Maternity Leave

by Trish Felice Cohen

  “Yeah, it was my favorite movie in fourth grade. It’s good, you’ll like it.”

  “Man, I could sit out here on your deck all day,” Dad said.

  “You’re sixty, you own the company and you’re a month and a half out of tax season and still catching up. I say go for it, you can’t buy a minute.”

  “I think I will. I’m going to sleep in the hammock for a bit. Can you call and wake me at one-thirty? I have a meeting at two.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  I went out to go back to the office and realized Dad had parked behind me. I let him sleep and just drove over my lawn to get out. I returned to work and started to get out of my car, but I felt like something was off. Son-of-a-bitch! I forgot to put my belly back on. I drove back home.

  It was only one-twenty when I got home, so I decided to let Dad sleep for ten more minutes. I grabbed the belly from under the bed along with the maternity clothes I had worn to work that morning, changed and rushed back to the office. I was somewhat efficient for the rest of the afternoon to compensate for the time spent at the subrogation meeting and my long lunch. I was finalizing a letter to a client at three-thirty when I got a call from Dad.

  “Thanks for waking me,” he said.

  “Oh shit! Sorry.”

  “Lucky for you, Sonny woke me up right on time when a squirrel had the audacity to be in a tree.”

  “I told him to do that at one-thirty before I left. That’s why I didn’t call,” I said.

  “Hey,” Dad said. “I meant to ask you, when did you get the trampoline?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Why?” he said in his most judgmental voice.

  “They’re fun and you never got me one when I was a kid.”

  “That’s because they ruin your lawn and attract kids to come by and break their arms. Your insurance is going to cancel. How much did you spend on that thing?”

  “Less than on my new remote control car.”

  “You need therapy, Jenna, before you regress completely.”

  “Thanks. Bye, Dad.” That went better than expected.

  I called Danny and told him about my forced date with Sarah’s son Tony.

  “Ha. You really are lucky in love.”

  “I know, I have a gift.”

  “This is the beginning of the end,” said Danny. “It all comes crashing down from here.”

  “Have some faith. I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, I want to get out of here. Are you doing the St. Pete ride today?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’m meeting Travis and Jesus at my house at four.”

  “Great. Swing by my house at four-thirty and I’ll ride over with you guys. I’m going to finish up a few things here and take off.”

  I left work early to go to the 6:00 p.m. group ride in St. Petersburg. As I entered the elevator to go to the parking lot, I came face to face with Ryan Smith from Italian Fest. I thought of jumping out of the elevator, but that would be too obvious. Instead, I faced the other direction. He didn’t seem to notice me let alone recognize me. My face was completely flushed and my hair was damp by the time we parted ways on the first floor.

  I stopped shaking by the time I got to my car and was calm again when I pulled into my driveway at four-thirty. Prior to my pregnancy, I had to leave my office at five p.m. and kill myself to get to the start of the ride on time. But because of my “obstetrician appointment,” I’d left the office at four, enabling me to cruise over to St. Pete at a leisurely pace.

  I met Danny and two of our friends, Jesus and Travis, at my house and we rode our bikes over to St. Petersburg. Jesus and Travis are both married, but constantly flirting with me. It’s playful, though I have a feeling that, were I inclined, it would turn from playful to serious pretty quickly.

  “Hi, Mami.”

  Jesus is Cuban. He came to America twenty years ago and speaks English well, but with a strong accent. He calls me, and every other woman under the age of sixty, Mami and asks them to call him Papi. This seems to be a common request among Latino males, so even though I don’t understand why the Spanish name for “dad” has a sexual connotation, I’ve come to terms with the fact that it just does. I really hope female Latinos call their real fathers something else.

  “I told you, call me Papi,”

  “I think Papi is a step down from Jesus.” I always pronounce the J when addressing Jesus.

  “Why won’t you call me Papi? Don’t you like Cubans?”

  “Sure, they’re great sandwiches,” I replied.

  “No, the people!”

  Travis chimed in and said, “She likes the dark meat.”

