This is the Water Page 9

  “I know, who would think anything associated with heavy metal pans could make your daughter swim faster, but it does,” you say.

  “And what’s this about hydrophobic suits?” Chris asks. “Isn’t hydrophobia associated with rabies?” You tell her you don’t think it’s the same thing. Hydrophobia in this case is what you want. It repels the water, lessening the resistance. In the end, Chris finds a john she likes for Cleo and they order it for overnight shipping. There’s another swim meet in a week, and it is important for Cleo to wear the suit during practice to see how it feels, so there won’t be any surprises when she has to wear it all day.

  You wish, for a moment, you were swimming instead of technical suit shopping with Chris. You watched a video at home on how to perfect the fly, and you want to practice bringing your hands up earlier in the recovery. You have always dragged your hands far behind yourself, as if waiting for someone to grab on to them and keep you from completing your stroke. Who? Maybe someone who could convince you that all the swimming you are doing is pointless, that maybe you should be trying to get your daughters to pay more attention to improving their own swimming since they are the ones with potential and not you, or maybe you should be at home instead or out in the world trying to make a difference. A difference to what, you don’t know. You aren’t one to volunteer in your town or work at the food shelf or be a driver for the meals-on-wheels program. You prefer to stay at home when you can. When it is a warm day and the clouds are far away from each other, you go outside and lie on a blanket and feel the sun on your face. You aren’t thinking about making a difference in the world when you’re lying on a blanket under the sun. You are mostly thinking about the kind of bug that is trying to land on your face. Is it a deerfly? A mosquito? A stray hair from your own head mimicking a bug as it blows in the breeze? And what about that bird blocking your sun for a moment? Is it a raven? A crow? And what is the difference?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Some swimmers don’t shower at all after practice. They dry off and get dressed right away. Later, at home, they shower. Some swimmers spend forever in the shower, wearing their swimsuits the entire time. None of the swimmers stand naked under the shower. You don’t understand how they can spend hours in bathing suits in front of crowds of people at swim meets wearing suits so tight the outlines of their pubic bones and the clefts of their vaginas can be seen, but then in the shower be so modest amongst each other and never reveal themselves. Even the little ones, from an early age, learn how to put their bathing suits on without taking off their shirts first. Your Sofia is one of them. You are convinced no one has ever seen Sofia’s breasts, except Sofia herself. You have never seen them either. In the locker room, after she’s showered still wearing her suit, she lowers the straps of her bathing suit down just to her shoulders and then pulls her shirt over her head. That way she can remove her suit from under the shirt. When she comes out of the locker room her shirtfront is wet from having touched the wet suit, and her posture is poor. She looks as if she is doubling herself over. You’re not sure why she does this. Maybe it’s to hide the fact that her shirtfront is wet and that she has breasts large enough now, they’re noticeable beneath the cotton cloth of the tee shirt she wears. You hope she is not caving in on herself, trying to curl up in two to protect all of the feeling parts of her. This is you hoping she doesn’t end up like your brother someday, someone who never felt good about himself, someone who would try to fold himself in two if someone he loved stopped loving him in return. This is you telling Sofia to keep her back straight, but this is Sofia shooting you a look that could freeze water. This is you thinking what you should have done instead was asked how practice was, or told her how good she looks in that sky-blue-colored tee shirt she is wearing. What if, you think, your father, instead of yelling at your brother to do a chore, had told him how well he played the trumpet, how like the rest of us he enjoyed the sound of the notes that landed so pleasantly on our ears with a ring of authority and a tone of respect at the same time. Would your brother have been different as an adult then? Not that your father ever paid you compliments yourself, but your mother did, and that’s all you needed maybe to face growing up. That’s all any girl ever needed, maybe, a mother telling her how beautiful she was.

  Some of the swimmers stay and practice their dives and their strokes after practice, asking the coaches for extra help. Kim is usually one of these girls, and today after practice she says, “What am I doing wrong?” to Coach, and Coach tells her what she’s been telling her for a while now: “Your rhythm is off, that’s all. You’ll get it back.” Kim wants to stay longer and practice with Coach, but she has to go home. She’s taking an online advanced chemistry course this summer, and she has an exam to study for. At home, after studying, she replays a race in her mind. She remembers all of her races and sees them as clearly as if she were racing them again at that moment. She replays a race that she won, trying to see what it was she was doing right at the time. She cannot figure out why it was such a good race. She wasn’t doing anything that different from what she’s doing now. She begins to think it’s the water itself. Her chemistry teacher posted a video lecture on how all molecules were once parts of something else. He held up an orange. “What you see here could have been the molecules that made up George Washington’s hat.” She imagines the water at that pool she won the race in was made up of the molecules that maybe once made up her relatives, people who would have a reason to care for her and help usher her along the lane as speedily as possible. Other pools where her times were slow had water molecules floating in them from people who maybe were not so nice. Lizzie Borden and her ax, maybe, are making up the water in those pools, she thinks before drifting off to sleep, wondering whose molecules are in the pillow she rests her head upon now.

