According to her husband, Gideon was always a wuss—rarely willing to step outside her comfort zone.
“I thought it would be really good for her to see our son get battered around. Maybe break an arm or leg,” said her husband. “Incur a little brain damage. Reversible, of course.”
“I keep telling her she’s got to get into the game,” said Renee. “She can’t sit in the bleachers forever.”
“I’m glad I pushed myself,” said Gideon.
She took a knee as the sobbing woman she slugged in the face was led off the field by her husband, who was speed-dialing their dentist.
Gideon stood and wiped her bloody hands on her jeans. “It’s important to set an example for my son. Being a Lacrosse Mom was the most challenging job I’ve ever had, but I didn’t quit. I pushed through my fear.”
Gideon reports that after this success, she’s ready to be a Cricket Mother, Rugby Mother and Competitive Ping-Pong Mom. “Ling it,” she said.
“Bring it,” translated her husband.
He held out his hand. Gideon spit out her mouth guard.
We lose 12–0. We lose by so much it’s almost like winning, and the losing quickly metamorphoses into what an honor it is to play such an amazing team. The more evolved parents begin complimenting the winning team in earnest, showing what good sports they are.
“Well, they certainly can pass.”
“What a shot!”
“Man, that kid’s got wheels.”
Nobody seems depressed except me.
“Nice game,” says my husband when Ben walks off the field.
I don’t believe in lying to children. “You guys sucked,” I say to Ben.
No, of course I didn’t really say that, but that’s what I thought.
*
That afternoon the doorbell rings. It’s my friend Kerri. She is from Mexico, Maine, which tells you everything you need to know. She has biked ten miles to get to my house so we can go for a hike.
A while ago my husband got my bike tuned up for me as a surprise. I had been saying that I really should try biking on an actual road, especially since I had taken up spinning class, but I was kidding. The bike had been sitting in the entryway for months.
“Does that thing work?” asks Kerri.
I pinch the tires. “They’re flat.”
“They’re not flat,” says Kerri. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m scared. People run bikers off the road all the time.”
“What people?”
“People who are annoyed by bikers and their holier-than-thou ways.”
“People like you?” asks Kerri. “Get your lazy ass on the bike.”
The ride starts off badly, as we have to bike up a hill.
“Just take your time. Get into a rhythm,” says Kerri.
I’m panicked. Hills terrify me. You have to work so hard to get up them.
“If it’s too steep you can get off the bike and walk,” says Kerri.
That has never occurred to me. Isn’t that—cheating? “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” says Kerri.
I hop off the bike and push it up the hill. When we get to the top I get back on and slowly we ride down the road. I inhale deeply. The air smells like mulch and bay leaves.
“Beautiful day,” says a man on a bike as he passes us.
“Yes!” we cry.
Suddenly I am seized with happiness. He thinks I’m like him. I am passing as a woman who knows a kind of happiness and freedom that only bikers know. How could I have ever hated them?
Soon I begin to ride two or three days a week. I quickly learn that the reason bicyclists ride in the middle of the street is most times they can’t hear cars coming up behind them, what with the wind whistling in their ears and those helmets.
I start giving bikers a wide berth when I’m in my car. I tap on my horn lightly to let them know I’m behind them. I wave at them in solidarity.
“Nice day for a ride,” I yell at them, but what I’m really yelling is I’m one of you.
I have a bit of Post-Traumatic Hills Syndrome from when my husband forced me to do that ten-mile ride, so every time I approach a hill and feel that familiar pressure building in my chest, the panic at the thought of all the hard work I’m about to be forced to do, I just remind myself to put it in the lowest gear and pedal, and when I do this I notice things. The way the sun beats through the vents on my helmet. The way fellow cyclists zip past me and shout hello and don’t judge me for going too slow or having the wrong kind of bike. Sometimes I pedal and look up, just for a moment, and think of what Ben said—that the sky is calling, not falling. I dare to think the day may come when I like hills more than coasting, but that might be pushing it.
