Signs of Life (29 page)

In addition to condescending questions, I’d also insist that the entire show be filmed here, in Michigan, in the middle of
February when the days are gray and bleak and snowy and no one has a tan. The first guy to wake up early and scrape the ice off of my car and shovel the driveway gets a rose. And he doesn’t get a rose for shoveling the driveway like a ten-year-old. He needs to make clean, clear lines, and no, we don’t use the front walkway, but he still has to shovel it for the mailman. These are the challenges in my life, in any real life, that a man would have to meet. It would be brutal.

“Dates” would first consist of a strict interview process. I would sit and ask suitor number one a series of questions, and if any one, any one, of his answers does not fit what I want, there will be no second date, no suspenseful rose ceremony. I may even leave before the food arrives, and by food I mean the Primo’s pizza that I ordered because we’d be sitting in my messy living room. The point is that it is simply not worth my time to pursue anything less than perfection. (The second part of the date would consist of a game of Scrabble.) I would have twenty important questions.

1. Do you have any experience in household chores such as emptying the dishwasher, folding laundry, and running a vacuum cleaner?
   
2. Are you willing to spend every Fourth of July in northern Michigan? Never, for the next eighteen years, will my son or I be anywhere except northern Michigan on the Fourth of July. If you have another Fourth of July location, tell me now. Personally, I don’t care if it’s the goddamn Hamptons, we’re not going.
   
3. Do you read? If so, name the last five books you have read.
   
4. Do you listen to talk radio? If so, name your three favorite talk radio programs.
   
5. Are you a competent driver? (Actually, this does not even have to be a question, but I absolutely will not be with someone who does not demonstrate impeccable driving skills. Anything subpar and they will be eliminated immediately.)
   
6. Are you okay with the fact that every Christmas will be spent with my family? If this is unacceptable to you or your family, speak now. Your family needs to be aware that I want nothing to do with them on major holidays. I have enough families and enough major holidays.
   
7. Do you play Scrabble? What is the highest score you have ever earned in Scrabble?
   
8. Do you play any stupid fucking video games? If so, how many hours a week, on average, do you dedicate to stupid fucking video games? (The follow-up to this question addresses YouTube videos.)
   
9. Identify three goals you have for yourself, both personal and professional, that you would like to accomplish in the next five years. If you do not have any personal or professional goals, please tell me now.
   
10. What time do you wake up on Saturday morning?
    
11. Do you like to try new foods?
    
12. Do you have any stupid friends? Identify one activity that you and your friends do for fun. Would you call that activity stupid or would you call it fun?
    
13. In five years, would you be willing to move to a community in Berkley, Michigan, and raise my child in the Berkley School District?
    
14. Do you have any financial debt? If so, how much?
    
15. How long has it been since you lived with your mother?
    
16. Speaking of mothers, tell me about yours. On a scale of
    one to ten in the category of “overbearing,” where does she rank?
    
17. Can you throw a good punch?
    
18. Do you have a problem saying “I’m sorry”?
    
19. Do you have a problem saying “You were right all along”?
    
20. How would you describe your level of physical fitness?
    

If
any
derogatory language is used during the interview (fag, homo, etc.), the date will be terminated immediately. Also, there should be no swearing on the part of the suitor. I can swear, but he can’t. The suitor must also demonstrate an above-average command of the English language. Any discrepancies in the area of subject-verb agreement, proper verb tense, using adjectives in place of adverbs, and so on will be noted. A double negative will also result in immediate termination of the date.

Also, during the interview, the candidate will be evaluated on character. Internally I will ask myself the following questions about the candidate. He will have no knowledge of the fact that he is being evaluated on the following criteria.

1. Are you a funny person? Have you made me laugh at all?
   
2. Would I describe you as stupid-funny or witty-funny?
   
3. Are you polite to the pizza delivery guy?
   
4. If it takes a while for the food to come, do you get antsy?
   
5. Do you make good eye contact?
   
6. At some point in the date, have you made some sort of effort to tell me that I look absolutely fantastic?
   
7. When given the opportunity, do you talk about yourself, or do you ask me questions about me?
   
8. When I tell you things about me, do you somehow
   reaffirm that I am the coolest fucking person on the face of the planet?
   
