pie, pizza, plow, faceplant

chapter 5

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I learned a lot about privilege from Tommy. There were privileges that were unique to him, but also ones that we shared which were theretofore unknown to me and unexplored until I observed them through him, privileges that for the rest of my life I did my best to be aware of and be grateful for.

The greatest privileges Tommy had, which I did not, were of lesser consequence in the grand scheme of things. Namely: those of enrichment, higher on the Maslow hierarchy, things like vacations or activities or hobbies and the time for them.

One such activity was skiing.

I had asked my parents before why I knew a handful of kids at school, including Tommy, who were avid skiers, but we as a family had never skied, despite living in an area not far from some prime skiing locations of the Northeast. My dad just grunted and shared a look with my mom.

“Your mom and I aren’t from families that skied. Too expensive,” my dad said.

“You mean too expensive for your parents? Or too expensive for us now?” I asked.

“Both,” my mom said. “Do you know how much it is for a ski pass? To buy skis? Not worth it for something we’ve never done before.”

This, too, was the same reason my dad gave for why he never played golf.

I didn’t see why we couldn’t invest the money to try to learn such an activity as skiing, but I trusted my family to know it wasn’t for them, while at the same time remained willing to try it for myself.

Therefore, it was up to Tommy and his family to expose me to the joys of skiing.

The winter of 7th grade, the Goodspeeds invited me to go skiing with them on President’s Day weekend, that most hallowed of skiing three-day weekends.

“Have you ever been skiing before?” Tommy asked me.

What Tommy might have more accurately asked was “Do you know how to ski?”, and if I had interpreted that, the whole incident could have been avoided if I had just answered appropriately and said “no”.

Instead, I gave a half-truth, which was that I had, in fact, been skiing with my cousins once, years ago. I had technically worn a pair of skis before and crested over the bunny hills with an instructor. But I felt that if I let Tommy know my inexperience, he might rescind the invitation.

“I’ve been before,” I told Tommy. “But I don’t have skis.”

“No problem, my dad said he’d rent you some!” Tommy told me, and so Mr. Goodspeed did when we arrived at Gore Mountain, along with a helmet and the other accoutrement.

I already felt out of place at the lodge amongst the Patagonia and North Face jackets compared to the old, faded Columbia winter jacket my dad had bought me years ago. It was three sizes too big (so that there’d be no danger of outgrowing it and having to buy another) and I had only begun to fill it out in the past year. The vibe, the people, even the cold of the mountain, all of it let me know I was right to conceal my ignorance on the nature of skiing from the Goodspeeds, to belong until, at the very least, I could no longer hide it.

We got in line for the lift, and the great difficulty with which I proceeded there on skis should have warned Tommy of what was to come. But he was too distracted by the excitement to notice my discomfort, ecstatic to finally have a partner his own age to ski with.

“Jude-dude, last year my dad let me do my first black diamond trail and oh my God it was insane Jude-dude, it was so hard but it was like, you’re just alive, you know? Like it’s one of those things that just makes everything else seem so pointless. We’ll do that one last, I kind of have to get warmed up for it. I wiped out a couple times. We’ll do a blue square first. I’ll race you!” he droned as I looked over the shoulders of the people in front of us to examine how this chairlift thing worked.

We stepped forward to some sort of red indicator line and from my observations I knew to be prepared for the chairlift that was to scoop me up. As it came around, Tommy sat down like he was sitting at the dinner table, but I miscalculated and, in my nervousness, gave a little hop and ended up slamming my back against the metal chair. Then as we took off, my skis dragged along the snow.

“Lift up!” Tommy shouted. He pulled down the metal bar. My heart was pounding, the cold was forgotten as I flushed with sweat. “I thought you’d been skiing before?” He finally queried.

“Yeah, I have,” I said. “They didn’t have a chairlift at that one though.”

If he hadn’t already lowered his goggles, I would have probably seen his eyes narrow. I lowered my own, grateful for the mask to hide the red in my face and the tears that may or may not have already been forming.

The chairlift terrified me. I saw no difference between it and the many amusement park rides I was afraid of, height being the main issue, and I did my best to look straight ahead as the mountain passed beneath us.

“Ready?” Tommy said as we reached the point where, apparently, we were supposed to dismount. He lifted the bar.

Before I could say “no”, I found myself face first in the snow, with very little idea as to how I got there. I heard laughter around me, Tommy’s intermingled with it, as a chairlift attendant dragged me to the side and hoisted me up.

“You okay?” the attendant asked. I ignored them and shuffled away toward Tommy, ready to throw myself off the mountain. I brushed the snow from my face.

“Jude, are you really ready for this?” Tommy asked, for the first time clearly doubting my skiing proficiency. “I thought you said you’d been skiing before.”

