Hazard Page 17

  “I’ll be there in a minute, Mom,” I said.

  When I was sure she and my brother were inside, I backtracked to the edge of the patio, right where Rod had been flying a few minutes before. Grounded on that spot, I stood and stared pointedly at the Armisteads’ picture window. Slowly, the binoculars sank to the boy’s side, and for a moment his silhouetted figure remained, furtive, uncertain.

  Mellifluously, I floated my arm as high as it would stretch, counted to three, and, like a switch blade, flipped out my third finger.

  Asshole, I mouthed, dredging up that old, venerable term.

  His silhouette disappeared.

  In all of my years, I hadn’t wanted to escape as much as I did that afternoon, to step away and leave it all behind. My parents had held our family together and, in some ways, our struggle appeared to be a success story, and yet I felt an undertow, a persistent pull on my ankles that exhausted me. I didn’t know this was an ache for my mother and that I shared it with other siblings of disabled children. I only knew that Barbara Ann was gone and in her place was a new baby sister, whom I changed, burped, and walked to sleep. I felt the weight of it all, the coping with things none of my friends had on their hands—and, most relentlessly, the staring, ogling world.

  Chapter 21

  Dive

  On a warm fall day in 1970, I said goodbye to my family and boarded an airplane bound for New England. I was eighteen, and the idea that I no longer had to answer to Baptist rules, or my brother’s needs, or my mother’s underlying sorrow, intoxicated me. My mother stood on the patio, holding Cami on her hip and half-shadowing Roddy, who lurked behind her, pulling on his lip. If I hadn’t been so bent on escape, I might have noticed the pink rims of my mother’s eyes and the Kleenex in her hand. She waved as my father and I backed down the driveway, circling her arm around Roddy and pulling him close. As we turned, Roddy fluttered his soft hands, but I couldn’t tell whether he was waving goodbye or simply excited by the wind. Either way, he disappeared.

  Nothing could dampen my giddiness at being on my own, not even the nauseating bumpy plane flight or the loss of my luggage or the implacable weather. When I stepped into the gym at the University of Massachusetts a few days later, I looked like a drowned goat. The unforgiving downpour outside, coupled with pitiless gusts of wind, had mangled my umbrella halfway across the campus green. My suede jacket, a going-away gift from my parents and the most expensive piece of clothing I had ever owned, was darkly splattered and ruined. My boots were badly chosen, more for style and their matching buck-skin color, not for the real work of keeping my feet dry. Most of my luggage had not arrived, lost somewhere in the twenty-five-hundred miles between Denver and Hartford, leaving me with nothing clean or dry to change into.

  Still, here I was. The sight of the gym, with its familiar maze of mats and rings and bars hazed in chalk, thrilled me. I stood just inside the door, disheveled, dripping, suddenly relieved I hadn’t brought a leotard. A long-legged gymnast up on the beam was executing what was considered a marvel in those days: two front walkovers on the four-inch-wide surface as if she were on the floor. Closer to me, on the bars, another gymnast threw a flip between bars I had never been able to master. If this wasn’t enough to rattle my confidence, the room was full of males as well as females—a new thing for me. Despite the fact that I had spent half of my life barelegged and swinging on gymnastic bars, I had never shed my shyness. For all of my yearning for independence, I was an introverted girl who preferred watching from the edge of the room before stepping into the limelight. Until that point, my athletic life had been separate from males. Now I realized I’d be sweating, grunting, and crashing alongside them every day.

  “Margaret?” A buxom, big-hipped woman in a warm up suit came toward me—my new coach. Her size alarmed me. I had accepted the university sight unseen and instantly wondered if I’d made a mistake.

  “Margie,” I answered.

  Motion ceased on the nearby beam and uneven bars and all eyes turned to me, curious.

  “Come on, get dressed!” called out one female gymnast over by the chalk stand. Later, I’d come to know she and I were the two promising freshmen who had been granted partial scholarships. She was brazenly bare-legged, flushed with adrenalin, eyes glittering with excitement.

  Excuses boiled up in my throat: “Well, I can’t right now, I’m looking for my luggage.” And then I ran.

