Amateur Hour

by Kimberly Harrington

  “That’s because I’m older.”

  “Partly, yes.”

  We held you back—I held you back; I made that decision. To keep you from going to first grade, to stop the runaway train that had you cowering under tables in kindergarten, afraid of everything, loud sounds and toilets, impending fire drills and rowdy boys who slashed and burned.

  We homeschooled you for a year or, as I like to say, “homeschooled” you, quote unquote. What we really did was spend a year trying to figure you out, away from school days that ground us down. You went to OT and PT, to a social-thinking group and a therapist. You started piano lessons that year because I wanted you to have some kind of fun. But to you, most of it was fun. Five years later you still talk about the pool at PT and the little cars you got to ride on and the games you were able to play. You say you miss it.

  That makes one of us.

  This year you’ve made a point of telling me you would already be in middle school now, if we hadn’t held you back, if not for that year. It’s one of the very few times I tell you I regret nothing. That it was the right decision and you will never convince me otherwise. That you needed that time, we needed that time, and what we did then has made all the difference now.

  You can’t imagine how rare that sort of certainty is.

  You have come so far. And we will never know what pushed you forward. Was it all of those early interventions or was it holding you back or was it simply the fact that you are you and you matured and found your own way? It doesn’t matter to me. There are no awards ceremonies at the end of this. I just know you are doing so well, even if you don’t see it. Maybe that’s why when things blow up, it feels so much worse than it used to. And that’s really saying something, because it used to feel plenty awful.

  I understand now how spectacularly a person can fuck up when they’ve relied on physical presence, on height, to impose discipline. You’re to my cheek now and soon you will be taller than me. Who will be towering over whom then? Pointing fingers and yelling?

  As we continue to slowly separate from each other, I hope somewhere in your bones you’ll remember that almond-shaped eye of the storm where we began. Your bent ear. My stomach lashed closed and bandaged. A bruised-and-battered team.

  You would fall asleep in my arms. Mine was the lightest sleep. I slept on couches with my back bent, woke to hear your quiet breathing. Happy. Needed.

  From those mornings on, I have always wondered what is going on inside of your brilliant, complicated mind. I will always wonder. That mind that can figure out a song by ear and bring me to tears when I hear it from two rooms away. That mind that can break and remake things, because you can see it, right there, how to create, without instructions. That mind that thinks everyone in your class hates you, that we don’t love you, that the world is against you, that other adults—strangers—are the only people you can trust and the only ones who get you.

  In an age of bullying—and you have been bullied—there is one thing now that drives me crazier than all of it. That when you point out the window, thrilled, to see a fire truck or a police car, that the kids in your class will fake exclaim, “Oooooh WOW, that’s so cool,” and then let their eyes go dead to show you how uncool it actually is.

  I hate those kids. Politically correct everything aside, I want to punch those kids hard, right in the sternum, knock the breath right out of them. Those little fuckers. The ones who step on your heart, using it as a rung to inch their way up the most pathetic of social ladders. The ones who give your sometimes socially imprecise mind false hope that you’ve found a kindred spirit only to confirm, uh no, you definitely have not. Eye roll.

  I tell you to not let them kill that part of you that fills up with excitement and wonder; it’s what will carry you further than they will ever go. That your curiosity and sensitivity is a gift. That being cool is incredibly overrated. That those kids may be as cool as they ever get and look how they’re using it. By being a bunch of dicks.

  Keep being excited, I practically command. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

  Those kids are probably the same kids who watch you out of the side of their faces when you wave to me from the school bus. You are in fifth grade and you still wave to me as I stand in our living room window with a coffee in my hand. I see your round face in the window, waving and watching me wave back until we lose sight of each other. Every once in a while I catch myself tearing up and I think, I will always remember you like this. I will always think of these mornings, you waving to me from the school bus, the most open face, full of love, never shifting your gaze until I disappear from your sight.

  It feels like a thumb being pressed on my heart in those moments, as if to throw off the weight of a scale. It feels heavier than it should.

