Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  A few weeks before the big event, I began to short-circuit. I had mastered and added a new stunt to my uneven-bar routine—a handstand-pirouette on the high bar. Without warning, during practice, gravity reached up from the floor, clamped onto my limbs, and yanked me down. Time after time, I jumped upside down, turned on the top bar, and gripped my hands like talons around the wood, only to rip off at the bottom of my downswing and slam into a hard, tangled heap on the mat.

  The Wednesday before the meet, I pushed myself up from another crumpled landing and drew in a tight breath.

  “You okay?” Pat, my coach, popped her head out of her office door. The gym was empty and we were well past the dinner hour, but she had stayed on, agreeing to finish up some paperwork as I battled on for a few more tries. She had been coaching me for five years now, long enough to know I had a need to win and would push myself to the brink.

  I didn’t answer. My bones were fine and soft tissues attached, nothing twisted or wrenched, but something had lit fire to my left hand. Pat frowned and stepped through the office door toward me.

  I turned my palm upward, and there, in the center, was a fresh rip the size of a quarter glowing like a hot coal. Missing were several layers of skin and a hard-won callus, which must be hanging off the bar somewhere above me. Beads of blood oozed up through the only skin layer left intact.

  At any other time of the season, I would have scoffed at this injury, merely swabbing it with ointment and taking a few days off. Skin tears like this were a part of my swinging life. Usually, though, they happened early in the fall, when my palms were soft and unseasoned, and there was still plenty of time to heal before the first competition. In that moment, I stared at my bright raw hand and knew I was in trouble.

  “Go home,” said Pat. “I mean it. I don’t want to see you until Saturday.”

  For the next forty-eight hours, I moved inside a blur of dread and panic. A late spring snowstorm turned the roads and hills around my house hard and icy, then greasy with mud. Wrapping in layers, I went jogging anyway. Twice a day, I re-swabbed my hand with ointment and smothered it in gauze, then grimly went through tedious sets of sit-ups and leg lifts. My brain ran through my routines in an exhaustive, mindless loop. Both nights I jumped awake, startled and confused in the darkness of my room.

  The thought that I might spare myself and simply forfeit this meet never entered my mind. A tangle of reasons intertwined to make this so. I had both my ancestors’ hardscrabble genes and my father’s competitive, single-minded drive; I believed in the unspoken rule of athletes that whining made you a loser—the only injury that would have kept me from competing was a broken bone; and lastly, who would I be if not a champion? I had come of age as a winner in my family and also in my mind. It was my path to happiness and the way I helped my family. I was no longer sure how to be anything or anyone else.

  When Saturday dawned, I slogged into the gym and dropped my sports bag onto the bleachers. The vast room was clean and gleaming, the mats washed and the equipment carefully arranged, with judging chairs and scoring cards placed exactly so. People were trickling in.

  Unwrapping my bandage, I stared at the situation. Exposed was a pale layer of newly formed skin stretched over a dark pink underbelly. Appearing at my shoulder, Pat peered down at my palm and we both stood there for several moments.

  “Here’s the good news,” she said, finally. Her arms were full of score cards and clipboards for the judges. “Bars are your last event.”

  Halfway through warm-ups the stands were already packed and the doorways clogged with people. Shaky and muddled, I marked through my routines as best I could, favoring my palm and skipping warm-ups on the uneven bars. Hard-wrapped in a protective bandage of gauze and white athletic tape, my mummified hand swung like a club around my body. For the first time since I had scaled my first cottonwood tree, I felt like a clumsy, flightless human.

  Mercifully, my first event was vaulting, which I took as a sign that somehow luck was on my side. It was an all-leg event, requiring only a quick tap of the hands on the way by. To me, vaulting was almost playful, the equivalent of bounding off a diving board and floating free for a few milliseconds before gravity took hold. A handspring Yamashita was, in those days, a marvel in gymnastic circles, and I had a good one.

