My new dress is white with pink roses. Each flower is hand painted and adorned with no less than five crystals painstakingly glued to each petal. White satin ribbons crisscross the open back. It was made just for me, stitched precisely to the lines of my body.
Most figure-skating dresses are polyester, but mine is pure silk, airy and fragile. The skirt ripples around my hips when I spin on the ice, crystal roses catching the light with each turn. The dress hangs on my closet door, waiting for me.
Sometimes I hate that dress.
I am four years old, more snowsuit than child. My ankles wobble in dirty rental skates as I shuffle around the tiny outdoor rink. The other kids lean on stacked plastic crates, but I refuse the crutch. Some day I will dance on ice like the skaters who smile through my television set. I push my blades against the ice harder and harder until velocity forces me down to my knees. Later, I beg my parents for lessons, then a coach. I get white figure skates with clean laces and two crystals on each toe. I am in love.
Like all serious figure skaters, I have a dressmaker. Her studio is a shrine to the creative process – bolts of rich fabric, uncapped tubes of crystals spilling onto tables stained with fabric paint. I want a white dress with pink roses and ribbons lacing up the back. Together, we hunch over a sewing table with paper and pencils, planning and erasing, saying what goes where and, “Oh, wouldn’t that look lovely with pink crystals.” Each creative whimsy is etched onto the page until my dream has been realized.
I am nine years old, and I am ecstatic. I have landed a double jump for the first time – the youngest at my rink to do so. My coach gives me a hug, and my parents buy me a T-shirt that says “I landed my axel!” from the skating store. This new jump makes me competitive, a “real skater.” Two months later I wave good-bye to my old coach and make the long drive to the storied Skating Club of Boston. Now, I have four new coaches: one for jumps, one for spins, one for choreography, and one to manage the other three. I skate every day. I skate until my legs ache and my feet chafe and the tips of my fingers turn purple with cold.
It takes months of painstaking work to sew a skating dress; each piece of fabric is cut to my measurements and stitched with white thread. My dressmaker cuts the bodice from Lycra before lining it with silk. The silk is expensive, but my parents say I deserve this for working so hard.
I am 13 years old, long and supple. I am a beautiful spinner. I can grab the tip of my left blade with my right hand as I spin, then extend my legs into a full split, my back arched at an impossible angle. I spin like this at the beginning of each of my routines, soaking up jealous stares from rivals, high marks from judges. Other coaches approach me after competitions, saying, “I wish my students could spin like that.” I spin like this every day until I get so dizzy that everything goes black and stars dance across my eyes.
My favorite part of the dress are the ribbons lacing up my back and ending in a small bow at the nape of my neck. There is something so romantic about a corset back. I took the idea from The Bronze Horseman, an epic novel with the pretense of Tolstoy and the substance of Cinderella. A Red Army soldier comes home to Russia, sees a peasant girl in a white dress with ribbons laced up the back, and falls madly in love.
I am 15, and my back hurts. It hurts when I jump, when I walk, when I sit at my desk in school. This is bad; this is wrong. When I grab my leg to spin I feel vertebrae rub and crunch, a dull knife sawing at my spine. I stop spinning.“Not today,” I tell my coaches. “Tomorrow, I’ll be better.” But tomorrow comes, and it hurts to get out of bed. So I stop skating. The doctors tell me what I already know: my back is broken. I am broken. My back brace is white plastic. It squeezes my ribs and pinches my waist, encasing me day and night. If you hit the plastic, I sound hollow.
The crystals are the most expensive. Not just the gems themselves, but the fee for manual application. Thousands of tiny jewels are glued onto the dress by hand, arranged in intricate patterns to reflect light and dazzle the judges. My dress has 1,300 stones: clear crystal for the bodice, matte opal for the ribbons, and three different shades of pink for the roses. I pick them out myself, holding each sample up to the fluorescent lights in my dressmaker’s studio, squinting as I try to discern the difference between a 6.2 mm Indian Pink and 4.0 mm Vintage Rose.
I am 16 and miserable. I am back on the ice, but after being off for months, my knees ache and my hips pull and my weakened ankles wobble. I skate slowly now and jump close to the ground. The brace is gone, but the knife in my back saws with each landing. I watch the younger kids land their double jumps for the first time, hopping up and down on their toe-picks and shouting, “I did it!” I watch my old rivals land triple jumps, watch them fly off for the National Championships and come home with trophies. My back bends no more, every stab of pain a reminder that I am not what I once was.
I try on my new dress and wonder how such tiny crystals could become so heavy. They weigh on my chest, although the silk skirt lifts effortlessly when I twirl in front of the mirror. I admire the perfect stitches, the painted roses, the corset back, the thousands of glittering crystals. It is the most beautiful dress I have ever seen, and yet, I also hate it. I hate that I made this beautiful, expensive, useless thing. I hate that I still feel hollow when I put it on.
I am 17 and tired. I am tired of skating, tired of pain, tired of feeling worn down. I wonder what it would be like to hang up my skates, to give in to my body and quit. But then I remember the little girl who wanted nothing more than to dance on the ice, who skated every day until her fingers turned purple. I owe it to her to keep trying, to do the thing she loved. So I continue despite the pain. I get new music, a new routine … all I need is a dress. I imagine a white dress with pink roses and ribbons lacing up the back, a dress so beautiful that simply putting it on will make me fall in love.
Today I am competing. My new dress hangs outside my closet door. A bottle of little white pills sits on my dresser: painkillers that allow me to perform an approximation of my old spins. I do not compete to win a medal. I compete because it is what I have always done, because I have endured so much to be able to skate. And it would be such a shame for that beautiful dress, with its white ribbons softly lacing up my back, to sit in my bedroom unworn.