  “No, no, no,” Jesus said, as oblivious to sounding racist as my grandmother. “You don’t date black people do you?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not even comfortable with you guys using our water fountains,” I said to Travis.

  Travis did a double take when I said that, then laughed and said, “You’re lucky you’re hot.”

  “I’m just kidding.” I said, hopefully unnecessarily. To be on the safe side, I offered him a sip from my water bottle.

  Instead of telling me not to worry about it or just taking a sip, Travis dumped it all over his neck and head to cool off, then gave the empty bottle back to me while cracking up.

  This blatant but harmless flirting is common in cycling, which is a predominantly male sport in spite of the shaved legs and Lycra shorts. Objectively, I’m attractive. However, the only reason I attract so much attention in cycling is because I’m one of a small handful of female cyclists in the Tampa Bay area who can actually hang with the fast guys. All of us get hit on, both playfully and seriously. Occasionally, I forget that I’m the only game in town and let the compliments go to my head. When this happens, Danny likes to remind me that cycling is not exactly beach volleyball.

  At the Tampa side of the Gandy Bridge, we met seven other cyclists and continued heading to St. Petersburg. The eleven of us continued at a conversational pace, though we took a time-out from talking to sprint to the top of the hill on the bridge. Technically, the “hill” is an incline on the Gandy Bridge that allows boats to pass under. However, in flat Florida, any encounter with any increasing gradient instigates a “king of the mountains’” competition. I beat everyone but Jesus to the top of the hill. I’m a good climber, but so is Jesus and he can wipe the floor with me on the sprint at the top. Fidel Castro had personally assigned an eleven-year-old Jesus to be a cyclist based on his superior muscle-tone and lung capacity. Even though he’s at least forty now, if not older, he’s been unchallenged as the best rider in Tampa since he defected here from Cuba in his late teens. Those commies know how to pick an athlete.

  We coasted down the hill and resumed talking. It was nice to head to St. Pete at a leisurely pace. If I didn’t have my fake doctor’s appointment, I’d be pedaling into the headwind as hard as possible in order to get to the start of the ride on time. Like clockwork, as I marveled at my luck, my tire went flat. Travis, Jesus and Danny stopped and waited for me as I started changing my flat.

  Technically, I know how to change the tube out of a flat cycling tire. However, it takes me forty-five minutes to complete the task instead of the usual three. Normally, Danny will change my flats for me, but he evidently didn’t want to look like my bitch in front of Travis and Jesus, because he just sat there and watched me fumble with it. After several minutes of watching me try to remove the tire from the rim, Danny said, “For God’s sake, this is like watching a monkey fuck a football! Give me that wheel.” A few minutes later, we were off and running with plenty of time to ride easy and conserve our energy until the start of the St. Pete Olympics.

  The St. Pete cyclists take their rides very seriously. Very few of them attend official races. There’s no need to when they treat their Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday group rides as fierce competitions. Once, I cut in front of a rider we call “MMA” to avoid being hit by a car. MMA, who easily avoided crashing, responded by calling me a
“stupid fucking cunt.” MMA got his nickname because it stands for mixed martial arts and he starts a fight two to three times on every ride, sometimes with cyclists, sometimes with motorists. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen fight in cycling shoes. It’s not an advantage, but he held his own. Even though I’m a girl, I would not put it past him to punch me in the face. Thus, while I don’t take his tirades personally, I try to avoid being within three bike lengths of MMA at all times.

  At five forty-five, we rode into the parking lot, where a good crowd had assembled. MMA was joined by “Muscles,” who made a beeline toward me. I rode directly into the ladies’ room to avoid him since a year of rejecting his advances has done nothing to curtail his enthusiasm for asking me out and turning everything I say into a sexual charged double entendre that makes absolutely no sense. “Muscles” a.k.a. “Steroids” a.k.a. “Festina,” is on steroids and proud of it. He has only one cycling kit, a Festina jersey and shorts modeled after the 1998 Festina cycling team. In 1998, one of Festina’s team cars was caught at a border crossing with over 400 pills in it just three days before the start of the Tour de France. The Festina team was not allowed to start the 1998 Tour. Three years later, the team disbanded. Nevertheless, Muscles is a loyal fan, wearing the kit daily and rarely washing it. After each ride, he changes out of his Festina outfit and into his personalized T-shirt, the front and back of which are adorned with photographs of himself posing in various body building stances wearing nothing but a banana hammock. Once the coast was clear, I came out of the bathroom, refilled my water bottles and rode to where the riders were congregating.

