Jesse Munns was trying to tell his wife about the vault. It was June 1995, and he had just returned home from the Texas State Championship, where Angela Torres, his protégé, had buried the competition. Her vault—the Yurchenko—was otherworldly, involving a back-handspring mount and a layout with a full twist. On this occasion, in Dallas, she had gone for an extra half twist and still managed to stick the landing, which, for Jesse, was beauty itself. Nothing quickens a coach’s heart like the sight of an extra twist.
And she hadn’t even warned him, was his point. She’d just done it. She’d evolved before his very eyes, like a sapling in a time-lapse film. If she could conquer her fear of the beam, he thought, she could go all the way.
“I think she could go all the way,” he said.
“Wild,” Tina said. She was putting on blush, and he noticed she had painted her nails a creamy shade of violet.
“I mean it,” he said. “She’s almost there.” All she needed to learn was how to control her own mind. Angela was sixteen, and Jesse had coached her for ten years. She was a little stockier than your average girl—brainier, too—but she was also a warrior. He had seen it from the beginning. And with Nationals coming up—the meet was in five weeks, in New Orleans—it was time to hit the highest gear. A good performance there would build momentum for the Olympic Trials.
“She just needs to focus,” he said.
“She’ll focus if she wantsto focus,” Tina said. “You can’t force a teenage girl to train nonstop for the rest of her youth. At least not in a democracy.”
Jesse sighed and went to the fridge for an iced lemon tea. He mumbled the words sassafras and lederhosen under his breath. It was something he did to calm himself. He and Tina had reached a delicate juncture in their marriage, and he didn’t want to blow a fuse. Besides, he knew he was partly to blame. For the past ten years, he’d managed a small gymnasium in Spring, Texas, which—he was the first to admit—wasn’t the most financially genius arrangement for their household. The gym was in a modest commercial plaza right off I-45, wedged between a Kroger and Lucinda’s Hair Salon, and he had been paying far too much to keep the gym’s equipment up to USAG standards. With fewer and fewer gymnasts signing up, he was now in the red, and the building’s owners had threatened to turn the place into a Planet Fitness. The prospect made him irritable. The gym had once belonged to his former coach, Anton Petrescu, who fled his native Romania in the winter of 1968 and became a cult figure in the U.S. gymnastics community during the seventies and eighties. Jesse himself had trained at Coach Petrescu’s gym for fifteen years, until, at the age of twenty, during a warm-up for the Olympic Trials in the fall of 1980, his hands slipped from the high bar while performing a Maltese dismount and he landed beyond the protective mat, fracturing his tailbone and inflicting major damage on his two lowest vertebrae.
“I’m not forcing anything on anyone,” he said. “I just bring the horses to water.”
“That’s a stupid analogy, honey. What, you’re tugging the reins?”
“I’m saying I have a good feeling about her chances. That’s what I’m saying.”
“I have feelings, too,” she said. “I have powerful feelings about our savings account, for example. And anyway, she’s a junior now. Time to think about college.”
This was a delicate realm, he knew. Tina had dropped out of TCU and always wished she hadn’t.
“I don’t see the big clash between training and education,” he said. In other countries, it isn’t a problem. The kids train for hours and hours and still score high on all the tests. In fact, in the Romanian system—”
Tina set her kit down. “If you say another word about Romanian education, I cannot be held responsible for what happens next. She got a 1550, you know. That should be the headline here. She probably would have aced it if you didn’t have her prancing on the beam all day.”
Jesse sipped his can of tea and counted silently backwards from ten. He decided this was not the time to announce that he had spent a little extra on equipment.
“Why are you getting dolled up?” he asked. She was on to mascara.
“I told you. I’m going out to the bar with Carol and them tonight.”
They used to have a rule that Sundays were off-limits socially, but this was not a battle he was raring for in the moment. Carol was Tina’s coworker at the Chevron Recreation Center in downtown Houston, where they worked as physical therapists; Carol’s boyfriend, an oil trader, enjoyed treating her entourage to food and drink at Houston’s finest culinary establishments, presumably to demonstrate his cashflow and vigor.
