Bamboo and Mirror by Alan Barstow
I was building a bicycle frame out of bamboo when Maya phoned. She said mirrors had shattered on our sons. She said she couldn’t find the boys at first. When she did, they were covered in blood. Her voice was choked, garbled. “It’s ok it’s ok,” she said, the words running together, “it’s my blood.”
I remember standing before pale bamboo shafts, my cell phone pinned between shoulder and ear. I’d been measuring the poles, sawing, mitering, and sanding. I remember the gritty smell of cut bamboo, the electric feeling when the tubes fit together just right, when a bicycle began to take shape.
My friend John guided me through the frame’s construction: selecting seasoned bamboo pieces, mitering them to the proper contact, tacking the tubes together with a slurry made from sawdust, wrapping the joints with burlap strips dipped in an epoxy derived from pine sap. I drew diagrams in a journal. Posts and dropouts. Angles, lengths, forces. John said bamboo’s elasticity and memory made it more resilient than aluminum. He said a bamboo frame was stronger than its parts, each piece buoying the others.
But that day, I was doing more harm than good. With a twelve-inch rasp I shaved the excess where the tubes met, the idea being that a sleeker frame was a lighter one. But the vibrations from my rasping shook apart the tubes I’d already tacked together. I tried re-tacking with more slurry. I even splinted them together with tape. But as soon as I started rasping, they popped apart like repelling magnets.
John bore the grace of having built a hundred frames. His could have hung at the Getty, the bamboo polished to obsidian. The son of a furniture maker, John grew up in the Philippines surrounded by wood and tools and ideas. His trained eye could identify problems before they were problems. Pointing to places where I’d cut off center, where I’d measured wrong, he’d cock his head, assess it anew, say, “We can save it.”
But as the frame kept shaking apart, I didn’t want to save it. I wanted to give up. What the hell was I doing building a bicycle out of grass while Maya was home with our two toddlers?
In truth, when my phone vibrated with Maya’s name on the display, I was relieved, ready to escape my frustration. I turned away from the misshapen fetus of a frame to the floor-to-ceiling window. I was on the third floor of a building at the school where John and I taught. It had rained in the night, the air clear and crisp as it only is after a winter storm, my favorite time in Los Angeles, when the sky is a blue that aches and you can pick out every rock and scrub bush on the mountains to the north.
The voice I heard was blunted with shock. I asked Maya if she was ok, if the boys were okay, if she’d lost consciousness, if there was someone there to help, if she’d called 911, if I should. Her answers didn’t make sense. I turned to John and said with characteristic understatement, “I’ve got to go.”
The 10 freeway was backed up a mile before the 405. I exited, took surface streets, Pico to Bundy to Centinela to Culver to Vista del Mar, so desperate I pulled the California sleaze: to avoid red lights, I turned right into gas stations, then pulled through to the perpendicular street, cutting across four lanes, turning back onto the street that took me south. I was forty-five minutes away. Sometimes I feel like I’m still in that car, like I’ve always been there.
*
It was the weeks between our boys’ birthdays, when for just four months, they’re different ages. Irish twins, strangers have asked, forced twins, a blended family? A four-month labor? Laughter ensues.
How did we come to parent children born four months apart? How can I whittle into words the years of—what even to call it, trying, striving, flailing? Daily ovulation strips and temperature readings. Ultrasounds and semen analyses. A doctor telling us we had a better chance of winning the lottery than conceiving. The decision to pursue adoption. A five-month-pregnant woman contacting us to say she’d like us to adopt her baby. And, then, Maya waking in the night with certainty that she, herself, was pregnant.
The birthmother invited us into the delivery room for the birth of Audin. I cut the umbilical cord. Maya was the first to hold him. She was five months pregnant.
Just months later, struggling with pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, Maya gave birth to Ajay. Before Audin could even sit up, we swaddled and laid them together. Audin’s eye attachment had just developed, so his eyes never left mine. Ajay’s eyes were closed, his newborn hair fuzzy, his skin loose. The first photo of The Brothers.
From childless to child-overfull, we’d won the baby lottery, a miracle, and we plunged headlong into colic and sleep regressions. A four-month gap in the first two years is a lifetime, however ironic that sounds. One was ready for solids, the other not. One could sit up, cruise, walk. The other practiced tummy time and still had to be swaddled. One was climbing out of his crib, the other egging his brother on with grunts and claps and giggles. For a time we couldn’t leave the house, when Audin transitioned to one nap but Ajay still required two.
Anyone who told us to enjoy every fleeting moment was of course right, but that did little to belie the utter exhaustion. If there was a lesson to be learned from those first two years, I forgot it from sleep deprivation. One time I found my toothbrush in the microwave. Other times, I zombie-walked every block of our neighborhood and aisle of our grocery store, over and over, the boys in a double stroller, to put them to sleep.
