The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [31]
The home run. The father gone. The boy turning into man - he must have looked … beautiful.
That’s it.
That’s as far as I can go.
To go further into his story, it takes the air right out of my lungs as if I’d been swimming all night.
I do know his tongue was cut. When I look at my son and think of that I think I could kill a woman who would cut a boy’s tongue.
Before my father was my father he was a boy.
Just a boy.
Before I hated him I loved him.
How To Ride a Bike
WHEN I WAS 10 TO CHEER ME UP FROM MY DESPAIR OF my sister’s leaving, my father brought home a hot pink Schwinn with a banana seat and streamers coming out of the handlebars. I saw him pull it out of the trunk of the station wagon. I saw him wheel it up to the front porch. I saw him kick the kickstand and let her rest. The window a membrane between us.
I thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing I had ever seen - except for my green metal toy army jeep. Still. Its hot pink glory. Its streamers like hair. That big white banana seat. I gasped.
The thing was, however, I did not know how to ride a bike. Like at all. Scared of most things that required me to “do” something besides swim, I’d even forsaken trikes, their threewheeling menace not something I’d ever mastered. With trikes I’d flat foot the thing along, my failure disgusting my father enough to hide it away in the garage. So when I came outside to touch the hot pink ride, beautiful as she was, all I felt was terror. When my father said, “It’s time to learn to ride a bike,” my legs shook and my throat hurt.
He meant right then. He meant for me to get on and try right that second.
My mother stood in the doorway saying “Mike, she doesn’t know howah” in her southern drawl, but my father meant business.
“C’mon,” he said, and wheeled the bike around to face the street.
I felt the immediate sting of tears but followed anyway. Between terror and drawing his rage, I chose terror.
My father kicked up the kickstand and held the handlebars and told me to get on. I did. He pushed us forward slowly and told me to put my feet on the pedals. But the pedals seemed like giant befuddlements to me, and they were going around in a way I couldn’t understand, so my feet sort of interrupted them now and again like human clubs.
“Goddamn it, I said put your feet on the pedals.”
Fear gripped my little chest, but fear of his anger again won. I put my feet on the pedals and tried to follow them round and round, looking straight down.
Still holding the handlebars, and walking us forward, my father said, “Now look up and put your hands on the handle - bars. I put my hands near his - they looked like a doll’s hands next to the meat of a father’s. “I said look up, goddamn it, if you don’t look where you are going you are going to crash.”
Training wheels. Weren’t there such a thing? Hadn’t I seen them?
I put my hands on the handlebars. I looked up. My feet felt retarded - like heavy rocks going up and down. Then he let go of the handlebars and held on to the back of the bike. Briefly I wobbled and let go and tipped over. I fell knee first downward but he grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me upward. “Don’t cry, for christ’s sake,” he said. “You better not cry.”
Not crying, I could barely breathe.
We went through this routine up and down the street until the sun lowered. I remember thanking god for lowering the sun. Soon it would be dark, it would be dinner time, my mother would put plates out. I knew how to eat dinner.
But that was not what my father wanted.
On a pass close to the house, he turned me around and said, “Now we’ll try the hill.”
The hill was up the block from our cul-de-sac. I don’t have any idea what the true grade was - but in the car coming home from swim practice my mother used the brakes. At the top of the hill was my beloved