a tiny flip or lutz from a standstill. I suspect Georgeanne would have liked to become a better skater, though she might have acknowledged certain physical limitations and managed to satisfy herself with her progress. Regardless of my opinion of her athletic ability, Georgeanne continued to teach at Hans Koenig’s Ice Chalet. There are plenty of adult skaters more accomplished than Georgeanne, but she had the nerve to hang out a shingle and call herself a coach.
When the skating season ended in June, so did my temporary job at the veterinary hospital. Suddenly, I had ample free time on my hands. I only contracted two days of ice per week at the Chestnut Valley club, naively thinking I might return to Hansie’s one day each week to skate with Georgeanne. This only happened twice during the summer. I felt so uncomfortable in that environment, I preferred to sign up for another ballet class and take up aerobic exercise to supplement my reduced skating schedule.
Chapter 80 posted 9/19/03
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