Bouncing Blue
Every weekday after school, she and her two kids walked the path from the next neighborhood into ours. They’d emerge from the woods into our back yard, and the three would climb onto our trampoline and bounce for about a half hour before continuing on to their house.
We’d encouraged them to use it, the trampoline, because we hated to see it go to waste. It had been arduous, getting it here. We’d hoisted it onto the roof of the minivan and drove-walked it up the street. I strained my back dragging it down the hill — our boys helped somewhat, but they were little, back then — to its present location, just under our — mine and Justine’s —second story bathroom window.
It had served us well, but our kids had long outgrown it.
Sometimes the three, the mom and her kids, visited the trampoline not to bounce, but to talk. Occasionally it seemed as though they were holding a meeting there. She leaned forward, seemingly concentrating hard on what they said, even though they were five or six years old and couldn’t have said anything profound. They made her laugh, and she tilted her head back, her dark, shoulder-length hair bouncing a little with each breath. I noticed it made her breasts bounce too.
Though I’d been told her name and those of the children several times, I never could remember them. Cloris was close, but not quite right. It was only recently that I coyly, in a roundabout way, asked Justine. I learned her name is Madeline. Madeline Feinstein.
Her Facebook profile revealed a married woman who had traveled to Sydney, Australia with her kids last summer — which of course was winter there. Her husband seemed to have a gigantic head and an expression hinting of something smelling bad. They loved their dog, a border collie their kids sometimes walked past our house. Madeline got a unicycle for Christmas.
Our kids, bad sleepers long into toddlerhood, wrecked my sleep cycle and I’ve struggled to get it back. Eventually the boys got over it — Loudon moreso than Magellan, who, like his namesake, likes to explore the world (wide web) — while I often have to occasionally get up during the night to drink wine and read myself back to sleep. Justine’s used to it, and has learned not to let it disrupt her own. It’s a deceptive quiet in the middle of the night, the refrigerator’s hum and the occasional engine roar from the highway somehow comforting.
When I get up to use the bathroom during the wee small hours, I feel my way to the commode in hopes that keeping things dark will allow me to fall quickly back to sleep. I sit as I urinate, and bow my head and close my eyes. That was the position I was in not long ago when I heard a rhythmic, springing sound coming from outside.
Someone was using the trampoline.
This realization made my chest tighten and my heartbeat increase its rhythm. I finished peeing and, without flushing, rose to look out the window.
It was very dark out there, save for the streetlight about fifty yards away that cast light only near the top of the netting that surrounded the trampoline. Its user’s identity was revealed only when he or she bounced high and reached his or her apex.
The bouncer, you might have guessed, was Madeline. The longer I watched the more her features revealed themselves to me. Watching even longer, I became aware, much to my shock and delight, she was completely unclad. Immediately I felt lecherous, and kept turning back to look into the bedroom, making sure Justine wasn’t watching me watch.
Before long I’d decided I wasn’t going back to bed any time soon. Who could go to sleep after witnessing such a thing? My nude neighbor was jumping with abandon, occasionally landing on her back and then back on her feet. It seemed she might be smiling. Who could not? Finally, after ten minutes of this, she fell on her back and bounced to a halt. I could hear her panting.
Would she resume jumping after a rest? I was willing to wait and find out. She did not resume, but instead rolled to the slit of the netting, squeezed through, hopped down, reached for her robe that hung from the fig tree Justine and the boys had planted a few years ago, and covered herself before walking up the hill to the street.
She made it home; I’m sure of it because I saw her slip through her kitchen door from the bedroom window I’d switched over to. “You up?” came a voice from the bed, and I nearly yelped.
“Uh, yeah, I, I,” I stammered, before recovering. “I heard an owl or something.”
“Oh,” replied Justine, and yawned.
“Yeah, that thing was really ‘hooing.’”
“Mmm.”
“Oh well, I guess he’s done. Back to bed I suppose.”
