Randi Glatzer

ROLLER SKATES

The skates arrived in a box in a box within a plastic envelope. I tore through the layers of packaging with my hands, too rushed to even grab scissors or a knife. I ahhhed when I saw them. The white vinyl ankle boots were nothing special, just the classic shape, with eyelets for laces. But oh! The wheels! They were a clear, iridescent plastic, shimmering with flecks of pink, blue, and indigo. And when I held a skate upside down and rolled a wheel with my flattened palm, lights flashed. Seeing the description of these light-up wheels on Amazon was one thing. Turning my living room into a 1970s disco just by moving an axle was something else entirely. As a teenager in the late 70s, I dance-skated to the plinking electronic notes of “Funky Town” at the local roller ring. Now, at 59, decades after my teen years and the disco craze, I sat down, loosened the laces, pulled back the tongue of one skate, and shoved my foot in to see if it would fit. It did.

The sparks from those skates brightened an otherwise dark time. Though vaccines had come out by April 2021, much of the world was still on a COVID-19 lockdown. Public schools were open in my city, Philadelphia, but learning was still virtual, which meant that each weekday I opened my computer to teach a black screen dotted by anime icons—high schoolers who refused to turn their cameras on. At the same time, my teenage daughter, Claire, was diagnosed with gastroparesis, an illness that meant that she couldn’t keep food down. She’d been in and out of the hospital, trying to tolerate a succession of feeding tubes to keep from starving to death. My parents, 88 and 93, were also regular hospital goers. I sensed that they were declining rapidly, but my brother and sister and I, all in separate cities, feared bringing them COVID if we took the plane ride to Florida. I also worried about carrying COVID back to my sick kid.

I couldn’t deny my mother’s worsening dementia. “How’s Claire?” my mother would ask me on the phone, with an acuity that reminded me of her former caring, tuned-in sharpness. I’d give her some details, such as that Claire had been less nauseated for a day or been discharged from the hospital. My mother would listen attentively. Then, a minute later: “How’s Claire?”

For weeks, when I wasn’t at the hospital with my daughter, I’d find myself up at two a.m., in bed, eyes on my iPhone screen, watching roller skaters on TikTok and YouTube. They swerved down paths in an Arizona park, or over ramps in Venice Beach. They wore tank tops and short shorts, tattoos, and pigtails. I followed the politics of the trend: how Black skaters had kept quad-skating (on skates with two wheels in front and two in back instead of all in a line) alive from the ’70s. TikTok’s flashy white girls trying out Black moves had helped bring the quad-skating subculture above ground again. My favorite skater online was Joy, a Black woman in her late twenties, who’d moved home with her parents during the pandemic. She chronicled her journey from being terrified to skate even a foot in her new wheels, to swooping through her Southern suburb backwards, while swinging a hula-hoop like a lasso over her head. As hula hooping was one of my prior obsessions, and I could do a few tricks with a hula hoop, Joy became my inspiration.

My friends weren’t so sure. “You’re doing what?” Simone said. Even through the phone line, I could hear her eyebrows rise. Still, I signed up for roller skating classes that had begun in my neighborhood, a trend capitalizing on the TikTok craze and people’s urge—like mine—to get outdoors and be active with others after a year of pandemic isolation.

I tried the skates out in the living room, feeling them hug my ankles as I tugged the laces tight. The smell of new vinyl in my stale house changed everything. I took them to the just-rebuilt schoolyard down the street. The playground’s clay surface, a patchwork of pink circles and green squares, beckoned me. As I sat on the slide, lacing up, one of my camera-off high school students recognized me. “Hi, miss!” the girl, a recent immigrant from Mexico, called to me from outside the park. We waved and waved at each other through the park’s chain-link fence. Her cheer mixed with mine. I felt exuberant, thrilled to see an actual student in real life. Spring was coming. I stood up. I rolled. I bent my knees and stretched my arms out in front of me for balance. I drew curves with my inside edges, until I picked up momentum, and was skating backward. I imagined adding in a hula hoop.

The weekly lessons, underneath the highway on a strip of basketball courts, opened new possibilities. Like the skaters on TikTok, the instructor, India, a hip-hop dancer with a shower of curls and an endless smile, never wore protective gear. But before the classes, I teamed up with the other middle-aged ladies at the edge of the basketball court. There, while seated on some upside-down buckets that the class organizers had set up, we put on our skates, but also helmets, knee pads, elbow pads, wrist guards. One lady, to protect herself from a broken tailbone, had pants with rubber cushions sewn into the butt.

One day on the buckets, I saw a man pulling different skates out of a duffle bag and trying them on in succession. Master Jay! India’s dad, a licensed plumber, a pole dancer, and a merengue instructor was considered one of the O.G.s of Philadelphia’s Black skate-dancing scene. He’d been my plumber for years. I surmised he was several years older than me, definitely in his sixties. But his deftness with his skates’ laces, and the fact that he was leading the advanced skate-dancing class that I didn’t dare try, reminded me that when it came to roller skates, we had only our generation in common.

He watched me inch my way toward my lesson. The sloped, pitted concrete unnerved me, and I felt less courageous than I’d been on the playground’s smooth clay. Skates made me taller, but also ganglier. My legs shook. I tried to lower my center of gravity by bending my knees. My tense muscles made it feel impossible to squat down. “Be careful,” he told me, gravely. If there had been piano music at that moment, it might have been low-pitched and ominous.

