by Lisa Fenn
“I’d like you to meet your grandson,” I said, placing my swaddled newborn into his arms. I knew this wasn’t how he’d envisioned the birth of his first grandchild, but the kindness in his eyes told me that this was not an obligatory visit, that we were not simply setting our differences aside. Gone was his nervous twitch. He looked more willing to accept a different kind of plan, made up of different kinds of people. He was spurred onto higher ground by his love for me, and now for Saxon, this tiny warrior for justice, who in his first twenty-four hours of life was already starting to right the past. I brimmed with a kind of pride I had never previously felt toward my father, followed by sorrow for having formerly lacked the grace to accept that we are all imperfect works in progress, tangled in history and hope as we try and fail and try again. And though my father and I didn’t know how to express such huge and humble ideas to one another, there we were, arm in arm, having a different type of conversation than the one we’d had in the kitchen, standing over Jayda’s photo. This time we were speaking the same language.
CHAPTER 12
TRANSITIONS
Just like that, I found myself sashaying along both ends of the parenting spectrum. By night I was sleep-training an infant; by day I was settling two teenagers into college life. Because Collins College operated on a unique term schedule, Leroy enrolled for a mid-November start. I bought his plane ticket, had three rooms of furniture delivered to his Arizona apartment, and scheduled the utilities to be turned on. On the morning of his flight, Leroy insisted that he was not nervous. “I’ve been waiting for my life to begin for a long time,” he said. “I’m ready.”
I wanted to fly with Leroy and hold his hand through this rite of passage, just as my parents had for me. But I could neither leave new baby Saxon nor take him with me. Leroy assured me he was a big boy. I promised him I would worry anyway. Once he arrived in Phoenix, Alicia Mandel-Hickey, a former Paralympic director who had recently relocated to Arizona, picked Leroy up at the airport for me. Alicia said Leroy rolled through the door of this modest apartment with a smile as wide as the desert sky, for he thought that home might last more than a few months this time. He laid down diagonally across the queen-size bed, and then vertically, and then horizontally, treasuring every inch of the biggest mattress he’d ever had. And then he did backflips on it. He repeated this cycle for nearly an hour before calling me.
“This is really all mine?” Leroy asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “How are you feeling now that you’re there?”
He went quiet, like he always did on the heels of a question. “I think I finally figured out what I’m supposed to say when something good happens,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Thank you.”
USA JUDO ARRANGED to have Dartanyon retested in Cleveland three weeks after Saxon’s birth. I was still in town, staying with my mother as I waited for Saxon’s interstate adoption clearance from Connecticut. This time I coached Dartanyon to refrain from guesswork—if a letter required a far-flung reach on his part, he should answer that it was unclear. Too many correct guesses could once again disqualify him from competition. We laughed about rooting for him to fail this exam. “It’s gotta be the first time God’s heard someone praying to be more blind,” Dartanyon said. He promised to call the minute he finished, but after what seemed like too long, I rang him instead.
“How did the exam go?” I asked excitedly.
“Oh, I couldn’t go.”
“What do you mean, you couldn’t go? This wasn’t optional.”
“It was raining, and my sister’s windshield wipers don’t work, so she couldn’t drive me,” he said, as though this was a reasonable explanation.
“Dartanyon, why didn’t you call me?” I cried. “I’m in Cleveland. I would have taken you!”
“It didn’t start raining till just before we were supposed to leave. I wouldn’t have made it, even if you had come.”
Dartanyon did not seem the least bit rattled, watching his second chance wash away.
“It’s still coming down over on my side of town,” he said. “Looks like it’s gonna be like this for a while too.”
These are the moments in which those removed from poverty presume that the poor are irresponsible, or stupid, or just don’t care. Prior to this scene, I could not conceive that something as innocuous as windshield wipers wielded the power to sabotage the greatest opportunity of one’s life. Even after Dartanyon told me, the only thing convincing me it could be true was that it was too ludicrous to not be true.