“I wish you wouldn’t hang with that crowd.”
“And I wish you’d start thinking long-term.”
“Come on, this isn’t some plastic ribbon. Every scout in the region will be there. You know they give out scholarships, right?”
Tina sighed. She tied up her hair and started putting on earrings. “These girls, man, they peak at twenty. It’s nuts. What do they do then?”
He knew that Tina wanted the best for Angela. They both did. They’d known her since she was five years old, when her mother, Isabel, signed her up at the gym one Saturday afternoon, having moved to Houston from Mexico City, in part to escape the mounting threats of her ex-husband, Angela’s father. Isabel worked the evening shift as a waitress at Pappasito’s, and she rarely took a day off, so Jesse would often let Angela stay at the gym until it closed for the night, and sometimes he and Tina let her hang in their apartment until her mother was free to pick her up. On a few occasions, Angela even spent the night on their pull-out couch; Tina would pack her a lunch and drive her to school the next morning.
“You know how much this means to her.”
“Means to her, or means to you? How many names do they put on the trophy?”
“I’m being serious here.”
“Me too. You know this can’t go on forever.”
◆
Jesse and Angela started training six days a week. Angela was in stellar form, but she still struggled on the beam—or, as Coach Petrescu liked to call it, “the dreaded plank.” (“The beam is the most terrifying event,” he writes in Trapeze of the Mind: A Winner’s Guide to Gymnastics. “But beauty, as we know from Rilke, is nothing but the onset of terror we’re still just about to bear.”) They had worked on her beam routine for years, and she had exquisite balance. The problem was psychological. A beam routine has longer pauses by far than any other event, which means the gymnast has more time to think before she executes, and beam-thinking is famously dire. It’s easy to lose your nerve. In Angela’s case, it happened during a move known as the Winter Flamingo, one of the more elementary in her otherwise advanced routine. To complete the move, she stood on one leg and arched the other backwards until her toes brushed her ponytail. She could perform it in her sleep. The issue was that the Winter Flamingo came before the Bucharest Flop, a tumbling sequence with several twists that required her to land on the beam in the stance of a tight-rope walker. This was the move that made her routine a potential mega-scorer, and although she had nailed it several times in training, somehow the fear got in, and now her planted leg would always tremble during the Winter Flamingo, sometimes so dramatically that she lost her balance altogether and had to hop off the beam.
“It’s the only time I lose track of where I am in the air,” she said. They were snacking on chips and salsa at La Cocina, near the gym, while they waited for her mother, having spent the entire afternoon trying to conquer to Bucharest Flop. Angela wore a Student Council tee-shirt over her leotard and was using her hand as a surrogate plate as she scooped up the salsa. “It scares the shit out of me.”
Jesse watched a construction crew hammer away at the roof of a new RadioShack across the street. He thought about what he would do once they couldn’t afford to keep the gym. He’d had a few conversations with a sports equipment company—they were always looking for sales reps—but he had been slow to follow up, much to Tina’s chagrin. He tried to picture himself wearing a nametag, shaking customers’ hands, roaming the aisles of shoulder pads and catcher’s masks and rifles.
“Scares the heck out of you,” he said, more out of habit than anything else. Years before, he had promised Tina that he would discipline Angela’s language. If he was going to be her coach, she said, he was an influence.
Angela pushed the chips away. “No, it scares the shit out of me. Spiders scare the heck out of me. Zombies scare the heck out of me.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out. It’s just training jitters. Once it’s time to perform for the judges you’ll be on autopilot.”
“Maybe I should just quit,” she said. “That would solve the problem.”
“After all the work you’ve put in? Don’t you think you’d regret it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess.” She was sitting on her hands and had to lean forward to sip her Dr. Pepper from the straw. He knew when she was stressed she sometimes reverted to childish behavior—or at least he thought it was childish—but Tina had warned him many times not to point this out, just as she’d warned him not to tease her about her boyfriends, or her retainer, which she carried around in a lime green case. But Angela seemed more self-contained than she had in previous years. When she was in the fifth grade, he’d teased her about her Rubik’s cube—she used to solve it while she stretched—and Angela threw a handful of chalk at him and stormed off. Now she’d just roll her eyes.
