The Mistake
After a pre-swim shower, towel over my shoulder, goggles high on my bald head, I turned left out of the locker room instead of right and went through the emergency exit door instead of the door to the swimming pool. Ridiculous, to mess up a turn after so many years swimming at the Y, though that could be an explanation, that my habits had torn through, weakened rather than strengthened from repetitive use. Troubling too, but there had been no other warning signs.
Those doors don’t even resemble each other; the emergency exit door is metal with a push bar handle that releases the latch, the pool door opaque glass with drops of condensation running down. The exit door closed with a heavy thud behind me before I realized my mistake, out in the freezing air.
Later, I thought about all that was required for this to happen, that my eyes saw but did not register what they saw, that my hands gripped and pushed a metal bar instead of a glass surface, that my ears were deaf to the meanings of sounds, and out the wrong door I went. I had moved like someone in a dream fitting into predestined footsteps, and then woke as if summoned into the chill light of day.
An emergency alarm sounded distantly inside the building. I spun around. The dark green metal door, snug now in its metal frame, had no knob or handle. It was a one-way door, an exit not an entrance. My Y requires members to enter at the main entrance and pass through security to have their membership cards scanned. Surely, I thought, surely the security guard, a friendly, loping African American man with a salt and pepper goatee, who always said hello to me, surely the guard having heard the alarm, was on his way to where security had been breached, and would let me back in the building soon. I imagined myself explaining what had happened to the calm guard who would recognize that I was okay and had just had a moment. No fool like an old fool. We would probably laugh over it for years to come.
I was standing now at the top of a gravel path that went down past a parking lot up to the children’s playground, an out-of-the-way part of the Y grounds where I had never been before or where I had often been, but always just inside the walls I was now outside of, getting dressed in the locker room or doing my laps.
I banged on the door with the side of my fist in the hope that someone in the locker room would hear me or that someone was just then in the small hallway that connected the locker rooms and the pool, perhaps my wife coming out of the women’s side. Usually my wife and I shared a lane to avoid crooked swimmers and lane hoggers. I expected a loud, echoing report from my banging but none came. The building was too cold and solid to conduct much sound.
Wet from my shower, the air stinging cold, I not only felt foolish but diminished and insubstantial, vulnerable, and pale, next to the big red brick building. Thick steam was rising out of a slatted vent high up in the wall. I banged on the door a few more times, feeling idiotic and strangely incompetent. At 74, I still had my medical practice, seeing patients two days a week, while I tended to the poignant and complicated business of handing things over to a younger doctor. There were long-time patients who were not doing very well, some dying but all with serious conditions to monitor and navigate, and my replacement, good in so many ways and respectful, bugged me with his subtle tinge of arrogance.
I banged the door again, halfheartedly, but quit when I heard children laughing behind me, an unmistakable sound. I turned, heard a woman say something “oh my lord” or “oh my god” I think it was and saw about a dozen five and six-year-olds, in daycare on winter break from school, rotund and stiff-armed in colorful, puffed, hooded winter coats, standing on the gravel path twenty feet away, laughing at the grown-up banging on the building. Children know about being small and powerless compared to something big and forbidding. Children know about wanting in and not being able to get in. Having their desires thwarted is the air they breathe and for them to see it happening to a grown-up was funny to them, a hilarious reversal of roles.
I didn’t mind at all, in fact hearing them laugh made me feel better and, looking down at the hooded faces, I joined in, clapping my hands together a few times and laughing with them, but their female minders, one very large and one very small, at each end of the line, started yelling for me to stay right where I was, Sir. I understood, of course.
What I didn’t understand was how completely absurd and deranged I appeared. My body was steaming, and so was my bald head probably, like a human smokestack, and what’s more, much more, I had neglected to put my bathing suit on. After I looked down and saw the truth, I quick pulled the towel from my shoulder and wrapped it around my waist. A flash of worry shot through me. I hoped not.
The large teacher shouted for Group One to hush, look at her, look at her, and move on the double up the path to the main entrance, the quickest escape route, though it was away from the playground where they were headed. Arms spread wide, the minders herded the reluctant children into an awkward pack. All laughter had ceased and the children complained in their way, uhhh, stop it, no, stop it, uhhh, uhhh, no. They moved haltingly, while being told to look where they were going when all they wanted was to look at me. No child faced the right direction, the whole group tripping backwards on their little feet. Several children fell down only to be scooped up by a minder so the group hardly made any progress. I could see each kid’s individual breath rise up, mingle with others and float away. I imagined many running noses, tearing eyes and cold little fingers. It had begun to snow lightly. The flakes landing on my shoulders did not melt right away.