9. Do you talk with food in your mouth?
   
10. Do you seem intrigued about who I am and what I offer?
    
11. Do you seem like you would impress my grandparents?
    

Of course, Chris Harrison would be there to help me along with this process. He’d be the calm, guiding force, just as he is on the actual show. More important, he could be our score-keeper for Scrabble.

I wish I could call this girl on
The Bachelorette
and give her some advice. My FMG could give her advice too. My Fairy Mom Godmother and I are sitting on the couch in the basement. We both are wearing our bathrobes, drinking a beer, watching the show. “Pick the guy who talks the least but offers to clean up after other people,” she says. “He’s a keeper.” She is
such
a genius.

Moo calls again and tells me she officially has a Team in Training website for fund-raising. She asks me when I am going to start mine. I neglect to tell her that I promised a group of old people that I would take on this triathlon as my banner cause. I have rethought this decision since my last grief group. I was embraced by the moment, I made an irrational decision, and they’ll never know if I don’t end up doing it. Moo puts the heat on me. I get her off the phone by promising I’ll at least donate twenty dollars to her triathlon.

Here’s the thing about my older sister: All my life I’ve wanted to do everything she did. I tried to pal around with her friends when we were little. I was thrilled when my dad said I was old enough to join the father-daughter group called Indian Princesses with her and my dad. In middle school I loved it when a teacher would see my name on her sheet at the beginning of the school year and say, “Oh, you must be Sarah’s sister.”
When I had to make the crucial decision on whether to wear my backpack to middle school with both straps affixed to my shoulders or go for the one-strap look, I obviously consulted my older sister. I constantly stole her clothes in high school even though we went to the same high school. Sometimes she would have to leave early for school and I’d go running into her closet or her laundry basket looking for a cool shirt. She would find me in the hallways (I was a bad thief, as most ninth-graders are) and say something like, “What the
hell
do you think you’re wearing?” I would mutter something about finding it in the basement by the washing machine and I didn’t know it was hers, but all the while my main concern was making sure my friends and classmates could see me getting yelled at by my cooler older sister. Even in college my mom would call me and say, “What do you want for Christmas?” I would tell her to take Moo shopping and let her pick out clothes she liked and then just buy them for me.

Moo has always been a person I want to be like. Even into adulthood the clothing just changes into another thing that she does or wears more gracefully than I could ever pull off. So when she calls me and tells me to think about something, I take her very, very seriously, but that still doesn’t make me want to do a freaking triathlon. I meet her halfway and sign up for a meeting.

I recruit Maggie to go to the meeting with me. Maggie thinks of Moo in much the same light I do. We may only be friends so Maggie can be closer to Moo, which is fine by me. I’m 90 percent sure that’s the only reason I had any boyfriends in high school. Maggie is also a marathon runner. She’s done two in the last few years, so this is right up her alley.

We find a Team in Training meeting at a local high school. On the way to the meeting I give Maggie a long lecture in the
car about how we are
not
going to make a snap decision. We are not going to be the victims of efficient, manipulative (though it may be for a good cause) marketing. We are going to go to the meeting and think about it and not sign our lives away on the spot and then maybe,
maybe
, we will actually commit to doing this thing.

We walk in a little late. Maggie and I have to sit on opposite sides of the room. (In retrospect, this was clearly a well-constructed marketing tactic on their part. I swear this thing is run by the same people who operate Mary Kay cosmetics.) They hand us a pile of information. Maggie, Moo, and I would be potentially competing in the Nation’s Triathlon. The Nation’s Triathlon is the weekend of September 15 in Washington, D.C. It is an Olympic distance triathlon. Olympic distance means it’s a 1.5-kilometer swim (just under a mile), a 40-kilometer bike ride (roughly 26 miles), and a 10-kilometer run (6.2 miles). There is no way I can do this. If I ever swam a mile, I would have to take a three-hour nap afterward. Who in their right mind could get out of the water and bike, then run? Insane. I try to get Maggie’s attention to signal that this is a “no go.” She is engrossed in her literature on the opposite side of the room.

