The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  “Did Ben get hit last game?” she asks.

  “No, but he will,” I say.

  Renee sighs. “You can’t sit around worrying if this is the day when he gets hit.”

  “That’s the point. I can’t bear the agony of waiting. That’s why I don’t want to go,” I say.

  “Well, don’t go, then,” she says.

  “Really?” I say.

  “No, not really! Don’t you want to be there when he wins?”

  “Yes, of course I want to be there when he wins. I just don’t want to be there when he loses.”

  Renee doesn’t respond. A good coach knows when to be silent and exactly how much silence is needed to have the stupid thing that has just flown out of your mouth find a way back in.

  “It hurts too much,” I say.

  “It hurts Ben?”

  “No, it hurts me! Don’t you hate losing?” I ask her.

  “They actually learn more from losing than they do from winning,” she says.

  “But it sucks to lose,” I say.

  “It sucks more not to be in the game,” she says.

  The problem is the caste system and that it is so much more delineated in lacrosse than it is in soccer. In lacrosse everyone knows who the A team is even if they don’t say it. Lacrosse is a game of statistics. Everything is always being counted—goals and assists and concussions—so the boys know exactly what their ranking is. This is not like recreation league soccer where everybody gets a trophy even if you come in last. Lacrosse is a microcosm of the real world. Out on the field there are rock stars, and there are project managers and garbage collectors and video store clerks, and each boy knows exactly what job he has although some are more vocal about it than others. For instance, the garbage collectors and video clerks tend to keep their career choices to themselves. The rock stars frequently do little shimmies of joy.

  Ben adores the game, but he has yet to break out and score a goal. I know he wants one, but in order to get one he’ll have to move past my fear.

  “He’s got my athleticism and your reserve,” says my husband.

  Which is a nice way of saying Ben got all his gifts from his father and all his neuroses from me.

  “Just what do you mean by ‘reserve’?” I ask.

  “Well, you’re not exactly a risk-taker,” he says.

  “I tore my ACL skiing,” I remind him, lifting up my skirt to show him the three-inch scar.

  This usually scores me lots of points. People are shocked at the size of the scar and they assume I am a double-black-diamond skier and I do not disabuse them of this notion.

  “I was teaching you to ski, we were on the bunny slope, you were doing a pizza wedge and the instant you gained the tiniest bit of speed you screamed and fell on top of me. That’s how you tore your ACL,” he says.

  “It was a serious injury. They had to carry me down in a sled!”

  My husband rolls his eyes.

  “Pop! That’s the sound it made. Twang. Twang. Like a rubber band.”

  I read somewhere that’s what an ACL tear sounded like, and I had repeated the story often enough that it felt true.

  My husband shakes his head. “If you’re going to keep this attitude up I don’t think you should come to the lacrosse games. You’re psyching Ben out.”

  “How can you say that? I’m a good mother.”

  “Yes, you are. At everything but sports,” he says. “You’re horrible at sports.”

  “That’s not nice,” I say.

  “Well, it’s true,” he says.

  “But it’s so in-your-face,” I say. “Everybody wanting to WIN, WIN, WIN! Is this what it’s like to be a boy?”

  “This is what it’s like to be alive,” he says.

  There are lots of things I used to do that I don’t do anymore: climb trees, dive, ski, ride my bicycle. These activities used to bring me a lot of joy. Now I can barely imagine doing them.

  The diving and tree climbing I don’t miss so much because, honestly, how many opportunities does a forty-four-year-old woman have to dive and climb trees? And because I wrecked my knee I figure I have a free pass to never ski again. But the biking haunts me because we live in paradise. People come from all around the Bay Area to bike in my neighborhood. It’s very hard to see the bikers and not feel inadequate, so instead I make fun of them: those ridiculous hornet-men helmets, that skintight clothing. Have you ever met a more entitled group? Hogging the road. Zipping through red lights. Waving their fists at you angrily when all you were trying to do was get past them on that blind curve.