Angela leaned back in her chair and breathed sharply through her nose. He could tell she was upset. She’d always been a perfectionist. It was something they had in common.
“Listen, we can shut the whole thing down whenever you want.”
She peeled a sticker on her Walkman while he ate his chips in silence. After a moment she shook her head. “No, I’m not ready to quit.”
Jesse hid his profound relief. “Then we’ll pick up where we left off.”
Angela sighed. “We left off with me falling on my ass.”
“Backside,” he said, reaching across the table for one of her uneaten chips.
That night, Jesse cooked a tuna casserole and opened a bottle of wine he’d picked up from Kroger. He chilled the wine and lit some candles. They used to do this all the time. One of them would surprise the other, no occasion necessary. They would just eat and talk for hours, making each other laugh. At some point Tina would get that look and lead him into the bedroom, where she’d help remove his back brace (in the best of moods, they called it his “corset”) and tell him what she had in mind. One night, after lasagna, they decided not to use protection, and this became their standard practice until, thirteen months later (a few weeks before she turned thirty-three and he turned thirty-four) they finally made an appointment with an expert at St. Joseph’s, whose official diagnosis was “premature ovarian failure.” After a few more tests, a consultation, and a week or two of browsing adoption literature, Tina seemed to lose interest in putting together a strategy. She said she wanted to live in the present, find new hobbies, travel. She wanted to look at condos instead of the brick house near the cul-de-sac on Calendar Lake Drive. She cut her hair and dyed it blonde, then changed her mind and dyed it brown, a slightly darker shade than its original color, but close enough.
Tina came home late, smelling like beer and smoke and strong perfume. She walked gingerly on her heels, like a mountain goat inching its way to a patch of flat terrain. Jesse was sitting on the couch with a heating pad on his lower spine, doing a visual exercise. It was something he had learned from Coach Petrescu years before. You visualize your entire routine—every step, every flourish, every last tip of the chin—to prepare yourself for the main event. “There are no surprises,” Coach would say, “for those whose minds are truly prepared.” Jesse was practicing greeting his wife without raising his voice or making unfair accusations.
“Damn it,” Tina said, when she saw the tuna casserole, which he’d already wrapped. “I told you tonight was Carol’s thing. Why the hell did you do all this?”
Jesse had planned to tell his wife that he liked her hair the way it was, just as he liked her shoulders, and ears, and weirdly splayed toes. He’d envisioned himself saying these things. He’d planned to say that ever since their first training session at the Springleaf Physical Therapy Center (when, after he’d hollered and groaned, she told him that the worst pain was the pain of never chasing your dream) he had discovered life as it would be known to him from that day forward.
Instead he said: “Jesus Christ.”
Tina dropped her purse on the table. She hiccupped. “Too much wine.”
“I got that impression.”
She poured a glass of water and drank it down in a single gulp. “I met a prince,” she said. “Aziz. One of Jerry’s clients. Guy has his own private jet. Owns a bunch of camels, too. You know how much a camel costs?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
She looked around the room. “Probably more than this apartment.”
“You’re saying you want me to buy you a camel.”
“I’m saying I don’t want to live in a place where the carpet smells like mold.”
“What do you think you’d name it? Humpty?”
“Forget it. I’m exhausted.”
“Oh, I see. That’s what you are.”
She clopped into the bedroom. Jesse pressed his palms to his forehead. He heard her slam a drawer, shuffle some clothes around, and curse. She came back out in a nightgown and he noticed how thin her frame had become.
“Here’s what I want,” she said. “I want to take a nice vacation someday that doesn’t involve gymnastics.”
