Olympians

Kent Kosack

__________

The kick becomes a glide in a graceful shuffle as Jon’s skis cruise along the cross-country trails carved into the ice-crusted snow of Lapland Lake, his body cruising with them, his thoughts and fears and hopes and memories cruising too, concurrent, behind, ahead, the same groomed trails he’d skied as a kid brought here by his father, listening to the owner, Olaf, a former Olympian with two bum knees, brag about his bronze medal and his homemade glogg. But Jon has collided with middle-age, his own balm-coated knees creak and ache: a father of three, a husband to one, though he knows his record is mixed regarding both positions. Yet maybe that’s fine, now, forgiven, forgivable? Because the winters are glorious in the Adirondacks, and it’s kick, glide, as snot freezes along his upper lip. He looks through the Scots Pines, their snow-laden limbs and the snow-coated earth beneath them glittering like broken glass and the air crisp, as crisp as Jon can ever recall, crisp too when he pulled into the parking lot yesterday afternoon with his family in tow, the ice and rock salt crunching under their feet as they shambled, stiff from the six-hour drive from the suburbs of Philadelphia, towards their rented cabin and he said, like his father had each time they arrived, a record not so much broken as well-worn, “know what those are, kids? Scots Pines. You can tell them by their bronze bark,” pointing to the trees beyond while his wife Sara said “save the lecture for later, Jon. We all need to pee” as if she and their children shared one collective bladder. Kick, glide, and he feels his breath sticky in his balaclava as he recalls Kirsten, his oldest daughter, a surly twelve, entering the cabin first, turning on every light, wrenching open drawers and jumping on the plaid sofa, its aged springs squealing under the weight of her, and Linn, the middle-child, sweet as jam at ten years old, strolling in next and holding Erik’s hand, the youngest, a toddler, and Linn looked around blankly while Sara let her eyes adjust and tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her disapproval, or perhaps successfully feigned that courtesy, performed a consideration of his feelings. Jon knew she would dislike the faded gingham curtains, the scuffed linoleum kitchen floor, the rickety-looking and mismatched furniture, and the cold seeping in everywhere through the old single-pane windows and half-caulked cracks along their frames. She’d dislike it all the more if she knew how much Jon had really paid for it, but he took the money from a secret account he opened last year when the word “divorce” started hovering unsaid over their whispered fights in the kitchen, the car, at Linn’s recitals and Kirsten’s soccer games, humming in the background liked a muted refrain. Kick, glide, and Jon’s now snowploughing down a short slope and recalling entering the cabin aglow with nostalgia, his father almost there beside him, his father as a hale young man before his stroke and the years of mumbling as plain oatmeal dribbled down his chin, his father sitting beside the fire after a full day on the trails, drinking mulled wine or aquavit as icicles grew long glistening along the gutters outside and Jon feels younger and more virile with each kick, each glide, oblivious to the cold. After they entered the cabin, Jon hoisted Erik onto his shoulders and gave his son a tour, saying “your father slept on this rug once when he was Kirsten’s age. You listening, Kirsten?” he pointed to a scrap of mottled brown fabric that had once been red, “it’s all the same. Even those curtains. Simple, honest, country curtains. And look at the stove. Four inches of soot caked on. A lifetime of soot, of warming this sturdy little cabin for families when they aren’t skiing or making snowmen or ice skating on the lake.” He wanted his family—maybe not the tense group of atomized and conflicting yet interdependent needs they’d become but his true family, the family he’d imagined having when he was a kid himself kicking and gliding on short skis and clumsily sliding across the icy Lapland Lake snow—he wanted them, the idealized them, to come live with him here, this idealized here, forever cloistered in the warmth of a snow-covered cabin in the Adirondack winter in his mind. Kick, glide, and he thinks about this morning, the air crisp, the sky a cloudless gray-blue as he slid out of bed and examined the ice crystals dissolving and reforming along the edge of the window and Sara beside him, an indeterminate pile of blankets, asleep or pretending to be, still sulking about his affair, his affairs, though he’d ended them, recanted, apologized—how long would she hold it over him? Was that fair? He made coffee with an old aluminum percolator on the range, probably the same one his mother had spent so many winter vacations constantly filling, the cabin filling too with the smell of coffee and hot metal. He grabbed ten brown and speckled eggs from the refrigerator and opened a can of Spam, which he can still smell now, repeating on him like the past as he burps into his balaclava and climbs, pressing into the snow with his poles, with his shoulders, his back, his core, and duck walking up a hill before the next flat stretch. He knows the trail so well, and it’s kick, glide, and Sara coming into the kitchen, a slow and stubborn shuffle, the last to arrive, still wrapped in a scratchy wool blanket and wearing two pairs of socks as she slumped into a chair and drank her coffee, hot and black and Kirsten asked if she was sick and Jon said “how could anyone be sick on such a glorious morning?” and “your mom is a picture of health and vigor. She’s looks like an angel, in fact. Doesn’t she look like an angel?” and Linn replied “yeah, Mommy is an angel” as Sara sipped and slurped and stared, her dark hair matted to her face and afterwards Jon stood in front of the cabin in his storied ski gear trying to recall the younger versions of himself decked out in the same dark green wool pants from an Army-Navy store in Lake Placid, worn when he’d gotten them and now moth-eaten too, a neon-red fleece right out of the mid-eighties, black wool gloves, yellow gaiters, a purple and green plaid scarf and a red, white, and blue balaclava that an ex had knit him years ago, Margot, his third fuck and first love, maybe his only, for she had appreciated this place, the magic of it—hadn’t she?