I cringed, imagining my next groveling call to Coach Liddie. As suspected, Liddie was not pleased with this implausible excuse, and clearly doubted the efforts he had made on Dartanyon’s behalf. “If he can’t handle small obstacles, how is he ever going to handle the big ones?” he asked.
I argued that transportation was a large obstacle for a visually impaired person in poverty, and that the fault was mine for not coordinating a reliable ride.
“Give him a second chance,” I pleaded, “and I promise he will be at the appointment.”
“Okay, but it’s not a second chance,” Liddie said. “This is his last chance.”
DARTANYON MADE IT into Shane Hudson’s dojo about twice a week between January and March 2010, whenever he could bum a ride or I could arrange one with another parent in the class. Hudson pounded Dartanyon with rudimentary grappling and footwork over and over, until it was drilled into his muscle memory. The transition from wrestling to judo continued to be awkward, and the learning curve steep. What kept Dartanyon going was his burning itch to throw people, and Hudson scratched it by teaching him an ouchi gari. To initiate this most basic throwing technique, Dartanyon would pull his opponent forward with his right hand, thereby angling his opponent slightly to the left. Then, with a controlled and explosive force, Dartanyon would spring forward, with hips turned left, using his own right leg to displace (“reap,” in judo terms) his opponent’s supporting left leg from the inside. As a result, his opponent would stagger off balance, and Dartanyon would finish him off with a final two-handed push to the mat.
“Okay, I got it,” Dartanyon said after a few tries. “Show me another one.” Hudson refused. One throw and one throw only. “Master the basics, one at a time,” he insisted. “You must make the ouchi gari your own before you move on.” And though Dartanyon executed the throw with wrestling remnants thrown in, Hudson saw reason to hope. However, it wasn’t reason enough to justify the next bit of news from Ed Liddie.
“I got permission to bring Dartanyon out here to train full-time,” Liddie said during a surprise call on a gray March day. Dartanyon had passed his second eye exam and was finally deemed “blind enough.” “It’s been in the works for a while, but I didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up.” He explained that each Olympic and Paralympic sport has a fixed budget for a limited number of live-in training spots. Coaches fill their slots with athletes most likely to medal in the Games. Liddie’s two Paralympic residency spots were full, but he had petitioned the USOC to create an additional opening for Dartanyon.
“This is insanely flattering, but isn’t it awfully soon?” I said. “I mean, he’s only been learning judo for a few months. What chance does he have of actually succeeding out there?”
“Fair question. Candidly, we are weak at eighty-one kilos. We need to fill that hole. If Dartanyon is here on campus training twice a day instead of twice a week at home, I can pack several years of judo into one year. And if he works exceptionally hard, there is a chance that he makes the 2016 Games. It’s a pretty long shot, though, so don’t put that idea in his head yet.”
“Then why put the development dollars into such a risk?”
He laughed. “I better hang up before you talk me out of this,” he said. “Listen, though, if we’re going to do this, I need to know something from you.”
“Go ahead,” I replied.
“Does Dartanyon have the work ethic and the discipline to train full-time? Does he h
ave it in him to fully commit and do everything we ask of him?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” I assured him. “He absolutely does.”
I hung up the phone. Five-month-old Saxon was sitting at my feet, grinning like he had been hanging on to every word. “I’m not sure what I just said is true,” I told him. Yes, Dartanyon practiced hard in high school, but Coach Robinson hardly ran a boot camp. Could Dartanyon handle such an intense regimen? Did he even like judo? Did it matter? Ed Liddie was offering Dartanyon a competitive outlet, education, three meals a day, travel, and housing alongside some of our nation’s most motivated athletes. This opportunity promised a far greater upside than slogging through community college while I funneled him meager weekly allowances. This was Dartanyon’s winning ticket out of poverty. I looked at Saxon’s eager brown eyes and met his sloppy grin with one of my own. “I guess we’re just gonna have to make it true.”
Dartanyon was at school, between classes, when I gave him the news. “Coach Liddie is calling you up,” I said. “You’re moving to the Olympic Training Center.”