I lay on my back, which I never do, because I thought my pounding heart might shake the mattress if my chest came into contact with it. Justine moved close to snuggle, but I fended her off by rolling a quarter turn away from her, pulling the blanket tight over my shoulder. Once she was safely back asleep, I was free to contemplate what I’d just seen.
Was Madeline insane? Maybe just a little zany? We all need to escape whatever situation we’re in, from time to time, but this seemed a bit chancy and rash. Was she a moonlight exhibitionist? I’d read of the type, the housewife weary of the daily grind, escaping to work in a strip bar after tucking the kids in bed.
Madeline had never struck me as that type. In our few, brief conversations, she didn’t flirt or even bat her eyes. If anything, her comments to me had been perfunctory. She did compliment me on my deck staining job, and I thanked her. I didn’t talk more, or less, than what was normal. Why she decided to torment me with this nocturnal display of denuded gymnastics was beyond me.
I was a wreck the next morning, a little more so than usual. Justine was kind enough to have started my coffee machine, and its aroma gave me some hope. I pulled a cup from the cabinet and stood at the counter, waiting.
“This world,” murmured Justine from the breakfast nook, and I knew she’d been reading the news. Neither of us could stop these days.
“Yeah?” I asked, though my tone didn’t invite more information.
“Two kids playing with a gun,” she summarized.
“That’s all I need to know,” I muttered.
“Why people don’t keep them locked up.” She’ll never know, I silently completed her sentence.
The boys were upstairs, still sleeping. It was Saturday morning.
“How was your night?” she asked, and I thought of the owl I had claimed I’d heard for almost an hour in the middle of the night.
“Spotty at best,” I said. “Damned owl.”
“Who,” said Justine.
“The owl.”
“Its ‘hoo.’”
“No, what,” I corrected. “It was an owl.”
“I know, hoo,” she said, slightly annoyed.
“Third base.” She didn’t laugh.
I wondered how Madeline had slept. She’d certainly had enough exercise.
I didn’t see her emerge from her house all day, though her kids brought out some kind of ball and threw it toward each other. That night, she appeared on the trampoline again. I noted the time: 2:40. She bounced until 3:00, donned her robe and went home.
It is amazing how the brain works. The clock’s digital display of 2:40 seared itself into my being, and every night for the next two weeks I woke up exactly then and watched from the window. When the moon became full, the performance was lent a kind of eerie grandeur. Madeline’s form, not lean, not heavy, turned blue and almost ghostly. Her eyes were closed, her smile childlike and pure. My lust edged its way to love.
I had just watched another poorly-lit, late-night bouncing performance when a hand touched my shoulder. I gasped, then hiccupped. “You okay?” asked Justine. Down from the window, Madeline was putting on her robe and making her way up the hill to the road.
“Oh wow, yeah,” I said, recovering. “Just this amazing moon out tonight and all the, what, trees and the sky.”
Justine leaned closer to the window. “Yeah. Pretty cool.”
I kissed her neck, hoping to stop the interrogation. She responded in a way she hadn’t in a long time, and we returned to the bed and united carnally. One might assume I was thinking of Madeline, and maybe at first I was, but then Justine did that “uh-uh-uh” thing that is distinctively Justine, and the illusion evaporated. I thought that was for the best.
I pondered keeping different hours. Was it really necessary for me to be in bed by 11:30? And to rise at eight, so as to make it to my office by nine? It seemed now too regimented a schedule, and I appealed to my superior that my work hours become a bit more flexible. “Is this because of illness?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied, before I knew what I was saying. “I am ill. Insomnia.”
She looked at me a long time, and I felt my head quiver — a tic that kicks in when I’m either lying to or threatened by another. To ward it off I used a variation on an old remedy: I envisioned her, my boss, on my trampoline, nude, blue and bouncing in the middle of the night.
A wan smile from my mouth and a slight furrow of her brow later, I had won myself a new schedule, one that allowed me to sleep in, three mornings a workweek.
