The Bicycle Lesson
The door to the kitchen swung open. My mother carried in the birthday cake, her pale skin flushed in the candle glow, hair a frizzy gold halo around her plump face. Father followed, tall and angular, hunched over the bicycle he rolled into the dining room. It was lime green. A pink bow sat on the seat and a sign, Happy Birthday, Lydia, dangled from the handlebars. He snapped the kickstand down, parking the machine on the edge of the rug.
“Don’t leave it there, dear,” Mother said. The carpet, deep red and gold, had been in the truckload of furniture Grandmother Bradford, my father’s mother, sent from her house on Beacon Hill when we moved to Maryland the year before.
I closed my eyes and blew out the candles, eleven. I opened my eyes. The bicycle was still there, right on the carpet where my father had left it; I had wasted my wish.
We ate my mother’s marble cake topped with peppermint ice cream from Vinson’s drugstore. The best ice cream in town was scooped behind their long marble counter; Mother must have walked there earlier, to have a quart hand packed. Peppermint was my favorite because tiny nuggets of candy lodged between my teeth, leaking clean sweetness after the ice cream was gone.
“Seconds, please,” I said.
“Have mine,” Father said, pushing his plate toward me. His cake was untouched, the ice cream melting. My mother shook her head, frowning. He had grown very thin again.
“You’ve barely eaten anything,” she said to him, cutting a fresh piece of cake for me, topping it with the last of the ice cream. I ate slowly, to make it last. I knew what he would say when I finished.
“Let’s take it out for a spin,” he said as I put down my fork.
I had never ridden a bicycle; my grandmother said it was dangerous in Boston.
“What about training wheels?” I asked.
“You’re too old for that nonsense. All it takes is practice.”
I looked at my mother, but she glanced away, gathering the pink and white china plates. “Go ahead,” she said, plucking cake crumbs from the lace tablecloth with her quick, delicate hands. She looked across the table at my father, fixing him in her steady gray gaze, a little wrinkle creasing her broad forehead. “Have fun.”
“But of course,” said my father, raising an eyebrow. Tonight the air around him crackled, like a hot night before a storm. He was excited. I wondered how long it would last, this time.
He wheeled the bicycle through the kitchen and onto what we called the back porch, though it faced the street. Years ago, another family had built the house for their vacation cottage, coming out from Washington for the cool summer breezes. The street was just an alley in those days and the driveway had been on the far side of the house, stretching down the hillside all the way to the Falls Road. Long before we came here the land behind us had been sold and houses built. We still had a big yard though, with a fishpond.
Published in The Massachusetts Review: Autumn, 2008, Volume 49, No.III
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