Jesse thought of their trip to Corpus Christi four years earlier. It was Angela’s first big tournament, and Tina agreed to come along. Isabel was working that weekend and couldn’t make the trip. After the competition, they spent a day at the beach building sandcastles with droopy minarets, and on the way home, Tina sat in the back and showed Angela how to make bracelets from licorice strips. Two years later they took a trip to Galveston for the Frye-Jonson Memorial Championship.
“It’s just part of our lives,” he said.
Tina walked to the bedroom again and he heard her collapse on the bed. “I want to lie in a hammock,” she said.
“That I can buy you,” he said. “I think there might be a sale at Dick’s.”
The following week Jesse hired a crew to remove the beam from the gym. He put it in the storage area and covered it with an old tarp. Then he found a roll of white tape and taped the exact dimensions of a beam to the carpeted mat.
“O.K.,” he said to Angela, who was warming up in the corner in her sparkly blue leotard. “Let’s try it this way for a while.”
“You sure about this? The floor has springs.”
“Trust me. The important thing is to feel your body go through the motions.”
Angela stepped onto the tape and looked at him. “This is dumb.”
“You’re a leopard,” he said. “You’re queen of the leopards.” This was a running joke between them, but Tina was the one who’d started it. When Angela was eight years old, Tina had bought her a leopard-pattern leotard for her birthday, which Angela wore for about a year before she outgrew it. In those days Tina would sometimes come to the gym to offer moral support, and she’d sit in the bleachers with Isabel during major tournaments. Once, before a competition, Angela told Tina she had butterflies in her stomach, and Tina said, “That can’t be right. Leopards don’t eat butterflies.” For years afterwards, Jesse and Tina referred to her as Lady Leopard, a nickname she had relished at first but one that became untenable sometime after her twelfth birthday. They still used it among themselves, just not in front of her.
Angela shook her head at him. “Let’s get this over with.”
He watched her do the routine without a wobble. It was perfect. She even nailed the Bucharest Flop. Jesse could see why the move had been one of Coach Petrescu’s favorites. Most tumble sequences on the beam end with the gymnast facing the opposite direction, but the Bucharest Flop calls for a final half-turn at the peak of one’s arc, so the gymnast lands facing the same direction as when she started the move. Judges love it, and crowds do, too. For a harrowing moment, it looks as if the gymnast has totally lost control, like a fighter pilot who purposely stalls and seems to be heading straight for the sea but flips his jet at the last moment and pulls up over the waves. (“This kind of trick,” Coach Petrescu explains in Trapeze of the Mind, “was popular among the acrobats of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—and also, to a lesser extent, certain French ballerinas. The Bucharest Flop is the most ferociously whimsical move there is.”)
Jesse clapped and hooted. “Perfect. Now do it five more times.”
She did. She nailed it every time. They moved on to floor, then bars, then vault, all of which were a breeze. When Angela stuck the landing of her secondary vault routine—an elevated Sainsbury Pike—Jesse pumped his fist in the air. She’d always been a natural. At six years old she’d kept her toes straight during a cartwheel. At fourteen she’d spent three weeks mastering the Hawk’s Descent, a move that requires a backwards release from the higher of the uneven bars to the lower, and a blind catch. And even after all these years her vaults could still surprise him. Angela was still vaulting when her mother called and asked if Jesse could give her a ride home.
On the way, they stopped for ice cream. It wasn’t the best idea in terms of maintaining discipline, but Jesse had always believed in the wisdom of celebrating victories. They went to the Baskin Robbins where he’d once taught her how to make a dragon’s mouth with her hands.
“Did you ever get scared?” Angela asked as they sat down with their heaping bowls of chocolate almond mint. Kids in Little League uniforms lined the counter, tapping the glass.
“Sure,” he said. “But fear isn’t bad. We just have to manage it.”
“Yes, sensei,” Angela said, spooning a melting crescent of chocolate. She was quiet for a moment, then put down her spoon. “Can I ask you a question? You don’t have to answer.”
“There is no earthly chance that you are getting my extra scoop.”
“Do you ever wonder where you’d be if you hadn’t injured yourself?”