Now, knowing it wasn’t as crucial as on those nights previous to fall asleep before midnight, I stayed awake, pretending to read as Justine drifted off beside me. When she began making the tell-tale sounds of slumber — the soft snorts, the flinching, the smacking of her tongue against the roof of her mouth — I would extract myself from the bed, pour myself a glass of Cabernet, fix a PBJ, and read some more. At 2:15, I’d return to the bedroom to watch from the window for Madeline’s approach from the street.
Some nights it rained, but if it was warm enough she’d still come and bounce, each contact punctuated by a sharp, peeling sound. On colder rainy nights she didn’t appear, and I would sit on the deck’s hammock and try to rock away the pangs of heartbreak deep in my chest. I imagined her home, awake, finding some suitable alternative like bouncing on the bed of a basement bedroom or a mini-tramp. I resisted trudging through the wet turf to peer through her window.
On the nights when I was due at work the next morning at the regular time, I would gamely try to fall asleep with Justine. Usually it produced the lightest of dream states, wherein I would find myself looking out the window of the bathroom but be disappointed by Madeline’s failure to show, or, in a few horrid nightmares, find my mother or sister bouncing naked instead. Always I would wake in time for the 2:30 show.
As is almost always true with men in love, I eventually sought to escalate things. Telling Justine we needed an outdoor flood light with a motion sensor, for our protection of course, I had an electrician install a fixture at the corner of the house, up high near the soffit, and screw in a bulb. “It won’t be bright enough to wake you up, darling,” I assured her, and made sure the bulb was of low wattage and of a soft, blue hue.
That night, when Madeline triggered it and discovered herself in the sudden light, she stood as if paralyzed for a long time in her robe, not sure whether or not to climb onto the trampoline. I could see the conflict in her body language. Eventually she decided it was still worth the risk, shed her robe, and treated me to a clearer view of her splendid, bounding physique. I took photos with my phone.
If I had decided that was enough for me — a nightly balcony seat to something nakedly beautiful — maybe my torment could have been truncated right then and there. Maybe it was the lack of sleep that made me take things up another notch — to insert myself into the story (using a journalism metaphor).
Sleep deprivation and too much wine can be a lethal and dynamic duo. The plaque in the brain doesn’t get cleared away; fixations become obsessions; drunken flights of fancy grow into actual plans.
There was a copse of shrubs lining the edge of the yard, near where Madeline made her nightly entrance. Because she faced west as she jumped, and the bushes stood to the southeast of the trampoline, they provided a perfect vantage point from which to view. Cloaked in an olive green hoodie and dark pajama pants, I’d never be seen. I simply had to creep out there around 2:15, and wait.
When I did so, it was almost perfect. I hadn’t thought about the security light I’d had installed, so from my vantage point Madeline’s form was somewhat silhouetted. But in a way, that made her even more beautiful, more universal. When she donned her robe and passed the bushes from which I watched, I caught a fleeting and dizzying whiff of sweat mixed with perfume.
Woozily, I snuck back inside and enjoyed an oft-interrupted night of sleep.
Fortunately, it was Friday, one of my sleep-in days. Justine had already left for pickleball practice. I found the boys sitting at either end of the sofa, glumly half-watching a comedy routine on television.
“What happened to school?” I asked. Both boys’ faces seemed flushed when they turned to me and said, in unison, “conferences.”
“I know,” I answered, recovering. “Just testing you guys.” I tried to reconstruct the week’s family commitment schedule; I knew Justine had mentioned this on Sunday night, maybe, but couldn’t recall which of us was slated to attend.
The guys, instead of chuckling, snickered derisively. I didn’t like the tone. I walked past them into the kitchen, pausing to check the oven’s displayed time: 10:38. While preparing a light breakfast of eggs and seitan, I heard more giggling, mixed with conspiratorial-sounding whispers.
Close in age, they’d sometimes done this in the past, like when I put on a shirt inside out or left a fly down. Reminded of those small humiliations, I looked in a mirror hanging near the breakfast nook. Sure enough, my T-shirt, an old soccer coach’s jersey, was inside out. The boys were merely having a bit of fun at my expense.
I brought my breakfast into the living room and tried to make conversation. “How did sleep go?” I asked, chewing.