As my sons were just coming into existence, learning to speak and run and throw and scoot and pedal, my father was systematically un-learning these things. Diagnosed with a degenerative brain disease, my father would require diapers himself, both hands to guide a spoon to his mouth, thickener in his drinks because he could no longer swallow without aspirating. His words became a permanent slur. One time he fell, and I gathered him up in my arms, I carried him to safety, just like I did for my sons.
With the boys, our cup runneth over. With my father, what a falling off there was. As parents, we see the beginning in all its golden potential. The wonder of dimpled knuckles, of first words and steps, of jokes and mischief. As children we see our end in our aging parents. We realize our children will carry and bathe and feed us one day, if we’re lucky. Gazing into these mirrors, I saw I now inhabited that middle ground, and I found it soft and porous, muddy and murky. I struggled with my footing.
So, when John approached me about enrolling in one of his frame-building workshops, I leapt at the chance. As a passion project he founded Bambu Technologies to inspire a love of eco-friendly frames and cycling. His children were grown. He wanted more. As my boys evolved from the terrible-twos to the therrible-threes, and as my father transitioned to a full-care facility, I did too. Call it a mid-life crisis if you’d like, I wanted to build something with my hands that would last, however absurd that sounds.
*
I replay the accident over and over. Weeks prior, Maya bought several pairs of suit pants to try on for a job interview. On the day in question, she loads the ones she’ll return and the boys into the car. She takes her place in line at a boutique-style chain store that inexplicably sells business clothes alongside fine glassware. Audin spies an eight-foot-tall plank of wood with four large mirrors attached each atop the others. He ambles over to it. He’s just turned three and presents with the maturity of someone who thinks they’ve achieved something. Ajay follows. He’s still two and sneers each morning, “Today is not my birthday.” Maya eyes the boys before the installation. It’s been in the store for years, I’ll be told, unanchored, moved so often that it currently sits off balance. Maya sees the plank shift, the mirrors sway. Did one of the boys touch it? Could a two- or three-year-old exert enough pressure to do that? Then it starts tipping, tipping, tipping, and Maya is running.
I knew where to park in the outdoor mall based on the firetrucks and ambulances. A paramedic flagged me down, led me to the back of the building, away from the Sunday shoppers.
Like the lead in a play, Maya sat center stage, on a stool, paramedics, firefighters, police, store employees spinning around her like spokes. Audin sat on her lap, face screwed tight. As a newborn he never emitted a sound when he cried; rather, he silently imploded, much like me.
She held him in place with her forearms because her hands were wrapped in gauze. Bright red blood had seeped through the white fabric, the colors such a contrast it looked cliché. A paramedic knelt before her, taping fresh gauze to her chin. Another with a flashlight examined her eyes. Glass shards sparkled in her hair.
Ajay scurried around the boxes stacked in the storeroom like the carefree toddler he was, two EMTs in tow. But when he saw me, he let loose a dry sonorous wail.
“Dada,” Audin said, “A mirror, a …” He looked over his shoulder to Maya. A paramedic now vacuumed the glass from her hair. He raised his hands to his face. Implosion.
With Ajay on one hip and Audin now on the other, I moved to Maya.
“I couldn’t find the boys,” she said, her loop starting anew. “I was running and then I was on the ground and I kept screaming ‘Where are my kids?’”
A paramedic said two bystanders lifted the display off her. They said Maya had slowed the mirrors’ fall—with her hands, I understood, and her head and shoulders and back and neck—so the boys could scamper to safety.
The boys had clambered through the debris to her. There was glass in her eyes, in her hair, shimmering on the floor like sun on the ocean. She’d pulled the boys close, kissed them, ran her hands all over them to make sure they were safe.
“That’s when I saw the blood,” Maya said, sounding like a child herself.
Someone had to tell her the blood was from the cuts on her hands, wrists, chin, and scalp.
*
When Ajay was born, Maya’s milk was slow to come. She worried about production. After bottle-feeding Ajay, he’d cry uncontrollably. I swaddled him, rocked him, held him in the football hold, anything to spare Maya as she healed from a C-section. Within the hour he’d be crying again. Audin’s 99th-percentile head was developing plagiocephaly, flat-head syndrome. He needed to be held more, too. There was never enough of us.
We were exhausted and spent, but in those early days I felt united, together. I remember saying to Maya, “I don’t understand how two people can go through all this and fall out of love.”
In the weeks-months-years to come, I would.
There’s a line from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses that the narrator’s father, a poker player, gives when he explains why he and the narrator’s mother fell out of love: “Scared money can’t win,” he says, “and a worried man can’t love.”
I had no doubt that I loved Maya and the boys, but I so easily went there. Every cough and sneeze and I was there with Audin when he was hospitalized with RSV. Every wail and cry and I was there with Ajay during his colic. I was there with my father, bedridden and wheelchair-bound, crying out that his diaper had leaked, that his body needed adjusting, that he was in pain, lonely.
“You have to let all this out,” Maya told me.
But I shook my head ‘no.’ If I un-capped this well, I was scared there’d be no bottom. All my life I’d been conditioned to be strong and capable, coded language, I now understand, for suppression.
