by Una LaMarche
I feel I should take a moment to mention here that this wasn’t the first time I had tried to injure myself in an attempt to be honorably discharged from the wide world of sports. When I was eleven I joined a soccer league (possibly against my will; details remain murky). I asked my parents to let me quit the very first night, but, having already paid for cleats, knee pads, a completely unnecessary sports bra, and a nonrefundable enrollment fee, they said no. I spent the next eight weeks standing frozen on the field, refusing to move, waiting for one of the bigger kids to tackle me. I wanted nothing more than to limp home battered and bruised so that my parents—bleeding-heart liberal pacifists—would see the error of their ways and see that they had forced me into a horrifying twilight zone.
“We’re supposed to run after a ball,” I would report. “We’re supposed to run even though no one is chasing us and there isn’t a bus coming.”
My mother would look up briefly from the newspaper. “Well, just pretend there is, honey.”
It’s one thing to passively hope to be trampled, but it takes a special mix of willpower and stupidity to actively throw yourself down a rocky incline, especially when you’re wearing only a thin tank top and a pair of shorts with built-in underpants. But as I neared the final hill of that day’s race my resolve grew strong. All of a sudden I did start to hear the Chariots of Fire theme as I crested the hill. I was almost free! Free of the tyranny of Patchman and her saggy breasts and dour expressions. Free from the injustice of being made to sprint without the impetus of an air raid siren or pack of rabid dogs! With visions of glory dancing through my head and mumbled apologies to my left ankle, I faltered dramatically over a branch, buckled, and went down.
It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t actually hurt myself. But the moment I tripped, my arms shot out to cushion my fall, an automatic nervous system reaction that I could not will away. My palms smacked against the dirt, followed by my knees. I didn’t somersault treacherously down the path; I merely went from being vertical to horizontal, like a military recruit dropping to do a push-up. My ankle was unharmed, apart from a scratch from the branch that refused, cruelly, even to break the skin. Luckily, no one knew this but me.
“Are you okay?” someone cried, and soon there was a group of girls around me, helping me up, dusting me off. I could see that they were mentally ticking off the seconds that this act of good Samaritanism would rob from their finish times, so I smiled and said I was fine, that they should go on ahead. Then, once they were out of sight, I began to limp, slowly but surely, toward the final stretch.
I lurched awkwardly out of the woods and into view of the crowds at the finish line, dragging my left ankle behind me and fixing what I hoped was a look of grim determination on my face. The first person I saw was a varsity runner from my team named Kate. Kate was barrel shaped, with calves so muscular that from behind they looked like arrows pointing down at her ankles. She was screaming so hard at the other runners that spittle flew from her lips. When she saw me, her eyes flitted from my dirty tank top to my gimpy leg, and suddenly she stopped yelling and started to clap. “Way to go, Una!” she said warmly as I passed her. “Finish strong.” I smiled beatifically through my imaginary pain. This was exactly the reaction I had hoped for. Injured but persevering, I would limp my way into the hearts of all my teammates. “What a good sport that Una is,” they’d say during their daily warm-ups. “Sprained her ankle but finished the race anyway. What commitment! What sportsmanship! It’s too bad she’s out for the rest of the season and then graduating. We’ll really miss running with such a consummate athlete.”
My reverie was interrupted by the sight of Ms. Patchman, watching me with binoculars from a seat on the bleachers. She looked confused as I shuffled past, parting the throng of runners like Moses, with my foot drawing a sad, squiggly line in the path behind me, but as I crossed the finish line, wincing dramatically, suddenly she appeared.
“What the hell happened?” she barked, as I searched her voice for undertones of suspicion.
“My ankle,” I muttered. “I fell.”
“Better have someone take a look at it,” she said grimly, gesturing to a husky man pacing nearby with a roll of Ace bandages. “I can’t lose you this early in the season.” It might have been my imagination, but I could swear she narrowed her eyes at me just then, her hand worrying the key ring on her left hip as though we were facing off at high noon. Wincing again gave me the opportunity to narrow my eyes. Oh yeah? I drawled telepathically as tumbleweeds, in the form of leaves, blew by. Wanna bet?
