1
The Promise
You can do ANYTHING, Lauren. ANYTHING!"
My dad's calloused hands gripped my shoulders and his ice-blue eyes forced mine open wider with their intensity. "You hear me?!" I tried not to blink. I was eight.
"They're just scared of you. They know you can beat them. They don't want to lose to a girl, but too fucking BAD! You go back and tell 'em you're playing, and if they give you shit, you kick them RIGHT in the balls, and drag them down here by the ear, and I'll take care of the rest." He dusted his hands together like he was about to take care of business, and added a conspiratorial wink. It was the right mix of empowering and absurd, loosening the knot in my throat and making me smile, just as he intended.
Frank Fleshman seemed to speak in all caps. He didn't turn the dial down on his personality, or language, or anything really, for someone else's comfort. He was the kind of dad who wanted sons, but he got two daughters and refused to adjust his parenting plan.
"Jesus, Frank!" my mom would reply in these situations, followed by a gentle plea for peaceful resolution. But Joyce's shy kindness had a hard time being heard over the boom of Frank's charisma or the apparent simplicity of his solutions. So I kicked the neighborhood boys in the balls. And then they let me play.
My world was different from my mom’s in a million ways, but the one made apparent to me first was the central role of sports. The first women’s NCAA championships in track and field were held in 1981, three months before I was born. Technically, my mom’s time in high school overlapped with the passing of Title IX, but its promise of equal access for women and girls in sports took time to materialize.
In 1971, the year before Title IX was passed, fewer than 300,000 girls played high school sports-compared to 3.6 million boys-and my mom never met one. She did love playing ping-pong in PE class, and she had a deadly curve, according to my dad, whom she started dating in middle school. I saw it in action a couple of times at Super Bowl parties, but she was oddly shy about it, rarely playing a full game. She didn't seem to know how to claim athletic movement as her own.
My mom would have been good at sports. Dad, too, for that matter. He was too busy getting in fights and smoking weed in high school. But I could tell Dad was athletic because he worked manual labor building sets as a propmaker and I saw him move his body powerfully all the time. My mom's body was directed to household tasks with a side of gardening, until the one time I convinced her to go for a run with me in high school. As she popped powerfully off her midfoot and lifted her knees, I almost gasped. I recognized her distinct stride as my own. Running is hard, and with no base fitness, she couldn't run for longer than a couple minutes. But I never looked at her body the same way again. Like millions of women, she carried a treasure chest of undiscovered athletic potential.
My mom's world and mine were still different, even living under the same roof. While the girl power revolution of the 1990s was swirling all around, telling girls we could have it all if we worked hard, my mom's daily reality was frozen in the 1950s. In our home, Dad got the best chair, the first serving, and the last word. He told his daughters not to take shit from anyone, then turned around and treated my mom to large helpings of his own. He represented a kind of power hypothetically available to my sister, Lindsay, and me, but not to my mom.
It would have been confusing regardless, but his alcohol abuse created a terrifying gulf between what he said and how he behaved. Every single night, we had family dinner together around the table, cooked by my mom. Most nights were fine, great even-full of compliments to the chef, questions about our day at school, and entertaining stories about the cast and crew of whatever his latest movie set was. But the possibility of an explosion always lurked, especially when he had been laid off, which happened frequently in the entertainment industry. If the Bud Light hit just right on the wrong day, he could singe any one of us to a crisp with a bolt of lightning.
Outside of the occasional spanking or head flick, I only have one memory of physical violence, when he ripped me out of my dining chair by the armpit while I was mid-bite and threw me across the living room for eating my spaghetti "like a fucking pig." I landed on my side on the sofa, still holding my fork, and curled into a ball in the far corner. My arm socket throbbing, I watched him puff up like a silverback gorilla while my mom screamed at him to stop. I watched as she laid down the only ultimatum he ever took seriously, one delivered with a cold fury I never saw in her again: "Touch either of our girls like that one more time and I swear to God, Frank, I will leave you, and take them with me."
I learned to watch him differently after that. When he stepped out of his truck after his long commute home, I scanned his hands for an empty beer can being carried to the crusher. Doing homework at the kitchen table, I kept count of the crack and hiss of aluminum tabs adding unexpected percussion to Steely Dan playing too loud on the surround sound. An interruption in the rhythm of my mom chopping onions meant he was squeezing past her in the kitchen to pull another clunking can from the twenty-four-pack on the bottom shelf of the fridge. I pretended to love using the can crusher so he would hand his empties directly to me, making it easier to keep tabs. And when the number rose above four or five, it was time to watch more closely. I learned to discern the different blinks, slurs, and seated positions. I needed to know which Dad was going to show up for dinner.
I was never the target of serious physical violence again because I learned to be perfect during those times-to observe and do what I needed to do, whether it was laughing at his jokes, impressing him with my accomplishments, or disappearing into the background.
But sometimes, despite my vigilance, my mom would slip. Dad would assert that she'd forgotten to add the cayenne to Uncle Tommy's chili recipe, or she'd put too much cream in the beef Stroganoff, or maybe dinner was too early, or too late, or too hot, or too cold. As the oldest child, I assigned myself the role of rodeo clown distracting the bull. But some nights still ended with him charging out the front door with his truck keys rattling, slamming the iron screen door behind him. Fifteen minutes later, he would walk back in, smack his paper bag full of fast food on the bar, and turn up the volume of the football game loud enough to make it impossible for us to speak, even if we wanted to.
