B
a
ck in 1994, after I stood up on a surfboard for the first time, I thought I might just have discovered my purpose in life. Nothing I’d ever done compared to the exhilaration of gliding across the face of a wave. I moved into a tiny beach apartment with a hairdresser and a full-time bodybuilder. Craning my head out my bedroom window, I could see a shimmering thread of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. This felt like a major accomplishment.

But I urgently needed a steady income, so I took a position as an assistant at a Planned Parenthood clinic. The job paid enough to cover my rent and was close enough to my apartment that I could walk to work. It was also in keeping with my feminist ideals. In my undergraduate women’s studies classes, I’d found my tribe among classmates who debated passionately, laughed loudly, and dressed comfortably. In our discussions we sat in a circle on the floor, our unshaven legs tucked beneath us. We had heated discussions about gender constructs, institutionalized sexism, and whether a woman should feel self-conscious wearing a tampon at a nude beach. I had tossed off the artifacts of high school—curling irons, berry-flavored pink lip gloss, paralyzing self-consciousness—and discovered that it was acceptable, even desirable, to have a strong body and a critical mind. In my new job I looked forward to playing a role in empowering women.

In the mornings before work, I’d maneuver my heavy long board out of the apartment and walk down to the beach in the crisp dawn air, zipping up my wetsuit at the shoreline and then jogging into the surf. When my feet first hit the water, I’d recoil both from the cold that numbed my ankles and from the thought of being pulled under the gray waves. As much as I loved surfing, I was terrified of the ocean. Every morning I fought the impulse to turn back and stay on the sand, where it was warm and dry. Big waves sometimes appeared out of nowhere, tossing my heavy board as if it were a toothpick and pinning me against the ocean floor. The first time this had happened, I’d panicked, clawing desperately at the water while I spun like a sock in the laundry. It’s impossible to know which way is up while you’re being tossed by a wave, and I quickly learned that the more I struggled, the faster I depleted my oxygen supply. If I relaxed, however, my natural buoyancy would eventually float me back to the surface.

I’d get out of the water at 7:30
A.M
., leaving just enough time to hurry back to my apartment; pull my dripping, matted hair into a ponytail; rinse the thin white crust of salt from my face; and make it to the clinic by eight. The job was perfect for me, a literature major with a voracious appetite for people’s stories. Interviewing a client in my tiny office, our knees nearly touching, I felt like a music fanatic who’d landed a job at a record store.

Across from me usually sat a young woman around my age; many times I’d recognize her from the beach or campus. A recent graduate myself, I’d affect my best professional tone and sail through a list of questions about her medical history. I’d always pause awkwardly before asking “At what age did you first engage in sexual intercourse?” and “How many sexual partners have you had in the past year?” I’d save those two questions for last and note the answers with a brisk nod and a click of my pen, secretly comparing the woman’s experiences to my own. But before asking those questions, I’d try to guess if the woman across from me had a more adventurous sex life than I did and whether she had lost her virginity at a younger age than I had. I usually guessed wrong. The middle-aged former prostitute with the bleached-blonde hair and leathery tan, who lingered in my office and wondered aloud how she would explain the twelve-year gap in her résumé to potential employers, had been with very few partners in the previous year. The young woman who showed up at the clinic wearing nylons in the middle of summer and looking as if she were there for a job interview had lost her virginity at an age when I was still having slumber parties.

In addition to taking medical histories, I administered hormone injections for birth control, described the benefits of the IUD, and once explained “the three bases” to a nervous boy who called the clinic after school and asked questions in a high-pitched voice. But the most dramatic part of the job was administering pregnancy tests. I could tell from a patient’s eyes as she handed me her urine sample how she felt about possibly being pregnant. While she sat in the waiting room, I stood in the tiny laboratory, waiting to see whether the thin pink line on the dipstick would appear—first faint, then staining the white tip darker and darker, marking a permanent boundary between before and after.

