Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  Now, sitting on the runway, I longed to shed my bra and vowed I would do so the minute we got into the air. Come on, I thought. What are we waiting for? A stewardess appeared with a load of magazines in plastic covers and I chose Ms., flipping through the pages to distract myself. After another few minutes, each one stretching before me like an hour, I lifted my eyes and gasped. There, coming down the aisle, was my father, grim faced. He looked as if he was going to strike me.

  “Get up,” he said, his tone ugly. “You’re coming home.”

  My stomach roiled. I stared at him. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer and, expressionless, waited as I unstrapped my seat belt and gathered my things. I stood up and stepped into the aisle, queasy and weak-kneed. The cabin was deadly quiet as I made my way down the aisle and to the exit. Somehow, my father had found me out in time to stop the plane.

  On the way home, he didn’t answer my pleas for explanation, and by the time we arrived back home, I was a mess of nerves, chagrin, and indignation. Without a word, my mother handed me a letter as I came through the front door. It was a late birthday card from Carla, my so-called roommate. Inadvertently, she had put the wrong return address, the one that was her true address, not the one she and I were supposedly going to share. My parents threatened to take away my tuition and pull me out of college. I had a partial scholarship but it was not enough to cover my tuition and expenses; they had the power to keep me from school. They were trying to protect me, to keep me from ending up pregnant and abandoned, but they were treating me as if I hadn’t already turned into a woman, as if I hadn’t separated and left my childhood behind.

  Ironically, my parents believed that keeping me from a college education would keep me from an early pregnancy, when the opposite was more likely. Not to mention that I’d be stuck going nowhere. I didn’t know at the time that I was living the plight of women in the 1970s—pushing hard against my family’s mixed messages to study hard, go to college, make good grades, but only to honor your father’s good name and also to capture a husband. Not for your own aspirations. Don’t expect to own your own destiny.

  I didn’t bend. Like the young women of that era, I straddled the chasm of sexism and feminism, the old and the new, and did what I had to do. I lied. I stuck to my story, insisting Carla had made a mistake: that in fact the address on the envelope was her old address, not our new one—an honest mistake. Carla rallied and agreed to talk to my parents on the phone, confirming her mistake. A week later, I boarded the plane again, and this time, I got off the ground. Climbing above the clouds and crossing the continent had never been so pleasurable, the flight so marvelous. I vowed never to get caught out again.

  Before the summer was over, I did the one thing I knew would guarantee I never had to go home: I got engaged. Part of me sensed this was a bad idea, swapping my dependence on my parents for dependence on a husband. Not that Matthew and I weren’t in love; we were, quite madly so. But in truth, I was not ready to marry. Though I wouldn’t admit it to myself, I needed to breathe, to feel what it was like to answer only to me. But I was too young to realize this at the time. Since my mother had been married at eighteen, and Barbara Ann at nineteen, I told myself twenty was plenty old enough. But I was wrong.

  A few months before my wedding date, I was itching to get out of the small town of Amherst in the hot summer months, a deadly quiet town whenever the university closed down. Through the gymnastic grapevine I learned of a teaching job at a booming gymnastics camp in State College, Pennsylvania. I jumped at it, my first real salary; as a young liberated woman I was anxious to make my own way. Though the job meant I’d leave Matthew behind in Massachusetts for the summer, the alternative was to tediously assist him with office tasks as he worked on his graduate dissertation. Not only was the work excruciatingly boring, it meant I was under Matthew’s wing. He was already my coach and would soon be my husband; I didn’t want him to be my boss. Had I been able to see my younger self, I would have realized I was already chafing against the confines of a traditional relationship. At twenty, given my nature, my Southern Baptist upbringing, and my tamped-down childhood, I was primed to resist any thwart to my freedom.

