Hazard Page 14

  Now, I was the breath. I felt light and strong in a way that was new.

  “A-ha, your mother’s here. One more time, for her,” Mark said, gallantly.

  At my budding age, I knew Mark was handsome in a worn and rustic way, and I sensed he and my mother were about the same age. He flirted with her, recognizing what I did not: that she was beautiful and sad and admirable all at once. That she deserved to be flattered and to savor a bit of joy, the moment of pleasure that every mother longs for: when her child triumphs.

  Glancing over to the gaping door, which stood wide open to the heat, I saw my mother and Roddy silhouetted in the sliding light. I couldn’t see her features at first, but she stepped closer, over the tumbling mat, helping Roddy negotiate the surface, and I noticed that she was pretty and blushing lightly, her uplifted eyes anticipating pleasure.

  I wanted more than anything to keep that pleasure on her face. Hastily, I pushed off the trampoline bed once again, bouncing with gusto, once, twice …

  “Whoa!” shouted Mark, abruptly, startling me.

  I buckled my knees, giving into the bed and gravity, breaking my bounce. He had never raised his voice, but then again, I had never rocketed into motion with such disregard, ignoring the fact that he was standing on the bed. He had stepped in for this round, knowing more than I did: that the second try was the more dangerous, when overconfidence makes you careless. I had forgotten that when he was on the bed we needed to bounce in synchrony. Because of me, his body now twanged upward, arching over Barbara Ann and diving for the floor. Horrified, I gasped, clamped both hands on my mouth, and ran to the metal edge, in time to see him buckle and roll on the ground, absorbing the force as if he were a paratrooper dropping in from the sky. Rolling to his feet, he lunged forward into a round off, back handspring, bouncing out of it and landing on one foot and one knee, gesturing as if to say ta-da!

  We all burst into laughter, surprise ricocheting off metal pipes and the corrugated ceiling. I felt a rush of gratitude and relief. I had not caused his death, nor apparently was I going to suffer humiliation for my carelessness.

  “Start over,” he said, trotting back to the trampoline. In a few nifty steps, he hopped back up onto the frame. “But first, say what you know.”

  Reciting what he had taught me, I marked out the actions with my arms, reaching hard and fast up to my ears, then just as rapidly, clamping around my lifted knee as I mimicked tucking into a ball.

  “Okay, go ahead. Turn her over.”

  The close steamy air was thick with desire. My mother had no knowledge of this thing called gymnastics, coming as she had from the remote mountains of Kentucky. She had seen me crushed in my first competition only six months before: a merciless, all-day meet with hundreds of girls. I hadn’t even made it past the morning round. Riding home in the car, my parents up front, Barbara Ann, Roddy, and me in the back, I had fought a twisted wad in my throat. My mother had reached back over the seat and tugged on my sweater; she had tears in her eyes. Pulling away, I had snapped my face back to the window. I did not want her tears; I did not want to be the one who brought her to tears. Her tears were for my brother.

  Now, as I pushed off the bed once again, training my body in this new language, I felt the muscles in my thighs surge with determination. This was something I wanted, for me, and for her. Some part of me knew my mother had seen my raw ability even though I’d lost the competition. She’d gone right out and found someone who could teach me and now, here I was, mastering another world.

  On three, I reached hard, resisting the urge to see the ground, and lifted my pelvis to the ceiling, drove my knees into the wrap of my arms, spinning, spinning on my own. This time, my rotation was slow and I broke out a tad early, landing in a low squat, barely sneaking my feet under me. Mike did not intervene; he backed away and let me fight for my balance and finish on my own.

  I sensed my mother imagined doing what I was doing. I had her body, her petite frame, her strong thighs, and her tomboy energy. Deep within me, I had her musician’s rhythm and timing. If not for her birth in the middle of the Depression or her rheumatic fever as a child, she might have been me, the one up on this trampoline, learning how to fly.

  As I straightened up, triumphantly, I didn’t look to Mark; I looked to my mother. There was what I had longed for and didn’t think was within my reach: her face flushed with delight, her eyes tearless and full of hope—of ripe, ravishing hope.