*
Are you sure you don’t want to come to the game?” asks my husband a week later.
“I’ve got to do the bills,” I say “Besides it’s so early.”
Who schedules lacrosse games at eight on Saturday mornings? The truth is I can’t bear to see them lose again, so my plan is to just stay home—for the rest of the season.
An hour later my husband texts me. “Ben just got a goal!”
Can I tell you how ridiculously happy I am for him? For me? For all of us? How I leap out of the chair and do a little shimmy of joy. I pump my fist in the air, something I’ve watched other parents do when their kids get goals. I can’t believe this means so much, but it does.
And then a few minutes later my husband texts me again. “He just got another one!”
This time I cry. I missed seeing my son scoring his first lacrosse goals ever. I missed seeing him throw his hands up in the air in triumph and bump chests with his teammates.
I think about what Renee asked me: “Don’t you want to be there when he wins?”
The only way I will be there to see him win is if I am willing to be there when he loses. Every single time he loses. My job is to not look away.
A few days later Renee’s husband, Mike, calls and tells me Renee is not having a good day and she can’t come on the family bike ride we had planned. What this means is that the pain is so bad she’s bedridden. It’s a beautiful day—she urges us to go without her.
The five of us—my husband, Ben, Mike, his son, Parker, and I—set out on the Moraga bike trail. The first half of the ride is downhill and the path winds through fields and meadows. But what goes down must go up. The boys don’t want to ride all the way back, so we leave my husband with the kids and Mike and I bike back up to the parking lot to get the car.
If I had a brother I would want him to be just like Mike. He’s one of the sweetest men I know—kind and generous with a mean swearing streak. We are talking about food. It’s a kind of last hurrah, because on Monday we are both starting diets. We’ve already talked extensively about donuts and cream puffs and morning buns. Now we’ve moved on to cookies.
“Have you ever tried freezing Fudge Stripe Cookies?” he asks.
“Jesus, that’s brilliant,” I say.
“They get crispy. They just break into pieces,” he says. “Like peanut brittle.”
And then our handlebars get tangled up.
Kids are no strangers to the scraped knee and the bee bite, poison ivy pustules and broken fingers. But when you’re an adult, falling is unexpected. You think you’re too old to fall. Until you do.
Mike detaches his bike from mine and veers off to the left. But I can’t recover and I fall. An old lady fall, not an athletic fall, by which I mean I let out a kind of eagle caw, AHHHHH, and am suspended in midair for what seems like a minute, during which time I am thinking, I am falling, how did this happen, I can’t believe I’m falling, this is going to hurt, fuck, this is going to hurt and then I’m sprawled on the ground.
The first thing everybody asks me when I show them the impressive scrape on my elbow and my calf (which over the next week will swell into a stump, black and blue and purp
le and red and yellow), is Did you cry? No, I didn’t cry. I screamed in anticipation of what was coming, but I didn’t cry. Sure, my elbow was streaming blood and stung like hell and my leg was numb, but I felt grateful because I was here. In this day. Inside of this moment. The bike path was dappled with sun. People stopped to help me. Soon it would be dusk and I would have a nice glass of wine. I got back on the bike and pedaled uphill for the next five miles.
You should have heard her,” says Mike to my husband once we circled back in the car to pick them up. “She sounded like a deer screaming.”
“You don’t need to tell me. I’ve heard that scream before,” says my husband, who is about to pour hydrogen peroxide on my elbow and then pick the gravel out with a pair of tweezers.
“Will this hurt?” I ask him.
I think of Renee in her bed on this beautiful Saturday afternoon—just happy to be on the team—any team, A or B. Just so long as she’s out on the field.
“Close your eyes,” he says.
I shake my head. The days of closing my eyes are over.
