Learning to Skate--but Not Like Her

By Sarah Vowell

The stamp on my hand says "SCHOOL." I suppose the look on my face says "You gotta be kidding." Welcome to week three of skating school at Manhattan's Chelsea Piers. Every Monday for eight weeks, a different, seemingly younger instructor from Ice Theater of New York stands before a dozen women in their 30s and demands the impossible--literally.

Tonight's teacher, a wispy creature who reminds me of the adorable Icelandic pop singer Bjork, crouches effortlessly on one foot so that her rear end is nearly touching the ice while she simultaneously kicks the other leg straight out in front of her. She eases up from her elegant glide and with a big grin commands, "Now you!"

Everyone laughs.

I grew up in a town in Montana where every winter all the parks were flooded and turned into skating rinks. So I've been skating since I was 11. But I never really skated. My only skills were to stop and go, though I'll admit fences and snowbanks always did the lion's share of the stopping work. So I felt oddly homesick on the first lesson when everyone came to a crashing halt by slamming into the wall. (Stopping wasn't covered until lesson two.)

My goals were modest. I laced up my skates on the first night hoping that over the course of the next few weeks I would learn two new things. I know myself, and myself got Cs in gym; adding two moves is pushing it. But I was only there 15 minutes when that night's instructor, Emmanuel, noticed that I was skating with my right knee stiff and suggested that I bend it a couple of inches, just as I was already bending my left one. It sounds subtle, but it was as if I'd been chopping garlic with the blunt side of a knife my whole life and a dinner guest walked into the kitchen and pointed out the blade. Now, instead of the glorified walking I'd been doing, I could move to the blaring music with a smidgen of grace. Trust me, you haven't really heard the Backstreet Boys until you've slithered to their rhythm with your knees crooked anew.

During week two I picked up the "swizzle." This is a forward vector in which the legs are repeatedly bowed in and out, apart and together, as if drawing a chain of DNA. This too I more or less mastered, while achieving some success at its inversion, the backward swizzle. I went home elated and then was tickled to find an ice-skating movie on cable called The Cutting Edge. In the movie, the Russian coach counsels his ice dancers, "Douglas, you are stem. Katia, you are petal. Together, you make flower." I was starting to feel a little floral myself--until the next lesson.

Week three not only introduced the aforementioned crouched-down leg kick; it also informed me that I have arms and a chin. I had got through my skating so far by clenching my fists to my side and staring at my feet harder than an indie rock guitarist. Now I was asked to skate in a counterintuitive clockwise circle with my arms straight out in front of me. And I was not to look down at the ice because, the instructor yelled, "the ice is not interesting!"

It's so unfair. The instructor's job is defying gravity. My job is telling stories. Her job involves putting all her weight and faith on two hunks of metal that are three millimeters wide. My job is to write down my thoughts. But here's the main difference between her job and my job: because everyone has thoughts and just about everyone can write, when I do my job well, people outside the field think, "Hey, I could do that! Anyone could do that!" But when the skating instructor does her job well, laymen skid away humbly, mouthing the words "No way!" Thus the better she demonstrates this move, the less my fellow students and I are inclined to give it a try.

After the instructor skated away at the end of the class, the other women in my group huddled together consoling one another with affirmations. Even though my learning curve was taking a nosedive, standing there complimenting and being complimented reminded me of something more worthwhile to remember than the backward swizzle: how kind people can be. At the risk of sounding a little too Oprah, the loveliest thing about the lessons wasn't the halfhearted compliments of the instructors. It was the shared glances of my bumbling fellow students--the solidarity of the incompetent. Don't knock it. I received the first nonironic "You go, girl!" of my life, and so I went, on bended knee.

Sarah Vowell, a contributor to public radio's This American Life, writes this column about her continuing education