  From that moment forward, gymnastics became my second family. I stayed after school three times a week and spent two hours in the girls’ tiny gymnasium. This new world dared me to find my own way around being human, or at the very least to compensate for not having been fashioned with wings or a tail. I discovered a gymnast’s world, a swinging habitat where, if I was strong, agile, and fearless enough, I could choose when and if my feet ever touched down. My body adapted with thick calluses that rose at the base of each finger and beneath the hinge of every joint until the touch of my palm was like a leather glove; muscle fibers in my groin and thighs stretched into elastic strands; my inner ear turned limber and vertigo vanished. I craved the chalk-filled air and the smell of resin, the thrill of mastering each piece of equipment, and the wonder of rewiring my brain and body into a winged creature.

  The state championship meet, the very one in which I had so miserably failed that first year, came around again in the spring of my seventh-grade year. Again, I entered. These were the days when there was just a bare floor for floor exercise, no padding on the beam, and no flexibility in the uneven bars. Made of wood with a thin piece of metal down the center, bars were prone to snapping in half. Meets were excruciatingly long, judging slow, and preliminary and final rounds held on the same day. It was not unusual for a final competitor to land her beam dismount at eleven o’clock at night. But I was thrilled to be there. My adrenaline made me giddy, and I had to keep moving in the warm-up room just to calm my energy.

  Sitting in the stands, keeping scores on her tablet and cheering me on, was my mother. She had staked out a spot on the bleachers and set up a way station for me. When I needed a respite from warming up, going over my routines, performing, and scoring, I went to find her, refuel with food and drink, confiscate a Band-Aid or a Kleenex, and go away again. She glowed with fresh enthusiasm and determination. At the time, I didn’t know that she was a whiz at mathematics. She studied the judge’s scoring, caught on quickly to the numbers, and kept track of how I was doing all through the day-long meet.

  By the time darkness fell, I had not only made it into the final round, I had won my first gold medal. The silky blue ribbon sliding over my head was made all the more marvelous by my mother’s fervent applause and bright smile beaming from the stands. Even from this far away the tears on Barbara Ann’s face glittered in the bright lights.

  I held still, sharing my victory with my mother and sister for as long as I could, until finally, the judge gently tapped my arm and motioned me to the floor.

  Chapter 17

  Cracker Jacks

  Toward spring when I was thirteen, Barbara Ann came into my room and pretended we were ordinary girls. She sashayed over to my bed in pink pedal pushers, hair bound in a riot of curlers and skin flushed from Calgon and steam.

  “Stop reading,” she said, perching her hips on the mattress edge. “The Sound of Music’s at two o’clock.”

  “So?” I flipped the page. I was deep into Jane Eyre, with Mr. Rochester draped on my shoulder as he hobbled, swollen-ankled, back to his horse, the two of us drenched in fog and promise.

  “So, Mama said she’d drop us off.”

  A small, astonished yip came from my throat and I clapped my book closed. It was 1965, and in our small town of Morrison, Colorado, The Sound of Music was on everyone’s lips. My friend Natalie had rushed out to opening night and the next day she’d trilled “Do, a deer …” nearly perfectly to me over the phone. But that was as close as I’d ever dreamed of getting to the film. Julie Andrews was playing a nun, a he
athen. “Catholic” was still a strange and hushed word in my home, vaguely sinful, carrying ghosts of idolatry and odd rituals. I knew I wasn’t supposed to desire or delight in the happy melody of a nun.

  Barbara Ann stood and strolled to my closet, sliding the door aside and pondering my wardrobe. At fifteen, she was leggy and fully breasted in a way I’d never be, and already savvy to how rules might bend and sway. I couldn’t fathom how she’d gotten our mother to agree.

  “Roddy’s coming,” she said, casually.

  “What?” I inhaled. “What?”

  I didn’t want to sound like a dog, barking what what what, but I felt like one, instinctive and agitated. I stared at the back of her head.

  Barbara Ann flipped through culottes and home-sewn blouses, wire hooks screak-screaking as she zipped past outfits that wouldn’t do. As if on cue, a raucous sound burst into the hallway and headed for my door. Roddy was on the run again, chasing after his ladybug toy, its whirring wheels and flashing eyeballs thomping along the wall. At eight years old, Roddy had no friends and spent hours scooting after his robots, quivering with excitement and flapping his hands, his corduroyed legs rigid at the knees, trembling, as if he were an open, buzzing current.

