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So, her experiences on the slopes didn’t set her up for a delightful day.
This trip was about Deidre, though, so Mary was determined to suck it up and to try very hard not to be a killjoy.
Deidre was glowing with excitement.
In they went. They rented what they could, including (Thankfully!) parkas and goggles. And they bought the things that weren’t available for rent—hats and gloves. The guy had looked down at Mary’s yoga pants. “You don’t have ski pants with you?”
“Sorry.” There weren’t any for rental or sale there, so it would have to do. She’d be on the baby slope anyway. “I’ll be skiing with the toddlers. It should be fine.” Mary noticed the guy hadn’t said anything skeptical or paternalistic to Deidre. Of course, she looked and acted like the practiced hand she was.
“When you are on the baby slope. Please to keep yourself to the left. This is safer place.”
“Left,” Mary repeated with a nod. He probably wanted to keep her out of the path of the children who would be on the right. Right?
Deidre decided to skip the expert slope; she was still jet-lagged and had a restless, anxious sleep the previous night. “I’ll go down the one marked ‘advanced’ a few times, then I’ll meet you in the restaurant.”
Mary moved past the blue slope for people who had a clue what they were doing, walking past the beginner green slope and all the way over to where Mary saw children clumping together. Mary would guess they were a kindergarten-aged group, maybe still preschoolers, who gathered around adults with whistles that they’d toot from time to time. Mary wondered if this was designated only for tots and if she’d be allowed.
In her bulky ski boots, Mary stomped up and looked over the area. “Very potato-patchy,” Mary said as she laid the skis on the ground. “Basically flat.” She poked her sticks into the ground to balance herself as she clipped her boots into the skis. “Nice and easy. It’s okay to take baby steps next to the babies. It’s okay to be a beginner,” she coaxed herself as she moved forward. “Okay, bit more of a slope than it looked. Going a bit faster than I’m comfortable with.” She was just talking to herself like she’d do with her boys when they were trying something new. “It’s okay to suck. Just learn one takeaway today. One thing that will inform you the next time you try.”
And that was when Mary—arms windmilling through the air for balance—slicked right past the trees on her left where she had tried to dutifully follow the shop person’s counsel.
And then she was on her hip, desperately digging into the slick white surface, watching the three-year-olds with their teddy bear-eared hats swish joyfully past down the highest, longest slope that Mary had ever seen.
The toddlers were laughing at her.
Laughing.
Mary most certainly didn’t belong on this slope. What was she thinking signing up for skiing on a glacier in summer? If Mary could get off this darned mountain with only a broken ego, she was going to take it as a win.
She’d gotten herself to a stop, braced against her poles that dug into the crust of glittering snow. Overheated from the exertion, Mary melted the ice beneath her, and she was sure that her thigh and butt cheek were at risk of frostbite. She couldn’t feel her fingers.
How am I going to save myself here? Mary wondered as she scanned for a solution. Looking backward, she focused on the last tree she’d passed. If she could somehow get up to it, she could move from tree to tree back off this mountain.
Just head to the restaurant.
Just get that pot of hot cocoa and nurse her wounded pride.
But with a shriek, she was slipping again, skidding toward the right side of the mountain. The side that the shopkeeper said was the dangerous side.
The babies were swishing and swooshing as they evaded her almost parallel path from one side of the ski trail to the other. She had no business being on this slope. No business being covered in ice and snow at the end of the freaking summer.
Wet and cold, bruised and cut, Mary hit stretches of sheer abandon where she just let herself hip slide without any measure of dignity. Into this, Mary peppered moments of terror that had her flailing her limbs with the attached skis. She was desperate for control as she panicked in the face of the inevitability of gravity when there was a dearth of anything, even vaguely resembling friction, to slow her descent.
All the while, there was happy laughter and calling back and forth between the toddlers—"Weee! Isn’t this fun?” their giggles implied.
It seemed like taunting. “It feels cruel, to be honest,” she grumbled. And now that the kiddos were out of sight, Mary raised a fist. “Screw you. Screw you all,” she yelled, angry at her pain and the cold, wondering if maybe she had chipped the bone in her elbow and would need a cast. She felt like an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. Only, in retrospect, maybe she was on theirs.
Well, cussing made her feel a little better.
Inappropriate, but better.
That and just giving up.
There was a certain peace to lying back—her legs spread eagle, her skis a tangle—letting herself body surf the damned mountain.
Tucking her chin, Mary could see that she was fast approaching the shed that was part of the ski lift system. Why things were set up catawampus like this with the lodge at the top and the lift taking you from bottom to top instead of top to bottom probably had to do with the geography and rock structures. Mary didn’t care. She just wanted to hand in her equipment and find a corner to lick her wounds.
Using her abs to get her torso upright again, Mary mumbled, “All hail to whoever invented Pilates.”
