NEVER AGAIN

The whole problem was that Carol had wanted Jeff to fix her, not an unusual occurrence in her dealings with men. She had discussed this propensity for dysfunctional relationships ad nauseum with her shrink.

They’d eventually narrowed the original cause down to a day when she was twelve years old. Together they had pried the memory of that crisp November day in Compton, California out of her subconscious. But once it was floating there on the surface of her mind, she remembered all of it: the red T shirt she’d had on and the faded jeans she’d learned to tuck into her white socks while riding her bike, especially during a race.

And there had been a race that day, between her and Timmy McQuinn. Every kid in the neighborhood had turned out to watch their defending champion (her) take on the new kid in town. (Timmy) Willie Shaw from down the block was elected to start the race by shouting, “Ready! Set! Go!” But the “Go!” leapt out of the throats of the twenty kids lining the sidewalks of Oak Avenue and could probably have been heard in Orange County.

Carol had her right pedal set just forward of the top of its arc, and her right foot mashed down on it as strong as she could. She had her butt poised over the seat and her left toes on the pavement for balance. The rubber handlebar grips were clinched in both her hands and she was straining forward waiting for that “Go!”

The smell of Bermuda grass her dad had cut that morning mingled with the rank odor of the sweat in her armpits, when she stomped that pedal down with all the strength in her sixty pound body. She could beat this kid, she knew she could.

And she would have beat him too, if her dad hadn’t come around the corner and pulled his truck right onto the middle of the racetrack on his way home from the hardware store.

She’d slammed the pedals backwards, but knew that the brakes weren’t enough to keep her from smashing into the hood of the truck. So she swerved hard left – right into Willie’s front yard and the oak tree just off center of it. The impact ripped her right off her bike headfirst into the tree. But her left leg dragged across the metal edge of the pedal, ripped out the inseam of her pants from knee to ankle, and left a trail of bruises and blood in the soft flesh of her calf.

She didn’t feel like a champion then, she felt broken. Carol could still taste the dirt from the roots of the tree and the blood from her front tooth that had been loosened on impact. She was trying hard not to cry, her dad hated it when she cried.

And sure enough, when her dad had stomped his way from his truck to her wreck, the first thing he said was, ‘Can you move your arms and legs? Good. Okay then, nothing’s broken. Sit up and let me see that leg.” He rotated her left leg as though it were a thin tree branch, separate from her body. He poked his fingers at the scrapes and said, “You’re fine,” dropping her foot down into the dirt.

Then he crouched by her banged up bike and fingered the chain, spun the lopsided pedal, and stroked the ding where the red paint had peeled off. “This though, this is gonna take some serious fixing.” He picked up the bike and carried it to his truck, lowered it into the bed and drove it the half block to home.

Right there, at that moment, Carol wanted more than anything in the world to be a broken bicycle and not a girl. Something that could be fixed, something that he’d want to fix. She’d practiced being broken with every man she’d met since then, and not one of them was ever able to fix her. Her shrink had told her that she had to convince herself that either she didn’t need fixing or that she could do it herself. “Manifest that,” her shrink said. “Buy a tool box or a med kit and practice on yourself.” And Carol thought long and hard about doing so.

But what she finally did was to buy the fanciest reddest racing bike she could afford. She was going to race again, and she was going to win.