  The sheer intimacy of that small space, packed with bodies of all genders and talents equal or better than mine, unnerved me. All of my weaknesses were about to be exposed: my tight flexibility (a constant enemy), my propensity to bend my knees every time I kipped from low to high bar, my unshakable fear of the balance beam that plagued me with recurring dreams of foot slippage and crotch landings. I had managed to hide these foibles or, more truthfully, I had gotten away with them as a reigning state champion back in the Rockies. Here, I wasn’t so special.

  Chilled and wet, I stumbled into the dormitory lobby, shaking water from my hair, and nearly tripped over an enormous black army trunk. Instantly, I knew it was my father’s, the one I had jammed full of everything I owned and needed, which I thought was lost forever. Relief flooded over me. I grabbed its leather handle and hauled it into the elevator up to the second floor, then dragged it down the hall to my room. Skipping dinner, I chose instead to put away my things, making careful stacks in the closet drawers, shaking out my bedspread, arranging cosmetics, and sponging up the leaked Merle Norman cleanser from my cosmetic bag. I didn’t know I was doing more than unpacking: I was nesting, setting up a home in which I could retreat and center myself, one without clutter and chaos. This was how I had always grounded myself at home, keeping my bedroom clean and impeccable and shutting the door.

  The next day, the rain retreated long enough for me to smell the earth and trees, and to notice a bright red thread lining the lips of leaves. I pulled myself together, put on a new purple leotard and white sweat suit, and marched myself to the gym. My plan was to stay loose and casual, warm up, and throw a few tricks on each event—nothing risky. Despite efforts to keep my fitness up over the summer, I was weak and stiff and didn’t trust my body. Not until I joined the tumbling line did I sense any of my old confidence coming back. The men and women tumbled together, partly out of necessity, since there was only one floor exercise mat. To my relief, everyone wanted a spotter, even the men: no one was throwing tricks alone this early in the season. It was the one time I had access to the best spotter in the gym: the men’s assistant coach, a graduate student named Matthew. He was unsmiling and terse with his feedback, correcting me on my back handspring, and I came away feeling a bit green and silly, but I took what he said to heart and after my next turn he said, “Better.”

  That evening I returned from the cafeteria and crawled into bed, unable to move. My tonsils were on fire and my whole body ached with fever. I fell into a shivering, fitful sleep. For the next five days, I stayed beneath the covers as my roommate brought me antibiotics from the clinic and tiptoed in and out of the room between classes. Vaguely, I heard her whisper that she was going away for the weekend. I lost track of time and didn’t care about anything; the twisted sheets stank from sweat and cloistered mats of hair, and my raw throat flamed each time I swallowed. Tonsillitis had felled me several times in my life, hospitalizing me when I was five and religiously returning every few years. But this was the first time I’d had to suffer it alone. I came to in the middle of darkness with tears in my eyes, wishing for my mother who, if she were here, would be pressing cold cloths on my forehead head and around the back of my neck, and bringing me popsicles and ginger ale ice cubes. Finally, on the fifth day, my fever broke and a ringing rattled through my tender brain. Rolling to my side, I slapped for the phone.

  “Hello?” I croaked, hoping it was Barbara Ann or my mother, anyone who might lend me solace.

  “You’ll never win the Olympics this way,” a male voice answered, sardonically. Through my fog, I dimly thought this might
be a crank call.

  “Excuse me?” I said, annoyed. Speaking took all of my effort.

  “Let’s put it this way: Are you planning on showing up to the gym one of these days? Or maybe you’re not like the rest of us; you don’t have to practice.”

  The voice—its droll, unsmiling tone—came to me. It was Matthew, the men’s assistant coach. I cringed, feeling chastised and guilty. Here I was, one week into my new life and already looking like a flake. Though I wasn’t faking this illness, part of me knew I had been relieved when it hit me. I didn’t have to show up or perform.

  “I have tonsillitis,” I said, defensively, though this was no longer true: my fever was gone. He said nothing back, and after a few more seconds of dead air I added, indignantly, “I’m not lying.”

  “So what? You want soup? Borscht? Matzo ball?”

