Square Pizza by Brittany Ackerman

An excerpt from The Perpetual Motion Machine, winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award (forthcoming, fall 2018)

 Every Thursday Skyler accompanies me to my ice skating lesson. He’s a much more advanced skater than I, as I am only six years old and can barely walk on the ice. I always begin my lessons by clutching onto the rails while the instructor holds up my tiny body. I fumble around on the wall until I find my balance. While I struggle to get through my lesson, Skyler skates along perfectly.  His legs stretch out and graze the ice with each stroke of movement. But regardless of whether I learn a new technique, or even stay on my feet the entire time, I always get pizza from the snack stand after my lesson.

The snack stand at the ice skating rink is very dirty and dilapidated. A health inspector probably should have shut it down long ago, but I love that stand more than anything. I’m impressed by its glowing aura, the orange neon sign, the wafting smells of pizza and hot dog and nachos. There is a small window for ordering your food and two separate lines, one that reads “Order Here” and the other “Pick Up.” The window is too tall for me, so Skyler becomes the designated lookout and shouts when the pizzas are ready. There is a large black marquee over the window that has contrasting white lettering.  The snack stand has things like pretzels, Italian ice, Coca Cola products, etc., but the only thing we are ever interested in is pizza. The pizza isn’t ordinary pizza. It’s square. It’s not Sicilian, though, just square. The edges are always crispy and burnt and there is more cheese than tomato sauce. It comes in a little cardboard box where we pile up our crusts for mom to eat afterwards.

The hot little pizzas cool down by the time we get to the car and we eat them all the way home. It’s warmth to us, the pizza. It may even be love.

“Shouldn’t five-year-olds be able to lace up their own skates?” Mom asks. She has on her brown and white flannel fleece. It is early November in New York and the autumn chill is slowly turning into winter.

“It’s okay,” says Jen the instructor. “I don’t mind, really.”  

Jen kneels down and laces up my brown leather skates. Her blonde ponytail sways frantically as I lick my lips at the sight of the snack stand. A little curly headed girl is eating Italian ices and gives me an evil look while biting down on the wooden stick. I whimper and tug on mom’s fleece, but she just pats my head and assures me I’ll get a treat after the lesson.

Skyler watches as I tremble up onto my feet with Jen’s help. We walk over from the bench area to the rink and begin the lesson.

“Wanna go get your skates?” Mom asks Skyler.

“Why can’t I just play my Game Boy today?” He retaliates.

“But you’re so good! You can play your Game Boy on the way home. I want to see you skate!”

“Watch her skate,” Skyler says as he hears one of my fearful screams from the ice rink.

“Sky,” she groans. “Get your skates.”

Skyler laces up his skates. He hates that the only ones they had left were white, and they aren’t even his size. They feel so pristine and he doesn’t want to get them dirty. Even though he ties them up as tight as he can, the leather wobbles around his ankles a bit when he tries to walk around. He is five years older than me, but he is still sort of small. He has dark brown hair, almost as dark and black as the color of his hat and gloves.  He wears a big coat over a waffle printed thermal shirt. His brown eyes stand out and the black pupils look like the little black beads in my Pretty Pretty Princess game. He takes his hands out of his gloves and walks over to Mom.

“Can you at least hold my jacket?” he asks, presenting the jacket to her.
“Keep that thing on!” she screeches. “It’s freezing in here. You’re not skating without it. You’re going to get sick.”

“Ok then,” Skyler groans. “I just won’t skate. That’s fine.”  

His eyes are drawn to the one Pac Man machine that is unoccupied at the time. Mom holds the jacket out in front of him like a children’s paper snowflake project as if she expects him to be elated with it.  Skyler reluctantly loops his arms back through their holes and pulls at the collar.

