let me tell you about gymnastics, p. ii

{in honor of the women's all around final, taking place later today}

It didn’t all come so easily to me.


The floor exercise and the balance beam did, of course. Eventually, my vault came around too. I loved to dance. I loved to flip on the beam, to hold on to the event with my toes. And even though I wasn’t a big fan of tumbling backward, especially where twisting was involved, I did it well.

The floor, the beam, the vault: I was a top-level gymnast in those three apparatuses. I could compete among the elite.

It was the uneven bars that were the problem.

By then, I had this one teammate. Let’s call her M. I looked up to her tremendously; her flexibility was astonishing, and, to this day, something that I’ve never even seen on an Olympic gymnast. She was two years older than me, cooler than me, and for some reason or another, she’d taken a liking to me. We were cliquey – but so what, we thought? After all, we were just too cool for school.

M’s mother, C, was, without a doubt, Kris Jenner’s long lost twin – the gymnastics version, at least. A momager. C lived and breathed for her daughter’s gymnastics, attended every practice, and always made it a point to observe everyone carefully, whether a teammate or a rival.

“The thing with Debbie,” she told my father one time, “Is that she has very strong legs. Very, very strong legs. She doesn’t even need to run to build up momentum. Her legs are that strong.”

Ironically, I would later learn to despise those very same legs with a passion, as a teenager plagued with anorexia.

Perhaps it was my legs that made the vault, beam, and floor exercise a total breeze for me. But my legs wouldn’t be of much help on the uneven bars, now, would they? 

{to be continued}