  The last time I was on a bike was in Maine in 1989. My husband and I had just met, and he took me home to meet his parents. He thought it would be nice to ride to Port Clyde and get a lobster roll at the Dip Net. It was a lovely outing for my husband, as he was riding his father’s twenty-speed bike. It was much less lovely for me, as I was riding his mother’s no-speed bike in a pair of clogs. What my husband had neglected to tell me was that Port Clyde was a peninsula away. I recall sobbing uncontrollably on the side of the highway. I may even have made him pedal me ten miles home on his handlebars.

  This kind of behavior was okay when I was single. But now that I am a mother it’s not. Just yesterday Ben said to me, “It really isn’t cool if you fall down and cry and then you say the F word.”

  He claimed he was talking about a classmate, but I’m pretty sure he was talking about me when I fell on my butt on the stairs, so hard the tears welled up in my eyes, and I said fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck five times because it felt good to have a reason to say fuck so many times in a row.

  I asked Ben what should you do when you fall down.

  He said, “Get the F up.”

  I was thinking more along the lines of weep. I was also thinking of the future, when some kid in lacrosse checked him so hard he flew into the goalpost and cracked his skull open, so I said, “What if you’re really hurt? What if you get hit so hard your arm breaks?”

  He said, “Why are you such a pessimist? Why do you always think the sky is falling?”

  “Have you been eavesdropping on your father and me?”

  Ben shrugged. “Maybe the sky is calling, not falling.”

  I have never been on the A team, but I know all about being on the B team due to the fact I have been on it since I was in the womb. Born two minutes after Dawn (who I am convinced bit me and then shoved me aside in her haste to get out before me), I found that my first official name was Twin B.

  Dawn was the jock. We competed in everything: gymnastics, being allergic to poison ivy and growing boobs, and she beat me at all these things. The one thing I was faster than her at was reading. I was the girl who wandered through the woods with her notebook, spying on people, the girl who slurped down bowls of rice pudding and in her free time blackmailed Suzy Tucker into giving up her homemade sugar cookies.

  When I was in fifth grade I had my breakthrough. I wrote an essay about a father giving his three-year-old daughter a bath. I was inspired by an ad for towels I found in my parents’ Town & Country magazine and my longing for a simpler time when I did not have so much homework. I wrote about the softness of the towel and the sun pouring in through the window and the girl’s dimpled knees and the love the father felt for his daughter.

  When my teacher, Ms. Mania (I kid you not, and she lived up to her name—she often ran out of the classroom in tears) read it, she told me I had a gift. Finally I had something none of my sisters had: a knack for stringing words together. I would have preferred a knack for the balance beam or telepathy, but at least I had a knack for something.

  If I had known what my knack had in store for me—a lifetime membership to the B team—I would have denied authorship of that essay. I would have said it was Dawn’s. She was the writer. She was the one who longed to be three again because life was so easy when you didn’t have hair on your legs and unrequited crushes on boys named Billy and Jimmy, when the worst thing that could happen to you was to find a spider in your bed.

>   But it was too late. I had gotten my first taste of celebrity: the “A” scrawled in violet pen on my paper, Ms. Mania reading my work out loud to the class. It was my first invitation to the dance. Sure, I would go to the dance and be ignored, but at least I got invited.

  A few years ago I made the mistake of thinking I had moved up. I had recently published a book for young adults and as a result of good reviews and some local press I was invited to be on an authors’ panel at Book Group Expo. I didn’t say it to anyone, but I was thinking my time had finally come. After all these years I had finally made it to the A team.

  My friend Joanne accompanied me. We pretended she was my media escort so she could get in for free. I received a special name tag that said author, a bag full of literary swag, and a backstage pass to the Authors’ Green Room.

  The Authors’ Green Room! Who could have imagined such a thing? I parted ways with Joanne, stepped over the threshold and was immediately transported back to grade school. Everybody seemed to know everybody They were huddled in groups, whispering and laughing. Panicked, I went straight for the refreshment table. As I was looking at the array of bottled waters, a flashbulb went off in my eyes. Paparazzi!