Dartanyon crouched in a corner and wept. He said he didn’t know there was such a thing as tears of hope, the kind that make you feel like life might begin anew.
CELEBRATION HAD GIVEN way to trepidation by the time Dartanyon met with Hudson six hours later. How could he possibly be ready for the Olympic Training Center? “Dartanyon, this is amazing!” Hudson exclaimed. “This is a chance of a lifetime!” But as Dartanyon dressed for practice, tying his white cotton belt around his waist, Hudson felt his own throat tighten. “Who trains alongside Olympians as a white belt?” he panicked. “White belts come with the gi. Anyone who pays for a gi is automatically at white belt level.” Perhaps wanting to save face for them both, Hudson dialed up Dartanyon’s training so he could leave for Colorado with some rank. To test for a green belt, the second of five rankings before black belt, Dartanyon needed to demonstrate understanding of the fifteen basic building blocks of holding, falling, and throwing setups, which Hudson began throwing at him in a judo crash course.
Two nights before his scheduled flight to Colorado, Dartanyon passed his green belt test. The relief was momentary. He and Hudson and everyone in the dojo looked at one another as if to say, Well, who the heck goes to the Olympic Training Center as a green belt? He was as wet behind the ears as he now was green in rank.
“I’m going to get eaten alive in that lion’s den,” Dartanyon said. The only throw in his toolbox was the ouchi gari. He had never been to a judo competition. Was he an idiot to believe he could pick up a new sport as he headed into his twenties and emerge as an elite athlete? “Keep learning, keep applying yourself, and you will do well, Dartanyon,” Hudson said. “A man’s gift makes room for him.”
NAVID, SAXON, AND I were enjoying our first family vacation in Mexico in April 2010 when an unexpected storm cloud blew in: Leroy called in a huff.
“My bank card stopped working for no reason,” he said angrily.
He had been in Phoenix for five months.
“Did you call the bank?” I asked.
“No, I just called you.” Leroy gave me his banking password, and when I returned to the hotel that night, I logged on to his account. He was overdrawn by more than $300.
“Your bank card stopped working because you have no money in your account,” I explained. “And not only that, you’ve accrued overdraft fees.”
“What’s an overdraft?” Leroy asked.
“It’s what happens when you spend more money than you have,” I explained. “The bank covers you, but you’re charged penalties.” It had never occurred to me to explain an overdraft fee, because it never occurred to me that someone would allow an account balance to dip low enough to worry about one. Leroy received a monthly stipend from school to pay his rent, and a monthly disability payment to cover his utilities and food. His budget was modest yet achievable. “Are you not keeping track of what you spend in your checkbook ledger?”
“No,” Leroy answered. “I thought there was enough in the account, and I’ve been stressed about getting to school.” He explained that he had been using taxis to get to and from classes each day instead of the city’s dial-a-ride shuttle system for people with disabilities, which I had set up for him. He said the shuttle often ran late, causing him to miss his first-period class, or if another client in the shuttle’s network had a medical issue, that person had first priority for pickup, meaning that Leroy would be forced to miss school altogether.
“So the shuttle has been spotty for weeks, and you’re just telling me now?” I asked.
“I thought I was handling it by taking the taxi.”
“I understand,” I said, not wanting to make him feel guilty. It seemed like an honest mistake. I transferred money to resolve the mounting fees and to get Leroy to school for the rest of the week until we could figure out a more economical transportation plan.
Meanwhile, Dartanyon’s initial weeks at the Olympic Training Center felt far from a dream come true. I paid a visit to Colorado Springs, where I found him uncharacteristically sullen. With no friends and no school to fill his free time, he spent hours holed up on the phone with the girlfriend he had left behind in Cleveland. He wanted to go home. “Go home to what?” I asked. “This is where your opportunities are.” I begged him to stay, to give it a six-month trial. I took him out to lunch and shopping. Together we set up a bank account. We signed up for a phone plan in a credible cellular store that notably lacked wigs and hair dryers. I took him to a dentist for his first cleaning in, well, ever. The news killed my efforts to cheer him up: thirteen cavities and two cracked teeth.