  “Do you want to go or not?” Barbara Ann said, cocking her hip.

  My heart raveled with yeses and nos. As a member of a family with someone not quite right, someone strange in the eyes of the world, I didn’t know the right answer. My little brother no longer passed for “normal,” not even from far away. Though he mostly stayed calm at home, dressed himself, brushed his teeth, and ate like a gentleman, outside our family home he often short circuited. The world was wired with triggers that set him off: lights changing, bodies bumping, horns howling, eyes watching. Each one flipped a time-delay charge beneath his skin, crackling his nerves until he worked up to a moment of implosion, when he’d disintegrate into a fit of flapping, twitching, and frightened barks. What was wrong with him had a string of names, words my parents had collected from different doctors and articles over the last few years, and which felt cottony and crowded in my mouth: autism, aphasia, perceptually handicapped. Only my family seemed to know these words. Whenever we stepped out of our home, only one word followed us, sticking to our heels like a mangy cur. Retarded. I didn’t think of my brother as some sort of moron, but I knew the rest of the world did. As a young child I was embarrassed for him and for my parents, but not for me. I had been too busy running faster, climbing higher, spelling perfectly, and pleasing my teachers. But now that I was soon to turn thirteen, I felt a strange shift happening, a greater desire to fit in, a heightened fear of spectacle.

  Barbara Ann humfed into the closet. “We’ll be fine,” she said, thrusting a dotted Swiss blouse and a pair of navy culottes toward me. “Roddy can sit between us. It’ll be dark in there.”

  I so wanted to believe her: that I could be like my friends, like any other teenager. I yearned to feel more of life, to understand how I belonged. My thoughts slipped to the boy I’d fallen in love with, Wyn Anderson, who only days ago had flashed me a smile in school, letting drop that he was heading to the Cooper Cinerama that weekend. I thought of how my cheeks had turned hot and my stomach jambly and how I’d moved in a rubbery way down the corridor to home economics class. Word had traveled through currents around the lunchroom that he’d been asking for my last name.

  A rosy feeling bloomed in my chest as I pulled my blouse off the hanger—a kind of courage. Barbara Ann was right: we’d be fine. The odds were in our favor. Anything that excited Roddy would be nowhere near him—no wind, no washing machines, no battery-operated ladybugs with flashy eyeballs that worked him into a froth.

  “Besides,” she added in my doorway, “it’s a musical. Roddy loves rhythm.”

  Swiftly, I rummaged in my piggy bank and plucked up my comb, lip gloss, and Kleenex. For a moment, I paused at my doorway, breathing in little puffs, and then veered off to the kitchen, where I yanked out the Nabisco Grahams, Roddy’s favorite. Wrapping a fistful in waxed paper, I tucked the bundle into my pocketbook and dashed out to the car, dipping under the garage door just as it trundled closed.

  For fifty-five minutes, sagebrush and craggy hogbacks blurred past my car window before blending into thick traffic on South Colorado Boulevard. Suddenly, we were pulling into the sweeping entrance of the Cooper Super Cinerama. Fashionably, my curlers (necessary for tomorrow’s church) were tucked beneath my blue paisley scarf, a tip from Barbara Ann, who’d swiftly allayed my fears that we both looked like hot air balloons.

  “No, we look like we’re getting ready to go out tonight,” she’d countered.

  Thrilled, I stepped out onto the curb. I deserve to be here, at the Cooper, like everybody else, I thought.

  “Take Roddy’s hand,” Mama shouted out the window. “Keep an eye on him. Make sure he sits between you.”

  Roddy scooted out and stood furtively beside me. He wore a plaid, collared shirt, tucked into belted shorts, and his pale legs vanished into brown socks and Hush Puppy shoes. He was just tall enough to reach my chin and his cowlick brushed my nose. I took his hand. The crowd pulled us forward like a swift running current. Within seconds, the three of us were swept through the glass entrance and deposited into the bustle of the lobby.

  Barbara Ann pointed to a bench, pressed up against the wall, adjacent to the ladies’ room.

  “Over there,” she ordered.

  On high alert, we somehow knew our jobs. I herded Roddy to a spot on the bench and looked up to see Barbara Ann dive into the waves of people. She called over her shoulder, “I’ll get us tickets!” and instantly was swallowed up and gone.

