In my town in the New Jersey suburbs there’s a building called “the Arena.” It was named for a legendary football coach, but few bother to say the full name, everyone just says, “the Arena.” It’s a circular, roughly built structure of steel and cinder block that houses an ice-skating rink hugged by bleachers to sit on as the skaters twirl and spin. I spent many an afternoon at the Arena when my son was small. I could never relax on the hard metal benches. The Arena somehow manages to be too cold and too hot at the same time, and my afternoons there were equally mixed, the physical discomfort eased by seeing my child dizzy with the boundless delight children take in simple games.
My son is now a teenager, and I’ve awakened early to take him once again to the Arena, this time to meet his lacrosse team’s bus. He leads me out the door, his new titanium stick tight in his fist. It is six a.m. on a Saturday morning, still quite dark. My wife remains in bed, awaiting my return. The boy beside me is our only child.
On the drive to Valley Road we swing past a station wagon with blinking lights from which a hand heaves newspapers that roll to a stop on lawn after lawn. We glide through darkness that is not real darkness but the early morning kind, darkness about to lift. The way it dissolves in my headlights feels as if I am breaking through, that I am, at long last, seeing. I check my rear-view mirror; all I find are narrowing streets and sidewalks skipping backward. When I look again through the front I sense that I am seeing not only ahead but also behind, that I’m glimpsing my future as well as my past.
Before the life I have now I had another life,
with a different woman, and we also had a child,
a boy named Willie. It was a good life.
On Valley we are the only car, yet the traffic light at Lorraine acts normal, as if it had more than one car under its command. I humor it by slowing to a stop to wait out the red. The early weekend hour, the stillness we alone are here to break, is like the drive to a hospital for a birth, or (I cannot dwell on this) in an ambulance with an injured child. At the corner I turn left to the bagel store, the only lighted window on the block. I indulge in a U-turn and cruise into a space. As my son climbs out the aroma of bagels – onion, sesame, poppy – swirls into the car and teases me with the scent of morning, coffee before you’ve had any.
My son goes in with the dollar bills I stuff into his eerily man-size fingers. I look down the road to the mountain, blue light behind it, another fresh, promising day. Yet anxiety churns inside me, brought on by the ambulance memory, a memory so ingrained it felt like a dream I had remembered. My life is burdened by the weight of this “dream.” It has always been like this, at least for some time, a beautiful morning with a happy, healthy child, and fear gnawing at my stomach.
My son climbs back in, clutching a brown paper bag with the four bagels he insists he needs to nourish him during the hours he will spend with his team. The aroma warms the surfaces inside the car. He says nothing; a supply of food is still enough to sustain him. As he clicks into his seat belt I notice he has carried his stick into the store. He tucks the stick between his legs to free both hands to consume the first of his four-bagel provision, releasing more scent to thicken the space between us.
“We can go now,” he says because, watching him, I have not moved.
Before the life I have now I had another life, with a different woman, and we also had a child, a boy named Willie. It was a good life.
Beauty without warning is a gift, the other side
of accidental loss; they share, are one,
in the heartless way they pierce.
I make another illegal U-turn, enjoying my early morning license to break any traffic law. If there are cops around, they’ll surely understand. I turn right onto Park Street (the rear view mirror is clear!) and head for the Arena.
Accelerating down the empty road, I watch tree branches rise and float across the windshield. Yes, this was a surprise, that the beauty of nature would remain as sharp, tree branches in winter on a suburban street. I am caught up in their shapes, so haphazard and yet so perfect. Beauty without warning is a gift, the other side of accidental loss; they share, are one, in the heartless way they pierce.
In the clarity of morning the houses I pass are peaceful, a porch light weak in early sun, a hall lamp splashing yellow on a wall of lilacs. At dawn on a weekend my town is a stranger’s bedroom I somehow awoke in, stumbling onto colors and textures never seen before. Another woman’s body in my bed, the sheet circling over her hips, she’s still asleep, another life I have broken into. I awaken inside this life and check the time (in the ice-blue digital clock, crisp, exact), and hope I can fall back asleep. My wife looked like that as I slipped out of bed this morning, her hips arcing up in a white sheet. That was most surprising, that the beauty of a woman could remain after what happened with Willie. Did I mention that my second wife looks like my first? Friends were stunned at the resemblance. I never saw it, but at times I wake beside her and believe I am still with my first wife. As I wrench myself out of a dream it takes a moment to remember which life I’m in, this one or the last. Perhaps all second marriages are like this? I don’t know, but this morning as I tiptoed out the bedroom and looked back to see this patient and lovely woman’s hips swirling up in the sheet, I was confused for a moment which life I was in. I felt that magnetism a woman’s body can have, which I hadn’t felt in a while. I felt something like it again when I saw the branches on Park Street, nature as guileless in its beauty as a sleeping woman. I had expected it all to be gone after Willie. We had to part after what happened, and it wasn’t from lack of love, I promise you that.
