by Sarah Deming
Next came an enormous man she recognized as that usher, Herbert, from the Barclays Center. He walked by the body quickly, nodding as though passing an acquaintance on the street. Next were Boo Boo’s father, who ignored the body entirely, and Shelly, who crossed herself.
Gravity hesitated by the foot end of the box as Boo Boo and Nigel approached it. Nigel tried to put the Undertaker figurine into the coffin, but after a fierce, whispered exchange with his big brother, he took it back and stalked off.
She walked toward the explosion of flowers and silk at the coffin’s head and looked inside. It was nothing like Coach. The deep brown skin, which had been so alive with rivers of wrinkles, looked powdery and cold. The lips were painted, the cheeks rouged like a woman’s. Only the eyebrows seemed the same: those old bushy caterpillars, sleeping now. He looked strange in the suit and tie they had dressed him up in, but Gravity was glad they were burying him in one of his caps. This was the red, white, and blue one with stars on it from the Los Angeles Olympics.
She forced herself to touch his chest with two fingers. Even through the jacket and shirt, it felt hard as stone. Coach’s body seemed somehow diminished, less tall and broad, as though his soul had taken up actual physical space. Ms. Laventhol had said that gravity pulled on everything. Gravity would have to ask her if it pulled on the soul, too.
Her tears had dried up, leaving her eyeballs aching.
“I’m sorry, Coach,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head. This was pointless. He wasn’t there anymore. She took her hand back and left the coffin.
When she got outside with her suitcase, it had stopped raining. Men were still milling about with their bottles, talking more sloppily than when she had passed them going in. Boo Boo’s father pulled cigars out of his suit jacket and passed them around.
Gravity asked about D-Minus.
“Demetrius didn’t even go to his own brother’s service,” said Clarence.
“He doesn’t like funerals, Dad,” said Boo Boo.
“It’s disrespectful,” Shelly said. “Coach Thomas treated him like his own son!”
Gravity tried to imagine D there, in a suit, singing hymns.
No. D-Minus was a street cat, not a house cat. He didn’t come when people called. She felt a sudden pull to go to him, wherever he was, to find out how he was mourning their teacher.
She pulled out her phone and texted:
Hey this is G. I qualified for Rio!!! Where are you?
She was positive he wouldn’t respond, but the text came back right away:
Miami
“He’s in Miami!” she announced.
“Word?” said Boo Boo, looking at her phone.
A series of selfies came in: D-Minus shirtless on the beach, D-Minus shirtless in the gym, D-Minus and a tiny, hard-bodied fighter, grinning, post-sparring.
“That’s ‘Finito’ Bracero,” Shelly said. “Flyweight champ. He’s defending his title soon.”
“They must’ve paid him to go down there for sparring,” Gravity said, just as the next text came in:
I get $200/A Day
Gravity looked at the picture of D with the champ. He looked happy. A little over his fighting weight, but happy and focused. He had time to slim down before Rio. She searched for some trace of sadness in his eyes or his words, some hint that he felt the loss of their mentor, but his defense, as always, was airtight.
She texted, I’m at Coach’s funeral. We miss you
He stopped texting back.
It was hard to make herself go back to the gym. The first few days she just lay in bed, thinking it over and crying. Melsy came and went, with trays of chocolate milk and white roses. On the third day, Melsy’s tray also held a card.
“That came in the mail,” she said.
Gravity pushed herself up on one elbow and examined the envelope. Her first thought was that it might be from Lefty, that he was sorry for everything and wanted her back, but the return address was in Harlem.
“Drink the milk,” Melsy said.
Gravity grimaced. Melsy had been guilting her into drinking several glasses of chocolate milk per day. Gravity had no appetite and was actually down to 130.5, the lightest she had been in years. She took a deep breath and downed the entire glass in one gulp, then put a hand on her belly, forcing herself not to puke.
“Good girl,” Melsy said. “I’m gonna go pick up Tyler. Want a ride to Cops ’n Kids?”
“No, thanks.”
“Or I could take you to the other one?” Melsy said. “What’s it called? The one with Tiffany?”
“No, thanks,” Gravity said, turning her face to look out the window and willing her cousin to go away. She felt Melsy hesitate for a while and then withdraw.
Gravity was relieved. It was too hard to keep it together around people. She preferred to be alone with her thoughts, which were like a rat on a wheel, spinning and spinning around her own regret.
She gave herself a paper cut opening the envelope. She stared at the tiny red line across the pad of her finger, waiting for the blood, but it didn’t come.
The young heal fast. Coach had said that to her once, after she separated her shoulder in a hard sparring with D. It had been true back then. But she wasn’t so young anymore. Her seventeenth birthday was right around the corner, and she felt impossibly old.
