The coach is 28, which used to seem old but is a whole generation down now. He’s a man, but there is something soft and gentle about him. The child is 9. It is almost bedtime but that’s not why she’s so flopsy and giggly.
The girl is doing warmups, drills like jumping down the floor with her hands up straight. She throws her body into them chaotically. Through the practice, but even through the drills, if the mother doesn’t have her eyes WIDE OPEN UNBLINKING AND FIXED ON THE CHILD then the child will glare and set her jaw a little, even mouth something. So the mother watches.
None of the other kids in the class came on this night, so it is just the coach and the girl—a private. She gets to do all her tricks with an attentive audience and a dedicated spotter. When she muffs her front handsprings for comic effect, daring the coach to nudge her up off the ground, he lets her lie there for a minute, not indulging her too much but not getting cranky either. The mother remembers this exactly feeling: flirting as a baby bunny with a big, kindly bear. God, that is so long ago. Now she’s just a rusty piece of apparatus parked in the mezzanine.
They move to the trampoline. The girl lifts her arms over her head and the coach lowers a harness to her waist, yanking the belt to tighten it, then drops the spool of rope from the ceiling. She takes a few jumps, following his counts, then springs backward into a slow-motion somersault as he leans on the ropes, adjusting time to match her skills. She tries two more somersaults. When she is done she flops onto the mat laughing and he tugs the ropes to signal to her to stand up.
They move to the lower floor where there is a tumble track. The mother stands and grips the rail at the edge of the mezzanine, bending over and pressing her shoulder blades through to make a small fold in her upper back. Godfuckingdamn she is stiff.
The girl needs her water bottle so she dashes off, hanging briefly from the uneven bars as she passes under, knees tucked in a small interrobang. While she is gone the coach bounces on the tumble track. The teen gymnasts heckle him to do tricks. He floats over like a letter falling into a mailbox, a back-layout back-tuck. His shorts hang long to his knees and he looks like a kid for a second. The girl returns and the mother watches WITHOUT LOOKING AWAY OR BLINKING at how he kneels at the end of the track, ready to guide her through a flip.
Mostly, she notices the flat of his open palm, supporting the back. The hands! When the girl goes flying off sideways from a bad bounce, he reaches out to bend the air and land her. Once she’s safe, he lifts his hands off. She has it on video: the arms crossed to see her through, the deft hands of a baker. You’re welcome, she thinks from her position up in the sky. This costs $100 a month, a steal for a fantasy.
They’re walking out of the gymnasium and the child asks, Mom, why did you say goodbye to my coach? He’s my coach.
You weren’t loud enough, he helped you, you need to say thanks, replies the mother, a bit tersely.
Summer of lust, or “lusty summs”
Today, I bring you some classic Lorrie Moore:
He reached for my hand under the covers, lifted his head toward mine, and kissed me, his lips outside then inside, back and forth like polyps. The heel of his hand ran up my side beneath my nightgown, and he moved me, belly up, on top of him. His penis was soft against my buttocks and his arms were clasped tight around my waist. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, offered up to the ceiling like that. So I just lay there and let Gerard figure things out. He lay very still beneath me. I whispered finally: “What are we supposed to be doing, Gerard?”
“You don’t understand me,” he sighed. “You just don’t understand me at all.”
Haha. Also, this.
Goodies
🐛 It’s too much work for me to explain to my Aussie compatriots what is wrong with Jonathan Haidt (his new book comes at the same time as a petition in Oz to raise the social media minimum age from 13 to 16, explaining some of the positive attention), but I shall let this essay by Courtney Tenz address some of it.
🐛 Speaking of funny/bad sex scenes, I read Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s precise and severe critique of book-of-the-mo down under, Bri Lee’s The Work, and on finally reading the book myself (it was dispatched slowly over the ocean), must agree with her arguments. Humor and satire are not Lee’s strengths, and it’s odd to me that she chose that route for her fiction debut.
Good coaches are gems.
Definitely feeling the rusty apparatus of my own body, this really hits