Jesse put down his napkin and tried to answer the question honestly. He’d always tried to be honest with her, but the questions were getting more difficult. He used to help her with word problems while sitting in front of the TV. Train A is chugging along at such-and-such a speed in a northerly direction, while Train B is steaming south, and so on. Those were pretty simple. But soon enough she had questions about the logic of reincarnation or the politics of the Persian Gulf, questions he didn’t know how to answer, questions he’d never thought to ask. He’d have to bring in Tina then, the intellect of the household, but even Tina couldn’t keep up. All they could do was encourage her, give her an audience. On the way back from the State Championship, she’d sat in the passenger seat with a copy of the Dallas Morning News and read about the attacks in the Tokyo subway system. She’d spent half the drive explaining the gruesome effects of sarin gas on human muscle reflex.
“Sometimes I do,” Jesse said. “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“Just something I’ve been wondering about.”
If I hadn’t injured myself, then I wouldn’t be your coach, he thought. This was logic borrowed from Tina, who, in those first delicate weeks after his injury, reminded him of the symbiotic link between misfortune and blessing—condolence-card horseshit that in his case was actually true. He’d tried to offer his wife the same encouragement when she broke down in the hospital parking lot after their visit to the fertility doctor, but he didn’t have the same talent.
Angela dropped her spoon in her bowl. “Sometimes I have dreams where I’m falling.”
“I get those, too. I think they’re normal.”
“It’s weird, though, to only dream about falling, not landing.”
He thought of the moment his fingers slipped from the bar fifteen years ago. He’d been doing giants, building momentum for the dismount, and had lost his grip on the upswing. He’d once tried to capture the moment for Tina, but it was hard to describe. It was like when your fingers slip from a bowling ball, except you’re the ball, and you know it won’t be a clean thud. The nightmares were bad, but nothing compared to the loss of grace and dignity. His wife had never seen him compete. He was just a tottering man who overcooked the casserole. Every beautiful thing he’d done had happened long ago.
“It is weird,” he said, handing over his unfinished bowl.
Two weeks before the Nationals, Jesse came home to find that Tina had taken an orange highlighter to their last three credit card statements and spread them out on the coffee table next to a couple of travel brochures for South American countries.
“I’ve done the math,” she said. “We could have made it to Buenos Aires.”
“It wasn’t all for the gym.”
“You want me to read the numbers aloud?”
He excused himself, went to the bathroom, and sat on the toilet lid. He made a mental list of all the state capitals he could remember before getting up to splash his face. When he came back out he explained that it was a critical time for Angela and he asked if they could discuss the financials at some point in the future.
“Don’t push her,” Tina said. “Let her plan her own life. She’ll get a degree, find a career. You don’t need a gold medal to do any of that.”
“That’s never been my argument.” What mattered to him was that Angela thought of herself as a possible Olympian. Or maybe it was simply that he didn’t want her to think of herself as a non-Olympian.
“But that’s what people are,” Tina said. “The world consists almost entirely of non-Olympians.”
Jesse took a deep breath and thought of some prime numbers.
Tina softened her voice. “I know there’s no stopping either of you. It’s always been that way. But what if it doesn’t happen? What if she’s hurt? You want her to end up—”
“Crippled and angry?”
“That’s not what I said.”
She was crying now. He’d gone too far. He decided to keep his mouth shut while she wiped her cheeks with her sleeve. Her recovery was swift.
“Listen, Carol invited me to join them in Galveston for a week. She thinks I need some time away, and her boyfriend has an extra room in his house, so I’m going. Just bring her back in one piece. After that, I don’t know.”
A few days later Jesse hired a crew to carry the balance beam back into the gym. He instructed them to lower it down to a height of eighteen inches and position it over the safety pit, which was lined with soft matting and fluff that he had been meaning to have replaced. It was starting to look a little yellow.
“All right,” he said to Angela, who was wearing her plain red leotard. “Let’s do this thing. We’re getting there.”
Angela stepped on the lowered beam. She paused. “What’s that smell?”
“I think it’s the fluff. Gives you an extra reason not to fall.”