Skyler steps onto the ice. The large arena is lit up by the daylight from large windows on the roof. The ice is white with blue and red lines for hockey players and is scratched up pretty bad. His cheeks, flushed by the cold air, are the color of a faded red Lego brick found at the bottom of an old plastic bin. His small hands plop into each glove as they dangle over his fingers, the ring finger sliding awkwardly in the middle finger’s place.  He re-arranges the black fleece glove so that it is tightly secured, as if he is putting on his armor. Skyler looks for me on the ice. He sees all the skaters, some learning jumps with their instructors and some practicing a routine just by themselves. The afternoon is very popular for lessons and there is rarely free skating allowed.

He finally catches sight of me. There I am, wavering on the ice holding dearly onto Jen, my instructor.  I’m learning how to walk backwards on the ice. A skill, Skyler always told me, that he never even used when skating. But he notices that I seemed to be better at walking backwards than just simply standing up. Harder tasks are sometimes easier for me, and the easy things often seem impossible.

“Over here!” shouts Mom. “Let’s see some skating!”  

Skyler does a few laps around the rink. He starts out gliding one foot in front of the other, the way he knows ice-skating is supposed to look. An older man zips past him practicing a routine and startles him. He begins to skate a little faster.

Mom motions Skyler over in the stands. He glides to where she.  

“What?”

“Why don’t you do some tricks?” she asks.

“There’s a lot of people on the ice,” Skyler answers. “I don’t want to get in anyone’s way.”

“That’s ridiculous. You can practice and do whatever you want to. No one is going to bother you.”

“Look!” Skyler points excitedly. Jen and I skate backwards past where they are standing. Jen points at Mom and I wave to her, then stumble, then smile again.

“Come on,” Mom says and looks at Skyler. “Show me some tricks.”

Skyler steps back onto the ice. His lips are a little chapped from the cold and he pulls up his fleece collar above them. He skates out into the middle of the rink. He balances himself on one foot with his arms out at each side. He catches sight of Mom’s smiling face and decides to continue. He does a jump in which he completes a single rotation and lands on the ice a little wobbly. Practicing this jump another four or five times, he becomes more at ease on the ice and less concerned with our mother watching him. He wants to master the jump.

He pushes his left skate forward and the right one back, propelling him forward on the ice. He slides around the rink faster and faster. He knows that the only way he can perfectly complete the jump is if he skates really fast, which will give him enough momentum to turn in a full circle and land perfectly.

Skyler picks up speed. Mom watches from behind the glass, eyes glued on her son.

“Go as fast as you can!” she screams from behind the glass.

The metal on Skyler’s ice skates dig into the solid white ice, stained with gray. A sheer mist of frost spews out from the bottom of his skates. He stops and sees Mom standing there watching him, waving her arms around in the air. She looks so happy, but he wants to stop. I am nowhere in sight now and he thinks that my lesson might be over. He wishes that it were over so that he can step off the ice, get into the car, and play his Game Boy on the way home. He is getting tired and begins to feel the cold of the ice rink. He’s glad he put his jacket on after all.

“Go as fast as you can!” she shouts again.

Even though he wants to stop, he doesn’t want to disappoint Mom. He knows that if he doesn’t skate faster, she will just bug him to do it the next time I have my skating lesson. She won’t be able to forgive him. She wants to see her son do great things, amazing things, accomplishments and certificates, awards and be the best. Mom wants him to keep going and he knows that it will never stop.

His sharp white skates slice into the ice like a meat cleaver at the Riverdale Deli. He feels like an army man parachuting down from the balcony of our apartment, swift and agile. The rink is silent and all he hears is the swishing of his pants as his feet pass one in front of the other in a straight line toward where Mom is standing. He pictures himself on Mario’s Rainbow Road floating quickly on the ribbons of color about to reach the finish line. As he reaches his right foot forward, his feet shake because the skates are a size too big, causing the toe pick of his skate to dive into the ice. His small frame smacks right down into the ice and his head hits hard.

