Nobody Taught Me to Ride a Bicycle
I taught myself with bruises, and it explained my whole personality.
There is a scar on my left knee shaped like the number seven, and for thirty years I told people I earned it alone.
I was nine the summer my cousin left his bicycle at our house, a black Atlas two sizes too big for me, with a crossbar I could not swing my leg over and a bell that rang a half tone flat. My father was working double shifts at the plant that year and left before I woke. My mother did not know how to ride and considered roads to be, on the whole, a conspiracy against her only child. Someone will teach you in the holidays, they said. The holidays kept arriving... and the someone kept not.
So I decided, with the cold clarity nine-year-olds are capable of and adults forget they ever had, that I would teach myself, and that nobody would know until I could do it perfectly.
Behind the municipal water tank there was a dead-end road that belonged to no one. In those days it carried exactly one vehicle, the milk van at quarter to six, and after that only fog and dogs. I started setting a secret alarm inside my own head, the kind children can set and adults lose the trick of, and I woke at five fifteen every morning, walked the Atlas out through the gate lifting it slightly so the bell would not give me away, and went to the empty road to fall down.
I want to be accurate about the falling, because the falling was the education.
You lean the bicycle against the water tank wall. You climb on from the pedal, one foot through the frame because your legs are too short for dignity. You push off. You travel four feet... The ground introduces itself. You do this until your elbow is gravel-printed and your shin has a blue coin on it, and then you do it more. On day three the pedal came around and bit the back of my ankle so hard I sat on the road and cried, quietly, with the specific discipline of a child who cannot afford to be heard, because being heard meant being stopped.
The seven on my knee happened on day six, on the drain grate. I told my mother I fell playing kabaddi. I wore long trousers through the hottest May of my childhood. She said nothing.
On day eleven, something shifted in the machine of the world. The wobble that had lived in the handlebars since the beginning smoothed out the way a crying child suddenly sleeps, and the road began to pour underneath me by itself, and the fog opened, and I was not falling. I was flying at eleven kilometers an hour past the water tank, and the flat bell rang on a bump, and there was nobody there to see it.
At the time, that felt correct. It was mine because it was witnessed by no one.
It took me three decades to hear how sad that sentence is.
The personality
Here is what I built on that road without knowing I was building anything.
I became the person who does not ask.
I taught myself swimming at nineteen from a book, which nearly went very badly. I taught myself cooking, accounting, a programming language, and how to knot a tie from a diagram, alone, door closed, always the door closed.
I refused a driving instructor and learned in an empty lot at dawn, because apparently dawn and emptiness were now load-bearing parts of my character. When help was offered I heard it as an accusation. When I needed help, and everyone eventually needs help, I experienced the need itself as a kind of debt I had no way to repay, so I went without, the way other people skip meals.
My wife said once, in year four of our marriage, that being loved by me was like watching someone carry six bags of groceries up the stairs, refusing to put any of them down, and calling it independence. We were in the kitchen. I remember I was, at that moment, actually holding too many things.
The therapist I finally saw at thirty-eight asked me, in our second session, an absurd question. She asked, “Who taught you to ride a bicycle?”
I laughed. She did not.
The terrace
The turn in this story arrived at my mother's seventieth birthday, over cake, in the most casual voice imaginable.
Someone was telling a story about the old neighborhood, and my mother said, to the table at large, “Oh, the water tank road. My heart used to stop every morning behind that tank. He wobbled so much the first week I used to hold my tea and not drink it.”
The table moved on. I did not.
I followed her into the kitchen and said... you knew. She was arranging biscuits on a plate and did not even look up. Of course she knew, she said. The gate made a sound. The first morning she had followed me at a distance and stood behind the corner of the tank with her chappals in her hand so they would not slap.
After that she watched from the terrace, every morning, all eleven days, with her tea going cold. She had also, I learned over the biscuits, spoken to Bhola who drove the milk van and asked him to come slow on that stretch, and to the pharmacy man about which antiseptic does not sting, which explains the new bottle that had appeared in the bathroom that May, unremarked, next to the cotton.
I asked her the only question that mattered... Why didn't you say anything.
She put down the plate. “You wanted it to be yours,” she said. “So I let it be yours. What was I going to do, teach you? I can't ride. I could only watch. So I watched.”
Being quietly watched over is not the same as being alone. It took me thirty years to learn the difference.
I stood in that kitchen and felt my entire autobiography reorganize itself.
The empty road had never been empty.
The self-made boy had a woman on a terrace holding cold tea, and a milk van braking gently, and antiseptic bought in advance for wounds that had not happened yet. I had not been unhelped. I had been helped in the only currency I was willing to accept, which was silence.
I have been unlearning the road ever since, slowly, with bruises of a different kind. I started writing about it because saying it out loud still jams somewhere in my throat, and the writing began, embarrassingly, with a prompt that started it all: write about something you learned alone. I filled a page and then crossed out the word alone, and stared at what was left, and that crossing-out has been the whole project of my forties. Most of what I write ends up filed under loneliness, but the honest poems, the newer ones, keep drifting toward healing, which I am told is progress and which mostly feels like learning to put two grocery bags down.
Last month I taught my daughter to ride.
She is seven, and the bicycle is pink and exactly her size, because some inheritances stop with you if you insist. I ran behind her down our own quiet road holding the seat, and she yelled, let go, Papa, let go, and I let go.
But I kept running.
That is the whole trick, I wanted to tell her. Somebody kept running behind me too. I just never once looked back.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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