  This is the killer watching Kim again at a dual meet against a team from the southern part of the state. She swims her hundred fly and she breaks her record. She comes in with a 1:08.72. He wants to shout. He wants to call down to her and yell her name. She has given him such a gift. He looks to see what she looks like coming out of the water. He wishes he had brought binoculars so he could see her eyes more closely. Why isn’t she smiling? Why isn’t she raising her fist up in the air the way he has seen other girls do when they have beaten their times? And her eyes, why do they look dull from up in the bleachers?

  This is Kim, who has just swum her hundred fly again, and she thinks she saw an official raise their hand while she turned at the wall. Did she DQ because she was submerged on the start longer than fifteen meters before she took the required pull with both hands that brought her to the surface? After all these years doing it correctly, could she really have misjudged it? Has she grown in height and that’s why? What’s changed about me? she thinks, and she looks at herself in the reflection of the windows of the pool and she sees her waist and thinks she looks thick, as thick as the old maple that used to be in her yard, and she looks at her legs and thinks they look fat, as fat as the logs cut from that old maple in her yard after it was struck by lightning. She looks at her hair and it looks as if she doesn’t have any. It’s so pale around her face she might as well have been struck by lightning, and she’s a ghost at this meet who doesn’t even ripple the water’s surface or have enough weight to set off the touchpad so that it reads her finals time. When she goes up to Coach, Coach tells her that she DQ’ed after the start, that she stayed submerged underwater way past the first flags, and that it might have been sixteen meters that she stayed underwater instead of fifteen.

  “What was it you were thinking, or were you thinking?” the coach says, and affectionately puts her hand on top of Kim’s head. Kim shakes her head. It’s hard to tell if her eyes are red from the chlorine or from crying or from just being tired after staying up late at night studying, but then when the coach sees the tears welling up in Kim’s beautiful light-blue eyes, she wants to put her arms around her but knows she should not. If she puts her arms around Kim then she will be en
couraging Kim to cry and there is no crying at swim meets. We don’t get upset or get too excited. We don’t throw our goggles down in rage if we lose. We don’t jump up and down for joy if we win. We don’t run up and let our teammates hug us. We don’t curse or kick the post that supports the balcony with the bleachers with all the parents and the grandparents sitting up in them who are knitting or talking or yelling out their children’s or their grand children’s names. We don’t run to the locker room and wish we were still small enough to squeeze ourselves into a locker and hide. We don’t run into the shower and let the water course down our faces as we cry, letting the shower water take our tears down the drain. We don’t lash out at our parents and say, “No, I won’t!” when they tell us that we will do better next time. We don’t run outside into the parking lot in our swimsuits and gulp in the cold air to get away from those inside who are staring at us and not believing how we could have gained so much time in a stroke we thought was our best. We don’t do these things, but of course, we have all seen them done. Every big meet there is someone who cries, there is someone who drops their head after they get out of the water, there is someone who whoops for joy, there is someone who proudly raises their fist toward the sky.

  This is Kim at the meet the next day. She is less stressed about her butterfly being rhythmic enough because she has been thinking about driving. Being sixteen, she can now drive a car. Her parents have just bought her a new compact car, and she drove it to the meet by herself. She drove for two hours with her own music coming out from the speakers, and she sang to her own music the whole time without anyone telling her to lower the volume. She drove with all the windows down and her hair flying behind her because the summer wind on her face felt great, and made her feel just as good as when she’d last achieved her personal best time in the hundred fly. Now, at the meet, she stands on the blocks, ready to try the hundred fly in a time-trial just to see if she can come close to the time she could have had yesterday if she hadn’t DQ’ed. This is Kim registering how the blocks are a different height than the blocks at the home team’s pool, and realizing that her dive will have to be different to compensate for them.

  This is Kim on the takeoff, exploding and then extending up and out over the water. This is Kim in the lead, this is Kim thinking of herself as a rock skipping over water, this is Kim at the turn, feeling her feet touch the wall and plant themselves firmly, but not for too long, just enough to get the turbo boost from the wall that she needs to dolphin-kick and shoot to the surface. This is Kim at the finish, jamming her fingers into the wall, not feeling the pain in them until later, after she’s seen her time of 1:08.62 posted on the board, not until she’s gotten a high-five from her coach and hugs from all of her teammates, not until she has called her mother from the pool, telling her through tears how she broke the pool record, not to mention her own personal best record. And it’s not until later, a few days later, that the mortician who will be looking at her fingertips will wonder why they almost look as if they were burned by a flame.

  This is Kim, stopped at a rest stop on the way back from the meet thinking as she is being grabbed from behind and feeling the knife at her throat that it isn’t fair. She wants to live because she knows if she does she could beat her personal best time once again. She knows she could increase her speed. It was as if her new car had been her coach. Just driving down the highway with all the windows open had shown her the feel of the speed she would need to go faster than she had ever gone before.

