Left Foot, Green!
His only concern, at the moment, should have been putting his left foot on the green circle.
“What are we doing today, Dad?”
The seven-year-old girl and her nine-year-old sister sat in the backseat of their father’s Volkswagen Jetta. Their father had just worked out some quick logistics with their mother and opened the driver’s door to get in.
“Your mom wants to meet at 3:30 in Patterson by the post office,” the dad said
“What are we doing today?” the seven-year-old girl repeated.
“What do you want to do?” the dad asked as he made a left onto 374 to begin the drive back to his one bedroom apartment in Great Lakes.
“Forget it, it’s too expensive,” she retreated.
The dad noticed eyeball communication between both sisters.
“Isabella, what does she want to do?”
Katie, the younger of the two, stared out her window, feeling self conscious.
“She wants to go roller skating but she thinks you’ll say it’s too expensive.”
“We can go roller skating,” the dad said.
A wave of understated joy washed through the back of the car.
“They don’t open until 12,” the dad said. “The rink is so close to the Post Office in Patterson, we should probably shoot for getting there at one. That’ll give you guys two and a half hours to skate.”
“Okay,” Isabella said.
“In the meantime, we’ll go back to my place and you guys can watch a movie. I have a book that I have been dying to get back to.”
“Can you put on L.O.L. Surprise?” Isabella pleaded.
“I’d really rather not. Isn’t there something we can all agree on?”
“Can we listen to The Beatles?” Katie asked.
“That’s something we can all agree on,” the dad said.
Suddenly, the dad noticed a Subaru in the distance racing up behind him and getting very close to his back bumper.
“Why do people do this?”
“Do what?” Isabella asked.
“Tailgate. I’m doing 62. That’s all you’re going to get out of me. This isn’t a highway.”
The dad pulled over to the shoulder and looked to his left to make eye contact with the driver.
“I hope you eat a bad sandwich and get food poisoning this afternoon,” he said, the way one might tell someone to have a nice day.
“Dad!” Isabella protested.
“Let me vent. These people make me angry.”
At home, the girls began to bicker about who would sit in the leather executive chair, what board games they wanted to play, and what they were watching on YouTube.
“If you guys don’t learn to get along, we’re not going to the roller rink.”
“It’s Katie! She won’t share!”
“Isabella always wants what I have!”
“Once again, if you guys don’t…”
The dad received a Facebook message from a woman he had gone on a date with the night before. It seemed to go well. Both had claimed they wanted to go out again at some point. He clicked on his Facebook Messenger and read:
“In all honesty, the more I think about it, the more I think I’d like to explore other options before I agree to go on a second date. I hope I haven’t offended you.”
No, he thought. What makes you think I would be offended. I was hoping to find someone a little younger than you anyway. I wonder how she would feel if I wrote her back and said that. Or “Isn’t that funny? I was just now thinking that I’d rather date someone with big boobs. Now I don’t have to worry about hurting your feelings.” New rule, his thoughts continued, from now on complete honesty. Social conventions are for suckers.
Katie came into his bedroom and disturbed the runaway train of his negative thoughts.
“Can we play Twister?”
That was really the last thing he wanted to do. Truthfully, he wanted to sit there and pout. Maybe buy a few pills and erase all of the sadness from his mind, but reality set in rather quickly. That may have been the way he addressed his problems in the past, but he had reached an age where he finally saw the futility in all of it. They didn’t invent a chemical to battle loneliness. Besides, he thought, you have no right to be lonely. You have two beautiful little beings in the next room who don’t give a damn how tall you are or how hot you are or how much money you have. They just wanted your attention. They just wanted to play.
“Sure,” he said, fighting the gravity.
Isabella spun the wheel and called out the instructions.
“Left foot, green!”
Katie and her dad followed the request.
“Right hand, blue!”
Before long, there were ridiculous contortions and giggling. Little by little, the dad forgot about Caitlin and her mean-spirited dismissal of his humanity. That’s how he saw it, anyway. For all he knew, Caitlin could’ve been caught up in some really precarious situations with men like him. Regardless, he thought, it was a waste of his precious time on earth to think too hard about it. His only concern, at the moment, should have been putting his left foot on the green circle. Ironically, that seemed to make a lot more sense.
It was approximately one o’clock when the dad and his small brood walked through the doors at Skate Time.
“Will everyone be skating today?” the teenage girl at the desk asked.
“Just the girls. I’m going to chill by the snack bar,” the dad said.
“They both need skates?”
“Yes, and those skate mate things.”
“$36.”
The dad took out his wallet to retrieve his debit card. As he looked back up, his eyes made contact with a woman who was already in the roller rink. She was about five foot eight and thick–maybe about 200 lbs–and had striking blue eyes. They might have been described as turquoise. It took an extra few seconds for him to avert his gaze and continue with the pedestrian act of paying for the admission. The girls ran inside to the skate rental desk.
The dad was wearing designer slacks and black leather weaved shoes without socks. He was disappointed in the shoes. The first time he went to Italy, he saw a suave guy in Florence wearing them and he wanted to come off that way as well, but the ones he ordered from Amazon were way too shiny and cheap looking. He wished he would’ve worn something else.
