I’m excited by the opportunity to highlight some possibly lesser-known stories in this project, and I’d bet that Elizabeth Tallent’s ‘Ice’ is one that many do not yet know. One can feel saddened by this — one can worry about what gets lost when books go out of print, always one can worry about that — while also reveling in the opportunity to be the one to introduce this story into the life of another. This story was Tallent’s first to be published — in The New Yorker, of all places — and it opens her debut collection, In Constant Flight. The story is about a professional ice skater who’s viciously lonely and full of inchoate longings that come to define and circumscribe her. Its final scene — involving the skater dancing on the ice with a man in a bear costume — is pitch perfect, a marvelous marriage of the absurd, the comic, the cosmic, the surreal, the devastating.
First published in The New Yorker, September 1980, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Tallent’s first collection, In Constant Flight, Knopf, 1983
A Personal Anthology 