At the end they sat on the bench by the high windows with the light coming up the colour of weak honey over the rooftops of San Tomas, and Yusuf unwrapped, from a cloth bag, two oranges and a small, very dark loaf of the bread his wife baked on Fridays, and they ate a second, better breakfast in the quiet hall like conspirators, and he gave her, at last, the lesson he had been saving, in the form he saved all his real lessons, which was not advice about Saturday at all.
People keep asking me about the seven seconds, he said. Reporters. A man at the mosque. A boy at the bus stop who had seen the clip and wanted to know the trick. He turned an orange in his great, scarred hands. There is no trick to show them, Dolores. That is what I could not make the boy understand. Seven seconds was not the thing. Seven seconds was the end of the thing. The thing was twenty years. The thing was a girl falling ten thousand times and getting up ten thousand times in halls nobody filmed. The thing was a woman cleaning this room at night for eleven years and walking these mats in the dark with her cart parked there, by that door, feeling the give of them under her shoes, learning this floor the way a sailor learns a coast, while the young men were learning it for an hour a day with music playing. When he reached for you that night, you were not fast. You were finished. There is a difference your newspapers do not have a word for. The technique was finished, the way a sentence is finished when a person has been thinking it for twenty years. It just took seven seconds to say.
Dee peeled her orange in one long spiral, the way her father had taught her before judo, before everything, at a kitchen table in a house that no longer stood. And if tonight it takes the whole clock, she said. If it takes everything I have and still is not enough.
Then it takes the whole clock, Yusuf said, with enormous calm, and you will walk off that mat a woman who gave her whole work to a whole evening, and your daughter will drive you home, and Rosa will hear about it on Monday and say you ate properly, I am assuming you eat properly, Carla has threatened me with a chart. He ate a segment of orange and considered her over it. You did not agree to this to prove the seven seconds were real. They were real before anyone filmed them. Things do not become real when strangers watch. That is the sickness of this age and you are not to catch it on my account. You agreed so that Rosa Delgado gets her name in the same size letters as a coach. You agreed so that sixty thousand dollars learns to fall safely in this hall for four years. You agreed because a room laughed at a woman doing honest work and the room needed a better memory. Hold on to your reasons, Dolores. A fighter who borrows the crowd's reasons will spend the crowd's courage, and the crowd is a poor lender. It charges everything and it is gone by Sunday.
She sat with that while the light strengthened and the first sounds of the building's day began around them, a door, a radio, Simon's voice somewhere being optimistic at a telephone. She thought about the girl who had fallen ten thousand times. She thought about the woman with the cart, learning a coast in the dark. She found, to her own quiet astonishment, that she could hold both of them in the same pair of hands without either of them diminishing, and that this, and not the throw, and not Saturday, was the work her whole life had been doing while she was busy surviving it.
Enough, Yusuf said at last, standing, and offering her a hand she did not need and took anyway, because some hands are not about rising. Go home. Sleep if your body permits its opinion. Eat your daughter's food. Come back tonight and be exactly the size of yourself. Not smaller for their comfort and not larger for their cameras. Exactly the size of yourself. It has always been sufficient. It is, if you will forgive an old man's observation, quite a size.