  Danny and I named Muscles and MMA, as we name everyone on the ride. Mostly because we’re assholes and the names are apt, but also because we don’t know their real names. I started riding with the St. Pete training ride with Danny about a year ago and being from Tampa, neither of us knew anyone on the ride. After many Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday encounters, we gradually met everyone on the ride in brief conversations during the warm-ups and cool-downs. Soon enough, we knew what everyone did for a living and all of their best jokes, but still not their names. Since it’s awkward to ask someone their name after you’ve known them for a year, neither of us ever bothered. Plus, we really don’t need their names. If we want to talk to someone, we’ll ride up next to them and start talking. The only reason we need their names is to talk about them behind their backs to each other.

  In addition to Muscles and MMA, there’s “Old School,” whose bike and kits are all from the 1960s; “Ivan Drago,” who looks like Rocky’s nemesis from Rocky IV; “Sunscreen,” who puts zinc oxide on his entire body so that he looks painted white; “OCD,” whose bike, and every component on it, are meticulously cleaned before every ride; “B.O.” who stinks so much that you can’t ride within three bike lengths of him without gagging; “Ned Flanders,” who looks like Ned Flanders from The Simpsons; “Slobber,” who spits at you as he talks; “Sprinkler,” who sprays a constant stream of sweat as he rides, regardless of the temperature; “Bra,” who is a guy, but wears a skin-tight triathlon midriff bearing shirt; “Sandspur,” who freaks out when anyone cuts through the grass to refill their water because he insists we’ll get sandspurs in our tires and get a flat; “Tighty Whity,” who wears underwear under his cycling shorts; and “Junk Miles,” one of many cycling personal trainers on the ride. I met Junk Miles when he told me that my training plan of riding from Tampa to St. Petersburg and back three times a week is nothing but junk miles, and that I’d be much faster if I paid him to coach me.

  My plan for the ride was the same as it has been for the past few months: to grow some balls and learn how to mix it up in the sprint. I was a month away from my professional cycling debut and if I wasn’t in a breakaway off the front at the time of the sprint, I regularly floated to the back of the peloton to avoid the crash that seemed sure to happen every time the pack of riders accelerated to between thirty-five to forty miles per hour within inches of each other. Sometimes the crash happened, but usually I just placed last in a clean sprint, not only behind the good sprinters, but behind the pack fodder that barely managed to stay in the peloton during the ride.

  The first sprint was just after a drawbridge. Jesus attacked up the hill as I knew he would, and I immediately jumped on his wheel. He jacked the pace up to thirty miles per hour on the incline and sped up to forty-five miles per hour on the descent. I stayed on his wheel up to the finish line and glanced behind me. No one else was in our draft; they were charging for us fifty yards back. Jesus sat up just before the sign that is the finish line and I sprinted past him with a smile on my face, letting him know that I understand that he’s the real sprint winner.

  Cycling has unwritten etiquette for group rides and races. It is not cool to sit on someone’s wheel for a mile, let them do all the work distancing the pack, then outsprint them when they’re tired. It is okay if the person is on the front burying themselves with the understanding that they’re leading out the sprint for the entire pack; in that case everyone can sprint. However, if it’s just you and another guy on a group ride, and the other guy did all the work, it is poor etiquette to sprint against him. However, if the same situation presents itself in a race, you can sprint against the other person who was dumb enough to lead out the last mile for you.

  The two sprints on the way back to St. Pete did not go as well. Not surprisingly, my sprinting skills did not miraculously develop overnight, and I had a hard time staying towards the front of the pack as it wound its way on flat fast roads around tight corners to the second and third sprint points. I started the sprint in the pack, but drifted far to the left so I’d have an out in the event of a crash. The problem was that the outskirts of the peloton were windier than within the pack, where there’s a draft on all sides. I came in a solid last place.