  Maybe it’s because in those little slivers, I think, You know that I get you. Not always, but we will always have an understanding, you and I. We’re not always easy people, but we are worth it. I think so anyway.

  The first time I saw you struggle, really struggle, maybe you were four. You would blow up and be defiant or implode over some of the navigations and nuances we all take for granted.

  I thought:

  Make it through middle school, make it through high school.

  You will find your people.

  You will have a great life.

  You have one now, I think, but it really will get better.

  So when you started saying you wish you were dead, that maybe you shouldn’t be here, you were maybe seven or eight. And it sounded like you meant it, that you understood the words you were saying.

  I suddenly burst into tears and held your arms, maybe too tightly, and said, “Please promise me you will never hurt yourself. PROMISE ME.”

  We were both surprised by how seriously I took your words; I think we were both scared. I know we were.

  Promise me you will never leave me, is what every mother, every parent is saying, even if they don’t realize it. We are all saying it from that very first breath.

  Don’t you dare take yourself away from me, when the world is so full of forces that are more than happy to do it for you. Don’t you dare make that happen, so help me God.

  Don’t you dare put that thought out into the world, because now it’s in my head and it’s in yours. And the very worst part—the universe has heard it too.

  It’s there.

  Lurking and marinating.

  Just add anger or humiliation or sadness and it froths up to the surface again.

  Don’t you dare do this to me.

  To you.

  To us.

  Don’t you dare.

  * * *

  The morning of my birthday, as I drove from coffee to errands to home, I heard a poem on the radio that knocked me out, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then again, that’s poetry isn’t it?

  This being Vermont, we ended up living right down the street from that poet, Julie Cadwallader Staub, two years later. I soon put together the puzzle that one of her twin daughters worked in my kids’ first elementary school and the other one managed the farm we obsessively visited.

  I finally met her when she joined us for a neighborhood Green Up Day, my kids having designed and papered our neighborhood with an invitation to pick up trash. After a few minutes of stomping through the little creek down the hill, dodging pricker bushes and throwing old bottles and broken plastic flowerpots into trash bags, I told her how much I loved her poem, the one I had heard on The Writer’s Almanac. Like any accomplished and not-easily-flattered Vermonter she said, “Which one? There are quite a few.”

  We don’t wear makeup; we wear mud boots. This is a good place to raise kids, to be a writer, to spend the first warm sunny Saturday picking up trash after an unforgiving winter.

  Before the poem, before this neighborhood, as her daughters became familiar faces in my kids’ lives I thought, Those girls (women!) are such wonderful people. Their parents must be so proud of them. Whatever they did, I want
to do.

  I still do. I’m trying.

  Oh that feeling

  of running as fast as I could

  extending my arms, my hands, my fingers

  as far as I could

  watching that spiraling bullet of a football,

  reminding myself:

  if you can touch it,

  you can catch it.

  If you can touch it,

  you can catch it.

  You still leap to slap your fingertips against the doorjamb, to brush the fringe of the basketball net, to shove a long stick into the tree to get a Frisbee, a football, another stick, a ball, a parachuting GI Joe down from our half-dead tree.

  One day you will simply reach up and touch those things, it will be easy because they will just be there. Easily within your grasp. Because you will be longer and you will be taller.

  Until then I watch you leap and stretch, hand flat, fingers wiggling:

  If you can touch the frame of your future life, even a little bit, you will reach it.

  If you can feel the feathery edges of your potential and your promise, even in the most abstract way, you will get there.

  If you imagine yourself away from us, woven in with the people who fit you, the other family we all assemble away from our parents and siblings, from the way we grew up, you will more than survive. You will thrive.

  I repeat it like a prayer.

  If you can touch it, you can catch it.

  If you can touch it, you can catch it.

  Amen.

  As Young as We’ll Ever Be

  Every summer we spend time in Maine. The same beach my grandparents brought my dad and his brothers to. The same one my dad brought me to. The same one my kids now race each other to.

