Twenty-five hours a week was a lot. Anyone could tell you that. Most third graders don't even spend an hour a day on sports. This new team amounted to just over six hours daily. That, on top of school and just about every sport under the sun, and it seemed crazy to even consider letting Ella and Adah spending twenty-five hours a week on anything.
But, when the girls had been showered with what was normally infrequent praise from their gymnastics coach, they had been adamant: we want to join the Advanced Junior Team.
And that is how Jamie came to be standing in a freezing cold gym at ten at night, watching her exhausted eight-year-olds do one more routine on the balance beam (despite the fact that practice officially ended nearly an hour ago) musing over the fact that, two months ago, twenty-five hours a week had seemed like much less.
Six hours a day, four days a week. That's not that bad, she had though. She had tried to convince herself that Ella and Adah would enjoy it. They had always loved gymnastics. And there was some sort of scholarship worked out with the gym (her girls are that good, Jamie remembers thinking when she had heard), so it really wasn't that much extra money. Plus, all the time spent on gymnastics had cut out soccer, swimming and tennis from the schedule, so, all told, the Flacks came out almost on top with the switch, moneywise. Gymnastics was a healthy form of entertainment; it was basically a hundred percent working out, and what American didn't need 25 hours of exercise a week? It would teach the girls a strong work ethic.
What could be the downside?
The downsides, it turns out, were plentiful. One, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the girls didn't get home until ten at the earliest, and on Saturdays, they were gone from noon until dinner time. Two, on those days, what little time they did have at home was spent in a state of overexertion-induced stupor. Three, Jamie and Don were almost never available to do the school-to-gym ride, and they had to call upon either another gymnast's mother or Sam to cart the girls on the trip. Four, Coach was basically a professional buzz-kill, and it was easier to get a straight answer out of a Shakespearian character than to get a compliment out of her. Five, the constant exercise turned out to include a nearly one hundred percent risk that the girls would, at some point, injure themselves, at least according to the other moms. Jamie did not know how her daughters managed to stay upbeat, spending so much time around the loudly critical lady and eternally injured gymnasts.
Right now, said daughters were on two balance beams, directly across from each other, performing the same sequence of skills in perfect unison. Every time their feet left the hard wooden pole, Jamie's heart leapt to her throat. But each time, the girls' feet, timed together perfectly, fell in the exact center of the beam, and Jamie's heart could return to its normal place in the upper left of her chest, at least until the next jump.
To a mother's biased and untrained eye, the routine seemed perfect. No one fell, no one got hurt, and, to Jamie – by now a master of Neosporin and water-proof band-aids – that meant it was a good day. Coach had very different standards.
"Point your toes, Ella! I've told you this a thousand times."
Hadn't she been pointing her toes just then?
"Adah, you need to at least act like you know what you're doing!"
Did she not look completely comfortable for someone on a four inch wide beam?
"Girls, neither of those whatever you just did were a sheep jump!"
Coach's grammar had never been the best.
Finally, three one more routines later, Coach dismissed the girls. They seemed cheerful, and, even though they were sore and tired and acutely aware of the need to leave the house at six thirty the next morning, they nearly bounced to the locker room to pull on some outerwear for the ride home.
"How'd it go today?" Jamie asked Coach, almost scared to hear what she had to say.
"They think they can get by with their natural ability. It's true that they look better than most of the other girls, even if they're technique can't hold water, but that won't last forever – certainly not once they start competing in interstate competitions."
"Interstate competitions?" Weren't the three, four hour drives upstate enough?
"First one of the season is next weekend. It's in Vermont. I'm expecting gyms from all over New England, so your girls are going to have to start pointing their feet, hear me?"
Jamie can only nod, thankful that her daughters are finished changing. They all politely thank the woman before leaving.
The walk to the car is chilly, and Jamie sees Ella and Adah both, in the same instant, tuck their arms into their armpits and put their heads down. She smiles, despite the cold.
Once into the warmth of the car, seatbelts buckled, Jamie begins to start the usual questions about her children's day, but only half-heartedly. She was thinking about how she would ever be able to make it to a competition that was nearly in Canada when she couldn't find time make the thirty minute drive to her daughters' gym.
"How was school?"
"Good."
"Did you learn anything new?"
"Clouds are just water and you can't live on them."
She looked in the rearview mirror. Both girls were nodding off, heads resting on the sides of their backed booster seats. Jamie does some quick mental rearranging of Coach's comments in her head.