“You’ve never mentioned any discomfort,” I said. “Don’t you have pain?”
“Sometimes.” He shrugged. “You get used to it.”
If Dartanyon’s mouth throbbed by day, his body ached worse by night. Although judo meant “gentle way,” Ed Liddie had his own interpretation.
“He’s taken some hard falls. He’s walking like he fell off a roof five times a night,” Liddie told me as I watched training. “I cut his practices short to keep him from getting hurt too badly.” Training was indeed unkind to the newly minted green belt. In high school, he’d become accustomed to being the big fish in the small pond. Here there were nothing but big fish, and Dartanyon was a guppy.
A few weeks after my visit, Liddie sent Dartanyon to his first tournament—the Liberty Bell Classic in Philadelphia. “I need a flight and a hotel,” Dartanyon said in a frenzied call, two days before he was supposed to leave.
“Doesn’t judo pay for that?” I asked.
“Apparently not,” he said. “What do I do?” I hastily booked his travel, growing ever more grateful for the trust fund that carried us through these emergencies. His next call came from the Chicago airport, where his connecting flight had been canceled. He had six hours before his new flight, an empty stomach, and an emptier bank account. He hadn’t planned ahead, and had already blown through his weekly allowance from the trust fund.
“We can’t let him go to his first tournament hungry,” I cried to Navid. My good husband frantically searched for a terminal map, calling every restaurant on the concourse, pleading to pay for a meal over the phone. No one obliged. “There is a blind boy in the airport who has no food,” Navid said in his second frenzied call to McDonald’s. “He’s an athlete. He was on ESPN. Maybe you saw him, carrying his teammate with no legs?” Exasperated, someone finally handed Dartanyon a cheeseburger. Navid and I were relieved. But Dartanyon felt like a homeless beggar once again.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him. “This trip came up so fast that we didn’t have time to prepare properly. We’ll work out the kinks for next time.”
Navid, Saxon, and I drove down to Philadelphia to watch Dartanyon fight. After taking a hard fall halfway through his first match, he grabbed his knee and limped back to center, where he lost quickly and badly. Liddie pulled him from the tournament. No need to risk further injury when he’s just starting o
ut, he told us.
I had flashbacks to the faltering theatrics of the first high school wrestling match I’d watched Dartanyon compete in. Certainly it could be a coincidence, but I felt like I was growing familiar with Dartanyon’s body language. I knew how his answers to questions grew short when he was unsure in a situation, and how he would turn his head away when he was not being forthright. I could read the dips in his voice and the shifts in his stance, and my instincts told me there was more at play here than his knee. I wanted to tell Liddie that he should push Dartanyon to continue, that exaggerating injuries might be his default way of masking insecurity. But I held my tongue, figuring a seasoned Olympic coach didn’t need advice from a woman who had studied judo for all of one morning.
LEROY, DARTANYON, AND I reunited later that spring at the Olympic Training Center, along with Coach Robinson and Coach Hons. We had been invited to speak about the role of sports in empowering the disabled. My pride soared as I looked at Leroy and Dartanyon dressed in their button-down shirts, shaking hands with Olympic officials. But as we rehearsed our talking points backstage, Leroy suddenly went off script.
“Kayla’s got a bun in the oven,” he announced. No one so much as blinked, awaiting clarification. Kayla was Leroy’s friend from high school. He told us the two had begun dating while he was home over the Christmas break, but none of us had considered it anything serious, considering the distance between them.
“That’s it,” he said. “She told me this morning.”
“She told you what?” I asked, grasping for the table, for anything that wouldn’t move.
“She . . . is . . . you know . . . making something in there,” he said, pointing to his stomach. He couldn’t even say the word. Pregnant.
“Is it yours?” I shrieked. “It can’t be yours!” I whipped out my calendar and counted the weeks since Kayla’s spring break visit to Phoenix. “It’s only been four weeks,” I said, my hands shaking. “It wouldn’t have been detected by a pregnancy test already. It’s too soon to be yours.”
