This is the Water Page 3

  This is Dinah hoping her daughter Jessie doesn’t turn out to be a bumbler like her father, Joseph, a man Dinah married years ago because she thought he’d be a good father, which he is, but that was the only reason she married him. This is Dinah hoping her daughter doesn’t turn out to be like Dinah either, an overweight woman who has almost no friends and knows that she has almost no friends because she is critical of everyone else’s behavior and doesn’t understand why people can’t live by high moral standards and beliefs the way she always has. To Dinah, all things carry equal weight: Writing thank-you notes by hand to people who give you gifts ranks up there with not stealing from a store. Hanging up on a telemarketer is just as disrespectful and deplorable as cheating on a spouse. The few friends she has made over the years were always subject to her wrath when they made the slightest mistake in her eyes—“What? You keep in contact with old boyfriends? You might as well be having an affair with them!”—and they gradually stopped being her friend. That was also a mistake in Dinah’s eyes. If they were stronger people, they would see that she only made comments to help them become better people. Dinah knows she’s uptight, but doesn’t feel it’s right to deny that part of her. It would be like cheating on herself. Dinah’s husband is someone who always defends people like Annie, who don’t see the importance of following all the rules to a T, and he says that other mothers on the team, who are so uptight about doing everything the team asks of them, could learn from Annie’s more relaxed attitude.

  It’s work for Dinah to drive Jessie forty-five minutes to the pool every day after school and sit and wait for the two-hour practice to be over, but in the long run she feels it’s the best gift she can give her daughter, like a get-out-of-jail-free card allowing her a disassociation from those twisted strands, those DNA, she inherited. Joseph is not especially handsome or smart or funny (he looks and acts goofy, always tripping on stairs and hitting his big square-shaped head on low doorways), but he has been a good father—always there to scoop their daughter up in his arms after a fall or to whisk her off to the doctor when need be, with a trip afterward to the ice cream parlor. But now that Jessie is older and doesn’t need that kind of fatherly attention anymore, Dinah feels she doesn’t need Joseph either. It’s as if both daughter and mother have outgrown him. To make matters worse, he’s losing his hearing, a condition caused by one too many deer hunting trips during which he’s shot a rifle off close to his ear, and as a result he’s yelling more because he can’t hear himself and thinks no one else can hear him either, so now Dinah’s yelling more too, trying to get him to understand everyday things like, “I’m taking Jessie to practice tomorrow, you make the dinner,” or “We’ll be home from practice late, be sure to take the roast out of the oven.” What’s made him even more annoying is that in the past few weeks he’s asked that she become some kind of a translator for him. When he talks to people and he can’t understand them, he turns to her and says, “What did they say?” His hearing is affecting his work as a real estate salesman, and he’s asked Dinah to come along with him a few times on a showing to help translate, but she’s now refusing to do it. A part of this has to do with time—being a manager of a prosthetic supplier, she has to work nine to five shipping off artificial arms and legs gently packed in Bubble Wrap and Styrofoam popcorn. A part of it has to do with her not wanting to have to take care of him in any way, and a part of it is her not wanting to have to meet rich couples touring high-end houses.

  This is our killer. He drives fifteen minutes from the facility back to his home. He lives in an apartment he has lived in for twenty-five years. He has lines in his forehead so deep they could serve as stairs for a small doll. He has a washer and dryer in his kitchen, and when he eats meals he usually starts a load to wash or dry so that he has the sound of one of the machine’s drums turning to keep him company. As a killer, he has pride, he thinks, and does not want to be caught, the way so many experts think serial killers want to be. He is not like that careless killer out west all over the news who, as a matter of fact, made this killer want to kill again, just to prove it can be done right. It has been so many years since the last time. It makes him hungry again. Why shouldn’t I be able to once again see the light go out of a young woman’s eyes? he thinks. He thinks about Kim. He has been watching her for a few months. He thinks how Kim’s eyes, once she starts winning again, will be fever-bright with excitement and satisfaction. All he has to do is wait for that moment.

