The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner
For Tim Carey, and all the riders and leaders of the Bicycle Club of Philadelphia
I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.
—Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
—Albert Einstein
Abby
1996
Are you ready?”
She wasn’t. But her sister and her brother had both learned how to ride their bikes before they turned six, and Abby was a few weeks away from her seventh birthday, and her dad had already spent twenty minutes taking the training wheels off her bike. She knew she had to try.
“Okay, I’m going to hold the seat until you get your balance, and then I’m going to let go.”
She nodded without turning from her perch on her bike’s seat. If she took her feet off the pedals she’d be able to touch the ground with her tiptoes. Still, she felt like she was in outer space, that the ground was a million miles away; that if she lost her balance she’d go plummeting to her doom.
“Okay. Here we go.”
She felt her daddy’s hand on the back of her seat, steadying the bike. She made herself push with her right foot. The pedals turned. The wheels spun.
“Here you go! Pedal, pedal, pedal! You’ve got it!” her daddy shouted.
And then he wasn’t there. It was just Abby, alone on her bike… and she wasn’t falling. She clutched the handlebars, not paying any attention to where the bike was headed, and she pedaled, pedaled, keeping her balance, and the wind was cool on her cheeks, brushing back her hair, and she was picking up speed, only wobbling a little, and she wasn’t falling. She was riding.
It felt like floating. It felt like flying. It felt like she was far away from everything that hurt her. The icy silences that stretched between her parents. The way her mom would always put a plate of cut-up carrots or bell peppers by her plate, and no one else’s, at dinnertime. How Dylan McVay at school had started calling her Flabby Abby, and now all the boys called her that.
“Abby! Stop! Turn around! Don’t go on the busy street!” Her daddy was yelling, chasing after her, his voice getting farther away with every rotation of the pedals. And Abby wasn’t falling. She was riding, on a bike that could take her anywhere. She was free.
Abby
New York City April 2021
I’m getting married!” Kara hollered into Abby’s ear. The words came borne on a gust of tequila-scented breath as Kara grabbed Abby’s hand and squeezed. “I’m so happy! Are you happy for me?”
“Of course I am,” Abby said, guiding her friend over a crack in the sidewalk. “If you’re happy, I’m happy.”
“I AM!” Kara shouted into the Brooklyn night. “I AM happy!”
“Maybe let’s be happy a little more quietly,” Abby suggested as Marissa, another member of the bridal party, came teetering toward them and slung her arm around Abby’s neck. At the beginning of the night, Marissa had given each of the women a pink feather boa, and they had started to shed. Abby saw pink feathers floating in the air, drifting gently down onto the pavement.
“You’re next,” Marissa said, poking her finger against Abby’s chest. “You and Mark.”
“Mark and I have been on exactly two dates,” Abby said, bemused.
“Doesn’t matter,” Marissa said, and looked Abby in the eye. “He loves you. He’s been in love with you since he was thirteen! That’s…” Marissa wobbled to a halt, her cute nose wrinkled, incapable of walking drunk in high heels and doing math at the same time.
“Eighteen years,” said Abby, who was not precisely sober but who was also not anywhere near as tipsy as her friends. “But we’ve only been back in each other’s lives for fifteen minutes.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Marissa gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “He loooves you.”
Abby surveyed the rest of the party. There were Kara’s college friends: a trust and estates lawyer, a crisis communication expert, a banker who lived in San Francisco. There were a few other summer camp friends—Marissa, who lived in a suburb of Chicago with her husband and two little girls; Hannah, a physician’s assistant; and Chelsea, who worked as a public radio producer in Portland, Oregon. Then there was Abby, an employee of a doggie daycare called Pup Jawn, a freelance dog-walker and sometime Uber driver, who’d started and dropped out of two different master’s degree programs, one in early childhood education, the other in library sciences. Abby had gotten used to being the biggest girl in a group, but now she’d arrived at a point where she was both the biggest and the least accomplished. This development did not fill her heart with joy.