April
EVERY TIME I PULL INTO THE CAR POOL LINE TO PICK BEN UP FROM SCHOOL I have this strange sensation that I’ve just left the car pool line. My entire life is structured around 3:20 p.m. Unfortunately it’s the same for millions of other mothers. If you are not a mother with young children (children you cannot force to walk two miles home because things like that are now against the law), I suggest you avoid the roads from 2:45 to 3:30 unless it is absolutely necessary. If you find yourself on the road at this time do not blame me for the weaving Subaru Outback flying past you at top speed driven by the manic woman who is wondering what the hell ever happened to buses?
I can act inappropriately on the freeway, where I have anonymity. But once I approach the exit to school I have to behave. I can’t cut people off. Nor can I tailgate, because from the back they might look like strangers but from the front they turn out to be Ben’s sensei, so instead I let that woman in the Prius who is actually carpooling (by this I mean bringing home children that aren’t her own) into the stream of traffic. I wave, but inside I’m thinking, Hurry the fuck up. I’m in such a hurry to wait in the stifling hot car for thirty minutes because that’s how early I have to arrive to be first in car pool line, which is a very nice place to be because honestly, how many opportunities does one have to be first in anything?
Did I mention my son’s school is next door to a Mormon temple? It’s a very lovely and serene place. There are fountains and elaborate gardens, spires and bridges. When Ben was in kindergarten he asked me when I was going to take him to the amusement park down the street from his school. When I told him it was a church he didn’t believe me.
“What kind of a church has rides and castles?” he asked.
“Mormon churches,” I told him.
“I’m a Mormon,” he said.
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“Well, what am I?” he asked.
“You’re a boy,” I said. “A very nice, kind boy.”
“I’m a Mormon,” he whispered, his eyes filling with tears.
I have a little secret. How I pass the time when sitting in the car pool line. I use a little something my husband gave to me for Valentine’s Day. It’s called a StressEraser. And no he didn’t think of it himself. What kind of a husband would give his wife a StressEraser on Valentine’s Day? The kind of husband who wishes never to have sex again? But imagine the conversation if he did.
“I can’t wait to open the present you got me for Valentine’s Day.”
“Wait, don’t tell me. Let me guess.”
“That topaz necklace I saw at Pavé? You remembered topaz is my birthstone!”
“No? Okay—those fleece pajamas I saw in the Garnet Hill catalog?”
“No? Okay—a box of those amazing sea salt caramels?”
“I said I was stressed out? When did I say I was stressed out?”
“You paid how much for this?”
The StressEraser is not really an eraser. It’s a biofeedback device. It works like so: You stick your finger in it. It reads your pulse. It tells you when to inhale. It tells you when to exhale. That’s it. But here’s the brilliant part. Within five minutes of doing it you feel like you’ve drunk half a bottle of wine. And it’s legal! And you can do it anywhere. On a park bench. At the doctor’s office. In the car pool line. But what the literature doesn’t tell you is that it’s really really embarrassing if anybody catches you at it. So I hide the thing under the steering wheel and try to pretend nothing illicit is going on as I slump further and further down in my seat, my stress erased to the point where I’m practically on the ground.
It has occurred to me that I might be mistaken for somebody who is masturbating, because people who masturbate in cars slump, too. Every few minutes I wave my hands around in case anybody is looking and getting the wrong idea. But then I remember some people can orgasm hands-free. Probably most of those people live right here in California.
What am I hiding? What don’t I want people to know? That I have stress? That I get anxious? There’s a rap on my window. It’s my friend Lisa. I’ve done a hundred breaths. This is supposed to be your entire daily total of breaths and I’m so relaxed I’m not sure I’m capable of speech. I gently toss the StressEraser on the floor.
“Move over,” Lisa says, opening the door and sliding in.
Lisa is a therapist. I keep asking her for a name of a therapist and she keeps saying she’ll think about it and give me one and she keeps not giving me one and so I keep asking, knowing it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever get a name. Which is fine with me. I don’t really want to go. Certainly not now when I can erase my stress all on my own.
I tuck the StressEraser under the floor mat with my foot. I must protect Lisa. It would be horrible if she found out that a silver box the size of a transistor radio could replace her. Of course if she did I would be sure to remind her that the special patient population would always be in need of a therapist (those with asthma or heart conditions or dead) because proper use of the StressEraser requires breathing.