  I remember being eight years old, splashing through the glassy waves with my unruly girl feet. An olive drab nylon backpack bouncing against my back, nothing inside to weigh it down except for a single plastic collapsible drinking cup. I don’t remember drinking from that cup, but I remember its design. When expanded, each circle step building on the other, holding water. And when it was collapsed down flat, it had the feel of a giant checker. How could anything like that even remotely work?

  I’ve returned to this beach over and over again, as a teenager and as a college student. I brought my best friend from high school, then another from college, then my boyfriend, who became my husband. Passing acquaintances were not allowed. People who might feel snobbish about camping, squeamish about mosquitoes, or expect modern conveniences in a fancy setting could keep moving. I required commitment. I required people who were open to loving this place as much as I always had.

  There is an understanding here. There are no radios blaring wah-wah car dealership commercials. Most people bring horseshoes, a football, or books instead. This beach is for relaxing and reflecting. It’s for connection. It is not an amusement park. It is not a club.

  The one mirror in our cottage (it’s a rental, but it’s ours) is ancient and clouded, hung at a level that only allows adults to see themselves from the clavicle up. I don’t wear makeup or bother with a cover-up for my swimsuit-clad middle-aged body as I walk from the cottage to the beach and back to use the bathroom, get a drink, or grab a fresh towel. There is no one here to impress. It’s the closest I ever come to inhabiting my body like a small child, trusting and admiring its function.

  We are laid bare here. This is not the beach of the beautiful people. It’s the beach for the rest of us.

  A year passes.

  Kids tumble down to the beach on the first day and my breath catches at how much they’ve grown. A little boy who was pushing a dump truck on the beach last summer is recognized solely by the dump truck. He’s taller, more sure-footed. Without the same toy, it would’ve taken longer for my brain to match the former to the present.

  A freckle-faced nine-year-old girl from last summer now looks that much closer to the freckle-faced teenager she will soon be. And new babies arrive. Teenagers return and bring a friend with them. College kids come and everyone’s coupled up. Married couples walk their dogs and parents relish the freedom to let their kids run, yell, and sing as loudly as they want. No one can outshout the waves.

  There are the girls in their early teens, with the gangly limbs of children and the growing bodies of women. They romp in the waves not fully realizing the complicated power their bodies possess. They absentmindedly grab their budding breasts to adjust their tops, and I put my head in my hands. They don’t even know. Or maybe they do.

  One summer a mother and her two teenage girls lounged on a blanket next to us. They were very Vermont—the mother with long and wild gray hair and a cloth tote bag full of books, the girls slim and athletic with chestnut hair tangling in the wind. The older girl played board games and cards with her mother when the wind was still. The younger daughter, who was maybe fourteen and wore a simple bikini, lay on her side, directly on the hot sand. She sifted sand between her fingers for almost an hour letting it fall, her long hair lifting and falling to the side with the breeze. At ease.

  I was shocked to feel tears spring to my eyes as I watched her. I will never be that age again, I thought. I will never have a body like that, ever. I will never again feel like I have my whole life ahead of me. I can only go forward from here, if I’m lucky. I reached for my beach towel and shoved it under my sunglasses.

  There are middle-aged mothers in skirted bathing suits, shoulders hunched from the weight of raising children. There are middle-aged fathers bodysurfing with their kids, energized by the absence of work, restored to their young selves with the blind optimism of what their bodies can do. Finding out the hard way that maybe they actually can’t anymore. Sunburns and pulled muscles. Nothing a few beers can’t take care of.

  There is a man in his fifties who sits in a webbed folding chair, the nylon kind with an aluminum frame that you always used to see at barbecues and backyard parties. Every day he has a bottle of water tucked under one elbow as his other arm involuntarily flaps at his side. Parkinson’s, most likely. Each knee marked with a long vertical scar, double plus signs from a distance. The zinc sunscreen under each eye, suddenly the marks of a warrior.

  There is a group of ladies in their sixties, gathered under their umbrellas since breakfast. They drink Bloody Marys every morning, at least two of them holding a cup or wearing a T-shirt with the telltale pink ribbon.

