The Wall

ONCE I WAS SETTLED BACK IN CAMBRIDGE, I began to study. There was plenty of studying going on there, though this, of course, was different. It had to do with carving something into my body. Knowledge became defined as what my body knew and what it could be taught. For the first time, I learned to run. I ran along the Charles River. I came to know the distance between the bridges. I began to hunt up prospective walls around Cambridge to throw myself over, low ones at first. I'd wait for traffic to clear and then take a flying run.

It did not come naturally, jumping over a wall, and more often than not I smacked into it like a cartoon animal. My hands bled, my legs and arms bruised. People watched me. The best wall, the height of which I measured with the open span of my hand above my 5-foot-7 self, surrounded Episcopal Divinity School. I went there late at night, earnestly fiddling with my Walkman until the strolling couples and dog walkers passed, then I ran as fast as the narrow street allowed, and I hit it in a jump, my fingers curling around the top edges as I pulled up and up. On top, I sat for a minute and looked down at the gardens on the other side and thought about my smart father at 25, out of the Navy and working in a liquor store, wanting nothing more than to get a good job as a cop in L.A.

My work became like any other studying. Once I knew it, it was mine. I taught myself to jump over walls until I could do it in a skirt. Then I started working on my grip strength. I hung from jungle gyms in children's playgrounds and watched the tendons pop from inside my wrists. I bought grip strengtheners, two sets of plastic handles on tight metal coils. I kept them on my desk and squeezed them and squeezed them, until my fingers were weak as noodles. The high squeak they made, like springs in an ancient mattress, reminded me of staying with my father for that one beautiful week in the summers when I was a girl. My sister and I would know that he was awake when we heard the squeak of the grips that he kept on his bedside table. We would go into the back-porch room where he slept, and he would be sitting on the edge of his made-up bed, wearing a white T-shirt and sweat pants, crunching his hands in a steady rhythm.

"Don't be fooled," my father said when I called to tell him this happy memory. "The springs on those things wear out fast. You need to buy a new set every couple of weeks."

"They're killing me the way they are." It was not the point I'd wanted to make.

"You think you're getting stronger, but it's just that the coils are broken in," he said. "Squeeze a quarter between the handles and hold it for sixty seconds. That'll make the difference."

WHEN IT WAS SUMMER AND FINALLY TIME TO TAKE THE TEST, my father wanted me to come to California early. This had always been the case; any trip west should last a few days longer than I had planned. He said he could drill me for my oral, but what he really wanted was to watch me run. The morning after I arrived, we walked over to Glendale Community College. I ran laps on the track while my father stood at the grassy edge with a stopwatch. "Ten seconds," he yelled when I passed, which was how much time he wanted to see come off the next lap. While I kicked my heels up toward my back and cut past the other runners, my father, looking at me and his watch in equal measure, was a training officer and I the brightest cadet in the class. He yelled to me to sprint the last 100 yards, and I ripped my heels into the track.

"Jesus, Ann," he said when I stopped. He came to me and hugged my shoulders hard while I panted. "You're going to kill them."

I was no great athlete, but I was a very good student.

In the evening, we sat in the back yard of my father and stepmother's house, the house I had lived in briefly when I was 5 years old. I asked him to tell me things: Who was his favorite partner? What was the best case he ever had? We talked about police work until it was dark and my stepmother got tired and went inside.

"You're going to need to stay on for a year," my father said. "If you're going to get a feel for the thing. You need to give it that much time."

I told him again, I was never going to be a cop. I was going to write about being a cop.