The Late Bloomer's Revolution by Amy Cohen

Author:Amy Cohen
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781401388430
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

• 6 •

QUEEN OF THE COURT

AFTER I LEARNED to ride a bicycle at thirty-five, I decided to take on the list of skills I had always wanted to learn. This list included scuba diving, even though I hadn’t been in the ocean in over ten years and could only dog paddle, and painting, my great passion in high school, when I did a series of nude, deeply depressed women lying under tables in the fetal position. I began with tennis.

Because my whole family played tennis, my mother enrolled me in group lessons at an early age, but soon it became clear that I had the hand-eye coordination of someone with the wrong eyeglass prescription. It seemed I was always chosen last when we were dividing into teams, and once I was even picked after a girl on crutches. Every spring, when my family would travel down to Miami, my sister and brother played doubles with my parents, while I attended arts and crafts at the local senior center. I sat in an airless, poorly lit room, painting plaster Indian chief heads with white-haired women named Sidelle and Gussie, who debated the merits of prunes versus bran. My mother tried to convince me that by enrolling me in these classes she was merely encouraging my artistic talent, but I think she was trying to spare me the hard truth that when it came to tennis, I was about as athletic as a plaster Indian chief.

As an adult I considered tennis lessons to be part of what I optimistically referred to as “my pre-midlife crisis,” as I expected to have another midlife crisis in my forties. This line of thinking suggested that I hoped to live well into my eighties, and managed to be both fatalistic (“I’ll hit a peak of misery every decade”) and optimistic (“but at least I’ll live to a ripe old age”). I thought about all the fifty-year-old men who start dressing like Goths and get tattoos that say “Hell Raiser,” whose midlife dilemmas are a reaction to the confines of career, marriage, and children, but I had none of those, which defined itself as a crisis of its own.

As my father put it, “You’re living with a whole lot of borscht right now.” This was around the same time he said, “You know, if you want to bring home a woman, I could be okay with that.” When I told him I wasn’t gay, not even a little, he said, “I know, but I’d just like you to find somebody already. I’ve met some nice lesbian couples recently, they’re very matronly, but they seem very happy together.”

“But I’m not gay,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, appearing less than convinced. “But I’m just saying if that’s something you want to do, I’d accept it.”

I had the feeling my father was picturing me with an older, heavyset woman with a buzz cut and thin drizzle of hair that grazed the collar of her Indigo Girls T-shirt, the kind of woman who would drive me to family functions on the back of her hog.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.