  Aside from my horrendous sprint, I rode superbly. My training was really beginning to pay off and I could tell I was stronger than I had ever been. However, no matter how strong I was, a professional team wouldn’t want me if they saw my name at the bottom of the standings every single time a race ended in a sprint finish, which was at least eighty percent of the time.

  On the way home, I asked Travis, Jesus and Danny if there was an easy trick to learn to sprint.

  Jesus said, “Let’s take her out to a field and play bumper bikes with her. Once she learns to fall she’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t want to learn to fall, I want to learn to sprint. Falls are going to happen and they’re going to suck no matter how much I train myself to enjoy crashing. I’d like to sprint well without worrying about crashing and I’d like to pick it up immediately, like when the Karate Kid learned karate by painting a fence and Rocky Balboa learned to box by catching a greasy fast chicken. Can’t I just do something slightly challenging and unrelated to cycling to learn to sprint, like watching television on my head or eating spaghetti through a straw?”

  Danny gave me a deadpan look and said, “I think being the bitch in a gang bang is good for sprinting in cycling. Wanna give it a shot?”

  “Sure Danny. You’re last,” I replied.

  “Fine with me,” he said, “as long as I’m in the rotation.”

  “Shut up, there will be no gang banging. I’m serious.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” Danny said.“Just relax.”

  Eighty-six miles and five hours after leaving my house, I arrived home. John, Julie and Jason were in the backyard jumping on the trampoline with the dogs, our new favorite activity. They put all of their dogs on the trampoline and bounced them in the air. John and Julie have four dogs: a rat-poo, which is a rat terrier mixed with a toy poodle, a yorkie poo, a poogle and my favorite, a shih-tzu poo. Their names are Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde. Combined, their four dogs still weigh less than Sonny’s sixty pounds. That’s why it’s all the more embarrassing when their dogs enjoy playing on the trampoline and mine cries and jumps off in terror.

  “Hey, Jenna.” John said, “I still can’t beli
eve you bought a trampoline. I’m really enjoying your regression.”

  “Thanks. I agree it was a brilliant purchase. You guys want to grab dinner?”

  “Sure,” Julie said.

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s go to St. Pete, there’s a great place for crab legs.” I wanted to go to St. Pete to avoid another pregnancy incident like the ones I’d had with Sarah and Ryan. John and Jason are obsessed with crab legs, so the Crab Shack seemed like the best carrot to get them across the bridge to St. Petersburg.

  * * *

  The Crab Shack was located a mile past the end of the Gandy Bridge connecting Tampa and St. Petersburg. In the mile between the bridge and the restaurant, cars that looked like they were tailgating lined the highway along both sides of the road. Technically, these people were on “the beach.” However, if they drove twenty more minutes, they would be treated to a real beach instead of the Redneck Riviera, which was essentially three inches of sand on either side of a six lane highway.

  While we were on a bench at the restaurant waiting to be seated, a man in baggy jeans, white T-shirt, diamond earrings, chain necklace and a sleeve of tattoos sat next to me. I immediately pulled my purse closer and away from the thug. Jason, on the other hand, walked up to him and said, “Hey man, where’d you get that fade done up at?” My head almost fell off my neck as I turned around.

  The thug said, “Huh?”

  Jason repeated himself, “Fuck’n, where’d you get that fade done up at n’shit?”

  “Fade Masters,” tattoo man grunted.

  “That’s where I go,” Jason said. “Who do you see?”

  It turned out that Jason and the thug both got their haircuts, or “fades,” done up on Nebraska Avenue by Big Tony. I think Jason might have the most street cred of his entire confirmation class at synagogue.

  In hindsight, all-you-can-eat crab legs for $9.99 was not a good idea. The inevitable gastrointestinal distress followed like clockwork. I was unable to move further than seven inches from my toilet the next morning when Sarah called.