Angela’s first tumble on the beam was as graceful as ever. The rapid double-cartwheel into a braced scale was fine. She did the little shimmy that he’d introduced to clear her head and make her smile at the judges a bit. (He wasn’t a big fan of sass but Lord knows it didn’t hurt). Her second tumble sequence, however, sent her an inch too far to the left, and she wobbled after the landing. It was a slight wobble—a small deduction. Certainly not a disaster. But then he saw her pause before the Winter Flamingo. His heart sank. A pause that long, he knew, was fatal. He watched as she lifted her left leg back in a slow, deliberate arc. He kept an eye on her right leg. After a moment, it started to tremble. “Shit,” she said. She held the pose for a second longer and hopped off the beam. “Shit,” she said again. “I can’t.”
“It’s just a mental block,” he said. “It’s nothing we can’t figure out.” But he was already assessing their options. In smaller tournaments, the beam didn’t matter. On several occasions, he’d cut the Bucharest Flop from her routine altogether, deciding it was a needless risk. “Tell you what. Let’s take a break.”
Angela let her hair down and re-tied her ponytail. She rubbed some chalk on her hands and feet and clapped, sending a cloud in the air. “No. Let me do it again.”
She did. She pushed through the Winter Flamingo, despite her wobbly planted leg, and tried the Flop, really went for it, but he could see that she was about to land off-balance, so he caught her on the way down and guided her feet back onto the beam. He felt her body trembling.
“I got you.”
She hopped off the beam and paced the floor, cursing and growling under her breath. She looked at him fiercely. “One more time.”
“No, we need a Plan B.”
◆
A few days before the trip to New Orleans, Jesse drove to Angela’s house. She was waiting outside in jeans, sneakers, and a lavender shirt with frills at the sleeves. He drove downtown, to Rothko Chapel, the quietest place he knew in the city, and they took a seat on one of the benches, next to a pair of elderly women wearing fanny packs. He told Angela to close her eyes and imagine each step of her beam routine. It was something Coach Petrescu used to do whenever he struggled with nerves, a mental training exercise.
“When you get to the Winter Flamingo,” he said, “I want you to think of a soothing color and let that color fill your mind.”
One of the elderly women shushed him. He raised his hand in apology.
“And then what?” Angela whispered.
“Nothing. Just let it fill your mind. Take the beam out of the picture and concentrate on the color itself. You have a color in mind?”
“Yeah.”
“O.K. What is it, yellow?”
“It’s green.”
“I thought you might choose yellow.”
“What the hell does the color matter?”
The second lady shushed them with even greater authority than the first.
Angela whispered, softer now, “Is this gonna take a long time? I have chemistry homework.”
Jesse held up ten fingers. “Ten times,” he whispered back, in a voice that was barely audible. “I’ll be waiting right outside.”
He sat on a bench near the chapel and watched clusters of families play on the lawn. A father and son were throwing a Frisbee. Two young girls spun in a circle; one fell laughing into the grass. An older boy, maybe their brother, traced his steps along the gargantuan roots of an old oak tree.
Half an hour later, when a young woman emerged from the chapel, Jesse had to pause for a moment before he saw it was Angela. He waved, and she came over to him. “Are you going to tell me the point of that, or is this some kind of coach’s secret?”
“Well, how do you feel?”
Angela sat down next to him. “I don’t know. I feel the same.”
“Did you focus on the color?”
“Yeah, and the periodic table.” She smiled.
Jesse picked a splinter loose from the bench and rolled it between his fingers. He wanted to say something wise, but he didn’t know what that might be. He flicked the splinter into the grass. “I used to do that when I was in training,” he said.
“You sat and thought about green?”
“I tried a bunch of colors,” he said. “To be honest, I can’t promise it works.”
“I don’t think I can do the Flop,” she said.
He nodded, doing his best to hide the twinge of disappointment. They sat for a moment and watched the families. The two girls were spinning again; this time the other one fell in the grass. Jesse cleared his throat and said, “Well, I brought sandwiches.” He opened the bag he’d brought along, took out two of the sandwiches, and handed one to Angela. “This one’s yours,” he said. “It’s mustard.”