—and the balaclava is warm still, he is happy to say, and has grown softer with time, as has his mid-section, though fiercely kicking and gliding now it’s almost as if the intervening years have melted away, dribbled away like so much gummed oatmeal, and Sara appeared on the porch this morning and said “Erik shit his pants and it’s the warmest thing in the whole cabin” and he said “at least he’s regular” and Sara saw no humor in it, in anything, he thinks now, is that why he never before brought her to Lapland Lake? Was he so afraid of her disapproval? Did she ever see humor in anything, see anything in his humor, in him? Did he, in her—anything? He added “what’s one turd in the grand scheme of things?” and she said “as long as you don’t marry him” and stomped back into the cabin and after Jon cleaned Erik, he took Kirsten and Linn for their first lesson, singing the praises of Olaf only, it turned out—as it turns out for everyone—according to the pimply teen now in charge of the lessons, the other students kicking and gliding and snowploughing and duck-walking in the snowy meadow beside the parking lot, that Olaf was dead and Jon said “dead?” and the teen nodded and repeated “dead” and Linn echoed “dead” and Jon said “he can’t be dead. I scheduled a lesson with him three weeks ago” and Linn said “I heard mom tell Aunt Deb on the phone this morning that her nuptials are dead” and Jon ignored her and asked the teen “how did Olaf die?” to which the teen said “he just died. Old age, I guess. You know, natural causes” and Linn wondered aloud “What are nuptials anyhow? And how do they die? Natural causes?” and Jon continued to ignore her, tried to focus on skiing but couldn’t imagine then nor now, as he kicks and glides, letting a child, a patently unOlympian teen, teach his children how to ski so he taught the girls himself except it was a pedagogic and athletic disaster, an affront to Olaf’s legacy and Lapland Lake. Kirsten, the more athletic of the two, did pick up the basics with ease, crisscrossing the field a dozen times, but never let go of her dour disapproval of Linn’s stumbling or her father’s half-coherent instructions. He never saw anyone ski with such determined misery, with such an utter lack of joy, and he suspected Sara had revealed or insinuated or somehow transmitted, with maternal cunning, the truth about his infidelities and his role in killing their nuptials. Jon was a strong skier but a terrible teacher despite having been taught by the late, great Olaf. Kirsten skulked away after a sullen hour to play gin rummy with her mother in the cabin and complain about the cold and Linn kept at it for another hour, her small and graceless frame powered solely by daughterly devotion, but learned little, or nothing Jon wanted to impart and too much of what he didn’t, and retreated to the cabin, finally, half-frozen and dejected, to let Jon spend the afternoon skiing alone, watching the shadows lengthen and squinting through the glare on the snow, straining to remember what Olaf looked like or what his father usually wore when he skied or what his mother smelled like or what Margot felt like or if he’d ever liked himself but he couldn’t. The dissolution of these memories, their uncertainty, haunt him now, spur him on as he skis in the dark, turning his headlamp on to light the way, and haunted him when he entered the cabin and walked into a wall of dry heat. No fire lit in the woodstove yet his nostrils burning. Sara sat with the kids, flipping through old magazines, eyeing advertisements from defunct department stores and huddled under a quilt and two blankets. The thermostat was set to eighty degrees and the antiquated radiators shuddered trying to drag the cabin into the tropics. He asked if Sara wanted to drive Lapland Lake to bankruptcy and she said “I’m not going to turn into a popsicle to save the owners a few bucks” and he said, struggling to undo his gaiters, the snow he’d tracked in turning to slush at his feet, “because you let it die out. A fire needs to be constantly fed. And there’s practically a cord of wood on the porch” and she said “exactly. On the porch. Not in the stove. While you were goofing off in the snow, I had to watch Erik and now you’re saying I should’ve been hauling lumber too? We could’ve frozen to death. You would’ve come home to ice cubes, not a wife and kids. Or maybe you would have preferred that?” Jon imagined the scene, then, in the moment: Sara under a pile of split wood, frozen, her sneer preserved, a record of his infidelities preserved in it like a prehistoric insect encased in amber. A family of four blue corpses. He was disturbed to discover his sympathies lay with the cold. So, after greedily downing three glasses of aquavit, he said he’d try one more loop around the lake, a little early evening skiing, and Linn asked if she could come while Erik sat on the rug with his toys, oblivious to the heat or the cold, and Kirsten glanced his way just long enough to express her disapproval. He said he was sorry but promised to take her out first thing in the morning and he would, too, he could lead Linn along, he thinks now, tie her to his waist and take her through the woods along the flattest trails and to the lake and he feels his skis now and the world beneath them, the snow under him, the frosted earth under that, the layers of rock, the seas of it shifting, the mountains pushing up a couple of millimeters a year. Wind, bronze bark, the crunch of snow. He could teach Linn and charm Kirsten and raise Erik right, resuscitate his nuptials and win back Sara. He quickens his pace and comes through the trees to the lake, frozen, a white and flat expanse, a slab of talc like a tongue between two denticulated ridges that threaten to swallow Jon whole.

