Linda Mears, OWP 1998
Sense of Balance
Sense of Balance
Leaving for lunch, Robert passed by the couple, as, hand in hand, smiling and chatting about a purchasethey folded close into each other to enter the doorway of the bicycle shop.
They both nodded at him as he passed ; he was certain he recognized them but couldn't place the history for a moment, and forced an exclamation, "Long time no see!" And the man stood there in the doorway saying "Portland" and "not riding much " and the woman, ..."rid of us, bike has been great" or at least that was what registered. Rob was not altogether listening, lost in placing this association, and distracted by a strong impulse to grab the woman, shake her hand, or crush her in a sister sort of hug.
"Oh, yeah, that's a good little crosstraining bike, we've sold many of them," Robert was backing out the door, backpedaling in his head, still not quite in touch with the full memory of these people or some special significance he attached to them. He held up his stocky hand in a taking-off gesture and ducked his gray crewcut out the door. All the way down the block, he squinted in the sun, trying to remember what it was that was so particular about them then, or so different about them now, these years later.
The woman's gaze had tripped some of the memory for him; he remembered green eyes, intently reading his. So many customers don't see you, truly; nobody wants to get too close to the blaze of your being, when you are the salesman. They look at your hands, or their hands, or their bikes because in some way you are supposed to see what they see if they look in that direction. Or, they look at the bullseye of your face, and in Rob's case this target was no small feature. Broken in numerous bouts, his nose testified to the nature of his first professional sport, and if anyone truly met his baby blue eyes without wandering there, it made an impression.
Even at the time, he wasn't sure he could articulate what had snagged his notice, because the exchange had been short. Her focused listening, and then something to do with the unspoken tension that pressed the pair apart, as two magnets with like poles in proximity; resistance. Not a fight either; a fighter knows a fighter and these two didn't spar, didn't touch, didn't snip at heel of one another, and there was no wariness or ugly carping. Instead, there was this weird space between them, even their words kept polite distance, and they did not move or speak contrapuntally, like a couple. Maybe they weren't, Rob thought; they didn't have the same last name. They came in together often; and alone as well. He bought things for her. And she bought her own things, bicycles for her children. They just didn't fit type A, B, or C bike customer and Robert was puzzled, intrigued.
That didn't happen much anymore; he usually let the kids handle the lookers and the sales. He stayed back in the shop and listened for the hassles, poked his head out when it got busy, but mostly put his energies toward the complete package sale to tandem couples, or complex tech for the racers who flocked to him as guru of the pursuit. Retired only last season from competitive riding, Rob was as well known for his grasp of finer concentration and rigorous training regimen as he was for his miraculous repairs.
But these two wanted help solving a shimmy on a dog of an old mixte frame, 18 speed. And they kept coming back today, but nothing and no one could please them. Rob began to prepare himself to enter the discussion. The woman was shaking her head at Jeremy.
"No, not like that," she said, "not a wheel problem, a frame thing," she said, holding her sunburned arms out in front , gripping the drop-down bars and shaking her forearms all over as if she were riding through an earthquake&emdash;funny how people animate their talk, as if anyone could ride like that; of course, maybe she does and that's what the problem is, but you have to be careful in what you say to people. It isn't just about the sale; if you bump a person in just the wrong place, you get more than you bargained for. He'd learned, after 'Nam, when even longtime friends had hairtrigger reactions to some small slight. Initially this mystified Rob, but as an army boxer, he had had no frontline duty to whittle his nervebed or curdle his vitality. He'd come to accept the bitter brittleness in certain of his peers; later he brought the practice of feeling the sense of those around him to bear everyday in the shop, or on the race circuit. People are touchy, sensitive.
Like the guy with her. He was starting to bristle; was it embarrassment at the woman's pantomime? But it's more, this thing he does. When the kids try too bluntly to move him toward a sale he stiffens like a rake's gone up his spine and a particular exchange happens. Rob remembered, suddenly, the things he'd learned when he had custom built a bicycle for the man. This was his market rap, his conditioned reaction to a sales situation. Rob made a mental note to get the young crew to think more about their approach with him. The guy goes for the high end merchandise at that, with shop loyalty. But the kids don't see this. He scared them. Tall, darkly foreboding, impatient, the man drew himself up over the kid who was trying to show them the way the untrued wheel will throw the cadance. Rob stepped into the circle around the older bicycle.
"Hey, Rob, " the man greeted him. "We've got a problem with a downhill shimmy here." Rob gathered the history and the woman answered his questions without pause. Yes, she tucked in properly, yes, she thought she braked reasonably. Yes, she had distributed her weight over the seat and used her arms as loosely as possible. Rob took her outside, and they paralleled and practiced the brake squeeze. This, her form, and her balance looked fine, though a little tense.
Rob fixed her with a direct look. "What are you thinking about when you hit, say, 20 mph?"
What should I be thinking of, you jerk, I'm going down a hill and I'm going to go fast and I like speed, I am not a baby, but now I think of what is going to happen at 30 mph. I can't control the shaking of the bicycle, and I am scared to death I am going to crash.
"I guess I worry about the shimmy happening again," she answered.
Rob nodded and smiled, slightly, looking away from a sharpness in her voice, or in her eyes, and glanced down at her hands.
They were gripped around the handlebars so tightly, her knuckles were white. And the whiteness sent him back over 30th Avenue to bones sticking out of his own hands, blood, body crumpled in a thicket of fir 30 feet below the road, 30 feet below the deer in the road. But instead of this, he mentioned several possible used touring bicycles in stock, in case the problem was the mixte frame of her old bike, or an untrued wheel. So then they were off to test a touring bike, on the same hill; this was a controlled experiment.
He lightly patted the center of the woman's back with a comradely touch as she pushed off, her jersey cold with sweat. And she rode off with the man, leaving her old mixte in the corner. A triathlete buddy was waiting for a tune-up; this helped take his mind off the troubling anxiety he felt about this woman's ride down the hill.
When the man came back first without her, Rob left the job on his stand and met him at the door.
"I don't know what happened. I mean, it happened again; this is the last straw. I can't tell anymore if this is her problem with sloppy riding, or we are just cursed by the vagaries of used bicycles," said the man.
Rob was annoyed; the woman was anything but sloppy. He saw her pull up and carefully place the shop cycle in its spot in the used row outside the store. And then she stood there a moment, disappointment telling in the shoulders, rounded.
He took the man by the elbow and steered him to a powder blue racing bicycle. "This will answer the form question. If she can ride this without a wobble, she simply needs a new bike."
The woman was not prepared to take such expensive inventory on an experimental ride. But when the man declared again that she ought to settle things once and for all, the woman closed her mouth in a pin's-width line and began strapping into her gloves and helmet.
Her manner unsettled Rob.
" This is not some kind of death wish-fulfillment, right? I mean, take no oddball chances, do you hear?"
Rob was conscious of his parental tone; he thought of his daughter, close to the woman's age. She walked the bike to the parking lot outside, and he followed with his handset. The man was signing out the bike, scrambling to catch up with them. Rob checked the brake levers one more time, then handed her the cycle.
I could tell you about what happens when the deer steps out of the brush into your path at 42 mph, and what happens when you and your bicycle leave the earth end-over-end, suspended in arcs to touchdown, slam-down, at the bottom of the hill. I could tell you a person lives through a hell of a lot of pain and suffering with resilience. I could tell you all these things.
"Hurry back," said Rob.