As Maya was evaluated for a concussion, as her wounds received stitches and staples, as her wrist was x-rayed and the fracture evaluated, I went there. What if her injuries were worse, if she weren’t coming home with us that night? What if it were the boys in the hospital?
I thought about all of the emotions I’d suppressed for—what, my entire life? The fear, anxiety, guilt. A fertile emotional landscape for the bone-deep worry that I was not, and would never be, enough.
Nothing so ensnared Maya’s love. Hers was supple, resilient. Like bamboo. I saw it in the way she plied our boys with kisses, the way she tickled and surprised and snuggled, no matter the stressor. But now I saw she was shaken, afraid, and that scared me.
In their post-accident adrenaline, the boys vibrated around the examination room, opening cupboards, asking questions, inexplicably giggling and then wailing. So, I did what any parent would: I took them for frozen yoghurt.
Ajay ordered a mango smoothie, Audin a scoop of vanilla with gummy bears. The boys slid into a two-top. The chairs were anchored to the floor, so I sat solo at the deuce beside theirs.
They prattled on as toddlers do, saying a word and twisting its sounds.
“Ajay buh-jay,” Audin chirped.
“Baudin,” Ajay countered.
They didn’t ask about Maya. They didn’t ask for me. Ajay sipped his smoothie. Audin picked out the gummy bears. Then, they traded.
“Moo jay.”
“I’m a cowbird.”
“Me, I’m a cow bird on a boat.”
“I’m a pirate.”
“Arrr me hearties.”
I could’ve been a million miles away. These boys would have lives independent of mine, I knew, just as I had of my parents’. My father’s parents had died when I was my boys’ age. I wondered what it was like to lose his parents just as his children came into existence, to watch his children grow, age, move away, become parents. Watching the boys, I saw I couldn’t control this parenthood wave, only ride it.
“Yo-ho underpants,” Audin said.
“Wunderpants,” Ajay chimed.
*
When we returned for Maya, I did stand-up diaper changes in the parking lot, buckled the boys and Maya into the car.
I drove home, Maya wrapped and stitched and stapled beside me. Her knees were drawn to her chest. She whispered, “I keep thinking what if I didn’t see the mirror fall. I always wondered if I’d be quick enough to react, if I’d freeze.”
“You did,” I said, trying to brush aside her fears. “You were. Everything is okay.”
“I don’t know.” Her words ran together again. “I don’t know I don’t know.”
I reached out to her, took her bandaged hand. Her greatest fear, I saw, like mine, was that she wouldn’t be enough.
“You saved them,” I said. “You’re a superhero.”
Weeks later, Ajay joined Audin as a three-year-old, and we breathed a sigh of relief. Gone was the slight of one sibling being older than the other. Gone were Maya’s stiches and staples. Her wrist healed. In time the scars faded, as did the boys’ memories of the accident. What lingered was the panicked tinge to Maya’s voice when the boys climbed too high, or perched precariously on a fence or wall. Also, the bamboo frame.
I knew I needed to put it aside. I needed to sit with my emotions more, to understand how they manifested in my body. I needed to trust that the world was safe, that vulnerability was strength, that love could sustain. I needed to listen to Maya more.
For months the frame hung like a forgotten New Year’s resolution. Sometimes we used it as a drying rack.
It took more than a year to finish. Whenever I could I brought the boys to John’s workshop. “What’s this do, Tito John?” they asked of every tool, moving on before he could answer. He gave them lengths of bamboo that they turned into swords.
“When can we build our own bikes, Tito John?” they asked.
“Any time,” he said.
I taught the boys to ride, following in their wobbly wake on the bamboo bike, its frame the color of coffee ice cream. I added lime green pedals, hand grips, and a saddle. John named it “The Green Machine.”
When the boys fell, I dismounted and held them if they were hurt. I sat with them until the embarrassment faded and they were ready to go on. As they grew in skill we began riding to the beach and their school, me in the lead, the boys trailing like ducklings. Maya said we looked badass.
But one day I felt the frame shift when I sat on the saddle. A vibration developed in the seat post. Then, the post gave way. I thought the seat clamp had come loose, but that wasn’t it. The seat tube had cracked clean through.
I ran into John at work and showed him pictures of the four-inch crack in the bamboo.
“It’s garbage,” I lamented, thinking the bike done.
He grimaced, and in the minutes we had, our talk turned to our kids and lives and jobs, to our aging parents. We spoke of there never being enough time, of wanting to take control of things, make changes, get out of funks and into the saddle. We were fathers and sons and partners, and the words and emotions poured out, spoken and unspoken.
Before we parted, he took my phone and pinched the photo to zoom in on the crack.
He cocked his head, said maybe we could insert a shim and a spacer and a bamboo sleeve, wrap it all together with a new layer of burlap and re-insert the seat post.
He said, “You can save it.”
Alan Barstow‘s essays and fiction have appeared in The Sun, Witness, Terrain.org, Exposition Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and lives and teaches in Los Angeles. He can still be found biking with his sons, though now they ride their own bamboo bikes thanks to Tito John.
6 June 2024
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