Harley and Me

by Bernadette Murphy

I lob bread for the young woman I was when I paired up with J at twenty-two, impressionable, looking for security at any cost. I chuck another piece for the older, wiser, and flintier woman I’ve since become, staring down the barrel of fifty. Bread tossed away, like the hours of my life, the dreams and hopes I must relinquish in order for other, new ones to arrive. I empty my hands of the challah.

  • • •

  Getting comfortable on the motorcycle is helping me become more at ease in this flow state. So much of my past has been spent striving—for an education, the right career, a good marriage, the best opportunities for my children, material goods, a sense of security. But I now see I placed too heavy a value on achieving those goals. Getting the things I want in life does not always fulfill me. Nor does it always work out.

  As a young family, J and I struggled; we saved and sacrificed to buy a modest starter home when Jarrod was just one and we were still in our twenties. Two more children arrived and we lost that house to foreclosure eight years later when the real estate market plummeted. Still, unanticipated blessings followed that difficult experience. But only after I gave into the devastation and finally let go.

  On the day I drove away from that home we’d painted and landscaped and built a patio for, we started over with nothing in savings, ruined credit, and three small children to raise. I felt failure, awash in shame.

  We were sure we’d been cheated by the system. We’d played by the rules, saved diligently, been frugal, and still lost. However, I found the courage to make a decision I would never have made otherwise. I applied for a graduate program in creative writing, taking out student loans for the whole experience. Assuming debt seemed a risky course. But believing that I had nothing left to lose, a vitally enriching career became mine.

  I take solace from one of Csikszentmihalyi’s discoveries about flow state. When a person’s life makes sense, he explains, the “fact that one is not slim, rich, or powerful no longer matters. The tide of rising expectations is stilled; unfulfilled needs no longer trouble the mind. Even the most humdrum experiences become enjoyable.”

  I’m praying that this new perspective will pay off. Because, as Csikszentmihalyi reminds me, flow experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. “The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue—yet these could have been the best moments of his life.” Gaining control of one’s life is never easy, and many times, quite painful. But in the long run, optimal experiences add up to a sense of determining the content of one’s life. And that, he argues, “comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything we can conceivably imagine.”

  • • •

  Yom Kippur approaches and I decide that since Rosh Hashanah was so helpful, I’ll observe the atonement holy day as well. I find it odd that Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, precedes the Day of Atonement, that the sweetness of the New Year comes first, apples dipped in honey, when the fasting had yet to begin. But maybe that’s human nature. We need a taste of the sweetness to lure us into doing the hard work.

  I go to Catholic Mass in the morning on Yom Kippur and pray not in words but in silent groans that express unfocused desires. The Day of Atonement, I learn, is a time to ask to be released from any contracts we’ve been unable to keep in the past year. I entered into my marriage contract willingly and spoke those vows. But I see now I was not sufficiently formed at the time to understand their full meaning. I was a woman with considerable emotional wounds. The daughter of a mentally ill mother who used alcohol to medicate her symptoms, I was desperately seeking a man who would keep me from going crazy and perhaps get me to tone down my own drinking. Too frantic for someone to save me from myself, I was unable to make those vows in a substantive way. Kneeling at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church on Yom Kippur, inviting divine absolution and love, I come up with the words to ask that I be released from that contract.

  Then I ask for the courage to release old loyalties, to let go of the conflicting values that have kept me locked in place, to find a new belief system that might see me into the next part of my life. I can’t see what that new life looks like just yet, but I can feel it taking shape somewhere beyond my field of vision and I want to open my arms to greet it.

  I don’t hear angels singing God’s acceptance of my request, nor do the heavens part and doves descend. After I’ve destroyed a boxful of tissues, I leave the church, my heart half a gram lighter.

  Yom Kippur is a day of fasting. But as a Catholic, I’ve always been terrible at abstinence, claiming hypoglycemia or any excuse rather than admit that hunger makes me irritable, anxious, and scared. But this day feels important. I need to atone for my part in the end of this marriage. So I fast. Oddly, it is not nearly the ordeal I feared and that tells me something crucial. Yes, there is a mild headache as the day wears on. My stomach groans and I feel a bit weakened. But the hours pass. I feel good, as if I’m doing my part in the process of absolution.

  I ride Izzy Bella to the “break fast” meal with the same group of women from Rosh Hashanah. The power of my motorcycle seems to balance the sense of weakness and hunger. Without the bike, I sometimes fear I might cease to exist. The taste of food is heavenly after a day of abstinence, the flavors made richer by hunger.

  A few weeks later, during a four-hour car ride in which I’m held captive, J hammers me with demands. We have kept separate finances for most of our marriage since we couldn’t agree on how much debt each was willing to live with. He took on the household expenses, while I paid for the kids’ activities—private school and later college, dorm fees, music lessons, tutoring, summer camp, clothes. Since I don’t want to be married to him, he tells me, I am to pay my own utilities, health insurance, food, and gasoline. I will learn later that he took me off his work-sponsored health insurance without telling me.