The handmade greeting card had a symbol she’d seen somewhere before: a black circle, painted roughly in a single stroke. The two ends of the circle did not quite meet; in the gap she could see the fibers running through the paper. She opened the card and read the scrolly, old-fashioned cursive that filled the whole inside:
Dear Gravity,
I’m sorry for your lost. Jefferson was like a father to you. To me he was a better father than my real one. I wanted to tell you at the funeral but you looked shook up, and like in the corner, its better to give advice when a fighter can listen. You were his favorite more than D or Too Fine. I seen you look at the clippings by Jefferson’s locker back at Cops ’n Kids. You felt sorry for yourself because theres all Demetrius articles and my articles up and none of yours. Well one thing you never knew about your Coach is that he got kidney dialysis three days a week at this shit hole in East New York. He called dialysis A Living Death and he wasn’t wrong. Well he had all your clippings up in that place starting back at that fathers day card you gave him when you were a Pee Wee and going to that little picture Monster took of you outside Cops ’n Kids the last day you had come. He loved that damn fathers day card, I tried to get it for you but those ass holes threw everything away. I wanted you to know. He looked at it for strength while they stuck the needles in. He called you his Hundred Dollar Baby. We would laugh about it. He said he got a discount because you were Irregular. You know how he was Gravity. He had lots of sons but you were his only daughter. To Allah we belong and to Him we shall return. Champ don’t waste any more time crying, it’s seconds out. Call me if you need a ride to the gym.
Peace,
Mustafa (AKA Fatso)
Gravity set the card down.
The Father’s Day card. She had forgotten all about it. She had given Coach a card that first year together, and she had signed it “I love you,” and his response had been so gruff that she had felt ashamed. She had thought maybe she had been inappropriate, and she had never given him a card again. But it must have been okay, if he had saved it all those years.
Before she could change her mind, she grabbed her gym bag—it was still packed from before Coach’s funeral—and headed into the subway. She could just make it there before they closed. There wouldn’t be time to work out, but she could at least thank Fatso, if he was there. And if he wasn’t…
Gravity wasn’t sure what she would do. It was already June 1. There was a two-week training camp in Colorado Springs she was required to atten
d in a few weeks, and another in July. Maybe Boca would just let her work out by herself for a while, until she figured things out. She did like Tiffany, but she hesitated to go back to Smiley’s. It just didn’t feel the same.
She spent the long subway ride reading and rereading Fatso’s card. By the time she got to Brooklyn, she could laugh a little at the “Hundred Dollar Baby” part. That was a good one.
The walk to the gym was hard, but she put her head down and moved forward, not allowing her gaze to linger on landmarks that he would never see again. When she turned the corner and walked down the little dead-end street, she felt an actual pain in her legs. It was all she could do to get through the gym door.
She paused inside, inhaling deeply the smell of unwashed boys and sweat-soaked leather. The whole Bocacrew was in there, scattered on stretching mats in the big blue ring and on the floor around it. Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” was playing at top volume, and some little kid was hanging from the pull-up bar, singing along.
Gravity walked quietly to the logbook and signed in. Hers was only the third signature for the day, although there were dozens of kids in the gym.
The music snapped off.
She looked up in surprise as Boca’s voice thundered throughout the gym. “See how Gravity signs in! How many times do I have to tell you little bastards the same thing! Go do it! Now!”
The boxers peeled themselves off their stretching mats and rolled out of the ring, grumbling as they slunk across the gym to her.
“Hey, Grav,” said Boo Boo, giving her a pound. “I’m all sweaty.”
“I don’t care.”
He hugged her, and then they all did, and they took the pen from her to sign their names, one by one, in little puddles of sweat in the book. When Fatso enveloped her in an enormous embrace, she murmured her thanks in his ear.
“Seeing you back in the gym is all the thanks I need,” he said.
Boca was the last to come forward. He hugged her hard and spoke stiffly, as though reading from a script: “Your coach was a great man. I learned so much from watching him work with you. It was an honor to share the gym for so many years.”
She was still thinking of how to reply when he handed her a jump rope and told her to give him fifteen minutes.
“Then get in the ring to work on your feet,” Fatso said.
She glanced at the clock. “But aren’t you about to close?”
Fatso laughed. “I think we can stay open late for the Olympian.”
Boo Boo and Genya and several of Boca’s pros had gathered around to listen. As Gravity looked into their eyes, she saw a new recognition.
They looked up to her now. It was hard to believe, but it was true.
“We’re not gonna change her,” Boca announced. “We’re just gonna polish her up. We got two months to get Gravity in the best shape of her life.”
And just like that, Gravity was in the Bocacrew. Somebody turned Michael Jackson back on, and Fatso told her to quit stalling and get to work.
Gravity jogged through the Heather Garden, dodging a stroller and breathing the thick fragrance of early-summer flowers. It was a beautiful morning, and the Olympics were six weeks away. Her rib was fully healed, her weight was good, and her legs felt like they could carry her all the way to Rio.
She jogged down the steps cut into the stone and hit the straightaway along the water, way above the world in a canopy of trees. She had never thought she would find somewhere better than the Coney Island boardwalk, but Fort Tryon Park in the summer was her new favorite place to run. She picked up speed as she ran beneath a stone arch, letting out a whoop that echoed back, magnified.
She had learned a lot at the June camp at the Olympic Training Center. The nutritionist there had drawn up a custom diet plan, and she was sticking to it, no more plastic suits. It was easy now that she and Ty had their own place up here, near Melsy and Auntie Rosa.
