Should I Let Him Win?
A creative nonfiction short story from my 2013 bike journey, never before shared or published.
“Do I let him win, Mom?”
I waited for her advice. I was 13 years old, the epitome of awkward when the female body gets thrown its first curveball: an hourglass shape. Like the other girls in my class, my emotions struck with a fierceness that I didn’t know how to harness.
Mom gave me permission to go on my first date. The plan was to play tennis with Matt, a boy I obsessively passed folded paper love notes to in 7th grade, the same grade I would teach many years later and catch students attempting to flirt in similar ways.
“Let him win? Of course not!” Mom said dramatically. “You should always play your best and never let anyone win, especially a boy,” she grinned. Memories of Edith, whom I called, Bubbie, my maternal grandmother came to mind, with her feisty personality and tennis backhand defeating all the men living in her Florida apartment complex. Her returned balls darted across the net like cannon balls. With spin.
As far as I knew, all women in my family were created equal to men. Nothing in my early childhood indicated that I was weaker, less smart, less athletic or different than my brother, whose visible body parts, those not covered with clothing, looked incredibly similar to mine for most of my childhood. It helped that I came from a lineage of incredibly strong women.
Bubbie’s mom, Sadie, was the first woman in the borough of Brooklyn, New York to get her drivers license. She attended local organizational meetings regularly, leaving the house wearing matching gloves and hat with her hair pulled back tight in a bun like a ballerina’s, released into one long braid to sleep. Her home was where holidays and family celebrations took place, including a traditional Sabbath dinner every Friday night with challah made from scratch. I never met my great grandmother, but if she were born generations later, I have a feeling she never would have been married or had children. Rather, I envision her being CEO of a very successful business, even with her strong Yiddish accent.
Standing in an athletic stance on the court across the net from Bubbie each winter in Florida felt like getting up to speak in front of the entire middle school. She pushed me to play better, but gave in to nobody. Even observing her play was inspirational. She ran around that tennis court playing against men and women with perfect posture and her head held up high, like royalty. Would her lessons on the court of determination, competiveness help me beat my first date? Could I be as poised and strong?
We have defied gender stereotypes for generations. I was not the only female athlete among the lineage of women in my family. On the paternal side of my family, Grandma Irma grew up playing handball on Manhattan Beach in New York. She met my grandfather on that beach and they grew an active relationship hiking and rowing on Sundays, their only day off during the week.
When my father was 3 years old, Grandpa Arnold contracted polio, leaving him a paraplegic. Irma appeared to take on the role of a mother to 4 young children, draftsman and wife as easily as one slices bread. In reality, it must have been incredibly challenging and I always looked up to her as a result of her determination as an incredibly strong caretaker.
Grandma Irma was the more dominant parent when it came to discipline of her 4 children, discussing events in their lives, planning their course selections in high school and after school activities. Irma made the time to discuss things with the children because as an architect who started his own firm, my grandfather had so many evening meetings, did not often chime in as often regarding social matters.
As a child, I have memories of my own mother, Elin, gardening, mowing, walking, going to the gym and playing golf. I never saw women in my family sitting for more than a few minutes. Education was valued and careers were encouraged. Reliance on men in any way was almost an after-thought. It would make sense that I was born as fearless as a lion in the jungle. I was never afraid to follow an older child trying something above and beyond my physical abilities. I was king of my world, with no fear of spiders, snakes, he dark, heights, or the high beam in gymnastics.
Since my athletic abilities exceeded average as a little girl, I had confidence to join my athletic, tall, lean, male classmates, Chris, Rico, and Bill climbing trees, bicycling for hours around the neighborhood and throwing a football. I grew up in a world where playing whiffle ball, building forts, and swinging very high on a swing set only to jump off a the highest point of your momentum was completely normal for a girl. Every May, I came home with a stack of ribbons as thick as a math book for winning the three-legged race, sprints, distance runs, and long jump. The boys consistently selected me to be part of their capture the flag, soccer, dodge-ball and basketball teams, only second behind Wendy Zak, back when boys picked teams in physical education class. Until middle school, I exceeded the boys’ physical abilities, when their calves, abs, and biceps starting becoming more defined and as expectations to be stronger and better than girls in the physical world of sports set in.
