Joy For Beginners (11 page)

Back then, people were always asking Sara what she wanted to be when she grew up. She never knew what to tell them. But at the airport that day, Sara had decided that what she really wanted to be was the woman getting off the plane.

 

IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, Sara had learned to see the year as divided into two parts. There was school, when she and Henry and their father packed their lunches every day and set out—Sara and Henry to learn whatever was thrown in their direction, their father to teach physics at the high school. After the school day was over, their mother cooked while Sara and Henry did homework and their father created lesson plans swiftly and efficiently. In the evenings after he finished his work, their father would pull out huge pads of paper that he filled with designs—cogs and wheels and handlebars, sails and pontoons and streamers.

Then there was summer, when their father set aside the grading pen and the papers and the books and dove into the garage like the first kid in the pool on Memorial Day. Their father would cut and weld, the noise caterwauling through the neighborhood, and over the weeks, the drawings that Sara and Henry had peeked at when they thought their father wasn’t looking turned into mechanical creations, long-legged contraptions with giant wheels, or dainty little crafts with sleek metal flanks and neon-colored wings.

Toward the end of each August, their father would pack up that summer’s creation in a trailer that he attached to their station wagon and set off, to return a few days or a week later, sunburned and joyful, his creation usually dented and missing a few pieces.

When they were young, Henry and Sara had stayed home with their mother during their father’s summer excursions. Their mother would occasionally question their father about his use of time, remarking that there were other, perhaps more important concerns, such as patching the roof before the winter rains.

Their father would just smile and say, “Remember the motto of the race, Lyla.” And he would make Sara and Henry pancakes, as small as quarters, that they stacked into towers so they could watch the syrup dripping down from one to the next.

 

SPYING ON THEIR FATHER’S garage activities had been a summertime game for Sara and Henry when they were young. They would pull crates across the yard and peer through dusty windows, volunteer to take their father glasses of lemonade, reporting back to each other about what they saw, until the summer they were eight and their father turned to them casually at breakfast one morning and said, “Want to help me today?”

They had gone in the garage before, of course, but never as members of the team; the very air felt different. Sara had found herself wishing there was a uniform she could put on, a hat she had to wear. Maybe they could make badges, she thought, but looking at Henry’s and her father’s faces, already intent upon the bits and pieces of metal on the table, she rapidly discarded the thought for the reality.

There was, as their father explained, plenty of physics involved; they were building an entry for a kinetic sculpture race, with the emphasis on every one of the words. Each human-powered machine competed not only for the aesthetics of its design and decoration—“aesthetics” in this case applied in the loosest and most creative of fashions—but for its durability and speed in a course that included road, water, mud and sand. And while finishing was not necessarily required for an entry to be considered successful, the race was not nearly as much fun if you sank, her father noted.

There was much to be learned about balance and weight and momentum. It made Sara think about her own body, which seemed to be constantly stretching and growing and shifting, feet becoming bigger, legs longer, each change requiring an equivalent internal adjustment. Some designs needed triangulation for support, her father explained, which made them sturdier but slowed them down. Too slim a design, however, and you couldn’t float in water. Mud, well, that was almost impossible, their father told them; mostly what you needed for mud was patience.

Sara, who had inherited a bit of her mother’s practicality, commented early on that a solitary human being, without the trappings of metal and wood, giant fake flowers or papier-mâché animal heads, would perhaps be the most efficient entry of all.

“Well, yes,” her father commented, smiling, “but what would be the fun in that?”

 

SARA AND HENRY had begged to go to the kinetic sculpture race with their father that first garage summer. Their mother said they were too young, but their father simply replied that she should come along to make sure everything was all right. The four of them set off in the station wagon at the end of August, its back compartment filled with camping gear, pulling the long trailer behind them, traveling up the coast along beaches and into forests.

While they were driving, their mother told them factual tidbits about the places they were passing. Initially she read from a guidebook, but at one gas station the book mysteriously disappeared and after that, as the miles passed and they got farther from home, the stories began to lose their boundaries, meandering into worlds where gnomes and trolls lived in holes at the base of ancient, towering trees, where rain brought more than flowers from the ground. In the evenings they would stop to camp and their father, who never cooked at home, became the chef of nightly feasts prepared over a campfire, sausages dripping fat and making the burning logs spark and sizzle, marshmallows tanned over the embers, smooshed between crisp squares of graham crackers, the heat of the marshmallows softening the chocolate layer below. After dinner, they played cards by lamplight in the tent, Henry stockpiling sevens because he liked the shape of the number, and then they slept all together in the canvas tent, the symphony of their breath mingling with the crackling sounds of small animals moving in the undergrowth below trees dripping with moss.

At the end of the third day they had stopped in an old Victorian seaport, perched on the edge of nowhere, Sara was sure, for the highway simply ended at the edge of town and there was nothing but water at the other side. The brick buildings on the main street seemed frozen in time, tall and stately and ornate. Sara half-expected to see carriages come rattling down the street, which would turn to cobblestones under their wheels, and drunken sailors flying out through the old stained-glass barroom doors. It felt like a movie set, a feeling reinforced by the costumes of the people walking down the street, wearing everything from Victorian bustles and top hats to flowing tie-dyed robes in rainbow colors. There was a trio dressed up as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion; when they spotted Sara they raced toward her, begging her to be their Dorothy, but Sara’s father explained she was needed for their own entry, the theme of which he refused to divulge to any of the other contestants before race time the following day.

The morning of Sara and Henry’s first race, their father had woken them early, handing them white lab coats. His hair was wild about his head and he had huge, black-framed glasses perched on his nose.

“Okay,” he said, “the Mad Scientists are ready to roll.”

