Garrett has the gold medal game on the iPad propped against my sourdough starter, the volume cranked because he says you can’t hear the skates otherwise, and every time the camera pans across the rink I can feel my molars start to hum. That ice is not white. That ice is painted white. There is a difference and it is the difference between snow on a pine bough and a bathroom tile, and once you see it you cannot unsee it, which is why I am writing this from the mudroom.
The whiteness is titanium dioxide. I learned this from a Facebook group called Rink Chemistry Moms (We Stayed for the Pretzels) that I joined in November after Tate’s birthday party at the SkateZone in Hendersonville, where my throat closed up by the second loop and I had to sit in the warming hut and eat a clementine I’d brought from home. They paint the concrete first, then they layer the ice on top in thin sheets, and what you are watching when you are watching Olympic hockey is essentially a frozen Pinterest board over a Sherwin-Williams base coat. The players know. I assume the players know.
My sister-in-law Whitney, who works the front desk at a pediatric dental practice and is basically a hygienist, says titanium dioxide is the same thing they took out of Skittles in Europe, which Europe did for a reason, and that reason is not because Europe loves us. She sent me a Telegram screenshot from a coach in Slovenia who said the new Plexiglas the IOC mandated this cycle off-gases something called styrene for the first 400 hours of play, and the Milano Cortina rink was installed in November. Do the math. Garrett did the math and then said “that’s not how math works” and turned the volume up again.
The kids are in the living room absorbing it through the screen. I don’t think people understand that a 4K broadcast at that brightness is essentially a full-spectrum lamp pointed at your nervous system for three hours, and the rink is reflecting the arena lights back at the camera, which is reflecting them at my couch, which is reflecting them at Cleo, who has been chewing the inside of her cheek for forty minutes. That is a body trying to ground itself. That is a body trying to tell you something. I put a wet washcloth on the back of her neck and she said it felt “weird good,” which is the body confirming.
I suggested we turn the game off and do the puzzle of the national parks that my mother sent for Valentine’s, and Garrett looked at me the way he looked at me when I asked him to switch to the wool dryer balls. He said, and I am quoting, “Brooke, it is the gold medal game.” And I said, and I am quoting, “Garrett, it is titanium dioxide.” And we both stood there in the kitchen for a long second while the announcer yelled something about a power play, and I realized this is the marriage now, this is what the marriage is, and that is fine, that is fertile ground.
I am not anti-hockey. I want to be clear. Hockey on a frozen pond, the way God built it, where the ice is the color of the lake underneath and the sticks are wood and the kids’ cheeks are pink because of weather and not because of inflammation — that is one of the most beautiful sports a person can witness. My grandfather played hockey on a pond in Wisconsin and lived to be 91 and the only thing wrong with him at the end was that he had been a Lutheran. So I know the sport. I am not the enemy of the sport. I am the enemy of the coating.
The sourdough, before anyone asks, is fine. The starter is far enough from the iPad that the EMF reading on my app is well within the range I am comfortable with, and bread is not technically a food the way the seed-oil people mean food, it is more of a process, and time is not an ingredient. I checked. Marlene checked too and she agrees, although Marlene is on her own track this week involving a mason jar of Olympic-adjacent precipitation that I am not going to get into right now.
Italy just scored, I think. Garrett is doing the small clap he does when he doesn’t want me to notice he is enjoying something. Cleo has migrated to the mudroom with me and is sitting on the boot tray with the washcloth still on her neck, and we are both going to be fine, and the boys can have the rest of the broadcast, and somewhere in northern Italy a Zamboni is making another lap, laying down another shimmering coat of pigment, and the medals get handed out tomorrow, and life, as they say, goes on.