For in her chic dark-chocolate velvet costume with tight-fitted sleeves and “tinsel” bodice, Bliss didn’t make it. In her short, airy, flirty tulle skirt with a teasing glimmer of white-lace panties peekaboo beneath, Bliss didn’t make it. Despite the small gold cross around her neck on a slender gold chain, and tiny gold earrings to match, Bliss didn’t make it. Despite the very blond hair (bleached, just perceptibly brittle) charmingly plaited with tinsel ribbons (to suggest Hershey’s Kisses wrappers) and her small face meticulously made up like the face of an old-fashioned and very expensive ceramic doll, Bliss didn’t make it. Despite her white eyelet stockings, and her white kidskin Junior Miss Elite Skates, and the tense smile frozen on her perfect little rosebud lips, she didn’t make it. So many hours!—days, weeks!—of figure-skating practice at the drafty Halcyon rink, with Mummy scrupulously videotaping so that Bliss’s performances might be analyzed by her trainer Anastasia Kovitski and her choreographer Pytor Skakalov; so many hours of skate-dancing to the sultry thumping of Boléro, that kitsch-classic of girls’ competitive ice-skating; so many sessions with Dr.