Sara and Henry grinned at each other, the excitement almost more than they could stand. They helped pull their entry from the trailer, admiring again the long, sleek metal cover overlaying the minimalist brilliance of its multi-seat bicycle frame, the flowing white banners, the whimsical wooden grasshopper legs that Henry had insisted they add. They rolled it to the starting line, surrounded by a giant purple bird, a fanciful carriage drawn by mechanical horses, a bicycle topped with an elegantly sinuous metal hedgehog and a happy yellow bug-eyed airplane.

“This gives eccentric its own meaning,” Sara and Henry’s mother commented, but Sara could see the smile bubbling under her words. The day before, Sara had caught her parents holding hands when they thought no one was looking.

“Okay, everybody ready?” Tubas burped and clown horns blared. “Okay, but before we go . . .” A drum rolled, badly, and laughter erupted. “What is the motto of the race?” the announcer yelled out. The crowd roared back, the words muddied.

“What did they say?” Sara asked her father. He looked down at her and smiled.

“They said—Adults need to have fun so children will want to grow up.”

And so, for the next ten years, Sara and Henry’s summers had been filled with screwdrivers and wrenches and bicycle and boat parts, with dreams of flying and floating and racing down hills in cars that looked like butterflies, bicycles that felt like small boats sailing through air.

And for ten winters they waited for the moment when the whole process would start over again, when their father would look up, eyes lit with excitement, and say, “
I have an idea
.”

 

SARA HAD MET her future husband during her freshman year in college when they were assigned as lab partners in an art photography class. Dan had just needed another elective in his schedule, but it was clear to everyone that he had an eye that saw moments more than things, his photographs reaching out to the viewer, making them step closer into the story held on the paper.

Dan always said later that he had had a head start with Sara, getting to spend all that time with her in the darkroom, with its heady mix of chemicals and soft red light. Sara knew better. She had fallen in love with him the moment she saw his hands gently unrolling the developed film from the round metal cylinder, the way his fingers seemed to caress the edges of the ribbon of negatives, the anticipation in his face as he waited to see what had made its way into the camera. Some people said you could know before you looked, but Dan didn’t agree. He said half the fun was seeing what you didn’t know you’d taken, the story that had found you.

And yet when Dan, despite the urgings of the teacher, had declined to see photography as more than an extracurricular activity and chose instead to stay with the architecture major that would provide a living for Sara and the children they wanted to have, she had stepped under the wing of his practicality with relief. They got married the minute after they graduated.

From the beginning, Sara had felt the pull toward procreation, toward Dan, as strong as the current of a river, deep and sensual, impossible to resist when she was ovulating. During the weeks when she was not fertile, she had felt like paper, thin and insubstantial, ready to blow away with the next wind. Then the current would return and she would slide into it, let go, roll over to Dan and trace the lines of his shoulder blades with the tip of her tongue, let her fingers slide down the muscular lengths of his legs. Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hormones, Dan said with a laugh, but he had loved the feeling of the river as much as she did, the way it turned his wife into something fluid and rich and powerful, so absolutely sure of what she wanted. It had taken all the willpower they had to wait to conceive a baby until Dan was through architecture school and they had more than a studio apartment and a beat-up Volkswagen bus.

But when it finally happened, Sara loved being pregnant, the mystery of not knowing who was inside her, her own roll of film waiting to be developed. She and Dan would go to movies and scan the credits for names they liked. Dan would write the top contenders on strips of paper and lay them across Sara’s burgeoning stomach—to see if they fit, they would joke. They had spent weekends painting the baby’s room, evenings putting together the crib, and Sara had fallen in love with her husband’s hands all over again, the way they held a paintbrush or a screwdriver or the small of her back, the seemingly effortless capability of them.

While most women she knew wanted only bland food when they were pregnant, Sara was ravenous for new spices, the taste of heat. Coriander and cumin, habanero peppers, fish oil and red pepper flakes, a hot sauce from New Orleans that had them all sweating. She traveled among the spices, searching out the new and different, her ever-increasing stomach preceding her like a masthead on her ship of discovery. Dan would look across the table at her and smile, although she realized at one point that the lunches he was taking to work were becoming increasingly bland—yogurt and bananas, a bottle of Tums. It was, in a way, a relief to both of them when Tyler was born and the doctor told her to cut back on the spices as they might give Tyler colic. It was easier to slide into the world of white—milk, blankets, clouds.

 

CAUGHT UP as she was in her own internal travels, it hadn’t bothered Sara that her twin brother had taken off after college with a backpack and a startlingly small amount of money, a one-way ticket to Asia in hand. Henry’s letters had taken forever to get to her, often arriving when he was already in the next country. Word pictures distilled on whispery airmail paper—a faded red temple, standing in the middle of a lake like a ghost; two-thousand-year-old rice terraces, their boundaries irregular and sinuous, cascading their way down a slope; a stone Buddha so large Henry said he could have slept in its outstretched hand; yellow ginkgo leaves against stone steps. Sara saw his life in snapshots, like walking past open doors of hotel rooms and catching an image before the door closed again.

She couldn’t write back, Henry already gone by the time she knew where he was. She didn’t know what she would have written anyway, how to describe her life, the lush, stationary physicality of motherhood. The only way to understand would be to hold it in your arms.

 

SARA AND DAN’S TWINS had been, quite frankly, a surprise, both their conception and the abundance of it. Tyler had just turned five; Dan was moving steadily up the ladder in the architecture firm. All of a sudden, life was crowded—their house too small, their hands too few.

But after Hillary and Max had been born, she could never have imagined sending them back. Even in the chaos of the move to the new, larger house—the ridiculous timing of it all, the babies too early and barely a week old, the cloth diapers accidentally packed in some box they would find years later when Hillary and Max were entering kindergarten—there had been the excitement of the new and different. She could almost pretend she was traveling.