Motorcycles I've Loved (9 page)

Spacetime

I
woke up the Rebel sometime in April. She sputtered at first, grunted sleepily, but soon enough she was alert, purring like a lazy cat. I let her hum for a few minutes to get the juices flowing while I ran inside and threw my Carhartts on over my shorts and dug my riding jacket out of a trunk in the attic. I wrapped the laces of my boots around my ankles twice, skipping the metal eye hooks in my hurry, and ran back out to the driveway. I slid my helmet on. My hair filled it like a soft cloud against my face, and I flipped up the visor to let in the sun. Traffic slid slowly by as I swung my leg over. A jogger ran past. I waited for an opening and then swooped out of the driveway, onto the road, like a bird of prey stretching her wings after a long sleep. The traffic light before the bridge turned green, and as I sailed through I looked over the railing and caught a glimpse of a fisherman leaning into the frothy current down below, mid-cast, with the water swarming around the tops of his waders.

It was the first hot day of the season, but on the Rebel everything felt cool. The wind slipped down my shirt and up my sleeves, and the chill was pleasant after spending the morning baking on the lawn, getting the Rebel out of the basement and ready to ride. I turned onto Bay Road and sped past a few broken-down barns and empty pastures, past a country ice-cream stand and a cornfield and a herd of cows stomping their feet on the other side of the electric fence. When I was a kid there was a big sloping hill just before my house where a herd of cows used to graze. “Hey, girls,” my mother and I would say as we drove past them, because only girls get to be cows, and over the years it became kind of a ritual.

“Hey, girls,” I shouted from inside my helmet, and then I let out a whoop because it was so beautiful outside and because you can do things like that on a motorcycle, by yourself, speeding down a country road, and not feel foolish. The season had begun, I had no place to be, and for a moment there were no cars in sight, no houses, nothing but space, and me, traveling through it. Space, the infinite area objects move in. Height, width, and depth: three dimensions within which matter exists. The cornfield on my left, the meadow on my right, the horizon ahead, the sky above, and the road behind me, reflected in my sideview mirrors.

I rode around Hadley farmland for an hour or two, got lost for a while, and eventually arrived home, almost by accident. After I pulled into my parking space and cut the engine, I climbed off and felt as though my blood was carbonated, bubbling up from the soles of my feet like soda pop, and it took me a second or two to find my balance. The hot metal tinkled as it cooled. Slipping the key into my pocket, I pulled a tarp over the Rebel and weighed the corners down with bricks. The bricks were warm in my hands from lying in the sun all day, and I just held them for a moment because the heat was so satisfying against my palms. There were barely discernible buds at the tips of the tree branches that swept out into the driveway, and I noticed for the first time that the backyard had developed a yellowy-green glow beneath the gray bristle left from the previous year. I love the way passage of time in New England is so beautifully evident in the land. A month doesn't go by without some sort of development in the scenery, leaves changing, snow accumulating, then melting, then becoming mud, then exploding with vegetation. I realized I hadn't noticed that particular yellowy-green growth before because it hadn't been there two days ago. Space without time is a stilled frame, and time without space is a stationary, sense-deprived eternity. Space and time are intrinsic to the way we experience reality, and they accompany each other without fail. It isn't such a leap, then, to consider them as part of a single continuum.

Spacetime
is exactly what it sounds like—space and time considered alongside each other. In basic physics, this is unnecessary. Time is uniform, a universal constant. But when people began to think about the speed of light, and things moving relative to one another, revisions became necessary: space and time became flexible and inseparable quantities, because where velocities approach the speed of light, time's consistency falters. The spacetime continuum was born, a mathematical model in which the dimensions of space and time are both represented on the same plane. In spacetime, instead of mapping points in space,
events
are depicted. The additional dimension of time is represented, and so besides the where, you get the when. While the science is tricky, the idea itself isn't. Movement necessitates duration.

