Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

A two-wheeler takes confidence as long as you don’t have it; later— which is, after all, very soon — a two-wheeler uses the confidence you’re not conscious now of having. Bikes come and go, but if the sense of how to ride is constant, why should this be puzzling?

He picked the boy up. "Keep pedaling," he said. "Don’t think. Just keep pedaling."

The corners of the boy’s mouth were turning down against the equal but other force of this other adult.

"Get on, and this time never stop pedaling."

Sarah came by now, coasting, and she made the road-exit turn to come back along the other side of the island.

He started the boy. He ran him along holding the seat of the bike, feeling as if with his hands the boy’s narrow ribs and shoulders, and then the boy’s pedaling got away from him and he lost his footing and let go, but the boy was going. He hit the top turn pedaling like a cross-country racer and came down the back stretch just as a white motor scooter with a red-faced policeman upright in the seat buzzed in and stopped.

Sarah came by like merry-go-round music. "I like this bike," she said.

The woman had a paperback book in her lap. She was laughing as the boy made the bottom turn and came around toward her and Sarah’s father. "You got it, Mark." Laughing so hard that Mark started laughing himself. And as he came up with her he seemed to be thinking about an injury, an adult pain. The woman was seated on the curb; her legs were together, gracefully turned to one side as if she were picnicking in a field overlooking a valley.

The policeman had walked away toward the cafeteria.

Mark got himself out from under the bike, and the woman said, "You all right?" He sniveled. Then, seeing one adult coming and the other staying where she was, he watched to see what would happen next.

The woman put her book on the curb. "Don’t pull that crybaby number, I’ll slap your face." She got up and walked toward Mark. "You ain’t going to get your real bike till you know how to ride this one, now you get on that bike and ride it."

The other adult had stopped halfway, but he spoke to the woman: "Those rental bikes take a beating." She had looked up as the words were said, and she had to answer. She shook her head: "At least they don’t get ripped off."

"Oh they probably do."

She told Mark to get on his bike — did he expect to learn?

Then Mark said, just loud enough to be heard, "My daddy’s going to buy me my real bike," and the woman slapped him on the cheek as he was getting his leg over the saddle. She put her hands on her hips. Mark’s trousers were torn. She got her palm on the back of the bike seat and this time she gave Mark a running push and she held on for a few steps, but she didn’t want to play in front of Sarah’s father, or so he thought, and she let go and stood leaning on one hip.

Mark veered over into Sarah’s bike and fell.

"See what you did," said the woman.

"That’s O.K. Let me give him a push."

This time Mark got going. She went back to where her book was and seemed to look only when Mark came around the bottom turn and pedaled past her to the top turn. Sarah rode after him.

"Stop pedaling and coast," she heard her father call to the boy.

The woman looked up at the words — not toward him but toward Mark, who was pedaling faster to keep up with the bike.

"Stop pedaling and coast."

"Like this," called Sarah.

The boy was staying in front of her and on the turn nearly went over into the pedestrian path where people were passing with a transistor.

What book was the mother reading? She would be just as well-dressed on the subway in the morning. She wasn’t comfortable with the book, but it wasn’t the book; it was how time that she was spending was occupying her. He tried to repeat the thought. Possessing her. He looked at his watch. Two dollars, two-fifty. Next Sunday, double that for the same amount of time.

The boy wanted to stop; he’d done many circuits and other people were in the parking lot now, and he wanted to stop.

"Sarah, want a drink?" He thought she called back yes. The boy now coasting up past his mother looked toward him; the boy had an idea how to stop; he slowed way down, way down, then let the bike go over and jumped clear.

He looked down at his machine. He came and sat down on the curb.

He was close enough to be spoken to quietly so the mother didn’t hear: "Say, you better get it out of the way there."

The boy shrugged.

"I’ll show you how to stop."

The woman was watching. Sarah called.

He held the bike with the boy on it and got him to balance with his feet on the pedals, then drop one foot to the ground. The woman watched.

"But you got to be moving," said the boy.

When the time came you didn’t really think.

Sarah was watching too, but she was in motion coming round the bottom turn by the cafeteria path; she wasn’t watching where she was going, yet he saw that she’d made the turn and was approaching slowly. The boy looked back over his shoulder like a motorist.

Two other kids racing each other came up behind Sarah and it was a sideswipe squeeze, close enough to bump her knees or lock axles — well hardly — and when they got past her she seemed released as if other hands had been on her handlebars, and luckily no one else was coming up behind her for she turned across toward her father just as — he didn’t believe it — the black boy he was holding up suddenly decided to take off — the face would have been worth seeing — he staggered against the absence. But Sarah had forgotten how to stop or was thinking of something else, or maybe had been aiming for the black boy who wasn’t there.

"Daddy," she called, and he found he couldn’t get out of the way, and they would both have fallen if he hadn’t braced himself and caught her head-on by the handlebars.

She got off the bike. He was holding it.

She showed him where the wheel rubbed against the fender. She wanted something to drink.

She asked if they could go on the road next time. He said sure if she thought she was ready. She asked when she could ride one of the bikes with thin tires. He said those bikes were too big; she said no; he said they had hand brakes.

Maybe, she said (making a joke), they would just go on renting a different bike every week.

The thought consumed him. All those bikes. A chain of bikes. The city’s endless claim. But Sarah’s childhood was not endless.

But which was the thought that consumed him?

Sarah’s mother, ten blocks closer to the park, would say — he knew what she would say — Be a hero, if you want to shell out the money; but why buy her a bike now?

Well, he wanted the kid to have her own bike. But she would soon outgrow it, wherever it was at this moment. Well, what was money? No— he meant, what was it exactly? Like time, it had a claim on him to be used and not to go unused. These rental bikes had no reflectors apparently. His Raleigh had three red, two orange. He saw himself lifting the wheels out of the frame, holding the chain off the rear wheel’s gears, flagging cabs until he got one to stop — disembarking uptown, fixing his wheels back in, and renting a bike for Sarah.

Money was time — or had used to be, when there was money, before money had disappeared into an expanding cloud whose only bearable promise was that money might vanish into psychic barter. Well, if time was money, time spent thinking without success about how to avoid wasting money was money wasted. The thought was worth something. A medium of exchange. But hold on — the black woman had stood up to stretch — her head went one way, her hips the other — if wealth was a claim on someone else’s labor, what was he able to claim here but somebody’s exertion getting a bike out of the shed, and what was he paying for but someone to take his money and his identifying credit card and make an enterprising note of the time? Dumb question. Inflated thought. He felt himself — it made no sense at all — the most silent person in a radius of fifty miles. Dumb feeling, he thought. But then he remembered he was getting also the labor expended in order to buy the bikes — house them — fix them. He felt the sequence. He fitted into it. The owner couldn’t ride all those bikes — now or someday or once.