The Late Bloomer's Revolution
When I was growing up, my family ate dinner together every night and discussed the news of the day. That’s why, in 1975, at age nine, I knew that Saigon had fallen and the Vietnam war was finally coming to an end; New York city was in a serious fiscal crisis and in danger of going broke; and the three most powerful people in the world were American president, Gerald Ford, Russian Leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mindy Weinstein.
By all accounts, Mindy Weinstein was not only the most popular girl in our third grade class, but in the entire elementary school. She was lithe and blonde, blessed with a rare button nose that was adorable, but also possessed character. Legend had it that sleeping at The Weinstein house was nothing short of paradise: a mason jar overflowed with candy, and unlike my home, where bedtime resembled lights out at Attica, bedtime at Mindy’s was merely a helpful hint. Annie Ferrara said that when she slept over the whole family made shrunken apple head dolls, dressing up empty Windex bottles in clothes that Mrs. Weinstein sewed herself. But Mindy was not content to be merely the best student, athlete, or most well liked girl in our class; she wanted to write. And that’s where I came in, providing the magic marker illustrations for her first book, about an enormously popular girl and her friends, who are good at everything and all live happily ever after.
The book was an enormous success, re-read twice at Show and Tell. I was convinced this was how I came to be invited to Mindy Weinstein’s birthday celebration, a bicycle riding party in Central Park, the first Saturday in May. Each girl was instructed to bring her bike, as “a bunch o’ lunch” would be provided by Dr. and Mrs. Weinstein for Mindy’s “Birdle Daydle Doodle.” I was delighted to be invited. So delighted, in fact, that I neglected to mention one tiny detail: I didn’t actually know how to ride a bicycle. But I wasn’t worried; everyone said it was the easiest thing in the world to do, I expected to be doing wheelies by noon.
Boy, was I wrong.
“Oh, my God! Amy! Are you okay?” Dr. Weinstein asked, jumping over the woven, plastic fence through which I had just crashed. “Can you say your name? Can you hear me?”
I nodded, still a bit stunned. I was lying on my back, a few inches from a sign that said “Keep off the grass!” Dr. Weinstein came toward me, his hands outstretched in anticipation of broken bones.
“I’m fine,” I said, praying that my small accident had not been as public as it felt.
“She’s okay! She’s okay!” Dr. Weinstein yelled over to a crowd of people who had rushed to the scene. “Thank you all very much, all of you! You can all go now, she’s fine!”
“I really don’t know what happened,” I said. “I told my parents to get this fixed. It must be because I ride it constantly.”
I sat up. My elbows were bloody and my pants were ripped, but I knew that neither of these things compared to the real damage. Mindy stood with her arms folded, looking forlorn, her head bowed, as Mrs. Weinstein tried to comfort her. From my place in the mud, I could see the other girls, ten in all, waiting, gripping their handlebars. They looked, I thought, like the tribe of restless Apaches I had once seen in a Western, a long line of warriors poised for attack, hungry to burn log cabins and scalp people. I knew immediately I would be their story Monday morning. “Gahd,” they would tell the other kids. “She can’t even ride a bike.”
My standing with these girls was iffy. I worried they thought I was a dummy, because I was in the slowest reading and math groups, and weird, because of things like the recent “Show and Tell” incident.
We had been told to find out who our most famous relative was and give a short presentation in front of class the next day. I was worried. The only even remotely famous relative I knew of had dressed as a dog with glasses at a theme park in Florida before he gained fifty pounds and entered a cult. I went home and asked my mother if she could think of anyone better to mention, and she informed me, to my delight and surprise, that we were closely related to someone extremely famous.
The next morning, all the kids stood at the blackboard. Evan went first, excitedly telling us all that his second cousin was none other than “Fonzie,” which elicited “oohs and “ahhs” from the entire class. Lizby’s grandfather helped invent antifreeze, which got a “cool” from one of the boys. And then it was my turn. We were being graded on presentation, and I was careful to speak clearly and slowly and to stand very straight, with my hands folded neatly in front.
“My mother told me,” I announced proudly. “That my most famous relative is Moses.”
“What a dumbass,” I heard someone say in the back of the room.
Not surprisingly, at lunch when everyone hovered around Evan begging for an autograph from The Fonz, no one asked me for an autograph from my most famous relative, perhaps worrying that the stone tablets would be too heavy.