  Focusing adrenaline into my thighs, I shot down the runway and punched the springboard, soaring upside down. As I popped my hands off the horse I cringed, the sliver of pain shooting from my palm to my brain, and as I jack-knifed up to a V-sit in the air the world suddenly warped into a dangerous place. I was way off, my body rotating too fast and far, the floor zooming up to meet my face. My toes barely skimmed the ground as I ducked my head and rolled, bouncing my tailbone against the floor as the force hurled me off the end of the landing mat.

  A collective gasp whipped around the gym and the audience fell quiet. In the hushed silence, I collected my legs under me and stood up, shaken. My eyes found my mother’s face in the crowd: she was ashen, her hands cupped to her mouth. I had never crashed in competition. If I faltered, my mistakes were always slight and easily absorbed, amounting to little more than fraction of a deduction in my score. But this was altogether different; I couldn’t cover up this colossal botch.

  In the next few seconds of silence, an old part of me kicked in—the part that knew what to do in the midst of utter calamity. Facing the head judge, I presented to her and smiled, then rolled my eyes, as if this fiasco was nothing to me and I had crash-landed simply to add flare to these proceedings.

  The judge grinned. Laughter bubbled up from the audience, and applause broke out as I exhaled with relief and trotted back to the bench. I had salvaged some dignity. Still, my hand throbbed as if it had been sliced and stitched back together with a nail. Three more events lay ahead, including uneven bars, the most punishing one to my hands and the most likely to injure me seriously if I faltered.

  Passing up the cluster of my teammates, I climbed up to the second tier of bleachers where my mother and Barbara Ann were settled. For seven years my mother had parked herself on hard seats just like this all over the county, doing the math, adding up my winning scores.

  “Okay, hon,” she said, making space between her and Barbara Ann. “What can I get you? I have water and juice.”

  People were packed into the seats all around and there wasn’t much room. My mother handed me a cup of liquid, and Barbara Ann, with teary eyes, helped re-bandage my hand with ointment and an extra layer of gauze. My mother turned and agreed with someone behind us, “No, she’s no quitter. That’s for sure.”

  This respite was enough to help me face the next two events. I descended the bleachers and, though I was far from my best on balance beam and floor exercise, I managed to limp through and keep my scores in the high middle range. Normally, I’d be checking in with my mother to see how my scores stood overall, but part of me didn’t want to know. Bleary-eyed, I stared at the scoreboard and heard my coach call me over just before uneven bars.

  “All you have to do is get through this routine and you’ll still have a shot at winning all-around,” she said, handing me a block of chalk. “Don’t be Superwoman; skip the handstand; no twist on the dismount. Go.”

  Hands and thighs smothered in chalk, I faced the uneven bars and felt space stretch out in front of me. The fact that I might not be able to stand the pain and hang on meant I would let my teammates down and, worse, I would let my family down. I could not bear to see my mother deflated.

  The audience fell quiet as I punched the board and sailed over the low bar, reaching for the high bar and the fire that would ignite in my hand. The instant I gripped, pain seared through me, and I sucked in my breath. This wasn’t good; I had to breathe or I wouldn’t make it to the end. I released my hands, dropping to the low bar, exhaling as I gripped and clutched. Somewhere halfway through this swing and before the next, I leaned in toward the pain, long enough for my body to remember itself, to assume a deeper flood of hormones. In the next few
seconds the pain sighed, enough to turn my brain to the rhythm of swing and release, loft and loop. When the moment came for the handstand, I did not hesitate but bounded with both feet off the low bar, drove them to the sky into the handstand and switched my grip at the top for the downswing.

  There is a moment every athlete, dancer, and artist knows, when all of a sudden, your ability is in your own hands—it’s yours and no one else’s. Later, a friend would tell me that the Catholics call this charism—when the spirit within you becomes you.

  As I whooshed under the bar, I no longer felt I was on my way down, but on my way through to the next limb, softly catching and rebounding. My body swung past the floor, my pelvis stretched into the low bar, folded around it, and popped off into my full twisting Hecht dismount on the other side.

  For a few split seconds I hovered in the air, feathered and weightless. The floor was miles below me, my feet exactly where they should be. I had gained back my loft and all of my parts and limbs were flying together. This time, when I touched down, the joy and applause from the audience belonged to me.