“Fine,” said ‘Gellan, smiling wryly. “How was yours, Dad?”
When Loudon burst into laughter, my heart froze for a second. Then another. Looking back, that was the moment a part of me died, something about 14 and a half years old — ‘Gellan’s age.
I tried to shroud my flinch in a feigned coughing fit. “Fine!” I coughed, and the boys nodded their heads, feigning ignorance.
“We’re gonna ride our bikes to Carlton Road,” said Loudon, referring to the park a few miles away. I sensed he meant the wooded playground behind, where it was rumored adolescent boys could find adventure, as well as remnants of drug paraphernalia and discarded liquor bottles.
On the television screen, an Asian woman was recalling to a chuckling audience her first encounter with pornography. It seemed unseemly for me to allow it to continue. “Can we switch that off so we can talk about your day?” ‘Gellan sighed and switched it off with the remote that he could always find without looking.
“Sure,” he said, seemingly finding this exercise already tedious.
“Dad, your breakfast is getting cold,” said Loudon.
“Never mind that,” I shot back. “Are you meeting anyone at Carlton? Your mother would want to know.”
“Just a few of the guys,” answered ‘Gellan.
“Names, please?”
“Dad,” said Loudon. “Don’t worry about it.”
I stared at them, but when they confronted me with stares of their own, I felt my head start to shake in a “no” motion.
Not wanting them to think I was vetoing their mission, I said, “No. I mean, no, it’s not strange that a father would want to know who his children are hanging out with.”
“Fine,” said ‘Gellan. “We won’t go. We’ll just sit here and veg out to video games.”
“Maybe bounce on the trampoline a little,” added Loudon, and ‘Gellan expressed a laughing snort from his nose.
I stood up. “This…” I began, and then tried to figure out what this was. This was alarming and humiliating. “Whatever,” I continued. “Do what you want. Just let me know later how much they want for your bail.”
“Oh my God!” cried Loudon.
I tried to usher the remark towards jest. “I’ve been wanting to learn a few more chain gang songs, so this could be good.”
I felt my parental authority slipping away. Maybe it would have anyway, as is often the case for fathers with boys their age. But the thought of them giggling out their bedroom window — the one in the house closest to the trampoline — as they observed me mincing into the woods and leering at a naked neighbor, well, it got into my head. Surely they wouldn’t tell their mother. But if they were eventually going to let it slip, was it not better for me to come clean myself?
A lesser concern, I hoped, was the possibility of Madeline being confronted by Justine and my losing my nightly thrill. Did the boys know what kind of power they held, the seriousness of the issue?
I began to worry that if things got really out of hand, it could well be myself asking someone to bail me out of jail.
I called in sick (insomnia), and spent my day doing chores around and outside the house. The boys were gone about four hours, and I hoped some new drama in their lives was supplanting the one taking place in their home. Justine reminded me I was to meet with Loudon’s teacher at the school. I decided to bike there. The path out of our neighborhood and into the next one allows me to avoid a few treacherous left-hand turns. As I walked my bike and approached the bridge I’d built with the boys, the one that spans the little creek, I heard voices. It was too late to turn back and avoid Madeline and her two kids.
“Oh, hey there,” said my voice, too high-pitched.
“Hello,” they all chimed. Madeline smiled and my knees got weak.
“Everyone learn something today?” I asked, feigning sternness.
“No,” both kids said grumpily. The girl’s name was maybe Darla? No, that didn’t seem right. I don’t think I had ever known the boy’s name, and it was probably too late to ask.
“I did,” said Madeline. “Every day should be a learning experience.”
We had all stopped by then; now this was more than a walk-by conversation. I struggled to see this woman as someone different than the alluring figure I’d been watching for weeks.
“I agree,” I said. “You two should listen to your mom.”
“Thanks,” she said. Was that a wink?
“Well, going off to a parent-teacher conference.”
“Have fun with that.”
“Ha!” I shrieked. “Fun. Fun would be nice.”
