Jump

Jump.

It was the way she was.

Driving up in my little car I was fighting to see through the flurries of snow and through my oily, fingerprint and smoke smudged windshield. I was fighting the cold blasts of wind, whipping my Toyota so strongly that I held the steering wheel with both hands. I was fighting the knot in my back, like a fist around my lower spine. I killed time. I smoked cigarettes, I listened to local gospel radio and chuckled and I remembered things. Random things mostly. It was a two hour trip made into three by the weather and the traffic. Lots of time to think.

I remembered my high school gym class. Instead of playing volleyball or basketball I joined a class that did rock and high ropes climbing. We scaled walls, shot down zip-lines and tested our bravado. One challenge in particular came to mind. It was to climb up this tall pole, about forty feet in the air and then stand at the top. Like my car driving north, the pole wobbled in the wind and with every nervous jerk of the knee . Once at the top, and steady, we would have to leap out and up about eight feet and grab the hanging bars. Driving up to New York, I thought about a lot of things. Jumping from that pole was one of them. Why was I going to New York? It was the way she laughed at my jokes even though they weren’t even funny to me.

Her apartment was large and white and fresh and I made myself home on the couch, washing away the cold miles with beer. I liked it. I liked the way she hung up vintage records on the white walls and had only “chick-flicks” on DVD. I watched them, while I waited for her to come home.

Of all the girls my father ever coached, she was his favorite. Almost ten years later he still talked to her. Her picture in her red and black jersey sits beside his desk in his office. He named a drill after her. He had her stand under the basket and do lay-ups with her feet on the line and not stop until he told her to. She was the only girl that did it. She didn’t stop. She shot and shot and shot. When they lost the last game of the season she was the only girl that cried. Ten years have passed and my father still has girls do that drill. There are a lot of girls in town over the years that would have hated her for doing that drill.

I never liked basketball. I never watched a game. I never saw her cry at the end of the season. For me, it was the way she smiled and shrugged when the phone company shut off her cell phone. It was the way she wrinkled her nose at the new sounds her old car made. And the way she smoked while she hovered over crossword puzzles and wrinkled her brow while she thought and thought.

It was only supposed to be one night. Then back home to Manhattan. It was my birthday weekend celebration. I had made all the calls and everyone was coming. Bars and girls and booze. I didn’t go. I stayed in New York and they all went with out me and griped and grumbled and celebrated with out me.

When I got back my best friend shrugged off the insult of my absence at my own party. “Did you have fun?” I said I had. “What did you do?” Nothing, I answered. I did nothing.

It was different there. Things didn’t sprint, they sat and were. It was a place that trees actually grew. We sat and read the newspaper. She took me on a drive to see the icicles hanging from rocks. We listened to The Flaming Lips and drank in local bars and ate salads. We played with her cat. I didn’t go drinking in Manhattan with my friends and pretend to listen to what the Manhattan girls had to say and ride drunk in yellow cabs through the streets with no trees. I stayed and didn’t do anything. We made stir-fry and we slept.

I dreamed of that pole, of standing at the top as the wind blew and everyone watched. It was a leap of faith. Some people just stood and stood, begging to come down, petitioning their knees to move, praying their hands would grab the pole. Jump, everyone would yell. They all would. Some made it. Some fell and hung from their safety lines like hooked fish. I remembered standing on that pole and feeling my heart seizure and jumping into the air. I caught it.

It was the way she was unbreakable. The way she smiled and looked beautiful even at wakes and looked cozy under blankets in the cold and never stayed angry. It was the way she danced in her kitchen and how she couldn’t dance and didn’t care. It was the way she had kept on shooting that ball and didn’t quit. It was the way I was nothing and something too.

I drove home that Sunday along the gray and cold New York Thruway listening to the radio and smoking, counting the miles as they disappeared in the gray mountains of the Catskills. I had forgotten my jacket in her apartment, but I had brought home one thing she had given me, tucked securely in the folds of my book, packed in my duffel. It was a photograph, the only one I would ever have of her. It was her after that last game ten years ago, her face cradled in her hands as she cried.

It was the way she was. The whole time it was like standing on that pole. But this time I didn’t jump. I’m still standing on that pole. If you don’t jump you can’t catch that bar but you can’t fall either.

Jump.