“I have,” I said. Once again, technically not a lie. We approached the trailhead, and I thought back to what the instructor had taught the time I went with my cousins. You were supposed to make your skis shaped and pointed like a pie. Or was it a plow? Or a pizza? How did that even make sense?

The slope yawned before me. I had never been so terrified.

“Wanna race?” Tommy said, smiling, his braces gleaming in the light refracted from the snow.

“Uh, not the first time,” I said. “Let me just get down the first time.” Let me survive, was what I was thinking.

“Suit yourself,” Tommy said, and with a whisk and shift of the snow beneath him, he was gone, down the blue square hill. If this was an intermediate hill, I could hardly imagine the black diamond Tommy described.

I set off. All in the legs, all balance, pizza, plow! I thought to myself.

Ten yards—crash. Another ten yards—crash. Others zipped around me, and it became clear that I was in the way, that my incompetence was damaging the enjoyment of others, audible frustrations and consternations were cropping up around me. I did my best to carefully shuffle my way over to the side of the trail out of the way and try again.

The hill was too steep for me. Any time I did start to gain some speed and balance, I was so terrified, so out of control and unable to turn, stop, or control my progress at all, that I was at risk of crashing in a much more damaging fashion, and therefore proceeded to continually stop myself in the least graceful of fashions until, eventually, I gave up, resorting to squatting down on the skis and paddling myself forward and dragging my butt to slow down.

How did I end up here? I wondered as I crawled down the mountain inch by inch on my skinny 12-year-old butt. Why was it so important for me to keep up with Tommy Goodspeed? To belong with him?

I knew, intellectually, that Tommy and his family were not superior to mine, even though I loved spending time with Tommy.

So why did it feel that way? Why did it feel like I needed to be able to ski as though it were my natural birthright, like I had slalomed out of the womb?

After what felt like a minor epoch I reached the bottom, where Tommy and his family mercifully waited for me.

“Jude!” cried Tommy. “Are you okay dude? I thought you said you could ski!”

My throat felt tight. “I said I’d been before,” I said. “And I guess maybe I thought I could. But I can’t.”

“You poor thing!” Mrs. Goodspeed said. I always liked her.

“That was hard to watch,” Mr. Goodspeed conceded.

“T, why don’t you take Jude to the bunny hills?” Mrs. Goodspeed offered her son.

“Sure!” Tommy said.

“Well, I thought Tommy and I would try the black diamond again today,” Mr. Goodspeed said. “Look, I’ll pay for some lessons for you, Jude, if you want…”

“Oh stop, they came to have fun together,” Mrs. Goodspeed said.

Mr. Goodspeed clenched his jaw, no doubt holding back from insisting that, actually, they came for the Goodspeeds to have fun together and Jude was lucky to tag along. He didn’t say this, though. It was always clear to me that he was not a man used to being commanded over, and that his wife was one of the rare few that held any power over him at all.

“Actually, I think I’m done skiing,” I said, and the crack in my voice probably did a lot to garner sympathy. “I think I hurt my knee and I’m cold.” The former was a lie.

Mr. Goodspeed, upon hearing I might be injured under his watch, quickly softened, reached into his jacket pocket to pull out his wallet, and, subsequently, three twenty-dollar bills.

“Here, Jude, why don’t you go back to the lodge and get some hot chocolate and something to eat,” he said, handing me the money.

“Thanks,” I said, prepared to go alone.

“I’ll come too,” Tommy said. “We can go back to the car and get our books and sit by the big fireplace.”

Mr. Goodspeed and I both had our hearts plucked by this, for different reasons.

“But Tommy, I really thought that we were going to do the black—” Mr. Goodspeed started, then was silenced by a look from his wife.

Tommy and I spent the rest of the day in the lodge reading our books (entries in the Pendragon series by D.J. McHale), punctuated with Tommy trying to explain to me how to ski.

“So, you see, the thing about skiing is you have to be one with the snow, feel it beneath your boots, like it’s just a million pieces of frozen ice coming together and coming apart beneath your skis from there to your core, so you’re kind of aligned above them, right? Then you must make yourself as aerodynamic as possible, woosh, so you’re just sailing along, and when you turn it’s like you’re cutting the snow slightly to one side kind of, then to another, just gently pushing it like just right, it’s about having a delicate power over yourself and the snow…”

Useless advice, but beautiful, and perhaps poignant for a 12-year-old. He could make anything sound so poetic, especially such things he was passionate about, and I felt bad that I had torn him away from it.

Yet him spending the rest of the day with me proved what I was attempting to prove to myself all along: that I belonged with Tommy, and he belonged with me.

I never went skiing again, though.

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