  The camp, on the other hand, supplied me with a paragon of free spirit. The gymnasium, a converted rustic barn in the middle of an Amish farm field, was a few hundred feet from a swimming pool, bordered on one side by three trampolines sunken in the ground. Cabins dotted the path from barn to pool, full of starry-eyed young gymnasts. Classes for children ran all morning and afternoon, and in addition to teaching non-stop, I supervised one of the cabins and spent all day Sunday greeting incoming campers, touring them around the grounds, and helping them settle into their cabins.

  By evening I was exhausted, but the hours between dinner and darkness were the most exciting of the day: the barn and all of its equipment turned into a playground for staff, no campers allowed. We put on our knee wraps, hand guards, and the barest shreds of clothing, and wowed each other with impossible moves. Lubricated by adrenalin and the hot night air, we egged each other on, bent on outdoing one another, not just with skill but also with daring. Our bodies were such well-oiled machines that we felt invincible, capable of challenging the forces of physics and coming out unscathed.

  On one of those evenings, three weeks into the camp’s first session, I found myself scaling a tower of mats up to the barn ceiling. The thick heat of summer wrapped around me and sweat clung to my skin. I was twenty feet up, having just accepted a dare to dive off the cross beam into a crash pad below. Several others had already taken this plunge, all males, one of them crazy enough to have climbed even higher until he reached the rafters. But only one female had attempted it so far. A few moments before, my teammate, Ellie, had balked up on the beam, reversed her steps, and climbed back down. Now it was my turn.

  The cross beam was a rustic wood, barely milled, shellacked to keep from splintering. I stepped onto the slender surface and felt my way to the center where I stood and pondered the situation. This is nuts, I thought, observing what everyone else in the room already knew.

  I was too high up to simply lean forward and dive straight toward the mat, ducking into a roll at the bottom. The momentum of the fall would break my neck. Instead, I would have to push off and stiffen my body up and out into a swan dive, then tip like a wooden plank, rotating just enough during the fall to land, flat-backed, on the mat. That was the only way I could protect my spine. If I miscalculated, I could snap a vertebra.

  The barn fell quiet, the room taking on a curious, amused air. A cluster of sweaty faces looked up at me, expectant. One of them was Matthew’s. He had missed me enough to make the long trip down and stay the weekend, the first of several times he would come to visit me. Now he was enjoying this thoroughly; the thrill of it, the audacity. He made no move to stop me. He knew me well enough. If he said anything, I wouldn’t heed him. I felt an urgency to go through with this, to step into the bravado of men. It was the Seventies, and women were pounding down doors, proving their mettle. We were not at the point where we could be females in this male domain; we had to be male, to play by their rules, to come up or down to their level. Ellie had already chickened out; my doing the same thing would prove that the world and my parents were right: that deep down, women were inferior.

  Okay then, I said to myself. This is going to happen. Turning inward, I felt the length of my spine, from my skull down to my tailbone. I pictured myself airborne, felt how it would feel to drive my heels up behind my head just enough and slowly tip one hundred and eighty degrees to a dead man’s landing.

  Exhale, inhale, slight give in the knees. Push off.

  Suddenly, I was airborne, without any way to stop myself. I snapped both arms out like a pair of wings, tightened every strip of bone and muscle, fused my vertebrae, pointed my feet, drove my heels up behind my head and rotated, ever so slightly, closing both eyes, suspended in one glorious, aerodynamic free fall.

  Wham! My heels, thighs
, shoulder blades, and skull slapped the mat at the same exact moment. The room erupted into shouts and applause. I opened my eyes. Matthew’s face was right above me, his eyes full of relief, his handsome mouth flashing a pleased and possessive smile. I clasped his offered hand and leaped up beside him, and for a few moments we stood together, absorbing the lights, the ionized air, the hot headiness of our supple youth. Everything lay before us.

  Chapter 22

  Falling

  In my third year of college competition, I suddenly began freezing, midair. Kinesthetically I was lost, torqueing and flying blindly, bailing and crashing without knowing why. I no longer knew up from down and failed to sense the ground until it came rushing up to meet me. I slammed into it over and over, each time as stunned as ever.

