breeding ground for neurotics and exhibitionists”). When we moved to our new house, my father had a tennis court built in the backyard and hired a private coach. He set up a ballet barre and a mirror in the basement. He also built a lap pool. And he started to take me running with him.
I liked the tennis coach, a six-foot-tall Australian woman with an accent thick and salty as Vegemite, but I hated the tournaments, and so after a drawn-out campaign, I was allowed to quit when I was fourteen. After a few lame attempts at giving myself a ballet class (which is a lot harder and more boring than you might think), I quit that, too. I never did laps in the lap pool, since I have always found being underwater scary and isolating (the blood in my ears roaring!), although I never confessed this weakness to my father. But I loved the running.
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t some prodigy. Not bound for stardom. I was good, though, and I guess I knew it, but for me, being good was not the point. The point was cutting through the air, using the air, the way I used the ground. The point was joy. Who cared about good when there was joy like that?
I’ll tell you who cared, my father. He was thrilled, pleased as Punch that I was good. He bought a fancy stopwatch. He bought a fancy pedometer. He kept charts. I think this was why, in the end, he could not resist allowing me to be on the team—he wanted to see me race.
I found out about the team from a girl in my homeschooling group, Mary Ruth Coe. We weren’t exactly friends. She was so quiet that in the first month I knew her, I privately diagnosed her with a host of disorders, including expressive aphasia and stress-induced apraxia—my father was fascinated by neuroscience and taught me a lot about it—but she turned out to just be cripplingly shy. There was the added difficulty of her being of the variety of homeschooler who does not, as Ms. Shay would so eloquently put it a couple of years later, embrace the sciences. But she was the only girl my age in the very small homeschooling group that I began attending, spottily, reluctantly, and always accompaniedby my father, when I was thirteen, so we became some makeshift version of friends.
While her parents and my father had nothing else in common, they shared the belief in the body as temple, and because there is a law in our state that lets homeschoolers participate on public high school athletic teams, Mary Ruth’s parents insisted that Mary Ruth join the cross-country team at the local high school. It wasn’t the Webley School, which was private, but Thomas L. Mann High, named not after the writer but a local nineteenth-century gunpowder manufacturer, whose middle name turned out to be Lionel. In an unusually long and passionate verbal burst, Mary Ruth told me all about it. She raged. She sobbed. It was heartbreaking, actually, and I had to agree that making this poor, scared, pigeon-toed, gawky girl join a high school cross-country team was bordering on cruel and unusual punishment.
She begged me to ask my father to let me join, too, and even though I didn’t really care about running competitively, I went ahead and asked just so I could tell her that I had, fully expecting him to refuse me. When he said he would consider it, I almost fell over, and when he came back later and said, “All right, then. Let us see how you fare, my thoroughbred,” I spent a full twenty seconds being as speechless as Mary Ruth at her most speechless.
Then lo and behold, I liked it. A lot, in fact. If I only out and out loved it in moments, it was because only in moments did I feel a hundred percent part of the team, a hundred percent not like an outsider looking in. But the other kids were much nicer than I had expected; at worst, they were a little indifferent. No one was mean, which is saying something because—let’s face it—Mary Ruth and I weren’t your typical high school students. We shared virtually no cultural common ground
I liked the tennis coach, a six-foot-tall Australian woman with an accent thick and salty as Vegemite, but I hated the tournaments, and so after a drawn-out campaign, I was allowed to quit when I was fourteen. After a few lame attempts at giving myself a ballet class (which is a lot harder and more boring than you might think), I quit that, too. I never did laps in the lap pool, since I have always found being underwater scary and isolating (the blood in my ears roaring!), although I never confessed this weakness to my father. But I loved the running.
Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t some prodigy. Not bound for stardom. I was good, though, and I guess I knew it, but for me, being good was not the point. The point was cutting through the air, using the air, the way I used the ground. The point was joy. Who cared about good when there was joy like that?
I’ll tell you who cared, my father. He was thrilled, pleased as Punch that I was good. He bought a fancy stopwatch. He bought a fancy pedometer. He kept charts. I think this was why, in the end, he could not resist allowing me to be on the team—he wanted to see me race.
I found out about the team from a girl in my homeschooling group, Mary Ruth Coe. We weren’t exactly friends. She was so quiet that in the first month I knew her, I privately diagnosed her with a host of disorders, including expressive aphasia and stress-induced apraxia—my father was fascinated by neuroscience and taught me a lot about it—but she turned out to just be cripplingly shy. There was the added difficulty of her being of the variety of homeschooler who does not, as Ms. Shay would so eloquently put it a couple of years later, embrace the sciences. But she was the only girl my age in the very small homeschooling group that I began attending, spottily, reluctantly, and always accompaniedby my father, when I was thirteen, so we became some makeshift version of friends.
While her parents and my father had nothing else in common, they shared the belief in the body as temple, and because there is a law in our state that lets homeschoolers participate on public high school athletic teams, Mary Ruth’s parents insisted that Mary Ruth join the cross-country team at the local high school. It wasn’t the Webley School, which was private, but Thomas L. Mann High, named not after the writer but a local nineteenth-century gunpowder manufacturer, whose middle name turned out to be Lionel. In an unusually long and passionate verbal burst, Mary Ruth told me all about it. She raged. She sobbed. It was heartbreaking, actually, and I had to agree that making this poor, scared, pigeon-toed, gawky girl join a high school cross-country team was bordering on cruel and unusual punishment.
She begged me to ask my father to let me join, too, and even though I didn’t really care about running competitively, I went ahead and asked just so I could tell her that I had, fully expecting him to refuse me. When he said he would consider it, I almost fell over, and when he came back later and said, “All right, then. Let us see how you fare, my thoroughbred,” I spent a full twenty seconds being as speechless as Mary Ruth at her most speechless.
Then lo and behold, I liked it. A lot, in fact. If I only out and out loved it in moments, it was because only in moments did I feel a hundred percent part of the team, a hundred percent not like an outsider looking in. But the other kids were much nicer than I had expected; at worst, they were a little indifferent. No one was mean, which is saying something because—let’s face it—Mary Ruth and I weren’t your typical high school students. We shared virtually no cultural common ground
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