A crowd forms around his body. Skyler rolls over to his side and spits out splotches of blood onto the ice as his lip bleeds, profusely. A large gash on his forehead drips blood down his eyebrow and on his cheek. Tears well up in his eyes but he doesn’t cry.

“Skyler!  Skyler!” Mom runs over towards him, shrieking. “This is all my fault,” she says picking up his head and examining his forehead and lip.  

“I shouldn’t have listened to you,” Skyler replies, his eyes beginning to close.

I am standing by the snack stand, completely unaware of the events. My lesson had ended a while ago and I was ready for my treat. I stand on my tippy toes and watch the snack man with black curly hair use a big wooden paddle to extract pizza from the oven. I watch him take a round metal slicer and cut the pizza into individual squares.

“I want that one!” I whisper as the man cuts an edge piece, which contains two corners worth of crust and maximum cheese. I know Mom will like all the extra crust.

The man puts the pizza slices under a heat lamp on display for all the customers to look at. My eyes water from looking at the pizza so long and being so close to the heat lamp.

“We have to leave right now,” Mom says firmly as she strides by and plucks me away from the snack stand with Skyler stumbling behind, holding an ice pack on his head.

“But what about the square pizzas?” I whine, as I get taken further and further away from the snack stand.

“It’s my fault,” Mom repeats. “It’s all my fault.”

The three of us walk outside to the parking lot and head for Mom’s white Cadillac.  I cry as I reach back to the snack stand. Skyler holds up tissues and ice packs to his bloody and bruised face, which makes me cry harder. My brother is a mess and I don’t get my pizza. I have no idea what’s going on and why. It’s so unlike our routine to leave somewhere in a rush, without all the treats, without the things we both want. I wonder if we’ll ever even come back. When something horrible happens to a family are they allowed to go back to the places where it happened? Will my brother be okay? Will my mom stop yelling? Will I ever get my square pizza again?  

“Why…can’t I…just get…pizza?” I cry, hyperventilating.

“We need to get Skyler home,” Mom says, wiping her tears rapidly with the back of her hand.

I let out a scream. Mom places me in the car and buckles my seat belt. Skyler gets himself into the car and pulls down the mirror. His face is completely black and blue mixed with the red-crusted blood on his eyebrow and the streaks down his face. He wipes up most of the blood, but has to hold the ice pack in place so that his forehead won’t swell up.

“How am I going to tell Dad?” Mom is frantic.

Skyler looks out the window with his swollen eyes and sees the large building that we always pass on the way home. We were never really sure what it was for, but on the side of the building is a giant splatter painting that is blue, red, and yellow. Every time we pass it when driving, we always fight over who had painted it. “I painted it!” I would demand. “No, you’re too young to paint anything that big, I did it!” Skyler would proclaim. Then Mom would simply turn to both of us and say, “You both did it.”  

Today, only Skyler sees the painting as we drive by. Mom is too busy rehearsing how to tell Dad about disfiguring their son and I am too upset, still hollering and crying hysterically.

Skyler turns to me in the backseat. I am crying with my head down in my purple puff coat, unable to move my arms because the coat is so big. He tries to offer me his Game Boy, but I won’t stop crying. I don’t know how to play it yet anyway. I’ve only watched him press the buttons, the faded purple A’s and B’s, the little plus sign switch, but I’m not sure how it all works and I’m not interested now. Tears splatter onto the nylon fabric as I breathe heavily, whispering incoherent cries about the pizza that I didn’t get that only he can understand.

Brittany Ackerman is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing.  Since graduating, she has completed a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, and has attended the Writers by Writers Mont Blanc Workshop in Chamonix, France under the instruction of Alan Heathcock.  She recently attended the Methow Valley Workshop in May of 2017 under the leadership of Ross Gay.  She currently lives in Los Angeles and her forthcoming collection of essays and winner of the 2016 Nonfiction Award, The Perpetual Motion Machine, will be published by Red Hen Press in the fall of 2018.