But by the time we’d all practiced a bit, I could move forward or backward, and stop without ramming into a wall. I sunk into my squat, not with ease, but with less horror. When we gathered into a crowd and followed India’s moves, I could cross one metal-shod foot over the other.  I watched India’s curls bounce as she gave us a flirty smile or yelled, “Go ‘head! You got it!” over her shoulder. Music blasted from the boom box India had set on the curb. I didn’t recognize India’s 90’s party jams – she was too sophisticated for radio hits – but their thumping bass and electronic effects made me think of Salt-N-Pepa or Sir Mix-A-Lot. The songs had a “Jump On It” vibe. We all laughed and shouted “Hey!” or “Wooh!” at each other’s shoulder shimmies and hand waves. We executed a full spin in unison, like staggering Rockettes on wheels. I felt brave, infallible, invincible.

It was with the memory of that feeling a few nights later that I practiced dance moves on skates in my living room, and didn’t bother with the helmet, or the elbow, knee, or wrist pads. I was only going to skate for maybe twenty minutes, anyway. I bopped in time with a YouTube instructor, a decidedly middle-aged, third-generation roller rink owner who promised to break down every move. She did. And as I shuffled in my skates, performing the hex, a six-count, stylish pattern, my elation eclipsed all my life worries. “I’m getting it!” I told myself. “I’m really getting it!

My triumph fueled me. At last, I turned to sit down in my green armchair, take off the skates, and head to bed. Only I missed the chair. My feet flew forward, my butt slammed down, and my right hand reached out to break the fall. Then, pain. The vibration shot through all of me. I thought I’d faint, or vomit. But after I lay my cheek on the cool floor for a bit, then sat up to take off the skates with one hand, the nausea had passed. I tucked the laces into the boots, grabbed my phone, and looked up YouTube videos for the pattern I’d conquer next.

Three days later, I was still staring at YouTube on my phone, watching Joy’s fluid hips swaying in her jean shorts as she skated backward past colonial homes and green hedges when I peeled my eyes away from the screen to look at my wrist. It still throbbed. The pain hadn’t abated. If anything, the ache had magnified. A purplish-blue shadow spread from my palm to my elbow and crept toward my shoulder. I felt an equally dark and unpleasant dread spidering within me as well.

The orthopedist, a hand specialist, examined my X-ray on his computer screen. “A fracture like this in a fifty-nine-year-old woman . . . ” he said, letting his thought trail off. He shook his head, his eyes still on the image, not on me. “You’re probably osteoporotic. You’re going to need surgery to keep that bone together.”

I felt fury. If he’d turn toward me, surely he’d see my slimness, my muscle tone. I wasn’t one of those sedentary middle-agers with diabetes and high blood pressure. My elitism fused with indignation. I waited until the doctor’s eyes met mine.

“You mean my bones are crumbling?” I said, in disbelief.

“Well, yes,” he said, his tone softer now that he knew I was taking offense, but his words no less certain. He projected the X-ray onto a wall and pointed to a blurred spot beneath my thumb bone. “You’re going to need a steel plate and screws.”

“Is there any other option?” I asked.

He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “We can cast the wrist. Maybe the bone will heal on its own. There’s a chance.”

For my fingertip-to-elbow cast, I chose a Day-Glo pink fiberglass tape, the same bright color as the nail polish I wore when I was seventeen. In the doctor’s spacious lobby, I posed next to a pink-petaled moth orchid. I rested my cheek on my casted arm, smiled beneath my coincidentally pink cotton pandemic mask, and took a selfie. I thought the photo had a youthful joie de vivre, an ironic cheeriness, a bloom within a storm. I felt both aghast and giddy.

Over the next several weeks, as the wrist pain refused to subside, I realized I’d have to get surgery or wear the hot pink cast forever. Everything was harder: accompanying my daughter through medical procedures at the hospital, teaching my online high school classes, opening the mail, getting on a plane—alas, too late—to see my dying mother in the hospital.

I found myself explaining the situation to friends on phone calls. They couldn’t pin the wrist break to a single, specific mistake, as my seventeen-year-old daughter had done. “You should have been wearing wrist guards,” Claire said. “You know that.” Instead, my middle-aged friends globalized the situation into a mid-life crisis.

“Roller skating?” Nina in Seattle asked. “Don’t they have hiking groups in Philadelphia?”

“I didn’t want to say anything when you told me you were going to roller skate,” Simone, who was ten years younger than me, said. “I mean, I wouldn’t do it.” This was, somehow, worse than an “I told you so.”

“Why take up something new and dangerous like that at this age?” Jeannine said. “I stick to things I’m good at. You’ve salsa danced, and done ballet. Why didn’t you just work on one of those?”

I recognized, then, how much avoidance – of failure, fatigue, forlornness – lies in my search for novelty.

In the end, the surgery went fine. So did the weeks and weeks of hand therapy that followed. My daughter recovered. My father died three months after my mother. My right wrist, which has always been tender since my days as a newspaper reporter, continues to give me problems in yoga class or if I write for too many hours.

I didn’t put the skates on again. I doubt I ever will. Instead, those white boots with their iridescent wheels are packed in their box, in my basement. I don’t want to break another bone. I could see that as defeat, succumbing to the fear of aging and its frailty. 

But I don’t succumb. I still spin around in my living room. Now I’m working on my salsa dance turns. Double turns are the hardest. I spin, some nights until I’m dizzy and feel sick. The dance teachers online promise that the sensation passes with enough practice. The skill should translate to pirouettes when I get back to ballet.

When I look at the raised, pale, thread of a scar on the underside of my right wrist, I don’t think of how foolish I was. Instead, the scar, with its jagged detours and tapering exit, reminds me of a road that brought me to different terrain. That x-ray helped me recognize how few years I have left. I can’t waste that time by slowing down. Instead. I’ll balance new risks with familiar challenges. I’ll wear the safety gear. I’m chastened, but I won’t stop moving.