  This is the killer, putting his lips on each one of her eyelids as they close and she loses consciousness. Kissing her in, he thinks. The taste of the salt and chlorine on her and the warmth of her skin on his lips is the energy he has been waiting to call all his own.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  This is you at night getting into bed before Thomas does. He stays up with Sofia and teaches her math. I must remember to buy her more sanitary pads, you think to yourself, and you do the math, remembering when your daughter first started her period and when your daughter may get it next, and isn’t it hard enough, you think, to remember your own cycle, and now you have to remember your daughter’s, and in a few years, and maybe even sooner than that, you will have to remember the cycle of your other daughter. You remember your own first period when you were eleven. How your mother, too concerned with your brother, who was just twenty and still angry about your father leaving the family nine years before, hadn’t gotten around to telling you what to expect. You had some vague idea about needing to use sanitary pads, but you were so young you didn’t even realize that your period arrived every month, and so the second time it came you were shocked, thinking you only had to go through the cramps and the blood and the paraphernalia that came with it just once. Your mother was busy helping your brother lick his wounds from a girlfriend who left him. She worried so much that he would hurt himself in his grief that she hid the twenty-two rifle that was in the house and she gave him spending money to go out and have fun, and paid for him to take a college trip with an oceanography class to Bermuda, where he scuba-dived and snorkeled and was chased by hammerhead sharks. The hammerheads came from all directions, and when he tried to climb back into the boat, his classmates were trying to climb up the other side, and they made the boat sink down on their side, and on your brother’s side, the bottom of the boat rolled up and exposed a barnacled underside that your brother had to drag himself up against in order to climb back safely into the boat. He came home with a chest full of cuts from the sharp edges of barnacles and still a bad outlook on life. By then you had accepted the plight of your sex, its horrible regularity, and you questioned for the first time, really, whether your brother would ever get over this girl who dumped him, and realized that if it weren’t for this girl making him miserable, then something else would, because that’s how he was going to be in this world.

  Your daughter doesn’t even need for you to explain how or why the body has cycles. She has learned it all through reading some young adult book, or through some swim-team friend. When you offered to explain it to her she said she already knew and for you to go away because she wanted to be left alone to keep reading a book. Well, that was easy, you thought sadly, descending the stairs of her loft where she slept. Not that you really wanted to demonstrate tampon use or describe PMS, but you were almost jealous that she was having such an easy time with the change. She didn’t have to contend with a divorced, financially struggling mother worrying about her emotionally messed up son. Life is peachy for your daughter. She has her books and her swim team and her violin lessons and her beauty. She’s tall and thin, with soft brown hair and high cheekbones. Only the hint of blemishes appear on her nose, and they can only be seen in certain unforgiving forms of light, whereas you and your brother, of course your brother to a terrible extent, suffered acne. On the other hand, your daughter’s shyness is also a point of concern, and maybe her teenhood is not all that ideal. Her dislike of using the phone even to call the local library and ask for a book, or to call and order a meatball grinder at the general store, borders on the extreme, you think. Oh, is this something you have to worry about too? Do you have to watch your girl and make sure she is not the type who will one day end up like your brother on the floor with the bloodstain taking the shape of cauliflower? In the boards on the wall by your bed you see a face in the knots in the wood. You see two eyebrows and two eyes that look happy. No-see-ums fly between the pages of Anna Karenina, the book you are reading, and to kill them you simply close your book and then open it up again to the page you were reading so that now the letters, even though they’re in English, have smashed bug parts on top of them and look like letters in a foreign alphabet, as if you’re reading the original Russian. Thomas’s voice booms up through the floorboards. He is saying polynomials and factoring very loudly, and it is making it difficult for you to read a book where you have to remember all of the characters’ Russian names and nicknames, and you would like to concentrate on the book, on the plight of p
oor Anna, who has just sneaked back into her former home to visit her son, whom she was forbidden to see, but you can’t concentrate because of the math going on beneath you. Now the children are in bed and you are in bed and the day is finally becoming dark, and the last bit of light can be seen going down in the sky over the back field. Thomas, from the bathroom, where he’s brushing his teeth, starts talking through the foam of paste in his mouth about how he learned from his history book that the Taino Indians, the very natives that Columbus and his men encountered, slayed, and sickened with contagion in Hispaniola, kept ants from climbing up their beds by placing the posts of their beds in pots of water. He says this is further proof that civilization is in decline, since that is such a smart thing to do, and do we do anything today as smart as that? He answers his own question. “No, we pollute everything,” he says. “We cause global warming. We have that horrible radio station.” And you know the horrible radio station he is talking about. It is the one that records conversations of people who are having a joke played on them. It is the one that played the joke on the mother where the eighteen-year-old son calls to tell her that he needs money, that he got drunk and spent the last of it on a tattoo. Where is the tattoo? the mother says, and the tattoo is on the son’s penis. You remember laughing at that one, and now you think you are definitely adding to the decline of civilization.