  A zing of worry circled my stomach, but I batted it away. The hot, tangy smell of buttered popcorn, tangled with sweet stabs of Butterfinger bars, Jujubes, and black licorice, permeated my nose. The room was charged with energy. Kids my age and older swarmed in clutches of threes and fours, chattering and glancing about the room. I was inside a new world, one thrillingly askew, where anything might happen. Surely, Wyn was here. I knew it. I could feel him.

  Roddy twitched, so slight, like the flick of an ear. I murmured, soft-voiced. “It’s okay. She’s coming back.”

  “Yaas, Mossie,” he said, darkly. His name for me, like many of his words, left out letters that troubled his tongue, like r and soft g. I was supposed to correct him when he did this, but right then I didn’t care about house rules.

  “Barbara Ann’s getting you some Cracker Jacks,” I whispered.

  Roddy’s shoulders bunched around his ears. He pulled on his lip.

  “Yaas, Mossie,” he muttered.

  “And a Fresca, too.”

  “Fresca, too,” he repeated, as if he hadn’t really heard.

  “Yes, Fresca.”

  “Fresca.”

  Little sparks of anxiety tickled my chest: Roddy’s echo was never a good sign; any moment now he might start shouting. Searching for Barbara Ann, I scanned the crowd, but her pink-scarfed head was nowhere to be seen. Through the jumble of bodies, a blonde-headed blur of curly hair and a turned-up nose caught my eye. Wyn?

  I crouched, not at all sure I wanted him to see me. Heart fluttering, I rose stealthily, stepping backward up onto the bench seat. The sea of heads swelled and swayed, forcing me up on tiptoe, and, in small bursts of desire to see and not see, I hopped up and down on the bench. From the far side of the room, I must have appeared like an agitated fish, leaping above the crowd for a better look and plunging down each time I glimpsed a yellow-headed boy. Once, I dropped so fiercely into a squat, the button of my pedal pushers popped and spun off across the carpet.

  I didn’t want to bob this way. I wanted to stand still, long enough for Wyn to spot me and flash another smile, to come over and say hi in front of everyone; but I couldn’t. If he came closer, he’d know who I really was: not the girl who’d caught his fancy, but the other one, who lived in an unlucky family with a confounding boy. No one I knew harbored this secret, none of my friends
at school. On my best days I thought this meant I was inside some tragic story, like Jane Eyre, who made her way forward despite odd family circumstance. But more often, it simply meant I was flawed, deep down, in a place that felt black and bottomless. Floating there was something I believed and had never spoken of to anyone: God had smitten my family.

  “Cracker Jacks!” Roddy shouted.

  Buckling, I sat down, hard.

  “Yes, shhhh, yes, she’s bringing some. Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry, Mossie!”

  “Shh-shh-shh, yes. I mean no. It’s okay.”

  Heads swung our way. I yanked out the emergency Grahams and pushed one into Roddy’s palm. He snatched it and started munching in dinky, angry bites. Desperately, I looked around, and, suddenly, there was Barbara Ann careening toward us, weighted down with Frescas in both hands, Cracker Jacks pressed under one armpit, and three peppermint-striped straws sticking out from her mouth like blow darts.

  “Where have you been?” I bounded to my feet.

  With a lidded look, she freed up her mouth and handed Roddy his Cracker Jacks.

  “Getting the tickets,” she said, thrusting a bag of Sugar Daddies into my hand. “Here.”

  “Open it!” Roddy shouted.

  I must have flinched.

  “Stay calm, for heaven’s sake,” Barbara Ann said, frowning.

  “Wyn’s here,” I whispered, cupping my mouth.

  “Uh-oh,” she said, instantly rearranging the loot and reaching for Roddy’s fingers. “Let’s get inside where it’s dark.”

  We fell into line: Barbara Ann in the lead, Roddy shuffling in between, and me bringing up the rear. Scooting into our seats, we bookended Roddy on either side. I yanked open his Cracker Jacks, held his wrist, and poured some into his palm; Barbara Ann punched a straw through the ice cubes and folded its bendy neck to his mouth until certain he’d taken a sip. For several minutes, we supplied him as his head dipped from straw to sticky corn. At last, the lights dimmed, enveloping us in darkness.