  This is Kim at home at night watching butterfly technique videos and practicing, lying chest-down on the ottoman, trying to imitate the swimmer on the screen. The ottoman’s fabric has a coarse weave almost like a burlap sack and is uncomfortable on her skin, and her little sister, who is eight, keeps telling Kim how she swims butterfly and that maybe Kim should swim it more like she does, which doesn’t help Kim since her sister is like a rubber band and has such a flexible back she sometimes walks around the house in a backbend, reporting on what she sees on the ceiling, just for the fun of it.

  While lying in bed that night, behind her curtain of ribbons, Kim thinks about how her dream for years has been to go to age groups, zones, sectionals, then junior nationals, then nationals, and then of course the Olympics. Things looked as if they were headed that way for a long time. Every season she improved her times, and every year she was going to more age-group meets and then zone meets, and sectionals, and even out west to California for juniors, but this season she’s slipping backward. She thinks she should get out of bed and sit at her desk and study for her history test tomorrow, but she’s too tired. Who cares, anyway, she wonders, if Caesar was a villain or just ambitious? “I care,” she responds, and she means it. She wants to keep getting all A’s in school, so she turns on the light, gets up, puts her robe on, and opens up her history book. When she falls asleep reading at one a.m., her pale blond hair, which she wishes were blonder, more the color of corn silk than what she thinks looks ghostlike and wispy, is spread across an illustration of Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  This is you at home at night after the meet hanging up towels, wet and smelling like chlorine, and this is you with Sofia and Alex, looking at the swim videos you took of them earlier in the day, your girls stopping the frames now and then to see exactly where they started to slow down or when they reached out to touch the wall. They joke and make remarks like, “I wasn’t going to let the girl in the lane next to me win. I thought, This is my race, all mine!” they say. This is you later, looking at yourself in the mirror and hoping to see Chris in the reflection instead. Chris who has the breasts she can wear with no bra, and the rear all the swim-team dads stare at when they should be watching the race they’re timing. You know you will never be like Chris. You look out the window at the moonlight on the trees and on the rock wall. It makes the rocks glow. It makes the trees appear as though their leaves are made of silver.

  You think about you. How if you were to describe yourself to someone, you would empty out your purse on the table. You would not have to say anything. Your ChapStick that’s never used will talk for you. Your receipts from another country close to the equator that for some reason you’ve left in there for almost a year will talk for you. Your picture of your friend from years ago will talk for you. The hairbrush with hair from not only your head, but also Sofia and Alex’s heads, will talk for you. Then you sit on your unmade bed, the bed you never make except before you’re ready to go to bed, and you wonder who that someone would be who would want to know about you in the first place. You cannot think of anyone who would want to get to know you that well ever again. You wonder if your husband, Thomas, knows what you have in your purse. If he even has any clue. When he comes into your room to brush his teeth in the bathroom you say, “Do you have any idea what’s in my purse?” Thomas brushes his teeth for too long, you have always thought. He’s going to abrade his gums and someday they will peel away from his teeth like a pink strip of stretched-out bubble gum that’s already been chewed.
He is brushing his teeth too long now, and of course not answering you because he is brushing his teeth. When he is finally finished he rinses his mouth and then takes a long time dabbing at it with a towel that is still wet and smells like chlorine from when the girls used it after their races during the swim meet. If I were Chris, the swim-team mom with the breasts and the rear, you think, I bet he would not wait so long to answer me. He would have talked through his brushing and his toothpaste foam to say in a mumble, “Yes, dear,” or “No, dear.” Apparently, though, Thomas never heard the question about your purse. “I’ve got a great idea how to make money,” Thomas says. “Do you want to hear it?” he asks. Thomas does not ever wait for you to answer his questions, and starts telling you his ideas anyway.