Every time I’ve gone to the Arena
I enter a personal arena,
a battle from the past.
Meanwhile, my son has been talking. He wants to be sure his mother or I will meet the bus when it returns. He doesn’t understand how crucial this is, to be certain a parent will be in place when he needs one. I try to explore the psychological aspects of this but he loses interest and pretends he’s listening as his father rambles, as his father is wont to do. He is even more patient with me than his mother is. As he fakes listening he checks his supplies: the remaining three bagels in their hot, scent-swollen bag; his new titanium stick, that he switches from hand to hand in a practice shuffle; the oversize pillow for napping on the bus; and a bottle of water chilled in the freezer overnight. “The bus is always late, but you have to be there,” he says, staring ahead for the Arena to appear, though it is still blocks away, staring with the eagerness of a child, their naiveté, their trust.
Every time I’ve gone to the Arena I enter a personal arena, a battle from the past. The first time I came to pick up my son years ago there were teenagers in a corner, part of the “blue crew,” I suspected. That’s the expression kids in my town use for what we used to call “jocks.” They were kids who would know all about the legendary coach, and speak of him in hushed, reverential tones.
When Willie came into my life
I thought it was the biggest arena of all.
Other visits brought back other arenas. Teenage couples brought back early relationships. A later visit (two kids trying desperately to neck on a corner bench of the bleachers) reminded me of early sexual encounters. While waiting at the Arena I got in the habit of reflecting on arenas of earlier days, work, marriage, and the unexpected, being fired from a job I loved and needed. Early arenas leave their mark. They crop up in dreams that plague our nights and leave us uneasy on rainy winter afternoons. They’re visits back to arenas we were in. They sneak up like the scream of an ambulance. Or a dream.
When Willie came into my life I thought it was the biggest arena of all.
First the decision to start a family, after which we dwelled in that period of suspended animation when you’ve decided to have a child but don’t have one yet on the way. In our case, my wife and I dwelled there for years. After that stress the plan to adopt was a breakthrough, until we learned it can be as difficult an arena as conception and labor, as much turmoil as the physical ordeal of birth. In the end, as we held Willie and the birth-mother signed a slew of papers, it was worth it. This was the sweetest victory in any arena, Willie in my arms, that slight but significant heft of his flesh on my shoulder.
“Why didn’t you turn at Chestnut?” my son asks, fear cracking his voice.
I had missed my turn. I do this a lot. He’s never had a father who isn’t absent-minded, who remembers where to turn on roads he’s traveled a hundred times.
I make a few hasty turns. Although I’m without a natural sense of direction, since what happened with Willie I’ve learned to compensate for missed turns, to find exit ramps that curl back over highways, to carve U-turns out of gas stations that have outlets on the side I need. Often, I’ve done it before anyone realizes I made a mistake.
My mind skids back. I can’t help it.
My son’s voice loads the car with worry:
“We’re not going to be late, right? We won’t miss the bus?”
I reassure him we have time. The fear on his face in the dashboard light makes me envision a flat tire, a breakdown, a mix-up in communication that means the bus already left. I speed up, at the same time being careful to get there safely. You always have to think of safety with children.
My mind skids back. I can’t help it.
I know every parent is struck by the wonder of birth, the most amazing arena of all, a tiny human being squirming out of a woman’s belly (and I can only begin to imagine the emotions of the woman!). But because he was adopted, Willie was on another level. He came from the body of a stranger and was literally handed to us. Think of the odds, that out of the millions of children born on earth this one finds his way to you, altering both your lives forever, all the innumerable stars that have to be aligned at exactly the same time. It left me amused at the limitless egocentricity of birth parents, who secretly believe their love to be richer because their genes are involved, rather than the mystery of a child born to a stranger becoming one with your flesh, who comes out of nowhere to pierce your mornings with his cry.
“What in the world’s going on?” my son breaks in.
