“Now I know why I never became a marine,” I said. “I’m a weenie.”
Reba choked out a laugh, and Lily and Opal looked at me with pity.
Great. I’m only forty-seven and two older ladies can outdo me. But not for long. Once we got to actually ride our motorcycles, something inside of me clicked. Plus, it didn’t hurt that when I moved, the air moved, and the wind felt cool on my damp skin.
Opal quivered in her new boots as she tried in vain to follow the teacher’s instructions. The instructor explained things to the class more than once and then walked over to Opal and patiently repeated the instructions again.
Lily and Reba, who already knew how to ride, were the star students.
I was another story. Was the teacher leaning way over to the right? Were my handlebars turning? Were people standing over me looking down?
“You OK? Hey, Kirstie, snap out of it,” Reba hollered.
“Get back!” The instructor pulled everyone away from me. “Give her some air. Bring that water bottle over here.”
Splash.
Ahhhh. Wonderful, beautiful, cold, wet water.
I laughed, embarrassed.
“You fainted.” Reba reached out a hand to help me up.
“I can see that.” I grabbed onto Reba’s strong hand and pulled myself up but was too wobbly to stand without help.
“You gonna be OK?” The instructor poured more water on my head, and I enjoyed the icy stream flowing down my neck and back.
“Yes.” I took a deep breath. “I just need to cool off a little I think. Is the bike OK?”
“The bike’s fine.” Lily fanned me with her fanny pack. “There’s not a scratch on it.”
I knew I had chubby thighs for a reason.
Hands on all sides of me offered more water. Our entire class gathered around in concern. The teacher opened one of the bottles and handed it to me. “Drink some more and go sit under that tree and watch.”
The class cost a hundred fifty dollars. If she asked me to leave, it would be an expensive failure.
On Friday and Saturday, I brought a cooler full of water to class. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and I felt like a chicken wing in a broiler. I wasn’t the only one who fainted. One portly fellow with hypoglycemia ran his motorcycle into the fence as he passed out. His motorcycle didn’t fare as well as mine.
“They should tell people to bring granola bars or something. I never dreamed we’d be standing in the open for hours like this.” I shook my head and pitied the poor guy. The ambulance came and whisked him away. He’d have to take the class again.
The rest of us relaxed under one little tree in a median on the edge of the parking lot. We were like survivors on a wilderness game wondering which one of us would be eliminated next. I passed out water and a batch of cookies I’d fetched from my freezer. It eased the tension a little. We all knew any one of us could be removed by a set of bad circumstances.
On Friday night when I got home, I was too sore to cook supper and ordered pizza. I could barely move.
Timmy wanted me to play with him in the pool.
I looked at Aaron with pleading eyes. “I just can’t.”
I wanted to cry. No one prepared me for how difficult the course would be. I had a new admiration and respect now for riders. Who knew it took so much for them to soar down the road on two wheels?
“I’ll take him for a swim, Mom.” Daniel looked at me with pity.
“Do I look that bad?” I asked.
He simply nodded his head and took Timmy out to play.
Opal called while I soaked in the tub. “Are you ready for the test tomorrow?”
“I hope so.” I rubbed aloe across the new freckles on my sunburned nose. My reflection in the mirror across from the tub revealed exhausted, bloodshot eyes encircled with a white mask where sunglasses protected my skin from the sun’s angry glare.
“I’m worried about the swerve part,” I said. “I don’t think I did it right even once.”
“I’m worried about the stop.” I heard Opal bite into something crisp.
“Carrots?”
Opal loved healthy food. “Yup,” she said. “And celery.”
“Naturally.” I giggled at my own pun.
“Seriously, Kirsten, if I can’t stop suddenly, they won’t pass me.” She crunched in my ear, and I nodded as if she could see me.
“I know.”
She was right. That was the one requirement regardless of our scores on anything else on the test.
“But we’re gonna be prayed up and ready to do this, right?”
“Right.” She didn’t sound convinced.
The next morning the class took the written exam. Two people didn’t pass and weren’t permitted to take the riding test. We all pretended not to notice when they drove away as we mounted our bikes.