  Whenever I am being photographed I become incredibly self-conscious and I figure the best thing to do so I don’t appear vain is to pretend I have no idea I am being photographed. There were more flashes. I stood still, a serious look on my face, thinking deep Author thoughts like Holy shit, somebody is taking my picture! There was another voice in my head, a voice that I ignored that said, Melanie, honestly, why would anybody be taking your picture? More clicks of the shutter. I turned my head to the left and subtly tossed my hair.

  “Thank you, ZZ,” said a voice.

  “No problem,” said the woman next to me.

  I was standing next to ZZ Packer, who clearly had no problem smiling for the camera as she had so much experience being photographed. She smiled at me and said hello. I shuffled away, riddled with shame and envy.

  I should have left right then. I should have found Joanne and made her take me out to lunch, she being my media escort and all. Instead I took a closer look at my schedule and saw much to my horror that at the same time as my panel discussed “The Lure of the Young Adult Novel” in Salon B, fiction royalty Andrew Sean Greer, ZZ and Sara Gruen (whose book Water for Elephants had just catapulted her through the literary stratosphere) would be talking about “Where Do You Get Your Ideas” in Salon A.

  I tried some coping thoughts.

  Nobody is going to make fun of you.

  I’ll just pretend I’m not afraid.

  I have friends, too.

  And look, there’s a friend right there! Joanne arrived early to the panel and sat in the front row. She gave me a thumbs-up and started looking through the schedule. I was buoyed by the fact that Salon B was a vast room, filled with hundreds of chairs. That was a good sign, right? It meant they were expecting a big crowd. I was nervous, but I was prepared. I knew exactly what I wanted to talk about: why I’d chosen to write for kids, despite kiddie lit’s second-class reputation in the literary world, despite the pathetic advances, despite the pitying look I got when I told people I was a writer and they asked what kind of a writer and I told them a children’s book author and they asked if I wrote with a crayon.

  I planned on telling the audience that I wrote for kids because the books I read when I was a child saved my life. They showed me I could grow a second skin if my own skin was too thin or the wrong color. They made me into what I couldn’t be in my real life: brave, bold, and preternaturally fast. I wanted to give this back. I wanted those children who felt exiled, whose talents were yet to be appreciated, whose gifts had yet to surface to know that one day it would be their turn.

  People slowly started filtering into the room.

  Joanne came up to the dais.

  “Did you see who’s in Salon A?” she asked.

  “I know. Can you believe it?” I whispered.

  “Do you mind if I go?”

  “Go where?”

  “To Salon A,” she said.

  I tried to keep the same blank look on my face I’d had when I thought I was being photographed by the paparazzi, but I’m not sure how successful I was at keeping my jealousy at bay Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli was one of the few books I had ever read as an adult that had transported me so entirely that as soon as I finished it I read it again. I adored him.

  “Of course not. You’ve heard this all before. I’d be there, too, if I wasn’t on this panel,” I said.

  “I’ll take notes. I’ll write everything down,” she promised. “And I’ll meet up with you for the book signing.”

  While I watched her bolt out of the room, I thought of poor Ms. Mania. What was going on with her that spring of 1973? What must it have been like for her, having to endure listening to Free to Be … You and Me hundreds of times? And how old was she anyway? She seemed ancient to my eleven-year-old eyes. But she could have been in her twenties for all I knew. Perhaps she had a beautiful voice. Perhaps her dream was to be a singer, the next Joni Mitchell, and instead she was stuck teaching smelly fifth graders.

  I wish I could tell you what we discussed: that it was a lively conversation, that I was triumphant in inspiring my audience, that an audience that filled more than the first four rows of chairs was there to hear it. Instead I was in my own private hell, listening through the skimpy walls to the hundreds of people in Salon A roaring with laughter and clapping wildly. I cursed myself for being such a fool. Could my B team status be any clearer? Sure, the B was tarted up with Salon, but it was B all the same. Halfway through the panel a group of women wandered into our room, and my heart lifted. Here finally was the crowd: a little late, maybe there was a long line in the ladies’ room? But very quickly these women realized they had mistaken Salon B for Salon A and hightailed it out of there.