A block away are blinking lights, police cars, emergency vehicles.
After Willie we had no boundaries, no secrets.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
I’m right this time. It’s a broken traffic light, and the police are directing traffic. A truck is idling, workers in orange iridescent aprons under spotlights even though it’s nearly light, two policemen chatting. The horror of a serious accident is how it stops time. You’re driving down a road and the next second your life explodes, fixing you on that spot forever, to be relived for the rest of your life.
“They’re just repairing the light,” I say. “It must have broken.”
“The bus is never on time anyway,” my son says.
At that moment I feel my wife turn in bed, rolling over so her hips no longer jut up in the sheet. This was strange; after we lost Willie, and could barely look each other in the eye, my first wife and I became precisely attuned to each other’s rhythms. I could feel her no matter where she was or what she was doing. In the evening we’d finish conversations we started in our minds in the afternoon. At dinner we’d know what kind of day we had without speaking. It’s part of why we couldn’t stay together. When I remarried I couldn’t feel my new wife that way at all. With my first wife, it was as if the borders between what one expects and what happens, between one person and another, had collapsed. After Willie we had no boundaries, no secrets. I even felt her realize this and decide we couldn’t stay together any more.
The policeman signals me to pass. He’s out in the cold but it’s nice duty, better than the anguish they see, families dropping through a trapdoor into an alternate universe.
I turn toward Chestnut, where I should have gone in the first place. I can tell my son tensing, fearing he’ll be late and miss the bus.
“Another minute,” I say. “Just one more minute.”
“Dad, chill, we’ll make it. I said it never leaves on time.”
“I’ll drive you all the way if I have to. We can handle it.”
After Willie our friends asked how we coped, my wife and I. The odd thing was, we had no sense of coping. We attended a group for parents of children who died in preventable accidents, and everyone tried to be helpful. We talked a great deal, to each other, in the group, and to various counselors and therapists. After a while we could have dinner with friends, see movies, take walks, even make love, at pretty much the same frequency as before. We enjoyed all of it but in a different way that’s hard to describe.
Perhaps it was this: everything we did seemed to have quotation marks around it.
We discussed the change in our relationship. Afterward, we’d climb into bed and make love. But we’d only “make love.” Does that make sense? Talking felt like “talking,” hugging felt like “hugging.” It had to do with the loss of boundaries. Most people don’t understand what I mean when I put it this way.
“There it is,” my son says.
It is the Arena.
They run with the timeless grace of boys chasing balls,
The view is startling. Dozens of boys race around, swinging lacrosse sticks like my son’s, swiveling them in their hands as he does. Every stick has the same patch of white mesh on top, concave, a strand or two hanging loose. After watching my son for months cavorting alone with his stick the sight is magical, as if he had burst into a multitude of boys. It brings to mind the groups I mentioned, the sensation of entering a place where the peculiar circumstance that sets you apart is the one that binds you to a roomful of others. The connection should be instantaneous and healing; instead it was elusive and unsettling. Here, however, the bond is what I expected then, my son and his passion reproduced as a joyous mob that surges the wide lawn of the Arena, stamping, swinging, shouting.
My real son, meanwhile, is climbing out and knocking the door shut with a sidearm slap of his stick. I am invisible. I know the immutable law of nature that states that when peers arrive parents evaporate. I study the boys as they swarm over the lawn and it hits me as nothing has since Willie. I remember everything, I don’t fight it, as my son skips the curb and dumps his pillow, bag of bagels, and water bottle on the grass. He trots across the walkway as a boy hurls a ball toward him. He leaps, catches it, and flings it back. Another swats his stick, a ball takes flight, and a score of feet pound the earth around the Arena, all eyes fixed on the curving splotch of white that circles the now-light sky above their craning necks.
They run with the timeless grace of boys chasing balls, gestures that will continue no matter what happens to any one of them.
It was Willie who taught me this, the terror of parent-love, its brutal force and its nightmare risk, the love beside which all our other loves fall away. Previous arenas are nothing compared to this one. I will stand aside as my son enters his own arenas; I don’t really have much choice. But the terror never leaves, I realize, as my son springs higher than he ever has, snares the ball, and hauls his prize out of the sky.
I stay another minute, worrying over every inch around him, every moment that will come to him. Then I turn away. It’s time to go home.
I even felt her realize this and decide
we couldn’t stay together any more.
gestures that will continue no matter
what happens to any one of them.