One by one, the instructors put us through the paces of our newly acquired skills. U-turns without putting a foot down, swerving quickly to the left and right in succession, weaving in and out of cones, figure eights, stopping suddenly, and more. Watching Lily and Reba navigate the course was like watching a ballet. They danced with their bikes. Opal and I couldn’t take our eyes off them.
Opal and I were three bikes apart in line to take the test. Opal went first. I prayed the entire time. She knocked down some cones, and I couldn’t tell if she maneuvered correctly in the swerves because I wasn’t sure how to do it myself. But when it came to the stop, she did it. I could see her white teeth smiling at me from across the parking lot.
Finally, it was my turn. I maneuvered the cones, figure eight, and even the swerves correctly. “Thank you, Jesus,” I whispered. But when it came to the U-turn, I tapped my foot down in reflex. “God, please help me,” I whispered frantically.
The last part of the course was the sudden stop.
I nailed it.
After the testing ended, we all lined up for our scores and papers to take to the license branch to get the coveted “M” on our licenses. We had to score at least a seventy-five to pass. Reba and Lily passed with flying colors. Opal let out a sigh of relief when she discovered she’d gotten a seventy-six, and we all cheered. But when my turn came to learn my score, the teacher scowled at me with a serious expression on his face. He looked me in the eye, and then…he smiled.
We were ready to rumble.
7
“OK, now that we have our motorcycle endorsements, we should get together and have a bike naming ceremony. You know, like the natives do
.” Reba grinned and took a loud sip of her cherry cola.
“The natives name their bikes?” Opal asked.
“No, silly, they name their babies.” Reba cuffed Opal upside the head. “Don’t be difficult. Take me seriously.”
Reba’s loud voice carried clear across the restaurant.
Someone eating a brownie fudge sundae turned to stare.
I hid behind my candy bar flavored ice cream treat.
“Why should we name our bikes?” Lily bit into her hamburger
, and a pickle slid out and landed on her shirt. She scooped it up and ate it.
“Because that’s what you
do
. Bikers name their bikes. You named your horse, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but that’s because it’s a living thing,” Lily said. “A bike is a machine.”
“Haven’t you ever named your car or your tractor?”
Lily chewed another bite of hamburger and looked up in thought. “You know, now that I think of it, my grandpa used to call his pickup
Barbie
. Especially when he tried to
start her. He said she ran kind of cold.”
“OK, then. So, when do y’all want to get together and reveal bike names?” Reba looked at us with her left eyebrow up.
“This is silly.” I giggled.
Reba glared at me.
“Well, it is.”
She glared again.
I took a bite of my
ice cream.
Opal came up for air from eating her banana split. “How about we do it after our practice ride next Saturday?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“OK with you, Lily?”
Lily nodded, swallowed, and took a swig of her lemonade. “Sounds silly, but OK.”
All week long, I thought about my bike and what it should be called. First, I needed to decide its gender. I was pretty certain it was a girl, but I wanted to be sure.
“What should I name my bike?” I asked at the supper table.
“Name your bike?” Aaron looked at me and crinkled his forehead. Did he think I’d lost my mind?
“Yeah. Reba says it’s proper to give them a name.”
“Proper?”
Aaron scowled.
“Name him Pinky and the Brain.” Timmy giggled and sucked on his three middle fingers. “He’s Pinky and the Brain.” He laughed, flapped, and rocke
d so hard he almost fell off his chair.
I wanted to throttle the caregiver who let him watch Pinky and the Brain. I never allowed my kids to watch certain cartoons, and now Timmy echoed all the ones I avoided.
It was part of his language disorder. He could repeat anything on TV, but he couldn’t hold a conversation.
“How about Lightning?”
Daniel popped another shredded potato bit in his mouth.
“That’s an idea.” I nodded but rejected it in my mind. “I’m thinking of something a little less dramatic.”
“I think it’s stupid. No real biker wears pink and rides a pink Harley,” Patrick said. “I’m going to be the laughingstock of town.”
Aaron dropped his fork on his plate and cleared his throat. “Don’t talk to your mother that way. Do it again and you’re going to your room.” Aaron rarely got angry, but when it came to defending me, he became an alpha wolf.