  Chapter 20

  Chant from Another World

  One late spring afternoon when I was seventeen, in my last semester of high school, I pushed back from my bedroom desk, dazed from four hours of homework. I had at least another hour before I could quit, but first, I had to quiet my body. My stomach had been roaring for the last hour, daring me to feed it. Snacks for me rarely involved anything remotely solid. I was bent on staying thin for college competition, meaning that only a sugarless can of TAB would do, slowly sipped until dinnertime, and if that didn’t depress my appetite, I had a drawer full of sugarless Trident.

  Our house in Willowbrook was designed in such a way that I could stand at one end of the bedroom wing and see all the way to the other end of the house. The instant I stepped into the hallway, I spotted my mother several yards away on the long stretch of stone tiles running to the kitchen. She was utterly still, her gaze fixated on something outside the sliding glass doors, her expression an odd mixture—not of alarm and agitation, but a kind of wistfulness and detached wonderment.

  “What is it? What’s out there?” I called out, quickening my pace. I imagined some impossible wonder, like a polar bear or wildebeest, moseying across our back yard.

  She didn’t respond or seem to have any notion I was there. I kept coming, growing more puzzled and alarmed with every step. As I reached the floor-length drapes, I caught and pulled them back, craning my neck to follow her gaze.

  There, at the edge of the patio, in full sunlight, was my fourteen-year-old brother. His torso lurched to and fro as he rocked from foot to foot, knees locked and legs rigid, both hands beating the air, his brown hair rustling softly about his face. I couldn’t hear through the glass but knew well enough that he was whispering and whistling in a kind of wild mimicry of the wind.

  To one of our scant neighbors, my brother would seem to be having a seizure, an epileptic fit of some sort. But, in fact, Roddy was flying high. He was in windy ecstasy, and if given the choice, he’d stay right where he was for the rest of his life.

  “Mother, why don’t you stop him?” I asked, appalled.

  There was a tacit agreement in my family that we wouldn’t let Roddy buzz on like this—partly because the longer he went on the harder it was to get him calmed again, and partly because he might accidentally trip over a chaise longue and whack his skull on a weight-bearing pole. Immersed in one of his highs he was utterly oblivious to any solid object or person nearby. The instinct to step in and stop him, to protect him from himself, was embedded in my bones.

  In all honesty, another reason spurred me to step in and stop him—something deeper and more complex. I didn’t know at the time, and wouldn’t until I separated from home, that his habits unnerved me. Though I had come of age with my brother’s spastic reveries, still, his obsessive twitching in my peripheral vision never failed to alarm me. Fitful messages darted straight to my amygdala and relayed that all was not well, something needed to be attended to, pills had to be taken, reasoning restored. He was acting as if he were suffering a psychotic break or a dangerously bad trip. It was the kind behavior wired to raise red flags and signal EMTs.

  Still, I hesitated with my hand on the door handle. My mother’s odd behavior was more disturbing to me than my brother’s. I had never seen her observe Roddy this way, unaffected by his behavior, as if she were his doctor or therapist, rather than his mother. In some deep place it chilled me. I wanted to snap, What are you looking at? But sensing some new surrender in her, I kept silent. Instead, I turned to see what she was seeing.

  From here, the scene appeared like a far-off dream. Roddy leaped and moved in ways I couldn’t fathom. As much as I had trained to flip and fly, controlling my spin and plugging into the forces of physics and gravity, I moved like a being with mass and blood. I could not move like Roddy, who was more like an element, like a thousand threads of electricity.

  Not that I hadn’t tried. Before Barbara Ann had left for college, I had walked into her room expecting to find her sorting and stacking laundry, but, instead, caught her flailing about.

  “What are you doing?” I screeched with delight, relieved as always for a reason to laugh in our dour household. She looked wild and ridiculous.

  “I’m trying to be Rod,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “But what on earth for?”

  “Why not? Join me.”