“Tell me if this hurts,” the Ace bandage guy said, pressing down on the flesh just below my ankle with his thumb. I was on my back in a makeshift tent a few yards from the finish line, alone but for one other girl who had fainted after the race and was recuperating on a nearby cot. I glared at her, her and her actual medical condition. Bitch, I thought. I hadn’t anticipated a doctor’s visit, but I wasn’t willing to give up hope. I kicked myself for not having consulted a medical textbook as part of my plan. I had no idea what was supposed to hurt when you had a sprain, so I played it safe and went with everything.
“Ow!” I howled when he moved his fingers slightly upward.
“On a scale of one to ten, how much did that hurt?” he asked. I considered this for a moment. Once, as a child, I had backflipped off a porch swing and bashed my head against a concrete slab (an incident that could probably be blamed for my current situation). If it was hard enough to cause irreparable brain damage, it must have been a ten. As for my foot . . . “Um, eight?” I guessed.
“Well, there’s no swelling, which is odd, but it’s probably a sprain,” he said. Swell! I silently commanded my ankle. “From the amount of pain you’re in, I’d say it could be broken . . .” he continued. Oh God, no. Had I overshot? Was I headed to a hospital, where an X-ray would reveal that I was nothing more than a big, fat—and yet suspiciously unswollen—liar? “Except that (a) you’re not crying and (b) you were able to walk the rest of the race,” he finished. I smiled thinly.
“I just didn’t want to let Ms. Patchman down,” I said, fluttering my eyelids. By the time he fitted me with a temporary air cast and gave me the number of an orthopedic specialist to follow up with, I was spent. It had been the performance of a lifetime.
Later that night I allowed my parents to serve me ice cream as they elevated my foot with pillows, and later that week I faked my way through an appointment with a doctor on the Upper West Side and got another, fancier air cast, which I dutifully wore to school for the remainder of the fall semester. Apart from getting me out of track practices, the air cast granted me bleacher rest during gym class—my lifelong aspiration—as well as access to the school elevator. When I passed phys ed teachers in the hallway they nodded reverently, wordlessly acknowledging that I had, in the most literal sense of the phrase, taken one for the team. Ms. Patchman mostly ignored me once our paths stopped crossing daily, but at the end-of-the-year sports banquet, held at an Italian restaurant just before graduation, she called me up to accept an award for team spirit. I had long since abandoned the air cast by then, and the muscles I had developed running had softened to the texture of the mozzarella sticks we were shoveling into our mouths. As my teammates applauded, I rose, wiping marinara sauce from my cheek with the back of my wrist, and walked to the front of the room to accept what was a Lifetime Underachievement Award. Having spent the better part of my youth shedding sweat, tears, and fake menstrual fluids in the pursuit of athletic avoidance, I was about as qualified for a team spirit award as Keith Richards is to donate blood.
Still I took it and shook Ms. Patchman’s tiny, wizened hand, and as I looked out into the crowd I thought of Ms. McHenry, Mr. Hyman, Mr. Bolden, Mr. Mistriel, and every other education professional who’d ever struck fear into my heart in the name of physical fitness. And then I had my second aha! moment, which was that I should have just quit outright, or invented a disease, and that I
was nothing but an insanely passive-aggressive drama queen who couldn’t remember which foot she was supposed to be limping on half the time. But I forced myself to smile, secure in the knowledge that at the very least I was headed to a college with no gym requirement. If a window into the future had opened up at that second, I would have seen myself in my dorm room, a year later and ten pounds heavier, hoisting a handle of vodka in an inadvertent biceps curl as I searched the floor for my carton of Marlboro Reds. Beyond that, I might have seen myself as a recent college graduate on the streets of New York, beginning to run for a bus but then flipping it off as it roared past me and waving for a cab instead. And beyond that, if I squinted, I might have seen myself with a bundle of kids, homeschooling them to spare them the countless athletic humiliations our genetic legacy promised, holding a big bowl of popcorn as we paused the afternoon lesson to crack open a magazine and find out what Oprah had discovered about herself that day.