Fun would be nice? I chastised myself on the entire ride to the school. I toughed out the conference, asked a few questions I hoped would seem pointed, and I listened as the teacher extolled Loudon’s brilliance.
“I wouldn’t mind if he spent less time whispering and giggling with his friends,” Mrs. Lawton added.
“Wouldn’t we all?” I asked, laughing, then regretted the question. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Nothing too serious,” she said. “But I suppose that’s the problem.” We laughed.
So the meeting ended on a high note, at least on paper, but now my ride home was spent fretting about the nature of Loudon’s whispering — and giggling — with his friends. Was he telling everyone about Madeline?
I needed a plan. I decided to broach the subject with the boys after Justine went to bed. A man having a serious talk with his young men. But first there was dinner to get through.
“How’s my seventh-grader doing?” Justine asked, taking her purse off her shoulder as I slipped some chicken breasts into the oven and the boys reached into the refrigerator for drinks. I suppressed my usual agitation at a too-crowded kitchen.
“Oh, well waddaya think?” I announced. “He’s a certified genius. Definitely Yale material. The provost is coming down to see him next week.”
“So, no concerns?”
“Naw, come on! With Loudy here? He’s a saint.”
The boys opened their Gatorades simultaneously, left the kitchen and the fridge door open. “Hey you guys?” protested Justine. “Did you forget something?”
“No biggie,” I said, kicking the door closed. “These guys have bigger fish to fry.”
“Dad, what does that even mean?” asked Loudon.
What kind of person doesn’t know what that means? “You know, you’ve got homework and friends to, you know, text with.”
“No we don’t,” said ‘Gellen.
Dinner went pretty much the same way. The kids picked at their chicken, and hardly touched the greens. “I don’t know how you guys are still alive,” said Justine, shoveling in a load of chicken and rice. Her mouth full, she said to me something discernable only to those who’ve known her for years, “Please get them to eat something.”
“You heard her, guys,” I said. “Frough mough humpf grub mough mough.”
Loudon almost laughed, then turned to see ‘Gellen looking at me straightfaced, and stopped himself. Justine looked at me, eyes wide: seriously? I turned to her. She appeared to have the mumps. I didn’t want to say the first thing in my head: that the boys were watching their weight — a touchy subject lately to my portly wife.
“C’mon guys,” I said, trying to seem like I was putting my foot down. “Let’s give this grub a gobble.”
Loudon inserted five grains of rice into his mouth, but ‘Gellen got up, leaving his plate. “Hey!” shouted Justine.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Let him go. He’s got a lot on his plate. Ha ha.”
Which was truer than Justine knew. “Whatever!” she said, then focused on Loudon. “At least my little genius listens to me.”
I hated when she did that, picking temporary favorites. Today I let it go. I’d had a few glasses of wine while cooking, and all seemed okay with me. Me and my co-voyeurs.
Television, thankfully, saved further strife and discussion. We all sat and stared at the same thing, and that was enough. I couldn’t keep my mind on the plot of the detective series episode we had on. Instead, I plotted my bedtime talk with the boys.
But when the time came, I just kind of winged it. I’d always functioned best when improvising. “Well, you guys seem like a united front these days,” I said, after making myself at home in the vintage beanbag chair in the corner of their room.
Both grunted from behind their phones.
“United in your phone stuff,” I added.
“‘Phone stuff,’ echoed ‘Gellan, somewhat sneeringly.
“Sorry, pal, I just don’t know what you call it. Are you two texting each other? Ha! Wouldn’t that be something? Texting each other in the same room! Heh. What will they come up with next?”
I wasn’t getting through to them. I decided to wait them out. Three minutes later, ‘Gellan blurted, “Goin’ out later, Daddy?”
Loudon gasped, just a little.
“Maybe,” I said, staying on the offensive. “If I do, it’s an adult thing you don’t need to concern yourself with.”
“Unless it’s something that might affect us,” ‘Gellan shot back. “Right?”
“Well, it won’t. And I don’t think you know half of what you’re talking about.”
“Was I talking about something?”
“I’m talking about generally. Talking about what you’re, you know, normally talking about.”
