By Lucia Tang
The gymnast’s mother worked on Minoan Crete, and she loved it the way the gymnast once loved gymnastics. She even dressed like it. Her fresco-patterned sheath was shiny and tomato-red, but she made it look almost elegant. I was suddenly embarrassed by my own black shirtdress, creased from being left too long in the dryer.
In the faculty lounge, she sat down next to, not across from, me. As she moved, the nearly child-high male figure printed all across her front flexed with the rippling of her dress fabric. He was so long, his legs began where hers did. It looked like he, too, was bending at the waist.
She smiled at me, but I met his gaze instead — one eye, browless and lashless, suspended in a bone-colored profile. Above it, his headdress skimmed the flat arc of her neckline. The shape of it was like a many-pronged phallus.
Later, I’d look her up, tapping through her Academia.edu profile. I downloaded her CV twice. Linked under “Public appearances,” there was a clip from a documentary where she talked about him, the fresco. She was in a different dress, also Minoan-themed. And he was blown up on a screen behind her, to the height of an actual man. She stood up out of her armchair and strode towards him, bringing mustard-colored pumps into the camera’s gaze. His name, she explained, was the Prince of the Lilies.
In the faculty lounge, when she saw me staring, she skimmed a hand along the outstretched curve of his left arm. The gesture was graceful, but rehearsed.
She said, “You know,” and ghosted her fingertips across the bump of bone on my wrist. I thought she would start explaining the fresco, his provenance or maybe his meaning. Instead, she said, “I never wanted her to do gymnastics in the first place.”
***
The second time we met, I learned that the gymnast’s math was good. This was because she liked to calculate her own difficulty scores — the additive arithmetic of flips and leaps and twists, used to judge someone superior at negotiating her own body through air.
The gymnast’s Latin was bad. There was no such use for Virgil. Her Greek, her mother admitted, was nonexistent, in the tone of someone confessing a major maternal lapse.
This time, she wore her hair wound up in a pea-green scarf, and her ears chimed with champagne-colored pendants shaped like bees. I recognized the motif, again, as Minoan.
Her mouth was touched with translucent red, and it came off in pale clouds on the rim of her macchiato cup. My own coffee sat untouched and steaming. I’d gotten it to go. I said, “I’m sorry, we don’t actually offer ancient Greek.”
I didn’t mention that none of this was relevant to me, a history teacher who knew no foreign languages but undergraduate French. I assumed she had already tracked all of us down, to deliver this same small speech. We were the first teachers the gymnast would meet face to face since she was eight, when the coaches moved all her studying online.
It had been necessary, then, to devote all her time to arcane techniques for adjusting the shape and tension of her limbs, so the body could revolve its way improbably through the air. But time and talent hadn’t saved her knee. There would be no more strain of momentary flight for her — it was too improbable in the end.
***
Did she meet with each of us twice, following the same agenda? The second time, to share her assessment of her daughter’s skill for dividing numbers and declining nouns. The first time, to show us the sheet from the surgeon, extracted from a handbag that also held a slim Greek-to-German dictionary.
Some of the same fragrance that wreathed her clothes had spilled on the sheet. When I unfolded it, the scent of bruised white flowers, just this side of rot, saturated the lounge.
She left the diagram on the table when she let herself out. It wasn’t really the gymnast’s knee, I knew. It was a generic dislocated knee, resembling hers only in its painful disarticulations. The image was printed in thick black lines, details rendered in a blurry inkjet gray. But there were some blood-colored strokes, drawn in with a pen.
I could picture a white-coated figure filling them in from memory, while they anesthetized the air in the treatment room with a soothing patter. Showing the gymnast and her mother, with voice and with pen, where the ligaments would need to be reknit with surgery. As the smell of ink and lilies filled my throat, I tried and failed to suppress a cough.
Lucia Tang is a writer based in Minneapolis. Her essays and criticism have appeared in Electric Literature, Majuscule, and Slate, among other places. She earned a “Notable” mention in The Best American Essays 2021.
Hot Pot Magazine 