Now Mrs. Weinstein removed her tennis visor and yelled, “Ben! Is she okay?” She glanced at her watch and then looked back at us, annoyed. “I mean, do we need to call an ambulance?”
Dr. Weinstein waved his hand above his head. “Go on!” he called back, at which point all the kids yelled “yay!” and took off.
“We’ll meet them for lunch in Sheep’s Meadow,” he explained.
“I can still ride,” I said, stepping onto my bike. “We can catch up to them!”
“No!” he shouted. Worrying he had scared me, he added calmly. “No. It’s such a nice day. Let’s walk.”
As we pushed our bicycles up a steep hill, I considered explaining to Dr. Weinstein that my mother had been struggling with her second bout of breast cancer in three years, and the reason I didn’t know how to ride a bike, when my brother and sister rode perfectly, was that there was too much else going on in our house. But since I had just told him that my favorite book was a collection of Diane Arbus’ photographs, her transvestite series in particular, I thought I’d said enough.
Two hours later at lunch, as the other girls compared stories of dodging a carriage pulled by a horse wearing a straw hat, I tried to make conversation. “Wanna see my rip? Wanna see my bloody elbows?” I asked, but the girls looked up only briefly, and then, with scant enthusiasm. That was the last time I ever got on a bicycle.
Until today.
When Josh and I were still together, he could be heard on many weekend mornings saying, “I wish we could go bicycle riding today because it’s one of my favorite things, but, yeah, well, I guess we can’t.” He had since moved on and moved in with his new girlfriend. I had neither moved on nor moved in. Instead, I decided to buy a bicycle.
Today I was at the Bike n’ Hike, in Hampton Bays, Long Island. The store was housed in a small, white cottage with green trim. It needed a fresh coat of paint. If someone were to write a book about Heidi in her later years, as a heavyset, older Swiss shut-in, still wearing her hair in braids and yodeling to no one, she might live here.
“So Amy, what can I do you for,” a man named Leon said, wiping grease on his red and puce tie-dyed tee-shirt. He was all smiles, with just enough teeth to chew small cubes of beef without choking. “Are you looking for a road bike? A mountain bike? What?”
We were standing behind the house in a narrow back yard, which was paved with cement. Growing up in Manhattan, I’ve had a long-standing relationship, dare I say a love affair, with concrete. I referred to the balding patches of grass in Central Park as “nature.” I appreciated the miles of sidewalk that make New York the walking city that it is. But now, as I imagined myself on a bicycle on this same cement, my feelings changed. I imagined nasty scrapes. Gushing blood. Head injuries. Flash cards re-teaching me the alphabet.
“Leon, I haven’t been on a bike in a really long time,” I said.
“A really long time like what? A year, five years?” He asked.
“More like twenty-five,” I said.
“Really?” He said. “Get the fuck out of here. That’s a riot.”
“Wait til’ you see me ride,” I said. “Then you’ll really have a laugh.”
He readjusted his long, gray hair, letting it first fall down his back before gathering it into a ponytail. “Better late than never,” he said. “That’s what I always say. Like, last year I took a stand up comedy class. I’m fifty-three, but I thought: what the fuck, Rodney Dangerfield started in his forties and people tell me I’m as funny as Leno, Right?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
Leon patted me on the back. “So, what made you finally learn to ride a bike?”
“Ah, you know, it seemed like a good thing to do.” I was going to say something about how nice the weather had been or how a bicycle was the perfect way to see the beach, but I already felt a bond with Leon so I decided to tell him the truth. “My boyfriend broke up with me.”
“Wow, that’s rough,” he said. “Recently?”
“No. A year ago,” I said, realizing that twelve months have gone by. I had that odd feeling, where it seemed as if everything had changed in my life, but also nothing at all. “So, here I am. Empowering myself.”
“Jesus, well, you don’t look lit up or nothing.” He elbowed me. “Get it? Lit up? Empowering! I’m just kidding. Anyway, Amy, seriously, what kinda bike you got in mind?”
“Big,” I said. “I want a big bike that basically rides me.” I spotted a model that looked perfect. “Hey, what about that one?”
“That?” He said. “That’s a kiddie bike. I was just about to put a banana seat and bell on that.”
He wheeled out a heavy, copper colored number, that was essentially a barcolounger on wheels. The frame was thick and sturdy, the width of a heavy, kosher salami. To my delight, the seat on the bicycle was huge, like a cushion you would sit on after extensive hemorrhoid surgery.