  Should I tell you about the further humiliation of the book signing, where all the authors sit in one room behind desks with piles of their books in front of them, pens in hand? Should I tell you about my nonexistent line and the painfully long lines for ZZ, Sara and Andrew who were laughing it up with their fans? Fans that my loyal media escort, Joanne, was doing her best to steal away and send over to me.

  “She wrote an amazing children’s book. It’s about a boy whose face is burned off in a fire,” she told them.

  “We’re here for Luis Alberto Urrea,” they said.

  “It sounds a little dark,” they said.

  “Is it illustrated?” they asked.

  “Sure, there’s illustrations. A really neat one of a boy going up in flames,” I heard Joanne lie to some woman.

  “You can stop now,” I said to Joanne. “Your escorting services are no longer needed.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you want me to tell you this amazing thing that Andy said?”

  “Andy who?”

  “Andrew Sean Greer.”

  “People call him Andy?”

  “Well, his friends do,” said Joanne.

  I didn’t need Joanne to tell me what Andy said because I could imagine it. He probably said something along the lines of how he couldn’t believe this was happening to him. How it all felt so surreal and out of his control and all he could do was go along for the ride. How all his life he had sat on the bench and now this quirky, eloquent, breathtaking book about a man who ages in reverse had brought him here, where he sat on a stage speaking to hundreds of people whose faces were lit up like astronauts who had just seen the earth from outer space for the first time.

  I am allowed to go to the lacrosse game as long as I promise not to fill Ben’s mind with doubt or encourage him to quit—two things I am already guilty of. I find this is easiest to accomplish if I sit by myself far up in the bleachers because the closer I am to the field and to the other parents, the higher my anxiety and the higher the likelihood that I will misbehave.

  I am extremely competitive. I want our team
to win so badly that I feel sick. Surely there must be other parents who feel the same way. I look at them down below me, waiting for the game to begin. My husband and Renee are eating bagels and sitting at the scorekeeper’s table. One father is listening to his transistor radio. A mother is knitting. Do they think this is a picnic?

  The game starts and the other team scores a goal immediately, then another goal, and then another. I have a very bad feeling. If I can tear myself away from that bad feeling for a moment, I can see that lacrosse is a beautiful game. The way the boys pass and throw and hurl the ball at the net. The way they call out each other’s names and bump chests when they score. I only wish it was our team that was bumping chests. I only wish it was my son who was scoring.

  It’s clear to me within five minutes that our team is about to be crushed. Each time the other team scores, their parents stand up and cheer. After about the eighth goal I cover my ears. They know their team is going to win. Shouldn’t they show some compassion to us poor parents whose kids are such losers? Don’t they know that sometimes it is more relaxing for both parents and players to keep your mouth shut?

  I take out my notebook. I do this sometimes when I need distance from a situation. I pretend I’m a reporter covering the event. It helps me to stay objective.

  Lacrosse Mom Loses It Big in the Bleachers

  Next Time Stay Home, beg husband and son

  OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA—“That woman was asking for it,” reported Melanie Gideon last Saturday. “I mean, how many times did she expect me to hear her yelling, ‘Nice job, Ulysses! Way to juke him out. Way to score, you little scoremeister!’ before I lost it?”

  “It was only a little slap,” she added. “Perhaps if she’d been wearing her mouth guard that tooth wouldn’t have got busted.”

  Gideon, who was strong-armed into being a Lacrosse Mom by her husband and her friend Renee, who said what a great experience it would be for their sons to wear a cup and, best of all, have an excuse to whack other boys with sticks, said, “Even though I hit her, I’m not sorry. Being a Lacrosse Mom is not for wimps. You have to expect you’re going to get hit. It’s that kind of a game.”