I waited until she finished watering the plants and the excess water had stopped dripping from the baskets before I asked Mom to take me. She finished rolling up the hose and looked at
me. I tried to make a sad face, but not too much, or else Mom might see through me. Although I knew her to be the softer touch of my parents, Mom would not be snowed.
“Why can’t your daddy take you?” she asked, wiping her face with a towel.
“He can, but I don’t want him to.”
“Why not?”
“He...he....” How to word this—frightened? Maybe, for there was some fright on my part.
Nervous? That word fit as well. But which to tell Mom? Which sounded better and would convince her and her moon-eyes to drive me to tae kwon do? I took a deep breath and flipflopped the words in my head. “Dad makes me nervous.”
“You worry what he thinks of you too much,” Mom said and walked toward the door.
“Don’t you want to see me doing tae kwon do?”
Mom stopped. Possibly I had found the correct set of words.
“Of course I want to see you doing tae kwon do. You think I don’t?”
“You never come,” I said. “Dad always takes me.” A tiny shovel of true snow.
“It was his idea to sign you up for the lessons, so I didn’t want to interfere with what he’d started.”
“You won’t be interfering.”
“If I go, I’ll have to bathe first.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Son, I’ve been sweating all day. I’ve got a yard of dirt under each of my fingernails from re-potting those ferns.”
“That’s all right. Nobody’ll notice.”
“Next time, huh?” Mom said.
“Are you afraid to drive?”
Mom looked puzzled and I didn’t know how to interpret her look.
“You don’t want your daddy there at all?” Mom asked.
That would be the best scenario. No Dad, no chance of him recording me and getting irate when I screwed up. But having Mom there was first and foremost. If both of them came, at least she would be there to play buffer between Dad and me.
“He can come,” I said.
Mom wiped her face one more time with the towel and threw it over her shoulder. She put her arm around me and we walked out of the greenhouse together. The cooler outdoor air should have loosened my chest, but I still wasn’t sure she was coming.
Pigeons, imported from Germany, roosted on the small greenhouse. There were two types: Puffers and Fantails. The Puffers got their name because they puffed out their chests and strutted around. But the Fantails were my favorite. They had tails that opened up like a peacock’s, and they threw their heads back and their chests out and spread the tail out and strutted along the edge of the greenhouse’s roof.
But none of them were strutting when Mom and I stopped to look at them. They were gathered over the birdhouse’s door, waiting for Dad to emerge, and when he did he threw corn on the ground and the pigeons swarmed his feet, making it appear as if Dad stood in the middle of a pigeon pond. Dad held out both hands full of corn, pigeons fluttered up, took positions on his hands, arms, and even his head. Covered in birds, Dad looked like a mystic who could communicate with animals, and seeing Dad like this, which was a daily ritual at sundown, made
me wonder how I could fear him.
Mom told me quietly: “I’m gonna go take a shower.”
I followed her into the house and put on my uniform and waited for her to come tie my belt.
Dad was in the car and had it running when Mom and I walked out of the house.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dad asked.
“With y’all. I want to see Wesley do tae kwon do.”
“You didn’t want me to sign him up, but now you want to go watch?”
“I want to make sure you’re doing this right,” Mom said, getting in the car and slamming the door.
This drive to class was quiet.
After learning to punch and kick, for the last few nights we had been learning to combine them in what were called forms. Each belt level had a different form, and being a white belt I learned the simplest form, which meant that I turned to my left and punched, then spun to the right and punched again. Then I turned left and straight ahead performing three down-blocks—those were to protect the family jewels from attack. Then I did three front kicks aimed at the waist of an invisible opponent to take out his family jewels. The form, from beginning to end, should have taken no more than two minutes to perform, and I never had a bit of trouble making the time limit. But the form was like a dance, or at least that was how Mr. Bollars described it to us, and our feet were to end up at the same place where we started. This was where I had my difficulties. And I wanted Mom to come because Dad couldn’t stand having his son be the only
one who hadn’t mastered the form.
In the upper right-hand corner of the dojo, next to the mirrored wall, were strips of duct tape in the form of a cross on the floor. I stood in the center of the cross, feet together; then spread them to shoulder-width and began the form following the taped lines, and tried my best to stay on them so my feet would end up side by side on the center of the taped cross. We had been doing the form as a group, but now the other students were training in pairs, taking turns blocking each others’ slow controlled punches while I worked on the taped cross with Mr. Bollars.
He took a deep breath, then pushed me off the tape and placed himself in the center of it to show me one more time how easy it was. His back was to me and I took the opportunity to peek at Dad, whose legs were crossed and teeth clenched as he held the camcorder to his eye. As long as Dad had that body language, even Mom would not be able to shield me from his cursing and insults. Mr. Bollars was poised to perform the form one more time, but he only stood there and I wasn’t sure what was about to happen. Was he going to kick me out? Tell me to leave and not return because anyone who was not coordinated enough to complete the white belt form properly did not deserve to learn martial arts?
But he didn’t kick me out. Instead, he called Rubin over from the other side of the room.
“Rubin is my number one black belt,” he said to me. “The youngest one in the state.” Mr. Bollars slapped Rubin on the back, almost lovingly. “He learned this form in two days. I’m sure he can teach it to you. Rubin, meet Wesley.”
Mr. Bollars walked off and took over the pairs that Rubin had been working with.
Rubin had brown eyes; his skin was a dark tan, and his body was compact like his father’s. He stood about half a head taller than me.
“The secret to the form,” Rubin said, “is to count to three in your head. Your punch is one,” Rubin took my arm by the elbow and made me perform a slow punch. “Then you pull it
back to your shoulder and that’s two. And three is when you place it back at your waist. Let’s do it together,” Rubin said, and stood next to me. “One.”
I punched.
“Two.”
I pulled the punch back to my shoulder.
“Three.”
My hands were back in front of my waist. More importantly, my feet were close to the center of the cross, not exactly in the center, but they were touching it.
Rubin smiled and said, “That’s better. Let’s try it again.”