Jenny Sinclair
Little Miss Perfect
Miriam Wooster, nee Smith, was 47 years old when she decided to become
an Olympic gymnast.
She got the idea one night, just before bedtime, about half past nine,
from the television.
Channel 11 was showing a "best of" sports program: highlights of the
past eight Olympiads. She supposed it was a kind of teaser for their
upcoming Olympic Fever Fortnight, which she had been planning to
specifically not watch.
But this particular Wednesday night, as it wasn't quite time to sleep
yet, and Miriam had become exasperated with the advertising on Channel
Five (did anyone take shampoo that seriously?), she changed channels
and was caught out.
An ad for a new car was showing. Miriam laughed at the expression of
the tiny dog driving the red convertible down a crowded café strip.
She wondered how -- but of course, computers. Then a moment of blank
screen and the main program came back on, filling the sitting room
with the artificial light of an indoor arena.
Sport, she thought, reaching for the remote control thingie. It was
going to be harder to avoid sport on television with the Olympics
coming up, but she meant to try. And this wasn't even new sport; the
muted tones of the footage and the dated makeup on the prancing girl
on the screen fixed it sometime in the seventies.
A voice commanded her attention. "The next competitor is Miss Nadia
Comaneci of Romania. This extraordinary young woman has--" but Miriam
wasn't listening.
She was leaping, twisting, turning with the narrow, dark-haired figure
crossing and recrossing the screen; her world was tumbling around her;
she was lifting her hands in victory, panting, watching the scoreboard
for that perfect number: 10.
Miriam remembered this girl: she herself had been five years older
than Comaneci in 1976, at 19 too old to take up gymnastics seriously,
past it already. It had been her first great disappointment; she
suddenly remembered slipping from the gym into the locker room,
barricading herself in a toilet and sobbing with her forehead against
the wall and a fist in her mouth to muffle the sound -- no one should
hear her cry like that.
The ads came on, now for toothpaste and the home-transforming
possibilities of a haberdashery store. It was past 10 -- these were the
cheap ads -- she should sleep. When the program returned, there were
only grunting weightlifters and twitchy sprinters. She went to bed.
Miriam Wooster had lived a good life -- a qualified pharmacist by 24,
married to a lovely young dentist; their pharmacologically
well-adjusted children had both taken their perfect teeth to
university; it wasn't as if she had anything to complain about. Miriam
knew she was lucky; dispatches from friends reminded her of it often:
no cancer, no divorce, no failed real estate deals. She could glide
into midlife with the equanimity of the wide-berthed, deep-drawing
cruise ship she resembled.
But this night, listening to her heartbeat thud away in the dark, she
knew it wasn't enough.
Miriam had never slept well; years of listening for the cry of the
child in the night, on top of an internship in a 24-hour hospital, had
put her rhythms out of whack for good. When she woke in the night,
she'd check the clock, always uncertain how many hours were left to
her to sleep. She would often give up trying to rest and do some
housework -- quiet chores, like folding washing or wiping down benches
-- so Peter was not surprised to see the lights on when he woke up with
the alarm at 6.45 as usual. Miriam was downstairs in the old rec room;
probably finally getting around to clearing out the kids' toys, he
thought, best not disturb her.
So it was Alexandra, her daughter, her baby girl, who was the first to
discover that Miriam had gone mad.
"Mum! What on earth?" Alexandra took a step back from the door of the
basement room, as if she could come back in and find everything
restored to normality.
"Hello love, come in," panted her mother. But Alexandra stayed in the
doorway, too horrified to even put on the horrified expression she
reserved for her mother's foibles.
The ping-pong table had been upended and propped against the wall
beneath the high ground-level window, legs folded in like an insect's.
Across the floor, Miriam had scattered cushions, bean bags, old
mattresses, a half-inflated Lilo and every towel and blanket the
family owned.