I’d call the woman back into my office, maneuvering the folding door shut to provide an illusion of privacy. Most clients I saw did not want to be pregnant. When I confirmed their pregnancies, they sighed heavily and held their faces in their hands. I learned to sit in that confined space with a crying stranger, to hand her a tissue without saying anything.

With their copious tears and unpredictable reactions, these women made me anxious, and I was grateful for the color-coded information sheets I could hand them: purple for adoption, blue for abortion, green for prenatal care, pink for Medicaid information. As I outlined their options and helped them set up appointments, I spoke in the language of the clinic:
Clear, conscious choice.
Intended pregnancy. Every child a wanted child
. I liked the sound of these words, the way they seemed to cut through the churning, murky waters of these clients’ lives like an anchor, solid and certain. I wholeheartedly believed the gospel I shared in the counseling room: that if we planned carefully and made responsible decisions, we could create the lives we wanted.

Still, I was often baffled by the women’s choices. A married woman who tenderly held her squirming toddler on her lap, kissing the top of his head absentmindedly, requested an appointment for an abortion without a moment’s hesitation. A schoolgirl dropped her backpack on the floor, rubbed her fists into her eyes, then asked about prenatal care. Day after day, I counseled young women who stared blankly at me through their tears. Whether I was telling them about the adoption process or how to get on Medicaid or how an abortion was performed, I always reassured them that they would be fine. Like a preacher describing the gates of heaven, I relied heavily on my imagination to comfort these women. In truth, I had no idea how it felt to be confronted with such a decision. I didn’t even know how to set a clear, intentional course for my own life, which at that time was very much like my surfing: though every once in a while I found myself in just the right place at the right time, and all uncertainty dissolved in the exhilaration of the moment, more often I was off balance, trying to find my feet in a world constantly in motion. Usually I found my feet too late, just as the wave buckled over my head, or I stood up in the wrong place, and the tip of my board took a nosedive, jettisoning me into the water while fifty pounds of fiberglass whipped dangerously close to my head. Sometimes I didn’t even see the wave coming until it was crashing down on me.

When my father came to visit, I picked him up from the airport in my car that belched exhaust and smelled of musty wetsuits and towels. I drove him back to my cramped apartment and searched my kitchen for something to offer him, finding only granola, black coffee, and a half-eaten pint of ice cream. As we walked along the beach, he looked into my sunburned face. “If you ever want to do anything with your life, you’ll need to move away from the ocean.”

I was beginning to think he was right. At work I was tired of repeating the same words day after day to women who seemed to look right through me. I was dating a man whose bed sheets were always gritty with sand and who lived in a tiny beach apartment like mine and didn’t own enough dishes to serve a meal for two. While my college friends were continuing their educations or getting married, I was saving my pennies for trips to Baja and Hawaii to surf. I was tired of being broke all the time and building a life around the fleeting pleasure of riding a wave. I decided to apply to graduate school to study journalism, a field that would allow me to indulge my appetite for a good story. When I was offered a scholarship, I gave away my surfboard and drove across the country to the inland college town of Chapel Hill.

IN
NORTH CAROLINA
I missed the ocean, but less than a mile from my new house I discovered a network of running trails that snaked through the woods alongside a creek. I ran for miles beneath a dense canopy of leaves, losing myself in the rhythm of my breath the same way I’d lost myself in the motion of the waves. I ran in the early morning, when the woods were nearly deserted except for a tall, dark man, his graying hair cut close to his head, who leapt down the trail like a jackrabbit on long, toned legs. When our paths crossed, he swerved off the trail to let me pass and flashed a broad smile. I began to look for him, to listen for the distinct sound of his gait on the path. We became friendly, and sometimes I wished he would switch directions and run with me for a few miles.

One Saturday morning, just as I reached for a tomato, he appeared by my side at our local farmers’ market. A disarming smile played across his face as he lifted the vegetable out of my palm and replaced it with another: plumper, deeper red, its taut skin yielding to my thumb. In California I had only known one kind of tomato: waxy and faded, shaped like a kiwi, stacked into tall pyramids in the grocery store every season of the year. I was used to grabbing a couple from the top of the pile and adding them to my cart without even stopping to examine them. They were all the same anyway: flavorless and mealy. I had not yet learned that a tomato could be read like a book, that if I lifted it to my nose and smelled it like a flower, or pressed my thumb into its flesh, it would tell me a story.