“Whaddya think?” He said. “This baby’s seat is almost as big as my ex-wife’s.” He punched me in the shoulder. “See everyone’s got exes.”
“Listen, I’d love a seat bigger than your ex-wife’s, trust me,” I said. “But I need it lower.”
“Amy, It’s practically a sled.”
“I would just feel better if my feet could touch the ground.”
“Your feet okay but not your knees!” he said.
A group of people had congregated, all waiting for Leon to help them. There was a stony-faced couple who seemed dressed not for a ride around Long Island, but The Tour De France, in tight, yellow spandex outfits that said “Cinzano” in several places and little paper caps that resembled the ones cafeteria workers wear. They stood next to a woman whose fidgety son pointed to me and asked, “Mommy, Mommy, why is that lady taking so long? She’s taking too long!”
He threw a rock at a squirrel.
The woman, who was wearing a loose jacket made of hemp, knelt down next to her son, and immediately I could tell she was an explainer. “Sweetheart,” she said. “We can’t throw rocks at squirrels because the squirrel doesn’t like it. See how fast it’s hobbling up the tree. It’s scared and it wants to cry. You wouldn’t like it if someone threw a rock at you, would you?”
He threw another one.
“Amy, try this out,” Leon said, tapping the seat. “I’ll hold onto the back.”
“Great,” I said, nodding a little too rapidly.
Standing there, I had no idea of what to do -- peddle, then push off? Push off, then peddle? I was lost. Not knowing the simplest steps to riding a bicycle lead me to think about all the other things I assumed I’d know at thirty-five, but didn’t. I liked to consider myself a late bloomer, meaning someone who would eventually, however late, come into bloom. Although when and if I would bloom remained a mystery. I wished I knew how to speak a foreign language fluently. I had always fantasized about being able to argue in Italian, flailing my hands over my head while yelling “Basta! Paolo!” I wished I knew how to cook a simple roast chicken well or that I had read “The Brothers Karamazov,” or, “The Idiot,” whose main character sounds like someone I could relate to. I mentioned this to a friend, telling her that I often felt overwhelmed by all the things I didn’t know, to which she replied. “Don’t know anything? Don’t know anything?” Her tone was enthusiastic and cheerful. “You’ve been in therapy forever. You know so much about yourself!”
“Okay, Amy, I can tell you’re freaked out,” Leon said. “I’ll hold onto the front and the back and jog alongside you. Better? We’ll go up and down right along here.”
He motioned ahead to a short path, which lead to the picket fence of the house next door. He didn’t understand that these few feet were terrifying to me. I considered the picket fence, and the words “call 9-1-1!” and “she’s impaled!” came to mind. I took a deep breath. And then another. And another. In a second I was going to need a paper bag.
Leon took hold of the bike. “Ready, Amy?”
“Mommy, that lady’s hands are shaking..” The little boy said. “They’re like Grandpa’s hands.”
I looked down at my hands, trying to steady them unsuccessfully. I read somewhere that the only reason people have trouble learning things when they’re older is they have more fears and complexes. Part of what lead me to the bike store this morning was my great desire to be less afraid. I was determined to take more chances. I had often thought that if I had to choose a slogan to describe my approach to life, it would be “I fear, therefore I am.” As a child, I was always the kid who wore a life preserver just to dangle my feet in the shallow end. I thought about a guy I dated recently, a correspondent for the BBC. When I asked him when had been afraid in his life, he paused, touching the short beard he had grown on assignment in Afghanistan. “Well, I suppose it was when we entered Somalia as the Americans were arriving and our van got caught in a firefight between dueling warlords.” His voice was chatty -- he had used the same tone when describing how much he liked the soft pretzels at Coney Island. “That or when I got shot in Kosovo,” he added.
“Leon,” I finally managed to say. “Leon, Leon. I need a moment.”
My sister, Holly, and her seven-year-old son, Eric, arrived. They had just bought him a new helmet. I wondered if someday I’d ride as well as my seven-year-old nephew. He had just gotten his training wheels off.
“How’s it going,” she said.
“Leon has the patience of a saint,” I said. I moved closer to her so I could whisper.
“Listen, I’m going to put the bike in the back of the car and learn to ride it when we get home,” I said. “I’ll be less nervous. It’ll be private. I think that’s the best idea.”
My sister smiled. “The car’s not here. Dad left. We’re riding home.”
“Wait. Riding home? It’s almost ten miles.”
“That’s the only way you’ll learn,” she said.