  In spite of my lethargy, I laughed. I had never heard the word matzo ball, much less heard it pronounced in the cadence of a Jewish yenta. I didn’t know either existed and wouldn’t know until much later that Matthew was, in fact, Jewish. Because of his six-foot frame, dark straight hair, and Roman nose, I had mistaken him for Italian. I wasn’t sure if he was joking but when he spoke again I detected a smile. He told me to get some sleep and come into the gym the next afternoon, just to stretch and stay limber—nothing vigorous: time was ticking.

  I hung up the phone and rolled back onto my sweaty pillow, flabbergasted. He had noticed my absence. The one day I had spent in the gym, he had tersely corrected me and hadn’t once said my name. Now, I felt a twinge of courage. Perhaps he’d seen some promise in me, somehow, in this vast sprawling herd of freshmen.

  The next morning, I got out of bed and toddled to the bathroom at the end of the hall, standing under a hot shower and washing the remnants of illness from my hair and skin. At half-past three, I slipped into soft, pliable clothes (leotard, leggings, sweat pants) and walked to the gym. I did as Matthew had suggested, stretching through a slow warm-up and walking through some dance moves on floor and beam. As I breathed and stretched, I felt a twinge of belonging.

  Over the next weeks I came to know my teammates, all of whom hailed from different parts of the world: Isabelle from Cuba, fluid and flexible, a liquid beauty on balance beam; Bea from Washington, D.C., strong as an ox on uneven bars; Ellie from New Jersey, explosive on floor exercise. They all had strengths and weaknesses, and I found my own fit right in. Beam was still my nemesis but I held my own on the other three events. We bonded swiftly as athletes do, encouraging each other, spurred on by our equal intensity and desire and our complementary talents. Bea was especially funny and wise; I liked her immensely.

  By the end of September the gym had become my new home. Every day, for four straight hours, I worked fiendishly hard, falling down, getting up, trying again, suffering through leg lifts, pull-ups, stomach crunches, and then jogging back to the dorm. Utterly exhausted, I skipped the dining hall, a practice that would become a habit, and fell into a deep sleep.

  Not long into October, I summoned my courage and asked Matthew to stay after practice for an extra twenty minutes to coach me on my full-twisting back layout. Rapidly, I had come to trust him with my safety and I felt most confident when he was there. His spare, no-nonsense coaching suited me: he said little, didn’t sugarcoat, and expected me to listen. I was determined to learn the trick and, though tired and winded, I didn’t want to leave the gym without trying it alone.

  Lofting skyward and backward, I dropped my shoulder into the twist, and knew instantly that I was off, sluggishly corkscrewing through the air. Bracing his feet on the frame of the trampoline, Matthew reached under the hurling meteor of my body. The two of us, entangled, crashed on the metal teeth of the springs, his pant leg ripping at the knee, my thigh lacerating as it scraped the coils.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” he quipped as we unraveled our limbs.

  I scoffed. He often ribbed who he was working with, diffusing frustration and disappointment with teasing and humor. This made him a good coach. But he had never done this with me. A small part of me sensed a nuance: a flirtation, a pinch of provocation. I couldn’t be sure; he was a reserved person, ironic, amusingly sarcastic with everyone. Nevertheless, a tiny glint of pleasure twirled in my stomach.

  The next thing I knew, the Thanksgiving pre-season meet was upon me. I didn’t feel ready, partly because I was throwing all new routines and partly because I carried an extra five pounds from the dorm room peanut-butter-cracker parties. To top it off, I accepted an invitation to travel to Boston with my roommate for Thanksgiving dinner and the next day, as I arrived at the competition, I was heavy with turkey and pie. Dutifully, I managed to finish my new floor exercise and beam routines and come away with respectable scores, but I knew it wasn’t a good first showing. As soon as the last event was over, I was eager to get out of the gym and put the meet behind me. Slipping on my warm-up suit, I signaled to my roommate in the stands for a ride back to her house and, at the same moment, heard a voice behind me.

  “Chinese?”

  Sure enough, it was Matthew, as terse as ever.

  “No,” I said. “I’m American.”

  This time, he scoffed, and for the first time I saw him smile.

  “A few of us are heading to Chef Chang’s. You should come,” he said.

  “I don’t have a ride,” I said, blushing. Suddenly, I felt very young and awkward.

  “I do,” he said, gesturing to the exit.