“My name is Ismail,” he said, his vowels bent and stretched by an accent the likes of which I had never heard.Was it Irish? Moroccan? I had no idea.

I nodded and smiled. “I know you from the woods.”

“Next time we should run a few miles together.”

Caught off guard, I agreed to meet him at the trailhead the following day, though I regretted my choice as soon as I turned my back to him. His obvious interest in me was a weight I didn’t want to carry with me down narrow dirt trails. My body knew the work of tending to men like a mother’s breasts knew to leak in response to a baby’s hunger. Before I even realized what was happening, their need became mine; I smiled more brightly, nodded more enthusiastically, drew out even the most reticent man with probing questions. But that was the last thing I wanted to do during my precious time alone on the trail. I ran to feel free, to become like the deer I often glimpsed through the trees. If he was by my side, I feared I would not be able to outrun the good girl, the polite girl, the bright smiling one who tap-danced across the silence.

The following morning when I arrived at the park that backed up to the woods, he was leaning against his car in the parking lot, smiling. I knelt on the asphalt to lace up my running shoes and we started slow down the trail, making polite conversation. As we jogged past a playground, I commented that I had always feared swing sets as a child: those rickety frames groaning and rocking as children frantically pumped their legs higher and higher into the air. Once, while swinging on her belly, my sister had caught her leg on the ground: her knee had buckled backward. I still remembered how she had howled with pain. He probably thought my fear was silly, I added; all children loved swing sets.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I never played on one,” he replied in such a deadpan way that I thought he must be joking. “On the Libyan coast, where I grew up, we made our own swings—from ropes hung between palm, olive, or apricot trees.” I fell silent, trying for a moment to imagine a childhood without playgrounds. “Do you have any siblings?” I asked.

He nodded. “My mother gave birth to thirteen kids. Eight survived.” He went on to tell me about his younger brother whose nose had poured blood for days—and about the local healer who burned rubber on the fire and forced the child to inhale its toxic black smoke. He told me about the slippery, long leech that emerged from his brother’s nose days before he died—and about the daylong pilgrimage his parents made to the shrine of a Muslim saint in a remote village to pray and make an offering so that Ismail would be cured from his own chronic nosebleeds and survive childhood. Swept away by his stories, I lost track of time and distance as we wove through the trees.

As our breath quickened we fell silent, focusing on the ground before us, the pounding in our chests, the burn in our upper thighs. I was surprised by the easy silence between us. We fell into a steady rhythm, running side by side on a path padded with fallen pine needles, sidestepping stones and coiled roots that looked, at first glance, like undulating brown snakes. When the trail narrowed he took the lead, sweeping aside thorny vines before they could scrape my bare legs, warning me about sharp stones underfoot. I stole glances at his long, muscular legs, his nylon shorts clinging to the half-moon of his bottom. After he ran through the gossamer threads of a spiderweb, he frantically swiped at his face, over and over, like a squirrel grooming itself, for the next mile. I smiled to myself, realizing he was afraid of spiders.

When the trail widened we ran side by side once more, and he challenged me by lengthening his stride.We panted and gulped at the thick, moist air, our breath falling into a fast rhythm. He stole glances at my face and backed off when my flushed cheeks and jagged breaths told him it was too much. We sweated and strained, picking up our pace and then falling back, like a dance: I followed as he ran faster, and when I began to slow down he did, too, matching my pace so closely that it would have been impossible to tell who was leading and who was following.The deeper we went into the woods, the longer and harder we ran, the lighter and more fluid I became. The self-consciousness cleared from my head, and all that was left was our breath, the heat of our straining bodies, the pine branches above us gently sweeping the sky clean. At the end of the trail, when we approached our cars and slowed to a walk, a shyness asserted itself once again between us. We were flushed and awkward with a startling new intimacy, achieved without skin ever touching skin.

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