  I did. Scooching the bureau to make room, I launched into my best effort, whacking my knuckles on the corner of the bureau and knocking the lamp. Thirty seconds in, my skull cracked against Barbara Ann’s and we both sank to the floor, holding our heads and whispering ow, ow, ow. It came to me that Roddy never injured himself like this; he flailed in any space, closed or open, indoors and outdoors, without collision.

  Now, on this side of the patio glass, I pondered the inner life of this boy who was my brother, rocking, flapping, repeating whispery shreds of e-e-e-e-e. If I were inside him, would I be in the midst of a glorious hallucination? Scores of young people were altering their brains right then, in 1970, spurred on by Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg—brash upstarts who preached tripping as a creative act, a doorway to a higher consciousness. At seventeen, I was trying to make sense of this, the idea that my brain, any brain, held altered rooms of reality. One only had to find the key. Was this what my brother had: an infinite ring of keys?

  Once, as a child, I had played a popular game designed to alter the brain. Surrounded by fifth-grade girls in the restroom where we couldn’t be seen, I blew my lungs into large balloons, exhaled hard, inhaled again, and held my breath, bearing down. Greta, a robust girl who was the first of us to develop breasts, clutched me around my stomach and cinched my organs. The world spun magnificently, a delirious and delicious rush that flooded my limbs and choked off my consciousness. Thousands of bubbles shivered under my skin, quivered up my nose, flooded my brain. A frothy joy buoyed me as I floated to the ground. Awakening on the floor, I saw faces above me. The air was full of whispering and awe. I wanted to do it again.

  Now, I felt an urgency to stop it all. Timothy Leary frightened me. I thought of the brain as a precious, vulnerable thing, prone to damage. Sliding the door open, I stepped out into the spring air just as my brother emitted a round of hissing sounds. His whisperings were like a chant from another world, a foreign code of frequency, short-circuiting circuitry—a way of being in another dimension only he understood.

  “Rod.” I said again, reaching for his arm, “Rod!”

  My touch made him flinch, enough to break him from his spell. Instantly, he came to rest, as if I’d pulled a wire and disintegrated his current. For a slit of time, my fingers tingled like tuning forks and, as their resonation died, I felt a wisp of loss. How could I have known there would come a day when I would miss the passion of his wild gyrations? When not even the wind would excite him?

  “Come on now,” I said in a feather-light voice. “Let�
��s go in and have a Coke. Would you like that?”

  As I turned Rod toward the door, my mother’s catatonic gaze met mine. Something in the measure of her lips, her complacent smile, spelled out submittal, a kind of giving in, edged with loneliness. She was still a young woman at thirty-nine, petite and attractive, with lushly dark hair and refined, wrinkleless features. But she was also a mother of two daughters who were leaving her, whisking off to college for an intellectual life that had been interrupted for her and had died when she married. Barbara Ann had disappeared to Colorado State College two years before, and within a few months I, too, would abandon this house, hop on a plane, and fly two thousand miles to the University of Massachusetts: my new life, fueled by ambition and goals and buoyed by a scholarship. My mother, on the other hand, was looking at long stretches of days in a secluded prairie home with her son, who was not going on, who would not apply to college, find a mate, or start a family.

  I felt my mother acquiescing, and suddenly, I knew why she had birthed another baby. My younger sister Camela (Cami), born two years before—as Barbara Ann went out the door—had supposedly come as a surprise. Now I wondered. I couldn’t know that, shortly, my mother would become pregnant yet again and I’d answer the phone in my college town apartment to learn that she had delivered a baby boy. My new brother, James Owens, would bring her a happiness she hadn’t felt since her wedding day. His birth would be the reason she finally dried her tears.

  On the patio, I gently but firmly steered Rod to the door. Like the sibling I was, I had an overdeveloped sensitivity to staring eyes, and right then, some inkling made me glance back over my shoulder. Sure enough, up the hill, where a large house jutted out over the rocks, a pair of large-lensed black eyes stared down at me. In the glare of the sunlight I couldn’t see who held those binoculars, but I knew nevertheless. The Armistead boy, a teenager my age, stood poised before his family’s massive picture window and, assuming he was hidden, was taking in the show.