“On the highway?” I said, pointing to the road in front of the Bike n’ Hike. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“You just need to get out there,” she said. “If you get Dad to pick you up, you’re never going to learn.”
“That’s not true,” I said, knowing she was absolutely right.
“Listen, I know you. You’ll ride around the block tomorrow. You’ll fall a couple of times and that will be it.”
This was typical of our relationship. My sister pushed me; I pretended to hate it, but secretly thought it was good for me. I knew she was right, even though I didn’t want to admit it.
The man in the Cinzano shirt was now poking his finger at the Explainer, whose son was kicking the skinny tires of what appeared to be an extremely expensive, custom made Italian bicycle.
“It’s not a matter of opinion,” the man said. “Two plus two equals four and we were here first.”
Leon turned to me.
“Honey, this mob is ready to blow. What’s it gonna be?”
I regarded the picket fence in front of me and remembered crashing through the plastic barricade in Central Park twenty-five years ago. I thought about all the times Josh suggested a bike ride and I had to say no.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
Soon Leon was saying “Careful out there! Don’t break anything!” I laughed loudly, and then, when he wasn’t looking, secured the strap on my helmet.
My sister and her son were already so far ahead I couldn’t see them anymore. I was standing at a traffic light debating whether to walk across the wide intersection toward the Shell station on the opposite corner or attempt to ride. I was joined by a heavy couple in their fifties, who, I imagined, had recently met with a cardiologist who said if they didn’t get a little exercise soon, they’d both be dead within a year. The man was wearing shiny, warm up pants, white loafers and a gold pinky ring. The woman had a piled, black bouffant -- more durable than my helmet – that looked as if it weighed almost as much as her bike. What I loved about them was that they seemed as thrilled as I was just to be riding at all. I felt as if they understood the peddle, peddle, push mentality. The woman turned to me and said, in a voice that only a lifetime of smoking could produce, “Gorgeous day, right?” And for a moment, I felt as if the three of us were struggling together. That is until the light turned green and they glided forward without me. A minivan slowed to let me pass, the driver, honking gently, waved her hand to let me know she was giving me the right of way. I smiled and then, panicking, pantomimed a cramped leg, shaking my foot wildly. I even grabbed my calf and began massaging. It was not pretty, especially when I realized no one was even watching. When the minivan was long gone, I jogged my bike across the road.
I began to worry that I might not make it home -that buying this bike was a stupid idea. I worried I made a huge mistake when I decided to stay in New York and take a break from television writing. I had a career and a direction and now what did I have? Grease smears all over my inner thighs. I worried I’d never fall in love again. And even as cars honked at me and I actually did have something to worry about – namely getting called “a fucking idiot!” one more time, I told myself not to give in to my fears and the voice that said, “You’re too chicken for this.”
I thought about what I wanted to change in my life. I wanted to change the way I spoke to myself. I wanted to start talking to myself like one of those iconic football coaches, who say, “You can win this! You can do anything!” Which lead me to ask, as I often did, how much can you change about yourself after a certain age? I mean, really change. Can you go from being a pessimist to an optimist? From a wallflower to a ballsy broad? It’s often taken for granted that your early years and teens are essentially a dress rehearsal for the rest of your life. If you do well, you’re on your way to a great performance; If you do badly, don’t worry, it’s not the real show. Recently, I’d even heard people refer to their twenties as part of their youth, as in, “I got married when I was twenty-three. I was just a kid.” But, it’s often assumed that by your thirties, you are who you are. I found that interesting since I felt as if I only really started growing up at thirty-one. My mother’s cancer and subsequent death played a big part. My whole life she called me her "little girl." I think the younger she treated me, the younger it made her feel, and I was happy to oblige. It was only when she got sick and allowed me to take care of her, when her stroke turned her mind into that of a child’s, that I became an adult.
This was the kind of thing I thought about as I rode. I remembered something my friend, Ray, told me when I said I finally wanted to learn how to ride a bike. He was a mountain biker who loved to point out the raised scars on his legs and explain how he got them. “I got that one when I missed a turn and went down a hill when I was riding in the woods at midnight. And I got this one was when I hit a barbed wire fence riding in the woods at midnight.”
He looked down at his legs, regarding his wounds.
“Not to get all Buddha and shit on you, but I like the whole idea that if you look too far ahead or too far behind you’ll crash. You have to find the right balance on a bicycle or you’ll fuck your shit up.”