My ability to exceed physically as a female brought confidence, independence, and an ability to believe I could do whatever I put my heart and mind into. Yet, apart from seeing myself as equal to boys, I wanted to be feminine. It was important that men viewed me as confident, smart, and sexy. After 49 years, I get those props, however, many of them are intimidated by me. An athletic, independent woman is intimidating to many men, despite her confidence, sensuality, soft skin, and curves.
The first woman to row across the ocean solo, Tori Murden McClure, writes about these men in her book, A Pearl in the Storm; How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean, calling them testosterone-and-gorilla-dust guys. I can relate.
Matt beat me at tennis on that first date, but I tried my hardest to win. I had nothing to prove to Matt… or men I had significant relationships with since him. In fact, a close man friend in my life now beats the heck out of me in ping pong and every time, it drives me nuts. So, why did I want to be the best? My competitiveness comes from determination. Was it that I wanted to demonstrate strength and independence? Was I fighting for equality because I believed these men didn’t think I was equal to them? Or, is competition the way I relate to people? In what ways can I demonstrate being the best when in reality I’m not always going to be? I’m awful at trivia. I can’t do math. I’m a horrible test-taker. Is it just that I want to be respected?
At my Great Aunt Flossie’s 90th birthday party in March of 2013, I told my mom’s cousin, Michael that I had committed to bicycling solo across the United States that summer. He smirked and facetiously said, “You know you can take a plane from Oregon to Rhode Island. It’s about 6 hours.” He also asked what I was going do about my fingernails, as if being feminine suggested I needed to have perfectly manicured hands and being athletic was not lady-like. I laughed at both these questions, and when he asked, “Why, bike across America?” I simply and confidently said, “Because I can.”
I scaled up mountains, sliced down gorges, cycled under highways, and over rivers. As my body became an efficient machine, pedaling thousands of rotations a day, I began to feel strong. My thighs were enormous and toned, my fingernails were hard to keep clean, like my cousin mentioned, and at the end of each day I found myself scrubbing off a thick coating of sweat, bugs, sunblock, and insect repellent. I didn’t haul blush, lipstick, mascara, and eyeliner over 182,000 ascended feet, but found myself needing a way to express my femininity. I didn’t want to be ‘one of the boys.’ I wanted to be a beautiful woman who could accomplish anything a man could do.
In 776 B.C., the first Olympic games were held in Athens, Greece. These games showcased only the athletic abilities of men; women were prohibited from participating. Social perceptions of women in the 1800s included child rearing, homemakers and being supportive wives. As women began entering the athletic, world, it was initially to participate in sports such as croquet, horseback riding, dancing, and tennis for social interaction, not competition. In 1900, 22 women were granted access to the Olympic games in five sports. Over time, women in sport has increased as gender inequity has decreased. Opportunities such as education, birth control, and voting rights paved the way for more women to competitively play sports.
Luckily for me, I was born at a time where I had access to competitive play and could bike across the country solo. And as I cycled from west to east, the desire to feel beautiful and feminine grew inside me like the urge of a flower blooming under sunshine. I packed lip balm with a hint of pink tone, an extravagance I didn’t dare admit while on the trip. It took a few weeks into my journey to figure out how to feel pretty. The lip balm helped, as did picking flowers along the route securing the stem in my sports bra strap with the flower sticking out or on either side of my face, tucked behind my ears with the petals brightly leading the way like two headlights on a vehicle. At the end of each day as I stood in an unfamiliar shower washing the bugs, sweat, and lotions down the drain, I looked down at my muscular physique beyond my small breasts and smiled down at my pink toenails glaring up at me as if to say, “I’m a girl! I can do anything a man can!”