  The next morning, I pack a small suitcase. In previously discussing what we’d do with the house, J had made it clear that he was not going to leave it without a court order. I’m too worn out to fight him anymore. I tell Hope what is happening. She and I hold each other, gripping on. I don’t want to leave her and Jarrod, our dog, our home. The idea that we could abide amicably until Hope finishes high school in seven months is untenable.

  I move out of the family house into a one-room guesthouse with a fold-down bed, a tiny kitchenette, and gorgeous west-facing windows that paint the wooden floors golden in the afternoon light. The new life I cannot yet see is gaining an outline.

  • • •

  Flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, “is what the painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator.”

  I feel nothing as glorious living now on my own. I am depressed and tired of waiting for the tide to change and my outlook to improve.

  Contrary to what we often believe and sometimes mindlessly seek, flow moments do not occur when we’re passive, simply enjoying ourselves in a receptive mode, like lying on a South Seas beach and breathing in beauty. It’s not something that happens to us; it’s something we make happen. Optimal moments typically occur when our body or mind is taken to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. “For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves,” Csikszentmihalyi says.

  This, I suspect, has something to do with what the addiction specialist Lejuez told me about the “learned industriousness theory.” Our personalities, our brain chemicals, our bodies: They all fire up and feel good when we challenge ourselves and lose ourselves in what we’re doing.

  Riding my motorcycle can still trigger terror at what
I am doing. But when I get into a flow state, my fears, my grief, my worries about how I’ll survive now that I’ve left my marriage—all these are out of sight, out of mind. But that flow is cut off when I stop riding and find myself again in a state of anxiety. The more comfortable I get in the saddle, the more I renew hope that things will improve. I may have to use calm breathing exercises and talk myself down to get to that place. Once I’m in that flow, it turns out to be eminently worth the effort. The same is true for all risky endeavors. The focus required is so intense that in that act of focusing, our fears and worries slip out the back door, leaving only concentration and a sense of wholeness.

  And that—wholeness—is precisely what I’m after, even as I’m not sure what I’m doing. In order to leave my marriage, I have to embrace the fact that such a choice will hurt me financially, socially, and emotionally. It’s likely I will lose the house we bought, triumphantly, after the hideous foreclosure. Likewise, the cost of living separately will require financial sacrifice. Can I trust that I’ll be okay, that my decision will not ultimately cost my children? Financial advisors tell us all to be more conservative with our investments as we age. But there’s no way around this risk, this gamble of losing out, if I wish to be fully alive.

  Next there’s the emotional estrangement. My sister called a few days ago when she’d heard about the split. Hoping for a few words of consolation and compassion, I was stunned to hear her admonish me. “You can’t expect to do something like this and not have people be mad at you,” she said. The same thing from my oldest friend. “Let me get this straight: You’re leaving your marriage because your husband is boring?” My stepmother, at first seeming supportive, went on to tell me how much she misses my father. “Not a day goes by that I don’t talk to him, don’t think of him. Still,” she said, “I’m so glad he’s dead and not here to see what you did to poor J.”

  I feel shunned, adrift, and begin learning that authenticity comes at a price. Will I have the inner resources to pay? Over the coming few months, family and friends break into two camps: those who want to remain friends with me, and those who need to keep their distance, as if divorce fever is a virus that is contagious.

  And yet, the science of flow teaches that all these risks may be worthwhile. I need to keep in mind that optimal experiences are an end to themselves. I am standing up for myself, claiming myself. That is my reward.

  My heart on many days feels as if it is made of Jell-O, warm and creepy Jell-O that leaks all over me, staining my hands that artificial red as I try to force it back into the shape of a heart. The stickiness is everywhere.

  Yet, in my new place, I enact fresh rituals. I light candles and meditate and allow myself to feel as deeply as I can. I walk to the grocery store and buy only what I can carry home, a reminder that I’m on my own now and need to care for myself. Give us this day our daily bread. I cook in much smaller quantities—dinner for one—and am learning to find joy in doing so. I live a block from my daughter’s high school and invite her to join me for homework, dinner, or a sleep-over regularly. I help her with college applications. I’m learning how to be an active mother even when not sharing quarters with my children. And I ache in a new way—not the old familiar ache of loneliness within a coupled facade, but the ache of reconstruction.

  I remember reading about caterpillars turning into butterflies. It’s not like the caterpillar gives up one leg—I can manage without one leg this week—in exchange for, say, a wing, allowing transformation to happen little by little, piece by piece. No. The caterpillar basically becomes mush, ceasing to exist as a caterpillar during the time of transformation, becoming a blob of plasma for as long as it takes to re-form as a butterfly. I’m in that amorphous state. Neither wife nor single. Neither full-time mom nor absent mom. Neither the scared young girl who said “I do” in a church all those years ago, nor the woman who is learning to live fully on her own.

  It’s a tender-to-the-bone kind of transformation filled with ragged edges and messiness. But it’s real and feels genuine. I’m grateful for tashlich, for flow, for Rosh Hashanah, for Catholic Mass, for Yom Kippur, for my rituals that are being redesigned to fit this new reality. I am grateful for my children’s willingness to try to understand my choice even though it hurts them. These are the ceremonies and graces that will one day deliver me into my nascent, new life.

