Wheel world

Delia the Partial Yankee is partial to biking

by Sally Cragin

Delia Ellis Bell the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) stands in her room surrounded by a collection of vintage Bermuda shorts that had belonged to a maiden aunt. Not one of the damn things would fasten. So frustrating, especially since the fabrics were authentic 1950s bleached-out madras, and the cut was below the knee. About once a year such a moment of awful truth arrives: Delia is going to have to start exercising.

She calls Hollis the Mountain Man, and tells him to make some iced coffee, since she was planning to bicycle the seven miles to his house. "What, your car break down?" he asks.

"If only," Delia replies, explaining the dilemma of the shorts.

"You just need to cut back on your Happy's Donuts habit," Hollis offers, and the resulting shriek nearly punctured his eardrum. "Better make it decaf," he says to himself after hanging up. "She's way too wired as it is."

Delia goes downstairs and regards her old Lady Schwinn with dismay. Grease clogs the chain, and rust blooms like an untidy blush across the frame. The front tire is jelly-soft, and the rear tire is flat. Even the wicker basket in front is speckled with mildew. She swings a leg over the frame and dislodges a thick cobweb stretching from handlebar to seat. At least the bike still fits in the back of her car.

Hollis is renowned for his skill at diagnosing mechanical ailments (although human complaints are usually beyond his comprehension), so Delia unloads her bike at the Mountain Lair with great hopefulness. She presents it to the master who buries his summer-bearded chin in his hands and walks around the bike the way a reluctant art critic might circumnavigate a Brancusi at the dawn of Cubism. He sighs.

"Well, the bearings are dry, the wheel is out of true, the spokes are loose, the cables are dry and, yup, looks like they're kinked as well," he says. "This has definitely been neglected, and probably not stored properly. I don't even know if it's worth repairing -- you'd have to dig in, take the whole thing apart, and lube everything."

At Delia's stricken face, Hollis relents. "Well, we could take a run to the dump and see what there is. We might be able to find a bike or two and get a good one out of that."

"The dump?" Delia asked. "On a 90 degree day?" She wrinkles her nose and turns back to the car.

"Whereya goin'?" Hollis calls after her.

"Tritown Cycleworks," she says, revving the engine. "In the end, the cheap way is always the expensive way. I'm buying a new bike!"

Hollis watches the car tootle up the drive and then looks more closely at the Schwinn. The dump would definitely be a place to start.

DELIA ENTERS THE LUSHLY air-conditioned showroom of Tritown Cycleworks, feeling as if she should have brought Hollis along. She'd bought her car on her own, and even her computer, but there are certain emporia that require one be a certain gender for complete shopping comfort. Sexist stereotyping, she thought to herself, but still. . . . Her father always waited in the car for her mother to browse the remnant fabric bins at Tritown Notions. He was a very happy man in the car.

Delia first spends some time at the magazine rack, flipping pages and then moves toward the bike area. There are some sweet-looking rides, lighter than a leaf rake, with metallic-flake frames. She takes a bike out, swings a leg over, pretends to pedal, and then tries another. In the corner are used models, including a very spiffy and well-kept Lady Schwinn. Everyone in the store is wearing black spandex pants with a belly bag or baggy frayed khakis with a belly bag. She wanders over to two extremely lithe guys wearing store badges but stands at a distance. Both are thin as whippets with legs that would have pleased Praxiteles. And extremely cute, by anyone's definition. Delia quietly ogles them for a few moments and then says, "Excuse me," in her most firmly winning way.

She is ignored. One fellow says, "Yeah, I was pushing a 53:14 up Wal-Mart Mountain, and I just got into the draft of a garbage truck, and I wasn't sure about hanging on 'cause it smelled so much, but hey, it was a free ride!"

"Excuse me," Delia repeats.

The second guy responds, "I can't believe you were riding so hard on a Thursday. That's supposed to be your easy day."

"Stepped up my training," the first guy says. "You still have that team-issued Raleigh?"

"Excuse me," Delia states, more emphatically.

"Sure do," replies the second guy.

"The one with the 753 tubing?" says the first guy.

"EXCUSE ME!" Delia shouts.

"Ye-e-es?" both guys say, turning their heads in unison to stare at Delia. They are seriously good looking, she thinks, so fit even their jaw muscles stood out in stark relief.

"I want to buy a bike," she says.

"For what kind of training?" asks the first guy.

"My kind," she says. "I want that Lady Schwinn you've got against the wall for $100. And some cork ribbon for the handlebars." They raise their eyebrows. The pros used the cork ribbon to wrap their handlebars, but, hey, a sale's a sale, and a commission's a commission.

DELIA IS BACK AT the Mountain Lair that afternoon. Meanwhile, Hollis has disassembled most of her old bike, which lay in pieces on the lawn. When she hoists the new Lady Schwinn out of her car, Hollis collapses in laughter. "Excellent!" he declares. "We can cannibalize from that!" He tosses a pedal in the air.

"No way," Delia retorts. "We'll cannibalize that bike for my new bike. Wanna go for a ride?"

"Don't have a bike," says Hollis. "But I'll walk you down to the road."

Delia pedals down the road a bit, and then begins to loop back.

"Rides like a dream," she says. But Hollis is looking past her, with a worried expression. In the distance, a muffled roar begins and then a wave of warm air enveloped them.

"The Tritown Triathlon!" says Hollis. "Take cover! They've already run from Edenberg to Tritown, swum across Lake Unkechewalom, and now they're biking to the summit of Mt. Magoo!"

Delia pulls her bike back onto the road shoulder as a pack of neon-clad bicyclists approachs. A bobbing sea of sleek helmets and furiously pumping legs sweeps by and shouts emerge from the throng: "Pull through!" "Hold the line!" "Hold your #$%&* line!"

In a trice, they are gone. Hollis emerges from behind a bush, but Delia is starry-eyed. "So heroic!" she says. "I'm going to try to catch up with them!"

"On a Lady Schwinn?" Hollis asks, squinting more than usual.

"Eventually," Delia laughs and swings a leg over the frame. Shorts weren't the only thing worth riding for.

Sally Cragin thanks Doug Barney and André Goguen for bike lore -- technical errors are her own.

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