            Or he could not.

            He could decide, has already decided, he realizes, in some beat between a recent kick and glide, not to. A fire needs to be fed. And what’s one divorce in the grand scheme of things? He sees one other set of ski tracks and steps into them and imagines the tracks are Olaf’s or his father’s or a younger, better, fitter, freer, version of himself. He picks up speed. The zip, zip, zip of skis running over hardpack. Snow begins to fall. He pauses for a second, looks up into the trees, the light of his headlamp catching the fat flakes just before they land on his lips and tongue and lashes, live for a moment, then are gone. Natural causes. The snow muffles the landscape as he kicks and glides again, the blue light of his headlamp dancing along the trail ahead of him, his knit balaclava itchy and warm on his snot-crusted lips as he says “Olaf” over and over again like an incantation, a call to change his life, “Olaf,” to reclaim it, restart it. He pushes on towards the cabin, “Olaf,” and his lungs and legs burn with the exertion, “Olaf,” and the cold air stings his teeth. He wonders how far he can go. Twenty miles? Thirty? A hundred? He can ski up to Lake Placid, across it, farther north, kick and glide clear to Montreal, to the St. Lawrence River, into the past, towards Olaf, towards his father, past his family, his history, the cage they and it have become, and into a better future. But first, he’ll need a good lawyer. There’ll be a lot of paperwork. Sara, of course, will have to take the kids…

            …the radiator fails to warm the small bedroom as Linn leans on her pillow in the top bunk and listens to Kirsten shift in the bed below her and tell her to go to sleep. But she won’t. She can’t. She’s waiting for her father. She watches her breath cloud the window and looks through it for him. He had flown across the meadow and through the trees when he left. How could people ski that fast? He must be the best skier in the world. Better than Olaf even. Maybe he can even be in the Olympics someday? A blue light flashes through the trees in the distance, rising into the sky like a searchlight. The flurries falling around it are reflected in the light, shimmer like blue confetti, cold sparks in the night. It’s on the move. Darkness, light, darkness, light, darkness, darkness, darkness, and light again, emerging from the trees and coming towards the cabin, towards Linn, a locomotive bearing down on her. As it grows closer, she sees the outline of her father, his familiar figure emitting a fantastical light. She understands how magical Lapland Lake was and is and will be. She swears to herself that she’ll come back to this same cabin, this cozy, special place, every year, until she can show it to her own children as her father has shown it to her. Swears that she’ll learn to ski. To kick and to glide. It’s not that hard. Her father has already taught her so much. She’ll be a great skier, better than Olaf, better than her father. She can even be in the Olympics one day. Kirsten says “what are you looking at?” and Linn says “the blue light in the trees. The snow. Dad. The Scots Pines” and Kirsten sighs then Linn asks “what are nuptials?” and Kirsten tells her to shut up and go to sleep but Linn asks her to look out the window instead, she’s her sister after all, she’s family. Invites her to see it all, with Linn, through Linn’s eyes. She says “there are Scots Pines out there” and Kirsten says “you’re such a turd” and somewhere in the hall Erik is crying and her mother is shivering and her grandfather’s ghost is sipping mulled wine and a younger version of her father is groping a knitter named Margot and Linn hears her father now crunching through the snow and in a whisper only she can hear says “you can tell them by their bronze bark,” as her hot breath obscures the cold glass but she doesn’t know yet, can’t know, that years from now she’ll come back to this moment, a crystalline memory, over and over again, incessantly, obsessively, as if understanding and overcoming it might help her understand herself and the world, her place in the world, the termination of her two marriages, the enduring resentment of her two sons, as if understanding the role her father played in it all, the shadow he cast and why, exactly, he chose to dismantle their family in the weeks and months and years that followed this trip to Lapland Lake, as if understanding the love she felt and feels for him, the hatred too, might help her understand who and what and how she is—she’ll come back to this memory and this place, older now than he was then, mother of two, wife to none, as she retraces the path he wove through the pines and along the ice-crusted shores of Lapland Lake, advancing not with grace so much as an obstinate, even inevitable, competence, hard won from experience, neither an Olympian nor an amateur, as the kick becomes a glide…

__________

Kent Kosack is a writer, editor, and educator based in Pittsburgh, PA. His work has been published in Tin House (Flash Fidelity), the Cincinnati Review, the Normal School, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at: www.kentkosack.com

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