“Are you high?” she says.
“No, I’m not high,” I say, blinking my way out of my stupor.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’ve been napping,” I tell her.
“I’d nap, too, if I got here an hour early,” she says. “So what are you bringing for dinner on Saturday night?”
Lisa and I are part of a small group of women who get together every couple of months or so for dinner. We call ourselves the Flans. Not because we love flan but because our first dinner was in honor of Bastille Day. We spoke schoolgirl French, made crepes and did the Flan-Flan and, well, you get the picture. The name stuck. I for one am glad. Otherwise we would still be calling ourselves a small group of women who get together every couple of months or so for dinner.
I sigh. “Is there a theme?”
Many of the Flans are amazing cooks. For weeks now we’ve been e-mailing back and forth about what everybody is bringing for dinner. We start with a main dish and then people riff off that. I’ve been mostly silent for two reasons: I’m not sure I’m going to make it and the only thing I can reliably make is salad.
“Just bring salad,” says Lisa.
“I will if I can come,” I say.
“You’re coming,” says Lisa.
“No, really, I’m not sure I can.”
I explain that I’ll be out of town that day and just getting back at dinnertime, assuming everything goes smoothly and there’s no traffic.
“You have to come,” says Lisa. “You don’t have to bring anything. Come late. Just come.”
There’s a part of me that likes having an out. I enjoy our Flan dinners, but our burgeoning intimacy scares me. I used to think I was a touchy-feely kind of person. It turns out I’m not. Sometimes I think my husband and I have reversed genders. He’s much more nurturing. Softer with Ben. He’s compassionate and generous; he cooks and loves
unconditionally.
I am much more withholding. It’s easier for me to love in the abstract. I can take little sips of intimacy, like a good wine, but I hold the wine in my mouth for a long time before I swallow. Then I say Yikes, that was an amazing wine. I want to drink that wine forever. By which time the bottle is usually empty.
Kids start to straggle by.
“Gotta go,” says Lisa. “So I’ll see you Saturday night.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
*
A few minutes later I see Ben walking up the hill His posture changes from second to second, almost like he can’t quite remember who he is. He flits from running (school is out!) to shoulders slumped (I got picked fourth for soccer) to melodramatic belly clutching (maybe I can convince Mom to buy me a Snickers). When he spies me, he can’t help the expression streaming over his face. Relief. Happiness. She came back! I feel it, too. It’s ridiculous, I know—he’s not an infant. But it’s primal. Every day I forget what it costs to separate, but I remember as soon as I see that beloved, hopeful face.
I know these days are numbered. That in the not too distant future there will be no smiling, just scowling, and perhaps some grunts because he will be so weighed down with burdens of homework and social pressures and embarrassment of me. That detachment is coming. Perhaps it’s already there, calling sweetly to him after I’ve tucked him into bed at night.
Ben climbs in the car. “Jesus, I forgot my sweater,” he says, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Did you just say Jesus?” I say.
He claps his hand over his mouth. “Sorry.”
“Does your father say Jesus? Fuck. You’ve got to stop saying Jesus. It’s not appropriate for a nine-year-old to say. Do you ever say that in school? Please tell me you don’t say that at school.”
“I forgot my sweater.”
“Jesus! That’s a forty-dollar sweater.”
I think it’s time for me to go back to therapy. Not only am I stressed out and anxious but I also have insomnia. Every night for the past week I’ve woken up at two in the morning. I’ve taken to going outside on our deck and curling up on the chaise lounge with a blanket. Then I lie there and think of all the things I want: the list is endless. And all the things that I thought I wanted but it turned out I didn’t, which is most things, like that third helping of pad thai and those green Frye boots. Then I think of all the things I should want, if I were a better person, but I don’t, like the banning of plastic bags and quarterly reports of my credit rating.
The Slippery Year Page 10