I peddled now, trying to look just ahead of me. I was trying to stay in the bike lane, or at least in the vicinity of the bike lane. To my great surprise, I was actually moving, unsteadily yes, my handlebars were jerking sharply left, then right. And before I knew it I was down. On the ground. On my ass.
“Are you okay?” My sister said riding up.
“I am,” I said, slapping the dust off my pants. “Although I think I might have broken my ass.”
She helped me up. “Ame, when you ride, you have to stay within the white line or it’s really dangerous,” she said. She pointed to a thick painted dividing line, calling attention to the generous area between it and the sidewalk.
“Stay within the line?” I said. “I’m trying to stay within New York state.”
She looked across the intersection at her son, who was riding in circles. “He’s dying to go. Honestly, will you be okay?”
“Of course I will,” I said. “And besides, I can always walk. After all, it’s only ten miles.”
“Just stay within the line. I’ll keep checking on you,” she said and rode off.
“See you in six to eight hours,” I yelled after her.
I passed a tony petting zoo where children named “Ainsley” and “Trip” petted goats that were checked daily for mange. Further down the road, I went by a market that sold cartons of seven dollar orange juice. My skills had improved slightly in the last hour, and I was able to do three wheel revolutions before I lost my balance and threw my feet to the ground. My hip was throbbing from my fall, and in addition, I had wide, spongy blisters on my palms from clutching the handlebars so tightly.
One of the things that lead me to consider bike riding was that for the past year I’d taught “spinning” classes part-time. Teaching “Spinning,” which uses stationary bicycles to simulate a rigorous ride outdoors was not as easy as I imagined, less physically than because you have to field questions like, “Amy, instead of playing “Sympathy For the Devil” during the warm up, could you play my daughter’s version of `Somewhere Over The Rainbow’? She’s nine. We sent her tape to Ben Vereen, and he loved it!” Then there were all the times I felt compelled to lie, like when a group of orthodontists asked my advice about their forty mile bike trip upstate to see the foliage. And while I never exactly said I had done it, I did say “it’s a great ride,” never mentioning that my experience was from the inside of a car.
In any case, all the spinning had made my legs very strong -- not lean, I don’t come from lean people, I come from Russian women whose ankles were even thicker than their mustaches and who welcomed wearing eight skirts in summer. “You are strong, you can do this,” I told myself as I careened toward a parked Mercedes convertible.
A young woman in a crocheted bikini top and acid washed jean shorts, emerged from the front seat. She studied her fender.
“Um, you hit our car,” she said, thickly. “And we weren’t even moving.”
She rubbed her long nail, done in a pale French manicure, along the tiny scratch. “This was, like, totally brand new,” she said.
Once again I was on the ground. My second time in less than an hour. I must have taken quite a spill because now my water bottle was smashed in half, and I was lying in a pit of gravel next to an active set of railroad tracks.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I realized my helmet was askew, halfway off my head actually, and my pants, stretchy and black, were covered with dirt, and had big rips, as if they’d been chewed along the bottom.
The man at the wheel had a waxy chest and wore a ropy gold chain around his neck, a money sign scattered with small diamonds, which swayed as he spoke. “Forget it,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I was still gathering myself: my helmet, the remains of my bottle. I stood slowly, lifting up my brand, new gigantic bike with its enormous seat.
“No way,” she said. “It’s scratched.”
He widened his eyes and jerked his head toward me. For a moment she seemed confused, until she looked closer and suddenly her contempt turned to sympathy.
“Are you okay?” she yelled, articulating each word dramatically. “Are you alone?”
I was wondering if there was a group home nearby, and they thought I’d wandered off.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you.”
She got into the front seat of the convertible. “Well, you just be careful because --” she pointed to a car passing. “This is a busy road. With lots of cars. So stay within the white lines.”
The young, attractive couple drove off, nuzzling, as I sat picking bits of gravel out of my underwear.
It occurred to me that I was literally in this same position twenty-five years ago. It occurred to me I will never be Mindy Weinstein, the girl for whom things come easily. I heard Mindy was a local prosecutor with two children. I, on the other hand, was single, unemployed, and lying in a ditch. I got back on my bicycle. And almost immediately I fell off. I had seven miles to go, and I was limping but already I knew that tomorrow I would get on this bike again. I would pantomime my cramped leg. I would let people think what they would. Maybe I would work up to being able to go ten wheel revolutions before falling off, all the while telling myself, “Forward. Just go forward.”