Angela opened the ziplock bag and took a bite of her sandwich. She said, “Tina wrote me a letter.”
“She thinks I’m pushing you too hard.”
“I called her and told her not to worry.”
“She say anything else?”
“No.” She put down her sandwich and looked at him, shading her eyes from the sun’s glare. “But I get the feeling I’m not the only one she’s worried about.”
That night, Jesse stopped by Kroger and bought Tina a fresh bouquet. In the checkout line, he read about the divorce of two celebrities. He picked up a jumbo Kit-Kat bar, put it down, and paid for the flowers. On the drive home, he turned his Shostakovich cassette to full volume, humming and moaning along to the movements. He must have listened to “Waltz No. 2” upwards of a thousand times, yet every time he was blown apart like a dandelion in heavy wind. The tune, he finally understood, was song’s dying wish. He planned to let Tina in on this new discovery.
But Tina wasn’t home. She had left a note for him on the fridge: Gone early to Galveston. Potato salad bottom drawer. All my love to Lady Leopard. And goddamn it, be safe.
◆
And so it was just the three of them—Jesse, Angela, and Isabel—who drove the five hours to the Red Roof Inn a few miles from the Louisiana Superdome. They went to dinner at Applebee’s and split a pasta dish. Afterwards they went to their separate rooms, and Jesse called Tina, but there was no answer at Carol’s boyfriend’s place in Galveston. He felt an ache deep in his chest that was unlike anything else he’d known. He wished they could do it over again, the whole thing, with no mistakes. He thought of the night that he, Tina, and Angela had ordered pizza and watched The Karate Kid. It was after training, years ago. Angela must have been twelve or thirteen, her hair in a wild frizz. He and Tina had seen the movie before, when it first came out, and Tina had laughed at the ending, when the blonde villain from Cobra Kai runs face-first into Ralph Macchio’s flying dragon kick. She laughed again at the second viewing, with Angela joining in this time, and Jesse had tried to defend the film’s integrity by demonstrating the mechanics of the move, which only made them laugh at him. Then Angela dropped an entire slice of pepperoni on her foot. He wanted it back, that whole night. He pictured himself as an old man, shuffling around a sporting goods store, going home to—what, exactly? If it wasn’t Tina, he was dead. He tried the number one more time before giving up.
The next morning, they filed into the Superdome, which reminded him of a frigid airplane hangar. At registration, Angela got a piece of cloth with a number on it. He pinned it to her blue leotard.
“Make sure the pin’s not sticking out.”
“Hey, I’m a pro.”
They had an hour for warm-ups before the first event would begin. While Angela stretched and her mother found a place to sit in the lower stands, Jesse went to consult the schedule posted on a giant board. Her sequence was neither good nor bad: floor, bars, vault, beam.
Jesse peeled a banana that he’d taken from the breakfast bar, tore a half for Angela, and ate the other half himself. He helped secure her ankle brace. “Remember,” he said. “Standard pace. Don’t over-rotate.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t forget the flutter.”
“I have never once forgotten the flutter.”
“Give the judges a big smile.”
“Yes, sensei.”
“Let me see.”
She smiled. Her mouth was full of banana.
“Perfect. That’s the one.”
Jesse gave his Shostakovich cassette tape to the sound technician and stood off to the side. Angela took her place on the floor and waited in her starter pose for the first strings of the violin. A hush came over the crowd as the music filled the gymnasium. Jesse pinched the skin of his arm and held his breath as he watched Angela move through the opening steps. She looked fully in control. The first tumble sequence was the big one, a double back-flip; she landed clean in the corner of the mat. The crowd thundered. Jesse relaxed. Angela moved across the floor as if she were skating on ice. She hit the final tumble sequence just in time for the trumpets and the crowd erupted once again. Jesse shook his fists as if rattling the bars of a cage. Angela ran into his arms.
“That,” he said, “was your best one yet. It must have been the pep talk.”