  “For the love of Pete, if you can’t follow through, scratch. Go sit on the bench and let somebody take your place!” Matthew hissed at me during the warm-ups for a high-stakes meet against the French Olympic team. He had just seen me balk in a full-twisting back flip and had lunged in to grab my flailing body. As soon as he put me on my feet, he said, “Get off the floor.”

  His tone felt hot, like smelted metal on my face. He had never spoken to me in that way but I didn’t protest. Hesitation in the sport of gymnastics can be deadly, not only for yourself but also for your spotter. I hung my head and said nothing as we stood behind the bleachers and he dressed me down. We were both embarrassed for me. I was no longer a novice but I was behaving like one. I had prided myself on being the cool performer, the one who hit routines nine times out of ten and executed the difficulty with form and grace. That was the gymnast my husband knew and admired and had fallen in love with—not this one, this unpredictable flake.

  In the year leading up to that meet, I had developed the worst type of injury, a chronic one—the type that never heals. My inflamed left shoulder socket was likely due to how I’d been formed before birth, a tendon sheath that was tighter on that side. My tendon fired back and forth like a piston through that squeezed opening, heating and swelling like a boiled sausage. It wasn’t built for the relentless yank and pull of the uneven bars, or the repetition required to master a new trick or strengthen the body. All that friction triggered nodules, little calluses, sprouting along the insides of the sheath, turning the surface into sandpaper.

  I knew very little about how pain worked deep inside the brain. In my early days of competition, I had broken a toe, sprained both ankles, hard, and once been casted and fitted with crutches. But none of those injuries had stayed with me. I healed, tossed the crutches aside, and went back to training as if my joints and sinews were springy and new.

  Now, I couldn’t escape the pain. It had settled in my body like an organ, an ever-present mass that lived in my shoulder, sprouting tentacles that reached deeply into my brain and caused me to lose my bearings. Later, I would learn how the nervous system reacts to chronic injury and what the brain does to protect the body. It dials up the heat, sending out hotter and hotter signals so the body will be forced to stop and heal, until even the strongest of wills cannot override the pain.

  The summer before, my shoulder had shouted in protest. I awoke to a searing heat in my left arm. Matthew and I were living in a cabin on the Woodward Gymnastics Camp grounds; he was the camp director, and I, the girls’ program director. My shoulder had been bothering me off and on, a throbbing ache that worsened as I lifted and pushed campers through back handsprings and caught them as they flew off trampoline in wrong directions. I had begun to live on anti-inflammatories, taking them like vitamins, and in the evenings, I retreated into our cabin and iced my shoulder as Matthew directed the night events of the camp. Naively, I assumed I could keep going on this way.

  But that morning, in the cramped cabin loft, I shifted on the futon and gasped. A hot-white current shot from my shoulder socket in every direction, crackling down my arm and up into my throat.

  Matthew stirred beside me. “What is it?” he said, wearily, sitting up. We had both grown tired of this persistent pain of mine and the despondency that came with it.

  “A knife,” I said, wincing, holding my arm against my ribs, “in my shoulder.”

  The pitch of my voice, its bare rasp, must have told him this was urgent. Hastily, he slipped on sweat pants and told me to stay still; in a moment he was on the phone, arranging substitutes for my morning classes and an appointment with the doctor.

  That afternoon, the doctor informed me I was having an acute attack of tendinitis, a so-called frozen shoulder. The doctor shot me full of cortisone and put me in a sling, ordering me to keep my arm still at all times. No spotting and absolutely no working out. Immobility was the best and only solution.