“Dad,” said Loudon, whom I’d forgotten was in the room. “Are you and Mom, you know, okay?”
“Yup,” I answered, perhaps too quickly. “Why would you think we weren’t?”
Loudon started to answer, but I interrupted him.
“Couples, you’ll see one day, they just go through highs and lows over the years, and, you know, things get, well, a little, eh, repetitive, sometimes.
“If you think that, just because I do weird things sometimes, and maybe I get a little crazy, that you have to worry about Mom and I, well, you can just stop worrying now.”
“Okay.”
“‘Gellan? You worried?”
“Nope.”
“Good. Well, I hope we ironed out some things. You know how much I care about both of you.” I struggled my way out of the bean bag chair, rolling to the side and then getting up on one knee, the one that had been hurting, so I switched knees, and finally stood up. “Good night, my little big boys.”
“‘Night.” In unison.
“Please get some sleep tonight, okay? Sleep is the key.”
“You too, Dad,” said ‘Gellan, voice a bit shaky at the end.
Later, smoking a snuck cigarette, lying on the hammock suspended over my back deck, thinking about it all, I think, how would I, the 14-year-old me, have interpreted the sight of my father hiding in the bushes to watch a naked woman jump on his trampoline in the middle of the night? Especially when, if it had been some kind of sting operation, wouldn’t he have leapt out at some point and apprehended the offender? If my dad had just stayed there, cowering and watching, until the coast was clear, could I have respected him ever again?
Sure. I could have. I would have just assumed it was some adult thing, and gone on with my life in the 1980s, a much simpler time. Adults did what they had to do, and kids recognized that. It made sense, eventually.
I peer through the bare trees at Madeline’s house, three windows glowing with warm light, wondering what kind of drama is unfolding within. I think of her putting her kids to bed, then putting her lucky-ass, big-headed husband to bed too, straddling him and bouncing, bouncing.
She is making me crazy. Why would she do this to me? Why my trampoline? The Seiberts have one, maybe missing a spring or two, net a little frayed, and it was farther away, but geez. I feel targeted.
But then I think of my life minus bouncing nude Madeline and it feels bleak, almost pathetic. It feels like we’ve built something, Madeline and I. Justine and I had something, though we may not have realized it when having it, and now it’s over. Now it’s just a matter of endurance. If I have to ogle naked women on trampolines to keep this marriage together, you can damn well bet I’ll do it. The children should always come first. I am sure Justine has her secrets. All the time she spends on her phone? C’mon.
Let people have their secrets! is what I say. I wonder where the owls are. Where Madeline is, right now. Has she gotten into her robe? A nice breeze blows. The night is serene….
It’s the squeaking that wakes me from a dream about Justine and I, our first time. We were in my family’s basement and I was worried the squeaks will wake my parents. They did not. Instead our sons came in, sat down and watched. I’m so horrified and ashamed that I wake up, only to hear what has to be Madeline on the trampoline. I check the time via my watch. 2:42.
The position of the deck is such that my best vantage point is through the fork of an ash tree. Madeline is attempting a full somersault. She lands awkwardly and lies there, bouncing and groaning. The bouncing stops. The groaning does not.
It’s time to show up. “Hello?” I call. “Hello? Are you all right?”
There is a lengthy silence punctuated only by an owl’s hoots. I fear I have ruined everything.
“I’m,” she says, barely audibly. “I’m a bit hurt, I think.”
“Let me come down there.”
“Um.”
“It’s okay, I won’t look at you,” I assure her. “I’ll toss you the robe.” I step on a sharp twig. “Ow, fuck!”
When I reach the hanging robe, it smells like goodness. I step onto the cinder block at the foot of the entrance to the trampoline. “Here,” I say quietly. “Can you roll to me?”
As she does, I smell her sweat, and my knees start to give.
I toss her the robe. She pulls it over her, over her blue, gleaming skin.
“Swing your legs off the edge, and I’ll lift you off.”
She complies; I hold the robe so she can slip into it. She steps down and leans against me as we walk up to the street. She feels broken.