  Sitting in the booth across from Matthew, crammed in on all sides with fellow gymnasts, I confessed I had never had Chinese food. This was a first for me, and a far cry from the biscuits and gravy I’d grown up on. He showed me how to use chopsticks and teased me mercilessly as shrimp and snow peas twanged across the table. When my sweet and sour chicken bounced off his face, leaving a touch of red on his cheek, he whipped his head right and left, looking for who might have zinged him. I laughed. We all laughed. He had me.

  The first season of competition overtook me, and simultaneously, I slammed into love. As our fledgling team climbing up higher in the scoring with every successive meet, I returned from classes, workouts, and competitions nearly every night to Matthew’s Holyoke apartment. I stopped by my dorm room so infrequently and sporadically, and then only to fetch clean clothes, that my exasperated roommate moved out to a triple-bed down the hall. By Christmastime, I had petitioned to move off campus and I left the dorm behind. I felt stronger and happier than I’d ever been. Not only was I recklessly in love, but I was mastering new techniques and was conquering tricks that had always eluded me. For the first time, I felt utterly freed from the shadows of sorrow that had haunted my childhood and my family. At the time, I told myself that distance and the cost of flying prevented me from going back to Colorado that year. But in truth, I didn’t miss home and I was in the process of cutting myself away from an old unhappy life. Other than a short and hasty trip home for Christmas, the only time I flew back to visit was in April, for Barbara Ann’s wedding. I went alone, without Matthew. I didn’t want to share him or to muck up my new life.

  Barbara Ann was busy doing what I was doing: running away. Though only nineteen, she and her good-looking, somewhat-wild boyfriend were getting married in Lakeridge Baptist Church amid pink and white roses, and bridesmaids (me included) dressed in pink empire, floor-length dresses. Roddy was the ring bearer. He did a fine job promenading down the aisle, the pillow of rings (slightly listing to one side) held before him. Remembering what to do, he waited obediently at the altar while the rings were freed from the pillow ribbon, and then he stepped up onto the dais beside me. His eyes darted off to the side and his body stood off center, too close to me, but nonetheless, he remained patient and still, pleased to be part of these strange proceedings. I didn’t know at the time that Barbara Ann had a child in her womb; nor did I know this was also true for my mother.

  In swift order I returned to Amherst, my studies, and Matthew’s bed. I sped through the semester. As June
arrived, I suddenly realized that all of my teammates were leaving for the summer, back to their respective states up and down the coast. I couldn’t understand their hurry. I was expected home, in Colorado, but I found this unthinkable. Three months away from Matthew would be tortuous, and, even worse, I dreaded the thought of going back to everything I had flown away from. I dawdled and made excuses with my parents that I had to stay a few weeks for a make-up exam.

  Happily, Matthew was as miserable as I was. He cooked up a job for me on the UMass campus as his graduate assistant, typing up an official agreement on University letterhead. Next, I lied, boldfaced, to my parents, concocting a fake apartment address. These were the days when openly sleeping together out of wedlock was verboten; even though couples practiced it all across campus and in surrounding towns, no one admitted as much to their parents. Supposedly, I was rooming with Carla, who was also living with her boyfriend in another apartment and lying to her parents. I informed my mother I would be coming home for a short visit but had to be back in Amherst to move in with Carla and start my job by the first of July.

  All went so smoothly I began to relax. My parents read the letter carefully, and if they had any misgivings they didn’t tell me. During my ten-day stay in Colorado, I passed the time by sewing a new dress, a red print I picked out for Matthew. As my mother ran errands in the afternoon and bustled about fixing dinner, I sat with Roddy and Cami in the downstairs den, restless, plying the marble shoot with noisy orbs and stacking letter blocks. Roddy was happy to have me beside him, and I was happy to be leaving soon.

  After what felt like an eternity, I finally boarded and strapped into my seat on a Continental Airlines jet, readying for take-off from Denver airport. In mere hours, I’d be back with Matthew and our new life together, and I was light-hearted with anticipation and pleasure. I wore my new flattering red dress, which flounced softly at the hemline and dipped low enough at the neckline to subtly show the lace bra underneath—another falsehood: on campus I went without a bra no matter what I was wearing. Only in the gym and in front of my parents did I harness my breasts.