  This great idea is not so great, you think. He wants to develop a water gun that horse owners can use on dogs so that dogs don’t endanger them when they’re on horseback on the rural roads where you live. You think, why not just a regular water gun, the kind your daughter Alex has that blasts hose-sized streams of water more than fifty feet? You don’t tell Thomas, though, that his great idea is not so great. Instead you turn away from him in bed, facing the window where you can see the moon on the birch tree making its bark appear frozen white.

  This is Thomas in bed lying next to you, patting your arm once before you fall asleep. Thomas has dispensed with the kissing. You think this happened two years ago when the work he does in his research lab started becoming more difficult, coincidentally around the same time your brother shot himself. There is too much worry for Thomas now, what with managing the other researchers and creating the antibodies that he sells. You think that where his lab is located adds to his stress. It’s near the local commuter airport, and wouldn’t the constant screech of tires hitting the tarmac and the smell of airplane fuel in the air run him down? This is you facing the wall, wondering if the kissing would make a difference. In the morning, would you love him any better because he kissed you on the lips? Would you love him any worse? This is you wishing hours later when he wakes up and makes his way to the toilet in the thick, cloudy darkness of night that he hadn’t woken you up. This is the house whistling, the wind coming in through windows not all the way closed. This is you wondering if there is such a thing as wife energy, and if you had it whether maybe you would love Thomas more. Maybe Thomas would be kissing you at night instead of patting you on the arm. If you had wife energy, he would be complimented more often. You would tell him how smart he is. You would tell him you like the way his hair looks when it grows long. You would tell him he did a fine job with the mower, that the fields look like golf courses. You would tell him he is funny instead of listening to funny things he says and not laughing out loud, just laughing inside, because the outside laughter takes energy, and you have used the energy up already. You have used it when listening to your teenage daughter call you names. You have used up your energy trying not to get angry, trying not to care, so that she would eventually stop. You have used up the energy reaching behind you while driving and grabbing a book from your daughters that they were fighting over. You have used it up closing a window. Yes, just a window, you thought to yourself while doing it. The window was heavy and hard to pull down. You had to put your back into that window. What was the use of all that swimming you did at the facility while your daughters were practicing if you could not even close a window?

  Outside the house the bats are catching moths and slamming into the windowpanes. There are many moths now that the weather is warmer. You saw one the last time you shot a wedding. You photographed a luna moth fluttering by the bride’s face just as she said, “I do.” It was a photo you liked, the luna moth covering the bride’s mouth with its lime-green body. But the bride did not like the photo and said it was a shame you hadn’t taken one without the moth, as if you were the one who had called upon the moth to come fluttering by at that moment, as if you were the one who was trying to cover up the evidence of the words “I do” being spoken. You keep the photo anyway, in a drawer along with other photos you liked that the brides did not because they were not photos about their wedding day. Some are close-ups of flowers, a gardenia with a ladybug walking on its petals. Some are of the distorted, elephantine reflection of someone’s legs in the steel gray side of a guest’s car.

  “It’s great that the bats are back,” Thomas said a few days ago, and then you took your wool coat off its hook by the door and stored it on a shelf in a glass case, afraid the moths would find it. Even the glass case took your energy. You had to lift up on the handle while shutting it or it wouldn’t close all the way, and while you were closing it, Thomas was talking to you, or rather he was reading to you from his magazine. He wanted you to know how smart it was that he tutored the girls all year round because according to his magazine, schools were dumbing down textbooks, and dumbing down tests, and dumbing down courses in public schools. These were things you somehow already knew about. It wasn’t an article that was shedding any new light on what you already had learned as a parent of two children in the school system. “Stop already,” you said to him, “I know all this,” but Thomas did not listen and he kept reading, loudly, his deep voice seeming to resonate through your own chest because he was standing so close to you, wanting you to listen, and he was so loud that you could feel his voice inside yourself, behind your rib cage, like the rumble of a nasty chest cough.