The small teacher said something into a walkie-talkie, not a word understandable except ‘over’. At least, I knew better than to go toward the main entrance, where I would have to pass between the children and the hedges along the side of the building. I didn’t want to make things worse with the minders when they were already terrible, impossible to be explained, as if absurdly I might try to explain and they might listen to my explanation, as they were frantically trying to rush their charges away, because clearly I was a madman or pervert in their eyes. For me and for them it was damage control time. Circling the other way around the building was out of the question. It was too far, eventually went along a busy public avenue and I didn’t know if there was an opening in the fencing down there or not.
I have an organized mind which goes step by step, possibility by possibility, question by question until, given this and given that, I proceed to the next possibility, the next question. It was my way as a doctor and a person, thinking through things, figuring them out. I was a good diagnostician and a patient explainer of choices. No doubt about it, I was stuck out in the cold for a while. If no one came to open the emergency door, I would just have to wait out the children’s exit, long as it might take, cold as I was, idiotic as I felt. Then I would go in the front entrance with my tail between my legs, and try to explain to the gatekeepers what had happened and prove by my coherent explanation that I was not losing it, which should be easy because they all knew and liked me.
I was a regular at the Y, coming for years with my wife for laps. I also worked out in the large exercise and weight room other days while she took early morning yoga classes, so one or both of us was there pretty much every day, our home away from home. To the Y staff, we were a handsome, older couple, friendly, in good shape, very together it must seem, who always said hello, how are you today, aware that a smile and greeting made a difference to the fabric of civic life, especially these days. I often thought that from the neck down, the two of us could be mistaken for forty-year-olds, and never was I so painfully aware of my baldness, wrinkles, and grey, sunken eyes as when we entered the lobby to have our membership cards scanned. Beep. Thank you. Enjoy your workout, guys.
A forty-year-old body with the wrong head attached. And yet, I refused to wear sunglasses or a hat or shave every day. It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup, and so I exposed my age for all to see and pretended to accept myself as I was. Though it galled the hell out of me to be old: I hated my vanity more. How foolish, how unenlightened, for someone who is supposed to be a healer and a realist about aging.
My moment of entrance was a bit of theater, an audition for what part I did not know, but some kind of test. I even dreamt about it once, waking in a sweat. Secretly, for years, I had wanted the staff to know I was a physician without having to tell them, and one day they learned of it when a woman collapsed in the lobby, nothing serious it turned out, and I saw to her, putting my jacket under her head, her legs up on a chair and talking to her calmly, asking my questions. Would all this be in jeopardy now because of my wrong turn?
I began to shiver. My fingernails and toenails were turning blue and the children were making very little progress. At least the minders had gotten them off the gravel path onto the sidewalk leading to the entrance, though falling down and being scooped up had begun to seem like fun, I guess, or at least a way to stay outside longer and they all did it one by one, laughing and squirming not to be put upright again. Cooped up all morning, I guessed, they were feisty, restless. Being shoved away from the playground and the door-banging man was too much and the children sat down finally as a group on the cold concrete, on strike. The minders were at a loss. No amount of yelling or shoving could get Group One to follow instructions. All right then, sit there. See if we care. We can wait here all day.
The children won these few minutes respite, no longer having to obey. Sitting close together, they swayed as if in a boat rocking on gentle waves and then, as the snow started falling more heavily, they looked up and opened their mouths to catch snowflakes, in pure victory and joy.
Seeing this, I felt something give way inside me, not a dam of emotion, not a torrent or even a welling up, it wasn’t like that. It was more a shivering wince, a bolt of regret for my losses, losses of wonder and of time, silently counting all the years gone and the few years left. I knew myself through the children, apart from myself, as the child I had been, and knew why the man that I was had made his mistake; that man was exhausted of figuring things out, of striving, of maintaining his image, exhausted of habit, of any role he had taken or been given, to accomplish what he had in his life. As the snow quickened, I wanted to be a child and do my life over again, right this time. Though such a thing could never be, of course, that part of me never reckons with what is actually possible.
In my mind, I saw myself fall to my knees but I did not fall to my knees. Rather when the door opened behind me, I turned and saw the security guard looking at me with mild, level eyes, saw him smiling and shaking his head as he recognized me and the emergency alarm sounded again inside the building.
© Steven Schutzman
Steven Schutzman is a fiction writer, poet, and playwright whose work has appeared in such journals as The Pushcart Prize, Alaska Quarterly Review, Night Picnic, I70 Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, TriQuarterly, and Gargoyle among many others. He is a seven-time recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, awarded for creative writing excellence. Reach him at steveschutzman.com
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