The commute was a bitch, but that was life. She would graduate next year, and when Ty got into middle school, they would try to put him somewhere good uptown. For now, she used the subway time to listen to Carmen’s new podcast.
When she got to the benches at the park’s northern tip, she stopped to do the set of dips, incline push-ups, and squats that Boca had added to her morning routine. She liked training with Boca. She had been worried that it would feel like a betrayal of Coach, or that she would not jibe with Boca’s style, but it had all happened so naturally.
At first, Gravity had not known what to make of Boca’s sudden deference to Coach’s memory, how to square it with Coach’s rage at Boca, Boca’s habit of poaching Coach’s fighters, and the tension that had always filled the air between them. All that was gone now, and Boca spoke of Coach as though he was George Washington or some other historical figure to be cited as a distant ideal. But maybe that is how it is when someone dies. They go from being there to not being there, and the survivors get to tell the story. Surviving is the ultimate victory, and maybe that was what Coach had meant when he said Gravity had already defeated all her enemies. Whatever battle the two coaches had been fighting, Boca had won. That was why he could afford to be generous.
She marveled over this as she jogged back to the pathway that circled the Cloisters and looped south toward 190th Street. The Buddhist monk was walking in the Heather Garden again. She waved and he waved back, fat and jolly in his bright robes. He made her think of Clifford the Big Red Dog.
When she got back home, Tyler was still asleep. He slept so hard, and in the weirdest positions. Right now he looked like he had fallen from a great height. One arm was flung overhead and the other was stretched across his face, and his Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas were halfway off. Sugar had cuddled up inside his shirt, but when Gravity walked in, he opened his yellow eyes and meowed reproachfully.
“Yeah yeah yeah,” she said. “Don’t forget I saved you from a life on the streets.”
She popped open a can of Fancy Feast and put it in the little pet bowl she had bought at the Olympic Training Center. He skittered over in his tuxedo to eat breakfast.
She stood there a moment, drinking it in: their own place, clean and drenched in light.
It was such a small studio that it did not need much furniture. Mr. Rizzo had signed the lease for her and insisted on putting up the security deposit, even though her stipend had gone up to three thousand dollars because she had qualified for Rio. Auntie Rosa had made gauzy white curtains and given them cuttings from her houseplants. They had gotten a cute little sofa bed from the Housing Works Thrift Shop. Gravity’s trophy case sat against one wall, and Tyler’s Xbox against the other.
Best of all, there was nobody there to yell at them. Nobody to keep them from sleeping. Only the bare minimum of cockroaches, and Sugar put the fear of God in them.
Gravity drank a tall glass of delicious New York City tap water. She put out the cereal and milk for Tyler and went to jump in the shower, kissing him on the forehead on the way. She liked to let him sleep until the last possible moment. He always woke up when she made her kale smoothie.
As she turned down the alley that led to the gym, Gravity pulled her blouse away from her body and blew on her chest, trying to evaporate some of the sweat. There were camera trucks parked all along the street and reporters and random bigwigs milling about. D-Minus was back today. They were doing a press conference before they left for the international training camp at the OTC.
She tried to calm her heart at the thought of seeing him again, but everything was swirling around inside her like one of the snow globes at the Great Wall of China gift shop.
Melsy saying, “You love that boy.”
D whispering in her ear after that last crazy sparring, “It was worth it to get between your legs.”
Watching him win his Golden Gloves; watching him lose to Tiger; watching, in Sacred’s dorm room in China, the magnific
ent performance in Azerbaijan that had clinched his spot in Rio.
All the precious days spent learning at Coach’s side. D-Minus was the only one who really understood what she had lost. She felt she could not bear to see him again, but she could not bear not to.
She had only cried for five minutes that morning. She was going to keep it together.
“Hey, Gravity!” yelled a cameraman leaning against one of the trucks.
“Good to see you!” Gravity said, giving him a fake smile.
Melsy had told her to say “Good to see you!” when she could not remember if she had met someone.
“What’s the address here?”
“We don’t have one.”
“What?”
“The gym has no address.” She gave him the number of the apartment building across the street.
A woman in a suit passed her and stopped to shake her hand. “Ms. Delgado!”
“Good to see you!”
“How are you feeling?”
“I feel so confident about this exciting new opportunity!”
She and Melsy had practiced three generic responses that Gravity was going to keep in rotation: “I feel so confident about this exciting new opportunity,” “I feel humbled at the prospect of representing my country,” and “I feel grateful to God and USA Boxing for all the support they have given me.”
Once the sidewalk was quiet, Gravity pulled out the cat food and set it on the curb. The feral tabby and her remaining brood slunk out from the dumpster and fixed Gravity with their Technicolor eyes.
“Sugar says meow,” she told them.
“Gravity!” yelled Mr. Rizzo, holding the gym door open. “Go on up into the ring! We want to get a picture of you and D with the city councilman and borough president.”
Gravity hurried inside—where it was cooler, thank God—and through the crowd of press and family. She paused to kiss Boo Boo’s parents, hug Svetlana, shake many hands, and say “Good to see you” many times.