•   •   •

T
HE EFFECT
of spring's arrival was intoxicating, filling everything with evidence of change. About the same time I got the Rebel out of the basement, I got a scholarship to study in Oxford, England, for the summer, and I could hardly wait to get on the plane. I had spent more time living in western Massachusetts than I'd spent in any one country since I was seventeen, and I was beginning to feel restless. The chance to go overseas for the summer was a relief, an expensive but crucial indulgence, so I started saving what money I could, signed up for courses in Shakespeare and writing, and soon after began to plow through the required reading lists. I kept time by the lilacs that grew close to the side porch, budding, coloring, then finally blasting open. I rode the Rebel until my inspection sticker expired in June, and then I rode a little more. I dreaded the thought of going back to Roy's mechanic shop almost as much as I hated the idea of getting a ticket, and staying off the bike was pretty much unthinkable. I guess I must have gotten a few illegal weeks into June before I finally rode out to Roy's. At least I knew where to park it this time.

I pulled up to the white line in Roy's shop, and he shuffled over to take a look, sullen as ever. He had reading glasses on the end of his nose, fastened around his neck with a piece of cord, and when he bent over to measure the tread on my tires I got the full view: the vertical dawn of his ass crack rising above the rippling horizon of his leather belt, oceans of denim beneath.

“Nope,” he barked, after all of thirty seconds, and gave me a bemused, unimpressed sort of stare. “Better start walkin'.”

I just looked at him blankly. “What?” I said.

“Start walkin',” he repeated cryptically, and I decided he must be joking. I smiled good-naturedly, and resigned myself to a little heckling about how worn my tires were. I already knew they might not pass, but I was expecting some leeway here. A “fail” sticker and ten days to fix it up, or something like that.

“No fail sticker?” I said.

“This is a motorcycle, honey. Different rules for motorcycles. The minute you fail inspections it becomes illegal to ride. Start walkin'.”

The smile slipped off my face and down onto the greasy floor. “Oh,” I muttered, and started scheming. I was almost half an hour from home. No way could I afford to tow the damn thing, and, for that matter, no way was I sitting here all afternoon with this asshole, waiting for a tow truck. While I considered the matter, Roy went back over to his desk and started chatting with one of the salesgirls from the dealership showroom upstairs. The other mechanic had disappeared into the back room. I murmured something about getting it out of their way, then I turned the bike around and eased out of the garage, into the parking lot, and back onto the road. My cheeks were roasting red-hot inside my helmet, and I rode furtively back to Amherst, back roads the whole way.

I parked the Rebel in my driveway and left her there until I could find the money for the new tires, but there wasn't much time left before I was due in Oxford, and as I considered the conversion rate between the dollar and the pound, I began to suspect the tires would have to wait. Eventually, it was too late anyway; the lilacs had shriveled. I sublet my room for the summer months, packed a suitcase, and flew to London. The Rebel slept on.

•   •   •

A
RRIVING IN THE
UK
that summer felt like revisiting the scene of a crime. I couldn't help but recall my seventeen-year-old self, running off to Ireland and living there for a year or so, drinking too much and doing too many drugs and smoking way too many Benson & Hedges cigarettes. It was a different country, a different accent, a different everything, but I hadn't been back to the UK since I was a teenager, and it put me in a nostalgic mood.

About forty years before, but in the same spot, my mother was also a young woman on her own, carrying a rucksack and traveling from place to place. It's strange the way knowledge of family histories sometimes remains dormant. When I was a child, the stories of my parents' lives were loosely known to me, but they seemed irrelevant. Then, when I grew older, they dawned on me all over again because I could see myself in them. My mother's summer spent wandering the UK on the back of a motorcycle was one of those stories.

In my first year living abroad as a teenager, the question I always heard was: What do your parents think of all this? The propensity for this particular question always mystified me. What does it matter, I would wonder to myself, what my parents think? They taught me to think for myself—to trust my instincts, to use my head, and to do what seemed best. Eyebrows were raised, worries were voiced, but there was never a question of receiving anyone's permission, and never the possibility that they would try to stop me. I wasn't eighteen yet, but they had never measured my capabilities or my independence with that yardstick. Both my parents have done their fair share of exploring—they didn't like that I was going, but they understood it.