“Aaron, it’s okay.” I rested my hand on my husband’s arm to let him know I was fine
. “Never mind, boys. I’ll think of a name.”
That night I got on the Internet and looked up baby names. I wanted something that sounded pretty. My bike glowed pearlescent and blushing pink, like a bride. It needed a moniker like Cinderella or Snow White. I knew Reba would hate it, but it was my bike, not hers. It was a girl motorcycle and needed a female handle.
Finally, I hit on the perfect
label.
“That’s it,” I said aloud. “That’s her name.”
On Saturday, the girls and I rode slowly through the back roads to the nearby nature preserve. It was scary because Opal and I weren’t experienced enough to be on the road. I still hadn’t figured out how to get past third gear. Thankfully, the site was only a couple miles away.
We finally made it to the forest and parked our bikes in a wide circle on a campsite next to the lake. In the middle, we lit a small fire, roasted marshmallows, and ate way too much chocolate. We’d all brought our own thermoses of coffee or hot cocoa.
Opal brought her herbal tea. “To flush out all them sugar toxins.”
The glowing evening sun echoed the orange embers of our campfire and splashed the clouds with bright pinks and lavenders.
“See?”
I thought to myself.
“Even God likes to paint with pink.
”
“OK, time to get serious,” Reba said after the last sticky marshmallow. “Ladies, get your helmets. I’ll get the awl.”
“Awl?” We all looked at one other
.
We got our helmets and watched as Reba brought back a little vial of motor oil.
“Oh,
oil
.” Opal sighed.
We stifled a laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Reba asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“This here awl, I’m gonna smudge it on yer foreheads the way the natives do during their ceremonies.”
“Hold on there, pilgrim,” I said. “I’m not doing any such thing. The only oil I’m going to smudge on my head is anointing oil.”
“Same here.” Opal rarely spoke up against Reba, but she clearly would have none of Reba’s kind of anointing.
Reba shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She smudged some on her forehead and then smudged some on Lily’s.
“Now we’ll invite the spirit keepers to come for protection and guidance
.”
I gulped. What had I gotten myself into? Silently I prayed and asked God to protect me from any kind of spirits that Reba might be trying to conjure up. The only guidance I wanted was Holy Spirit guidance.
“In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” I spoke softly, but aloud.
Reba just shrugged. “Sure, whatever God you pray to, I don’t care. Go ahead.”
“Now we will anoint our bikes with the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I think the fact that we will be blessing our bikes at church sort of cancels out that part.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “OK, we can skip that part. Now, where’s my pipe?”
Reba pulled a pipe out of her jacket and lit it. She passed it to Lily. “We smoke the pipe to seal the agreement with the Great Spirit.”
“I don’t smoke, but I’ll just pretend to.” Lily drew the pipe to her lips and posed with it for a few giggles and then
passed the pipe to me.
“It smells lovely,” I said. “But I’ll pass and just agree with God that He will bless my journeys.”
“How about if I just light a candle instead?” Opal’s voice squeaked.
She didn’t have a candle, but we all agreed it was a good idea.
“You guys sure aren’t doing much of the ceremony. What’s the sense of a ceremony if we just sit here and say the name of our bike?” Reba looked miffed. She took another puff of the pipe. “Now,” she said. “The natives sing songs and play rattles. The rattles are for soul retrieval. That’s why we give rattles to babies.”
“We
do
?” I’m sure my eyes bulged halfway out of their sockets. I sure didn’t give rattles to babies for that. I thought we gave rattles to babies because babies liked the noise.
“Well, used to. Nowadays we just give them rattles. Anyway, we don’t have rattles for our bikes, but,” she said, pulling out four little boxes. How much stuff did she keep in that jacket anyway? “I have a gift for each of you.”
“Uhm, Reba, our bikes don’t have souls,” I said.
“Oh, but they do. They do. You’ll see. After our first big ride, you’ll see.” She gave each of us a tiny little box. “Now,” she smiled, “open them.”
We opened our boxes and found tiny bells inside
.
“Oh, how cute.” Lily pulled hers out of the box and held it up.
“Those are gremlin bells.” Reba grinned and popped a piece of bubble gum in her mouth.
“Gremlin bells?” Opal and I spoke in unison.