Late Bloomer
I have long held a secret wish that there was some way I could see, standing in a military-style line, all the people who had ever fantasized about having sex with me. So long as no blood relatives or childhood friends’ parents appeared, I always figured it would be extremely gratifying to see everyone whose world I had unwittingly rocked. On my better days I estimated there might be a few dozen; on less confident days I feared there would be no one—not even the people I’d actually had sex with. But then one night in early 2012, I learned the truth.
Jeff and I were out on a date. It was only the third time we’d been out without the kid since he’d been born, and so naturally we were trying to drink as much as possible before the bill arrived or we were summoned back home to an inconsolable baby, whichever came first. We were on new-parent speed, and the rush was so intoxicating that it gave us an uncharacteristic sense of abandon.
“Let’s do it in the bathroom!” my normally unadventurous husband whispered as soon as the busboy had cleared our apps. “It’s big and it smells like vanilla!”
Perhaps it was my refusal to engage in sink sex (I should add—and not just for my parents’ benefit—that we have never done the deed in any bathroom we weren’t paying rent on) that spurred his confession, two beers later, that he regretted never having slept with an Asian woman. I tried to commiserate.
“Yeah, there are a few people I wish I’d gotten the chance to sleep with.”
“Like how many?”
“I don’t know”—I did know; I keep a running tally—“five?”
He was shocked. Not that there were five people I still wanted to bang even though I supposedly had eyes for only him—but that my number was so low.
“Chances are,” he explained between long pulls on his beer, “any woman I’ve met, I’ve at least thought about . . . what it would be like.”
I was floored. “Any woman?”
He shrugged. “Pretty much.”
I immediately blurted out the name of the least physically attractive female I could think of who had ever crossed paths with Jeff (again, running tally). “Even her?” I demanded.
“Now that you mention it, yeah.”
I considered the ramifications of this world-shattering news. I mean, yes, sure, When Harry Met Sally had reported it back in 1989, but I’d always thought it only applied to uncontrollable sexual dynamos like Billy Crystal. Not to my sweet, reticent, devoted husband. How many of my friends, coworkers, and relatives had Jeff pictured in compromising positions through the years? I was about to start a fight when I saw the silver lining, glistening under the pile of writhing bodies like a discarded metallic thong.
If all men were like Jeff, then that meant they had all thought the same thing about me. In an instant, my short military line of would-be paramours became a troop a thousand strong.
Given that my first crush was a mythical centaur hybrid of Garrison Keillor and Ted Danson, you won’t be surprised to learn that I was a late bloomer. There were other indicators, too, like my troll doll earring collection and the fact that I was naturally drawn to gorgeous best friends who transformed me, by comparison, into the homely sidekick (in troll doll earrings*).
In elementary school, I stood in the shadow of Halima, a dusky Belizean beauty who was worshipped by every boy in our fifth-grade class. Girls and women like this, I have come to realize, all have one thing in common, and that is a natural shit-givinglessness that I have never and will never possess. They are confident enough in themselves that they don’t need to be liked, and therefore they are psychotically adored by all. As Halima’s best friend, I enjoyed a status boost that came with name recognition but almost no actual power—kind of like the vice president. Boys began to befriend me in an attempt to get close to her, sometimes passing me notes or presents, which I, of course, would open (one line that has stayed with me: Halima’s butt crack is long and narrow / Just one whiff makes me fly like a sparrow). When they would inevitably be rejected (a decade later, Halima would come out as a lesbian), I would comfort them, basking in the intimacy by proxy. “You know,” a boy named Charles—whose big brown doe eyes I quietly coveted—told me one day, as we sat commiserating in the cafeteria, “if your personality was in Halima’s body, you would be the perfect woman.”*
“You asshole,” I snapped, hitting him close-fisted in the balls. “That shitty backhanded compliment is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”
Just kidding. I think I actually said, “Thanks.”