"I'll have to get some proper mats," Miriam said, her inverted head
looking up at Alexandra from between her thick ankles. "I just wanted
to get started."
"Started? On what?"
"My gymnastics. Of course, a lot of it is strength, isn't it? Do you
know if Tom took his weights to Sydney with him?"
"In the -- gymnastics? Mum, you're 47."
"Yes, I was watching television last night and, Alexandra, where does
the time go? What are you going to do with your life, darling? Youth
is so precious."
Alexandra found the stairs and disappeared up them in search of her
sane, sensible, non-leotard-wearing father.
They couldn't stop her. She still went to work, in her usual suits and
heels, but Peter's dinners became perfunctory affairs involving pasta
and frozen desserts. They suggested she join a gym -- "work under
competent supervision" -- Peter said. Alexandra cut an article out of
the paper about an older women's circus she might like to join; Tom
proposed a mother-son walking trip in the hills ("Great for your
fitness.") But Miriam stayed in her basement.
They tried to talk sense into her.
"Even Comaneci was never really that good," Tom argued over the phone
from Sydney. "You know the Romanians had her on all kinds of drugs and
hormones?"
Miriam knew that. But every night the perfect, dark-eyed girl skipped
and swung and rolled and backflipped through her dreams. She followed.
She spent hours pulling at her toes, trying to get her head to touch
her knees. She marked the kids' old blackboard every time she
completed 10 pushups; soon the chalk marks made a forest. She stood on
her head for minutes at a time, fighting the dizziness that had come
with middle age. She let meals burn while she bounced ever higher on
the small circular trampoline she'd rescued from the street during the
hard rubbish collection; she dropped out of bridge club.
They got used to it; learned quickly not to make jokes about it or to
refer to her in public as "My mother/wife, the gymnast." At least her
work didn't suffer. (Peter had made discreet inquiries with some old
medical school friends; the pharmacy at St Mary's was dispensing the
right drugs, right on time, on Miriam's watch at least.)
Miriam still woke early most days, but now with a sense of eagerness;
she'd check the clock to see how long she had to practice before
breakfast, the train, work. Her acquaintances didn't miss her; her
friends had their own issues, their children, their diseases, their
careers. Miriam acquired new floor mats, a secondhand pommel horse at
an auction, a set of hand weights. If she tried -- and she did -- she
could get in three or four hours' practice most days.
Peter took out a gold membership at the video store, watched the
entire five seasons of The Sopranos while odd thumps and grunts
emanated from the floor.
It took two years. Miriam was 49, older than she'd ever believed
possible, before she was ready. She was still a little pudgy -- two
children, menopause, a job behind a counter, what do you expect -- and
her saggy T-shirt and comfortable all-cotton leggings were nothing
like an Olympic uniform. And of course, the Beijing Olympics were
still two years away. So you could say that she was peaking too early,
or 35 years too late.
Nevertheless. She stood in the corner of the mat-covered floor, arms
outstretched, fingers flexed like Circe or a crazy puppeteer abandoned
by her puppets. The music started (from where? who was that singing
"Yes Sir, that's my baby"?) and tens of millions of nerve and muscle
cells started up as one, one named Miriam Wooster.
"No, sir, I don't mean maybe." She ran forward, threw herself down. A
double forwards cartwheel. She stopped inches short of the opposite
wall and without turning, flipped backwards not once but twice,
sliding to a halt with one leg pointing forward, the other extended
behind her. The long legs scissored and she was up and dancing, then
tumbling, hurling arms and legs into space with such force the body
had to follow. "That's my baby now."
The audience -- had there been one -- forgot to breathe. The music
stopped. Miriam Wooster stood alone, triumphant, arms raised half in
victory and half to acknowledge the storm of silent applause
descending on her.
A perfect score: 10 out of 10. Miriam bowed, walked to the door and up
the stairs. It was ten to twelve; time to start cooking lunch.
©2006 by Jenny Sinclair