  In the months that followed that first attack, I lurched from remedy to remedy, searching for a way to keep training and competing. Shortly after college classes started up again, I had driven with Matthew to a clinic in Springfield and stretched out on a table, allowing a healer from China to insert needles into both of my shoulders, arms, and hands. Pinned to the table, I held still as he waved smoking herbs about my face. In those days, acupuncture was seen as hocus-pocus—an exotic phenomenon unsanctioned by the American Medical Association and not covered by college insurance. But I was willing to do or try anything. I was reaching my peak as an athlete and had only about a year and a half left in me. My youthful talent as a freshman was now fine-tuned and I felt in my bones that I was capable of winning nationals. I was coming into my own and I cared for my team. They were counting on me.

  On the way home from the acupuncturist, groggy from herbs, I fought to keep my eyes open and, once home, I fell into a deep sleep. Miraculously, within a few days, I could lift my arm above my head without a trace of pain, something I had not been able to do for months. Astonished and euphoric, I went right back to the gym. I didn’t understand that my injury was telling me to rest—that even though this treatment brought me relief it did not mean I was fixed. I couldn’t hear that it was time for me to step away from winning. Violating my part of the healing bargain, I dove back into training.

  All of this added up to this moment: me standing behind the bleachers with a tattered shoulder and a fed-up husband.

  “Be there in a minute,” Matthew called out to one of my teammates, who had stuck her head around the bleachers, wondering what on earth we were doing back there. I imagined them all looking for us, or at least looking for Matthew, whom they could still depend upon.

  He turned back to me. I looked down; my eyes stung. I didn’t have anything to say for myself and I had no idea how to recover my dignity. Two more teammates’ faces peered around the end of the bleachers. Matthew and I never held private conferences, never breached the professional line. Neither of us had ever brought our marriage into the gym.

  “Stay here and get a hold of yourself,” he said.

  I watched him walk away, his tall, broad-shouldered figure handsome in a dark blue sweat suit, long legs striding with confidence. As frustrated as he was with me, Matthew didn’t want me to quit. I knew this; he wanted me to go back to who I’d been. Recently, I had tried to sit out this last prestigious meet against the French Olympians, but he had talked me out of it.

  “Nah, you don’t really want to do that,” he had said, expertly stripping the white athletic tape and wrapping it around my ankle. I had just finished a twenty-minute whirlpool treatment for sore cartilage in both knees and was sitting on the physio table with an ice pack on my shoulder. Anyone coming into the room would have thought I’d been in a car accident.

  “Matthew, I’m tired.”

  “Of what?” His tone softened slightly.

  “Hurting,” I said.

  Silently, he smoothed the tape edges against my skin. He kept his eyes down, offering me, instead, his strong aquiline nose and fine high cheek bones, his thick dark hair. He put the tape back into the drawer. I sensed he was struggling as much as I was with this conundrum. This was the moment when I needed him to be my husband—to c
are for me more than the win.

  “Back off routines for the next few days,” he said, finally. “Do your strength work and step up the running. Get a lot of physio, hot packs, and ultrasound. Pace yourself. You’ll be ready to compete.”

  A dark tiny shadow moved through me: the thought that we might not make it. I looked down, forlorn, unconvinced, except for the sliver of me still listening.

  “The team needs you, Co,” he said, evoking the nickname he had given me.

  This swayed me. In truth, the team needed every one of us if we were going to win. We were not a big team, not like Springfield or Southern Illinois with a depth of fifteen to twenty ready gymnasts. We were only four all-around competitors with a handful of others backing us up on each event. My team couldn’t afford to lose my score.

  Now, huddled behind the bleachers, teary and smarting, I bent forward into a deep stretch, burying my face into my knees for several minutes, until my eyes stopped stinging. Then, slowly, I straightened up and began to crawl through the scaffolding under the bleachers to get to the opposite wall and the exit door. Small wonder Matthew had begun to turn his hopes away from me, shifting his attention to the healthier, younger freshmen, working with them extra hours, pushing them through vigorous strength work. His waning interest in me and my injuries was not lost on me. I felt helpless against this, betrayed by my body, disabled, envious of others who did not have my pain.