In Charles’s defense, though, I don’t think he knew I secretly loved him. This was because at the time, my primary methods of flirting were as follows:
Avoid eye, voice, or physical contact at all times.
Wear enormous, adult-man-size Bartman T-shirt that renders body amorphous.
Roller-skate around living room listening to Madonna’s Dick Tracy soundtrack on Walkman, passing conspicuously by the big front windows while performing arabesques. (This makes sense only if you know Charles lived next door.)
Halima and I eventually became insufferable, because the popularity (earned by her; siphoned off by me) went to our heads and turned us into stereotypical mean girls who made fun of everyone and acted like we were—to use the terminology of that era—stupid fly. But Charles did kiss me once, on the earlobe, during a game of sixth-grade truth or dare. He was supposed to kiss me on the lips, but I turned my head at the last second.
I would not make it to first base for another four years.
MY SEXUAL HISTORY: A GAME OF BASEBALL PLAYED BY EXTREMELY SLOW-MOVING, UNCOORDINATED FOREIGNERS FROM A COUNTRY WHERE BASEBALL DOES NOT EXIST
First Base: 1996
It took me sixteen years to kiss another (non-blood-relative) human being on the mouth for many reasons, but the main obstacle was that my fantasy world was far too rich to leave any room for actual life experience. I wanted all the thrills of obsessive lust without the risk of real vulnerability, so what I would do was essentially date people in my mind.
When I started high school, I met a cool and quirky brainiac named Anna, who remains one of my best friends to this day. Anna and I clicked immediately—as so many teenagers do—because we were mean and crazy in all the same ways. We used to sit in the back row of biology and giggle over what our sweet, matronly, hard-of-hearing teacher would say if, when prompted for the third time to speak louder, we yelled, “I said, GO FUCK YOURSELF!” Each of us thought the other was hilarious and totally underrated by our classmates. And we completely enabled each other’s penchant for acting totally insane about boys.
I don’t mean insane in the normal teenage girl way of being “boy crazy.” I mean we basically acted like serial killers. We used to cut out the letters of our crushes’ names, rearrange them to make anagrams, and then analyze the results. We made fortune-tellers out of loose-leaf paper and rigged them to tell us what we wanted to hear. We conspired to create scenarios in which we’d get to actually speak to the ob
ject of our desire, and we’d prepare by rehearsing the literally dozens of potential ways the conversation could play out—I’m also pretty sure we purchased voodoo dolls at one point. It was like we were playing our own version of Dungeons and Dragons, only with fewer elves and more steamy make-out scenes set in the abandoned fourth-floor computer lab.
My high school crush—whom I will call Fernando both to protect his privacy and also in the hopes that if he ever reads this he doesn’t realize it’s him because he’s not Latino—did not actually go to my high school. He was the son of my parents’ friends and I got to see him once every few months when our families would have dinner. He was also, conveniently, a child actor, so when I was really jonesing for a hit I could just go see the 1994 remake of Lassie over and over again in the theater, swooning as his name appeared in the opening credits. I penned a number of humiliating diary entries detailing our brief interactions as if we were the two stars of a passionately G-rated telenovela.
November 20, 1994
“The Morning After”
I don’t know if I can bear it. I’m in love. Fernando is everything I want. Before, I don’t think I was quite sure, but any reservations I may have had were swept away with last night. I think I have to get this out on paper or I’ll burst.
We didn’t talk much for almost ten minutes. Then we started a conversation about school. Forget that now, thow [sic]. What actually mattered was later, in my room. We entered and shared the first of many uncomfortable silences. Then he saw my Beatles tapes. He said he loved the Beatles. I could have kissed him.