"Coach said that you guys have really good natural ability. Do you know what that means?"
A slight nod from Adah, nothing from Ella. Jamie turns her eyes back to the road, which has become a meditative blur of yellow and white on a black background. She focuses all of the little energy she had left on staying awake for the next twenty minutes, until she can fall into bed. She envisions her husband, who had probably elected to go to sleep, knowing both his daughters would most likely be adrift in a land of (hopefully) balance-beam-free dreams by the time they get home. Even splitting this drive with him, only having to do it twice a week, was enough to make Jamie regret having agreed to put her daughters on the elite team.
She reaches their apartment building without even realizing she had gotten off the highway. It is this kind of driving that makes her nervous – this mindless control of a vehicle, surrounded by many others of the same kind, that was capable of killing everyone inside of and around it. She tried not to think of all the accidents she had seen, all the dead bodies that had been pulled out of destroyed cars while she watched.
Jamie wakes her sleeping daughters just enough so that they can stumble to the elevator, and then into the apartment. She is pleasantly surprised when she finds her husband, awake, if barely, sitting in the living room. He assists with the Herculean task of getting two exhausted eight-year-olds to switch their skin-tight leotards for loose cotton pajamas, brush their teeth, and into bed.
By the time Jamie had put on her own sleeping attire, a baggy tee shirt and sweatpants, and brushed a day's worth of fast food and polluted city air off her teeth, it is all she can do to drag herself down the hallway and onto her warm mattress. Once Don turns out the light, the only thing her eyes can make out are the small red numbers on her digital clock: 11:37. She has to be out the door in less than seven hours. She groans.
Her husband slides closer to her in bed, encircling her in his warm arms. "Long day?"
Jamie can barely remember arriving at the gym at eight o'clock, let alone her work day. She vaguely recalls interrogating a suspect who kept making snide remarks about her lack of a penis, so mumbles an affirmative sound.
Don kisses the back of her neck, and she twists toward him. "Why do we do this?"
"Do what?" he says, between pecks.
"Why do we send Ella and Adah to that God-awful woman every week?"
He pauses his show of affection, attempting to work the question through his brain, currently fogged with sleep deprivation.
"They like it, remember?"
"Do they, though? It just seems so…" She searches for the right word, unable to find it at such a late hour, and settles for "tiring. I was talking to Clara today, and she said Nicole has broken bones three times because of gymnastics. Can you imagine? Three trips to the hospital."
This seemed to strike a chord within her husband, as she knew it would. As a police officer, there wasn't much in the world that you desired less than taking your children to the hospital. To a cop, hospitals were the homes of the rape victims and the dying.
"We'll talk with them tomorrow, after dinner, okay? If they don't like it, we can stop."
Jamie nods, and is just falling asleep when she hears her husband begin to snore. Nearly twelve years of marriage, and she doesn't think she has once fallen asleep before him.
"I think you might want to consider singing Ella and Adah up to be on the Advanced Junior Team."
"Advanced Junior Team," Jamie repeats. Her daughters' gymnastic coach seemed different on the phone, more subdued. Jamie was accustomed to hearing the woman screaming insults, thinly veiled as constructive criticism, across a high ceilinged gym.
"Yes. They have shown incredible natural abilities, and I think the regime offered by the Advanced Team is what they need to truly prosper."
"What does this regime entail?"
"We meet three days a week, plus conditioning on Saturdays. There are extra fees, of course, for the increase in gym time-"
"Four days a week?"
"Four days, including conditioning, yes. A total of maybe twenty-five hours per week."
"That's ridiculous. That's a part-time job."
"If you want to truly become a gymnast, you have to put in the hours," the woman said, as if it was a waste of her time to talk to anyone who held a different opinion.
"My daughters aren't even eight yet, Coach." The fanatical woman insisted on being called that, even by the parents. Don joked that she forced her husband to use it in bed, as well.
"Most serious gymnasts start at five or six, at the latest. We're on borrowed time here as it is, Jamie."
"I really don't think twenty-five hours a week is a commitment I want to make for my children right now."
"Think about it. Talk it over with Don and the girls. Sleep on it. Call me in a few days, okay? I'm telling you, you're sitting on a gold mine here."
Coach ended the call before Jami could object to her children being called a gold mine.
What about now? Jamie wondered. Is a gold mine still a gold mine if it will not point its feet?