Rosa Takes a Seat

At her gym’s anniversary climbing contest, Rosa Pike became stuck facing the audience.

This was worse than falling.

Below her, forty spectators waited on folding chairs. Her daughter, Evie, had stopped chewing. The announcer lowered his microphone, apparently unwilling to describe a woman embracing a plywood corner with her bottom.

Rosa had entered because she taught the Thursday beginners. When they asked why their instructor never competed, she had exhausted the available lies.

Her last competition had been eleven years earlier. She remembered the fall badly. She remembered somebody laughing perfectly.

Now a clock showed two minutes, eighteen seconds.

The last route was purple: two low blocks, a narrow shelf around the corner, then a great curved hold near the top. Most competitors had jumped for the curve. Rosa had watched three taller climbers miss it. She knew the distance was longer than her reach.

So she had tried going around.

That had deposited her here, facing the wrong way, one foot wedged behind her other knee.

“Lovely view,” somebody called.

Rosa looked down. Her oldest Thursday beginner, Dennis, raised a paper cup. He was seventy and had spent six weeks learning to step off the ground.

The laugh that followed was small and friendly. Her body believed otherwise. Her shoulders tightened. She considered dropping, brushing her hands, performing the respectable failure of a person who had almost done something difficult.

Then she noticed the shelf beneath her hip.

From the ground it had looked useless, too sloping for a hand. From here she could see its shallow hollow.

She sat on it.

The announcer made a noise.

Rosa released her right hand. Her whole weight shifted. For a moment she was simply sitting four metres up a wall, with chalk in her eyebrows and an audience between her knees.

Evie began laughing so hard that her glasses slipped down her nose.

Rosa laughed too, and nearly fell.

The movement loosened something. She swung her free leg around the corner, planted her shoe against the purple block, and pushed. Her hip lifted. The top hold came within reach.

Her fingertips caught its edge.

She pulled, brought up her other hand, and held still.

The judge raised an arm.

On the mat, Rosa landed badly enough to sit down a second time. Evie reached her first.

“You looked like you were climbing out of a bath.”

“I was hoping for graceful.”

“You missed.”

Rosa finished second. The winner had reached the top on fewer attempts, a distinction Rosa understood and found mildly annoying. She wanted to win now. That was new.

On Thursday, Dennis stalled at the first purple block.

“Is there a proper way?” he asked.

Rosa considered the wall. Then she dragged a chair over and sat where he could see her.

“Show me what you’ve tried.”

Dennis hooked his knee over the block.

“Oh,” he said.

Rosa kept her mouth shut and watched him climb.