Dad was a wild tide, but Mom was our shore. With her quiet stability grounding the family, Lindsay and I were able to absorb a lot of good from his larger-than-life personality and love. He was a bighearted, loyal person who would do anything for his friends and family-except change. And when he was sober, he shined so brightly on the people he loved that we would go to great lengths to put ourselves in the path of his light. And nothing got him shining quite like excellence. Be it John Elway's throwing arm, Bonnie Raitt's vocal power, or Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance in Terminator 2, when Frank felt the spirit overtaking him, he made everyone else stop what they were doing and appreciate it, too. He would rewind a scene, play a song again. He needed us to know that excellence like that was accessible to us.
"Your mom and I had nothing when we were kids," he'd say. "We had to work hard to just survive, but you can do more than that. Most people aren't willing to work hard. But you're a FLESHMAN, and Fleshmans aren't afraid of HARD WORK." He'd pound his chest twice for emphasis.
I nodded along, not only because I wanted to please him, but also because my personality drove me to work obsessively hard anyway. I genuinely loved memorizing spelling lists and multiplication tables in school. I got a thrill and felt a burst of satisfaction when I saw the star on my homework. I took my deep focus into playtime, too. While my neighborhood friends played house or Barbies, I'd hover nearby for hours, attempting to balance a peacock feather on my nose. Or extending the length of time I could sleep a yo-yo. Or learning to walk down the narrow hall and back on my hands without falling. I loved taking on challenges that required refining the movements of my body and culminated in a feeling of mastery.
But my personal drive got tangled up with my dad's drinking and overall volatility. In the ninety-minute window between when my dad got home and when his personality changed, performing whatever tricks I'd been working on became the most reliable way to bask in his affection. I'd ask Dad to hold my legs while I hung upside down from his bar, counting off sit-ups. When I began playing softball at age eight, my natural desire to learn to throw hard and accurately was enhanced by the thrill of making his hand sting so I could watch his theatrics. I got good, despite being the smallest kid in the league every year. In games, I played hard every minute of every inning, no matter how badly we were losing, because afterward I knew I'd find my dad in the bleachers with his Bud Light camouflaged in a sliced apart Diet Coke can, and he would put it down to hug me, look me in the eyes with intense love, and tell me that he was so proud of me that his buttons were busting. He would tell me I had something better than talent: I had heart.
On our annual summer camping trip on the Kern River, a slippery cliff rock loomed above the swimming hole, inviting those brave enough to make the climb and jump. Dad did it every year, but it was exciting every time. The year I was seven, we watched four kids in our group, all older than I was, climb up to the ledge one by one, only to sit down and deliberate and eventually retreat the way they came.
"They're being pussies," my dad said to me. "I bet you could do that. Just don't overthink it. Thinking kills your courage." After a minute of feeling like I had a hummingbird in my chest, I swam across the swimming hole to the rock face on the other side and climbed up as fast as I could. My kneecaps began to shake as my wet fingers pulled me up onto the slippery landing, and as the hairs began to rise on my cheeks and my mind started to race, I walked straight to the edge of the limestone and threw my body toward the darkest part of the blue.
When my head popped up above the surface, I saw my dad standing with his hands in the touchdown position.
"Did you see that?!" he yelled to his camping buddies. "My girl's got balls the size of Texas!"
Treading water, I felt repulsion, having never heard that phrase used about a girl before. Watching the grown men slap their thighs and heckle their sons to go next, saying "Don't be a pussy!" I could see that having balls was the ultimate compliment, and it was the ultimate compliment because it wasn't female. I didn't just have balls, but Texas-sized balls, and the kids around me had to rise to the occasion. It was striking how motivating that was for them, how much it made them squirm to have me setting the standard. And as they swam past me toward the cliff rock for another attempt, I followed them up, determined to outdo them. I was learning to see myself through my dad's eyes-through the eyes of those with power, the eyes of men.
In school, I heard the same promise that I could be the best at whatever I set my mind to. I was taught that boys and girls were the same, outside of a couple of small details in physical appearance and the whole “who could have babies” thing. Inconsequential. I was told that people used to think men were superior, but we now knew this wasn’t true, and that oppression was a thing once, but now it was over. Women were just as capable as men. We could do whatever they could do. There were firsts happening for women everywhere, and there were countless more available to those who dreamed.
I remember those firsts being important to me. I colored in Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court robe with a black crayon in school as we learned about the first female Justice. After Aretha Franklin became the first woman elected to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when I was six, my dad blasted "Respect" for us so loudly the blinds rattled. I don't remember Joan Benoit running past my waving hands outside our home in Los Angeles on her way to the first-ever Olympic marathon gold for women, but I remember my excitement when my mom told me the story. And so I dreamed myself onto the pages of history books, wondering which page I'd land on. During President Clinton's inauguration when I was eleven, I remember my mom saying, "In your lifetime, you will see the first female president of the United States." I went to bed that night with my heart pounding with possibility, convinced that it was going to be me. I couldn't run for office at eleven years old, but I could race boys on the playground and compete with them in tetherball. Using my body athletically made me feel powerful, and I went from being someone who simply enjoyed pursuing mastery with my body to someone who wanted to use it to win-at everything. And every time I did, especially when I beat the boys, I felt affirmed that I could do anything in life.
By the time I was in middle school, I was an all-star softball player, but being good for a girl in a girls’ sport didn’t carry much weight. I got more recognition for being the girl who could beat the boys in PE class. And nowhere was my dominance more clear than in running. Once a week, we ran the same mile course that was marked by trees and cones placed around the outer edges of the schoolyard. The mile was completed with a lap around a dusty track carved out of the middle of weedy sports fields. Every week, at the sound of the bullhorn, I would take off with the pack, and within two minutes, I would be alone, gliding along the row of trees on the far end of the field, flying beneath the branches we were now too old to climb.
Copyright © 2023 by Lauren Fleshman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