  Csikszentmihalyi writes that a person who has achieved control over her psychic energy, and has invested it in consciously chosen goals, cannot help but grow into a more complex being. “By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.”

  Further, Csikszentmihalyi gives me a great gift in the form of a story about an indigenous tribe, the Shuswap, in British Columbia. The elders of the tribe noticed that at times, the world became too predictable and all the challenge and excitement began to ebb out of life. Without challenge, the elders knew, life for the tribe would lose its meaning.

  To upset this complacency, every twenty to thirty years the elders decided the entire village should move. The entire population relocated to a different part of the Shuswap land, forcing the tribe to confront new landscape, new problems in procuring food and water. As a result of that upset and change, life regained meaning and value. The tribe members felt rejuvenated and healthy.

  •CHAPTER SIX•

  MALE APPROVAL AND SEXUAL POWER

  Opportunity dances with those on the dance floor.

  —ANONYMOUS

  As a teenager, the names Fonzie, the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli, and Henry Winkler could all rocket me to a fourth dimension. I was a tomboy, a girl who competed and was ranked nationally in skateboarding slalom, a young lady more comfortable in a pair of Vans slip-ons and corduroy OP shorts than kitten heels and skirts. I liked to hang with the guys at empty, abandoned swimming pools getting “vert” rather than go to the mall with girlfriends to shop. But when it came to having a celebrity crush, I was about as girly as you can get.

  I bought fan magazines, went to every movie Henry Winkler made, read his biographies, toyed with acting because that would put me in the same mental territory as this man/character/dream figure. Though the Fonzie character was my favorite, Winkler didn’t have to be Arthur Fonzarelli to make me swoon. He played a Vietnam vet in the 1977 film Heroes that I practically memorized. I bought a sweater and shirt just like he wore in the movie. I had a sense that I knew him, and that he understood me. If we were to sit down and talk, I believed, we’d pick up a conversation that had already been in progress.

  Perhaps I was searching for male approval. My father was a wonderful, loving man. But he was preoccupied caring for my mother, traveling for business, watching out for my youngest brother who was fast becoming a juvenile delinquent, trying to tend the five basically motherless kids in our family. All this while he strived to keep food in the kitchen cabinets and making sure we went to Mass on Sundays. I’m sure, in some way, my father would have given me that approval if I’d known how to ask, but I didn’t. I was afraid and uncertain, convinced that the disappointment of not receiving his approval would be worse than never asking.

  When I couldn’t get the approval I was looking for at home, I sought it with my skateboard and the grudging respect I earned from the boys. Male approval was male approval, after all. But soon, even that power faded and I looked where young girls turn next for that anointing: my own sexual power. Only, in adolescence, I didn’t really know that’s what I was reaching for.

  • • •

  The desk of Alex, the chrome and pipe specialist at Harley-Davidson of Glendale, features a picture of Fonzie sitting on a Triumph motorcycle with a girl wearing a skirt sitting on the back, holding on to him fetchingly. The photo surfaced from the auction catalog when the actual motorcycle was found in someone’s garage after years of storage and neglect. I was hanging out with Alex while my bike was being serviced. I hadn’t thought about my Fonzie obsession in decades.

  “I
always wanted to be Fonzie,” Alex said of the TV character whose last official appearance dates back nearly thirty years. Alex is almost ten years younger than me and must have gotten in on the tail end of the Happy Days era. “He was just so cool.”

  I nodded. “I always wanted to date Fonzie,” I replied, plunking myself into the proper gender-specific role. As a girl who’d grown up in the ’70s, I couldn’t rightly wish for more than that. Yet I couldn’t explain to Alex that my yearning was deeper, more visceral. I wanted to consume Fonzie—just like the Holy Communion I took each week at Mass—and by ingesting him, to engender in myself the qualities I so admired.

  The conversation went on to other motorcycle-related subjects, but something was amiss. I’d just lied to Alex and, more important, to myself.

  “Actually, I take that back,” I clarified, knowing the truth didn’t matter to Alex but it did to me. “I wanted to be Fonzie, too.”

  After that conversation, I decided to look deeper into my Fonzie obsession. Certainly, the Fonz has been an important role model, demonstrating what it meant to be immune from peer pressure and true to one’s self. That made perfect sense at an age when my identity was forming. But now I was in midlife with established demographic markers—professor, author, homeowner, mother of three—when coolness seemed radically beside the point. Yet the more I thought about my long-forgotten Fonzie fascination, the more I found the qualities he’d embodied as important as ever. I was grappling once again with issues of identity.

  Alone for the first time in my life, I now make my home in a one-room apartment settled above a garage, just like Fonzie. Riding my motorcycle, I wear boots and a black leather jacket, just like Fonzie—though to be fair, I wear spring dresses and lace blouses when not on the bike. I am learning to make my way through life as a solo person, no longer tied by traditional family bonds, but a loner like Fonzie. I feel myself channeling some of the energy, the chutzpah, the generosity of spirit I found in the character. In short, I find myself needing to emulate Fonzie in order to survive.