In addition to all of this, all members of the Nation’s Triathlon Team have to raise a minimum of thirty-nine hundred dollars. If you fall short of that amount, you have to pay the difference out of your own pocket. Where on earth would I find the time to train, let alone time to fund-raise? Forget it. This is way more of a commitment than I thought. I look over at Maggie again. She is circling things on her sheet. She can’t be seriously considering this.

A woman in a white Team in Training shirt opens the meeting. She introduces herself, tells us about the organization, and then introduces the first speaker. Bruce did a marathon in
Vancouver with TNT (that’s their acronym). He is a tall, slender guy who looks like his body may be prone to marathons. Bruce tells us this was his first marathon. He’s never been a runner. He just followed the workouts, ran with the group a few nights a week, and met some great people. He trained with one woman who was a single mom of three kids. He said it was amazing to watch her. She was able to do it because she made time for it in her life, because she cared about the cause and achieving her goal.

I look back down at my sheet and read over the numbers again. If this woman could do a marathon with three kids, why couldn’t I do a triathlon with one kid?

After two more speakers, they start a movie. It’s this nice video with inspirational music and clips of people clapping and cheering and running out of the water in wet suits, the usual. Then they start talking about honored heroes and patients affected by the money raised. They show a clip of a little girl, probably younger than five years old, who has leukemia. I put my forefinger under my nose because I can feel myself start to tense up. One time I heard that putting your forefinger under your nose will keep you from crying, but then I remember that maybe it prevents you from sneezing. So I start to get tense and I hold my body in the same position to try to keep myself from getting upset. It suddenly occurs to me that not every child is born completely healthy or stays completely healthy. I am sure I knew this before in some capacity, but Kai is so perfect in every way, I can never imagine having to go to the doctor for anything except checkups and immunization shots. I look at this little girl who may not survive because she has cancer. I lost my husband almost a year ago and I thought I had the worst situation in the world. I don’t.

The lights go back on. The woman running the meeting
says something about an initial payment of sixty dollars to activate your fund-raising website and to register you with a team. Before she even finishes, I am vigorously writing out a check. I don’t even own a bike.

I call Moo. She is excited we are all training together, even though she’s fifteen hundred miles away.

After worrying about a bike, I remember that Josh’s old touring bike has been sitting in the basement, upside down, collecting dust for eleven months. I go downstairs to find the bike. I get a towel to wipe off the dust. He would be so sad to know a bike of his ever collected dust.

I’ve found my horse with harness bells. I guess it’s time to get moving.

triathlon
training is a bit more challenging than I thought. First of all, I was under the impression that swimming freestyle was similar to walking in that it was a natural, automatic combination of movements for the body. I thought I would jump in the water, throw my arms one in front of the other, and I’d be off. Turns out this is hardly the case. I had a similar experience when I decided to summit a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain a few years ago with Josh. I had zero experience in mountains and was convinced that hiking was merely walking on an incline. Let’s just say the day ended in tears.

Hales swam in high school and she lifeguards at a local pool, so I crash their swim lane when it’s not busy. When she’s not on guard duty she gets in the water with me and gives me some
pointers. She tells me to roll my shoulders and extend my arms to make my stroke as long as I can. I swim fifty meters and turn and look at her through my goggles, already out of breath. “How was that?” I yell from the deep end. She squints. “Um …” Hales is the most positive person in the world. Her trademark characteristic is to overcompliment everything, even highly mediocre material (she once said
The Lizzie Maguire Movie
changed her life), so when she says “Um,” I know I’m in trouble. She says I need to close my fingers, relax my neck, and not pull my head up so high to breathe. I swim another fifty. I pull my goggles off.