Essays

The numbers were big, or certainly bigger than anything I’d ever attempted before. A 1.2-mile swim. 56-mile bike ride. 13.1-mile run: 70.3 total - a nice number if measured in Fahrenheit on an outdoor thermometer, but a bit daunting in terms of miles on a race course. I’ve learned that triathletes like numbers, lots of numbers, measured in iotas of seconds. They obsess about them, rattle them off like Al Gore dishing out global warming statistics. Pace, distance, intervals, splits, heart rate, watts, VO2 max - whatever that is.

It is a rare thing indeed for an artist, especially one who’s been dead for almost 200 years, to command 21st century popular culture dominance. Nonetheless, novelist Jane Austen is enjoying more popularity now than she ever did during her lifetime. Over the last few years especially, her works (and her life) have spawned countless movies (i.e.

If you thought at all about where you’d like to experience an earthquake, you might imagine a hospital would feel like a safe place to wait it out. But the afternoon the Loma Prieta quake hit, nothing felt safe or predictable when the shaking began. In fact, at 5:04 pm, just before I was due to leave on a week’s vacation from the department where I worked, standing in the hospital was a bit like being inside a giant pinball machine in the moments after the ground began to tremble.

I was 19 and fresh off my freshman year at college. The university was only two hours from my home, but I’d met people from different corners of the country, expanding my world view as I expanded my waistline, thanks to Thursday night kegs and the availability of Häagen-Dazs on the college meal plan. My classmates were articulate, outspoken and in a constant state of disbelief that Jesse Helms, my senator and the hero of many hometown neighbors, was for real.

Meg and I are watching a nature program. They’re showing male birds of different species, all working hard in their various ways to woo females. Meg and I are assessing their performances. We’re looking for the most attractive male bird - the one we’d allow to mate with us. If we were birds.

“Ooo, that’s my guy,” Meg says approvingly, watching a flamboyant red and black bird from the tropical rainforest. “I like his moves.”

From elementary school on, my friend Meredith enlisted me as her sole confidante. The plump, pretty daughter of two conventionally minded parents, she talked with them about math class or Girl Scouts or what she most longed for at Christmas. Any topic more personal, we both knew, managed to upset their orderly, defended world so that they tended to lash out, confused and angry. I remember sitting with Meredith in the family living room after school, bored and fidgeting on the maroon velveteen sofa, while she engaged in spirited but severely edited conversation with her mother.

It’s tempting to blame it on Clarence. Thomas, that is. Since he so consistently rules on the wrong side of both history and women’s rights, it’s just about axiomatic that I’d be opposed to anything he likes. And he does like his pornography! But even taking the proclivities of our Supreme Court justice out of the picture, I’m opposed (although just as opposed to censorship) to anything that degrades women and extols violence against them. And most porn, in my opinion, does both.

A pink bikini I bought in the youth department at JCPenney sits in my underwear drawer. I’ve worn it twice in Djibouti.

Once as an experiment—would people gape at the stretch marks left by carrying twins to full term as much as I thought they would? And once to make a statement. I don’t know whether the statement was being made to myself or the American woman I was with, but it was this: I have a pink bikini from the youth department and I have stretch marks and I don’t care.

When it comes to feminism, there’s plenty of talk about gender equality on a political, social, and economic scale, but what about the power dynamics between men and women in love? Women may still have a long way to go in closing the salary gap, but where do we stand when it comes to equal opportunities in romance? Okay, it’s a broad topic, so for the sake of discussion, let’s zero in on a particularly charged, pivotal point in relationships - y’know the one: engagement.

You hear the story all the time, usually in feel-good novels or the Chicken Soup series: adventurous traveler wanders far and wide, only to discover a preference for home. Dorothy clicks her red shoes together and repeats her favorite mantra. Yawn.

I drove through my 17th year, avoiding anger, racing restlessness, letting the wind style my hair. My girl was an old maroon hatchback named Sparky - bruised and dusty, and covered in odd bumper stickers with messages of love for dinosaurs, card games and reggae, even though none of those things really meant that much to me.

By my 10th birthday, I’d established myself as a world traveler. I had visited a remarkable number of foreign countries all by myself, and my memories of each locale were colorful and distinct. I couldn’t help but smile, recalling the lilt of an odd-sounding greeting in an old market square, the smell of the ice-capped sea or the wildflowers on the hill above the village, the taste of goat’s milk or saffron or raspberry fool.

I went to my first appointment in the spring. With nine needles poking out of me, warm air blowing on my feet and the sounds of waves circulating, my mind raced. I couldn’t turn off my thoughts. The acupuncturist said I didn’t have a great response. Somehow I felt responsible—I’d not had good results related to fertility for a couple of years, so it wasn’t new, this weird sense of guilt over something I had absolutely no control over. But I couldn’t deny that the lingering sense of shame was there.

My father raked the leaves for four days straight when my brother Michael came out.