“Come on, Dad!” Isabella shouted across the roller rink. “Katie needs help tying her skates.”
The dad and the striking woman clapped eyes and she made a pained “they are so damned cute” face to him. It made his heart beat a little faster.
He bent down and tied both of their roller skates, set them up with their skate mates and watched as they made their way onto the rink floor. They were such beautiful little creatures, he thought. Maybe the universe was making it so difficult for him to find love at this stage in his life because it was trying to show him more of what he needed and less of what he wanted. He was thinking about that quote from Rilke in the famous letters he wrote. Something like, “Life has not forgotten you. It holds you in its hand. It will not let you fall.”
He cried the first time he read it. The thought of anyone or anything holding him and not letting him fall went straight to his guts. He never knew what it was like to be loved that way. His parents were very young when they had him and, like most young people, far too involved in getting theirs to think about what he needed to feel safe and nurtured. They weren’t evil. They were just too young to understand the far reaching weight of a child’s formative years. They were never able to, even when they got older. In his teen years, they saw his drug problems and just figured he was a shitty, selfish kid. They refused to let up for a second.They refused to consider that, like most people who get caught up, he was just trying to address a pain he could never quell.
He walked to the snack bar and bought a couple of those cherry-lime rickey’s the kids loved so much and a couple dozen hot pretzel bites. Normally, he tried to be sensible and frugal, but the thoughts he was having inspired him to let everything go. His father was a cheapskate and, in that moment, he needed to prove to himself that he, the apple, fell further from the tree than other apples did.
He sat down at the table with his snacks and was now only about eight yards away from the lady with the turquoise eyes. The children could see the cardboard containers and the bright red drinks from where they were skating and came over to indulge.
“Is that spicy mustard?” Isabella asked, grabbing two pretzel bites.
“I got you guys mild mustard,” he handed her a portion control cup with bright yellow mustard in it.
“Can I have a straw?” Katie asked.
He handed her one. His eyes kept returning to the cute woman and it wasn’t going unnoticed. She looked back for a moment and smiled, too. Then her daughters came off the rink to indulge in the bags of cotton candy she purchased from the snack bar. Suddenly, without warning, the sky opened up and the rain began to lash down in sheets. It seemed to be creating curtain-like patterns as it swept across the cars in the parking lot.
“Wow!” Isabella said. “Look at that rain!”
Blue eyes and her daughters looked out the front windows and noticed it, too. The dad received a text from his girls’ mother, explaining that she was getting ready to come get them earlier than expected. She was concerned that it was going to turn into a tropical storm of some proportions.
“Girls, your mom is coming to get you now. She thinks this is going to turn into a hurricane.”
Katie looked very apprehensive and said that she was scared.
“I’m sorry,” the dad said. “I shouldn’t have said ‘hurricane.’ Tropical storm.”
This seemed to put Katie at ease.
“Go bring your skates back and get your shoes on.”
“My tablet and my glasses are still in your car,” Isabella said.
“I’ll go get them,” the dad said.
The lady’s children went back to the rink, licking the cotton candy from their fingers. The dad leaned over toward her table.
“I’m sorry I kept glancing over at you,” he said. “I just think you’re very pretty.
The lady blushed immediately and thanked him. He smiled and jetted out the front door to get Isabella’s belongings. Once he retrieved them, he remained in the vestibule to keep an eye out for his ex. Also, he felt like it would’ve seemed creepy if he went back in after admitting his attraction. A minute later, the mom pulled into the parking lot with her SUV.
The violent storm made it difficult to say goodbye to the children in a satisfactory way, so when he got into his Jetta, he called the mother’s phone.
“Hey, what’s up?” she said.
“I just wanted to tell the girls that I loved them and I will see them next weekend.”
“Bye dad! Love you,” both girls said in a staggered unison.
It was 3 pm and the dad was driving home, shuffling through many different feelings. He was happy he got to spend such precious time with his little girls. He felt wistful that the beautiful woman was so much taller than him. He was kind of sad, also, that he was returning to an empty apartment in the rain. Rainy Sundays, he thought, were just as bad as rainy Mondays. Maybe worse.
In Patterson that evening, the mom with the turquoise eyes was clearing the dinner plates when she felt a vibration in her pocket. Her mother was calling from her timeshare in Myrtle Beach.
“...he came right up to me and apologized for staring. Said I was very pretty and he couldn’t help it.”
“You should’ve given him your number,” her mom laughed.
“I was much taller and probably outweighed him by 70 pounds. We’d be laughed at everywhere no matter where we went. Even the kids would laugh. Remember I went out with that guy last year. I felt like a monster next to him.”
“That’s too bad.”
The rain subsided and the summer air felt much cooler. Before long the sound of crickets and frogs replaced the sound of rain. The moon shone brightly through the windows in Patterson and Great Lakes. The dad and the woman with the turquoise eyes laid in bed, twenty miles away from each other, both thinking the same thought:
This would be a nice night not to have to be alone.