When my twenty-one-year-old mother went on her own UK adventure, she left an apartment in Philadelphia and a job doing graphic design for an insurance company, all on a whim. An old boyfriend from high school was riding around Scotland on his BMW motorcycle, and he invited her to come and join him. She gave her notice and did it; they met in England. “First things first,” he said, when he saw her. “Get rid of the suitcase.” She put her things in his rucksack, and they rode to Stonehenge. The stones rose up in front of them, like cold celestial pillars, mysterious and familiar all at once. They spent a few weeks wandering together before the boyfriend had to go back to the States, taking his motorcycle with him, leaving the rucksack. My mother decided to stay and hitchhike, and so she went to Scotland and then Ireland.

She got plenty of rides, not to mention a few free dinners, and the hostels along the way were abuzz with drifting European youths. My mother has always made connections with new people so easily. She's personable and outgoing, and if she wants you to like her, it's practically a done deal. I've never managed new people with the same ease. As a little girl, I remember hiding behind her long skirts whenever I was being introduced to anyone, mushing my face into her thigh until I was sure no one was paying attention to me, then stealthily observing from behind the cracks between my fingers. As a young woman traveling, I kept to myself in the hostels, made polite conversation with people who gave me rides, but mostly I stayed in my own head, seeing everything, hearing everything, and storing it silently away until I could take it out and examine it when I was alone.

During my first week in Ireland I ended up in a small coastal town after a day of traveling with nowhere to stay. I had stopped there for a youth hostel, only to find it shuttered and dark, and as night fell I searched frantically for a place to sleep that I could afford. Finally, I found a room in a little bed-and-breakfast, more expensive than my budget allowed, but it was either that or curling up under my raincoat on the cold, wet cliffs, so I took it.

I gratefully followed the innkeeper into a room with a single bed, the mattress heaped with down comforters, and a mound of pillows spilling down from the headboard and onto the foot like a delicious goose-feather avalanche. She showed me how to use the hot water in the bathroom and left me in a cloud of steam. I melted into the shower and then into the mattress. The woman came in again after knocking lightly and gave me a plate of gingersnaps and a cup of milky black tea. I ate the gingersnaps and drank the tea, and my eyelids slipped down like shades being drawn by someone else. I slept and I had so many dreams, but when I woke up I couldn't remember any of them.

In the morning it took me a minute to recall where I was, looking at the pale, bright glow on the walls and curtains. Without my contact lenses everything was a blur, the folds of the draperies rippling into waves, the dark mound of my heaped clothes on a chair melting into a hazy mountain. I like this view of the world, where anything more than a foot in front of me is imperceptibly smudged into vague blocks of color and light, because it is totally private. No one else sees what I see in this myopic universe. Objects fade away and everything is finally, simply, just space and light. Looking up at the ceiling that morning, I reminded myself that I was beginning the most epic journey of my life to date. I breathed a sigh of excitement and terror and pride, then I swung my legs out of bed and got on with it.

•   •   •

W
HILE MY JOURNEY BEGAN
in Ireland, my mother's ended there. After the motorcycle boyfriend had gone and she was hitchhiking through small towns, there was one afternoon when she couldn't get a ride. She stood out in the rain all day, shifting her pack from shoulder to shoulder, waving her thumb at everyone who passed. Across the street she could see a little bed-and-breakfast, warm yellow lights glowing from every window. She stared at the front door for hours as the rain tunneled down the collar of her jacket, down her back, to moisten the waistband of her pants. Finally, as the dim gray afternoon began to grow even dimmer, she gave up on getting a ride, said damn the expense, and went into the B&B. She asked for a room, and was led to a glorious four-poster featherbed, made up with soft white linen and a stack of duvets. She peeled away her clothes and sank into the sheets and slept as though she would never wake. She did, though, twelve hours later, and suddenly knew that it was time for her to go home.