  There is the elderly woman whose legs are as big as tree trunks, swollen and red with skin drawn taut. Her husband anticipates her every move and need, holds her loose bandages that trail in the wind behind her like streamers, her walking becoming more difficult with each passing year. The perimeter of her travels has grown ever smaller, from the beach one year to the viewing deck the next and now to just standing on the walkway, and only for a few minutes at a time, just to look out at the raging ocean and feel the breeze on her face. So much power, so little power.

  Simple ability and movement suddenly feel like fierce gifts instead of givens. I think of how easily I walk into the waves or navigate the hot sand path to the beach. How I unthinkingly go through the motions of assisting children or lugging things back to the cottage without help, a packhorse. I think about loyalty and love, vows and vulnerability.

  We can never know what’s coming. We can’t know what’s heading our way a year from now; we can’t know it just for tomorrow. I look around and think constantly, We are all fragile; we are all strong.

  I look back at photos of me when my son was a year old. I remember that at the time I thought I looked awful, old. I look at those pictures now and think of how young I look. My skin looks smooth. I know I’m tired, but I look happy. I was happy.

  I look in the mirror now and trace the deep crease between my eyebrows, the one that etched itself from forty-seven years of not believing what I was seeing. My neck is getting looser, the skin on my chest telling all kinds of truths. The sun has done its damage. So has time.

  But five and ten and twenty years from n
ow, I will look at pictures of me that were taken last week and think of how young I look. What was I complaining about? I must’ve been tired. But I looked happy. I was. I am.

  This is all of us, every year. We fill up. We collapse. Over and over again. But for now, we are here. As young as we’ll ever be.

  Hot-Ass Chicks

  When I am looking for you, I see you.

  You are walking briskly on your lunch break with your coworker, both in sensible sneakers and office-appropriate attire. Not power attire, more like a top and slacks. That word slacks just says it all, doesn’t it? You absentmindedly tug at your top, it’s a habit now. Trying to create space between the fabric and your blubby tummy or goddamn hips. Your words.

  Back at your desk you probably brought your own lunch and a healthy afternoon snack. That vending machine is the biggest slut in the office, always ready to put out for anyone with small bills and an appetite. You are forever on the defense.

  I see you see yourself. You catch your reflection in a passing mirror or the dentist office’s window or on your phone because the camera was accidentally set on reverse and is there anything worse in the entire universe than that? You think no one is watching—because no one ever is—so you smooth your hair, you press your fingertips between your eyebrows wishing it was a hot iron, pressing out the divot that has slowly carved its way into your flesh, the divot that broadcasted your doubt when you were twenty-five. Now you are permanently doubtful. You gently pull at the far corners of your eyes, or maybe under your jawline, and you can still see the smoother, sharper you. She’s in there. It feels as though she was just there a little while ago. If you could just make these tugs permanent, these little adjustments. You stop what you’re doing. It just makes you sad.

  I see you from behind, and you have the bottom of a twentysomething but when I pass you on the sidewalk I have the same reaction men must have—yikes, you’re like fifty! Your body is the opposite of so many of those other middle-aged bodies but somehow I still sense your inner monologue and its relentlessness, your inability to let yourself off the hook, your unwillingness to accept this is the stage of life you’re in now. I sense your fear. Your fear you are disappearing, that those eyes you grew accustomed to lingering upon you simply because you existed, those eyes are elsewhere now. Your fear that if heads aren’t turning, then what’s the point, really? Am I wrong? Your Bikram and CrossFit, tanning and raw foods; your no sugar, no alcohol, no bread, no pasta, no fats, no dessert, and all what-the-fuck-is-this-shit diet. You made a deal with the devil in exchange for a great-looking ass. You adhere to a complex Jenga of rules that barely make sense for models and actresses, all in an attempt to get back what you didn’t used to have to work for. You were just . . . you. Firm and beautiful, young and resilient, clueless and wanted. Who needed a personality back then?