“I dragged my foot on the first scale.”
“You just gained thousands of fans.”
While they waited for Angela’s turn on the bars, they watched the others perform. A fourteen-year-old from Denver scored a 9.925 on the beam. A nineteen-year-old from Columbus hit the springboard at an awkward angle and sprained her left knee. Soon the judges called Angela’s name. She strapped on her grips and chalked up. Jesse dragged the springboard to the distance they’d agreed upon and took his place next to the bars. Angela leaped to the higher bar, rotated twice, transferred down with a double-reverse Hawk’s Descent, then flung herself with a clean layout back up to the higher bar, where she rotated twice more before her dismount, a Celine Dive with a full twist. The routine wasn’t a crowd-pleaser, but Angela got the job done. Jesse was sweating through his shirt despite the air-conditioning.
As they made their way to the vault, Angela glanced up at the leader’s board. The slate with her name was slotted in third. She was in contention.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Jesse said, as he helped her stretch her arms behind her back. They watched a blonde girl sprint down the mat. She hit the spring and soared into an elegant double layout, but she landed on the balls of her feet and had to take an extra step forward to steady herself.
Angela took her place at the end of the narrow mat and signaled the judges, giving them an officious smile. Jesse stood off to the side and looked on, chewing his gums.
She flew down the mat. She was fast as hell. She kept her fingers straight as she ran. The crowd gasped as she dipped her shoulder and executed the back-handspring. She hit the board in reverse, pushing expertly off the skin of the vault and launching into a layout. Jesse had seen her perform this trick countless times in the past two years, so he knew as soon as she hit the vault that she had too much momentum. She landed on her heels, and though she wheeled her arms for balance, it was too late. She fell backwards. The fall would cost her more than a point. Jesse bit his knuckles.
“Well, that was that,” she said, walking over to where he stood. She seemed to be in denial—he had never seen her react so casually before. He himself was misty-eyed. He pretended to fix her ankle brace as they waited for the tallied scores. It didn’t take long. She was out. She was nowhere near the leaders.
Jesse put his arm around her. He felt his throat tighten. He realized he hadn’t prepared himself for the moment, and here it was. But Angela didn’t look distraught. She looked pensive, as if she were doing long division in her head.
He gave her a gentle pat on the back. “Come on, let’s go.”
They made their way to the balance beam and waited in silence for her turn. He opened a fig bar, took a bite, and offered her the rest. A Russian waltz echoed from the far side of the gym. Finally, one of the judges called her name, and she stood. But she didn’t look at the judges at all. Instead, she looked at Jesse and smiled.
Jesse remembered what happened next for many years to come. The image rose in his mind the following summer as he watched the U.S. gymnastics team hold their medals up for the TV cameras. It came to him when he switched off the lights for good at Coach Petrescu’s gym. And though Angela never competed again, he felt the same thrill when she called to say she’d earned a full scholarship to Cornell, where she stayed on for medical school, and he felt it once again when he saw the YouTube clip of her keynote speech at the Global Conference on Women’s Health, sponsored by the Providence Group in partnership with UNESCO. He watched the clip from his bed in Houston Methodist, hooked to an IV, with Tina crouching by his side, holding the tablet up to his face. But that was all years later.
He tried to tell Tina about it a few nights after the tournament, when he came home and found her in the kitchen, cooking lasagna, so that she could have the memory, too, but it was hard to describe. It was beauty unsurpassed. Over the course of their marriage, though, as he told the story again and again, the memory slowly morphed until it became hers as much as his. As if she, too, had seen Angela mount the beam, and flip, and twirl, and do her perfect handstand, and her shimmy, and her scale. As if she, too, had seen that smile, which meant: here goes. There was no reason, at that stage, to risk anything fancy, so he hadn’t expected the Flop at all. He tried to reenact it for his wife in their living room. The way Angela lifted her leg back until her pointed toes brushed against her ponytail—this time keeping her planted leg absolutely still—and the way he felt his heart pause for a moment as he understood what she was about to do.