  And you wonder if, like Dinah’s husband, he too is losing his hearing from his hunting rifle going off by his ear so many times. But really he didn’t shoot that often. You know this because years ago, before you had children, the two of you would hunt together on your property. He would sit high on a ridge overlooking the slender stream in your valley, and you, lower down, would face the opposite way, toward acres and acres of woods thick with nettles and scrub pines and tangles of blackberry bushes. You would sit very still and the few times you saw a buck, you would not shoot. You did not want it to die. You did not want to have to drag it home after chasing it in the woods, after following drops of blood and the sound of it stumbling. You did not want to have to eat its lean meat. You would let the deer pass by, and a few hours later after you learned to feel the quiet, and you became part of the quiet yourself, then your husband would rise from where he sat and come down toward you, and the sounds of his hard-heeled boots crunching on the leaves and his stiff canvass coat bending back and breaking branches were so loud compared to the quiet you were just a part of that it seemed as if there were an entire herd of your husband crashing through the woods. “Did you see anything?” he would ask, trying to whisper, but even his whisper was loud. Cradling your rifles as you walked back to your house, and then emptying out the bullets on the front lawn before you entered, you would shake your head. “No, not unless you count a few squirrels and a few noisy birds,” you would say. Slowly, over the years, you stopped going hunting with him, and so he would tell your girls, “Just wait until you are old enough. I will take you hunting. You can take your mother’s rifle.” But he himself was less fond of killing the deer than he was of just sitting quietly on the ridge, and so he would come home with just the smell of the leaves on him, bringing in the cold air when he opened the door.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  This is a qualifier meet weeks later when the weather is warmer. Driving two hours south to the away meet, you pass trees on the sides of the highway that look faintly green, the buds on the ends of their branches brand-new. You think how in a week’s time there will be leaves on the trees up by where you live too. No longer will people driving in cars on your road be able to turn their heads and look up at your house as it sits high on a hill, the copper roof like the buds on these trees, just starting to turn faint green with age. Once again, the trees will grow leaves and the bushes and the blond, tall grass will grow, and no one will be able to see you and your family walking through the rooms of your house: Thomas on the phone with the lab that he runs arguing with a staff member because for months now, almost a year, batche
s of bacteria he’s been growing to target a gene are failing and he can’t figure out if it’s due to a virus, contaminated water, or a temperature problem, and it’s driving Thomas crazy. You at the sink staring at your face in the mirror thinking if you were a bride you had to photograph, then you would have a hard time finding the right light to photograph yourself in—you would have to pull far back with the lens in order to capture the slightest hint of youth, of beauty, of any camera-worthiness at all. Those people in the cars below your hill on your road on a sunny summer’s day with the leaves and the blossoms in full riot would not be able to see your girls bent over homework, or standing tall, practicing, holding small chins over the warmly colored wood of old violins.

  This is the dead pool at the away meet, a huge affair built years ago and named after a man who has been dead for years in a town that looks like it’s dead, located on a college campus that looks like it’s dead, where the people shuffling into the store at the gas station to buy weak coffee look like they’re near dead. The dead pool, the moment you enter it, is so hot you feel your blood evaporating and your tongue thickening, and you’re already wanting a drink of water. The course is long, twice as long as the swimmers are used to. This is the national anthem. Who can hear it being played over a sound system so old?

  You eat grapes. The grapes have already become warm because the facility is so warm. You talk to the other parents. “Aren’t we lucky,” you tell each other. “We don’t have to time today. The home team has enough timers.” But you don’t feel lucky. You like to time. You like to be down on deck doing something. The children, the young ones, need to be asked their names. They need to be in the right order. You cannot have someone diving off the blocks who is not in the right order on the heat sheet. The swimmers are nervous and they are bored standing on line at the same time. They play with their goggles. They put them on and take them off so many times. On line, the girls give each other back massages or they spell letters with their fingers on each other’s backs and make each other guess what word they are spelling. They play a game called ninja, which you don’t understand even though your daughters have explained it to you. The girls all jump together and then end up with their hands in different poses as if they were karate-chopping the air. It reminds you of the game of statues you played as a girl, only these statues always end up in a fighting stance.