Swimming (3 page)

The Longbranch Family Diner, as usual, is packed. I open my gifts: a coupon for Dilly Bars, a gold pendant—chalice shining, a thin envelope containing fresh green dollars. I order sweet ribs, eat them fervently. Leonard and Mother discuss their old tired things. Bron fixes the clasp of my necklace, whispering into my
ear: Just tell me what happened to Baby Lenny and I give you my solemn oath I won’t mention it ever again
. She lowers her voice into creepy:
If not, it’s war
.

The Cocoplats must be dancing under the tent by now, helium balloons rising from their trees like majestic pink and silver grapes. Lilly’s dumped the veil, is wearing her favorite tiara. Leonard’s explaining things to Roxanne as Dot listens intently. I look at my sweet ribs, no longer hungry. I don’t know that death can waltz into life with a sharp pair of scissors, cutting someone out so neatly that all that’s left is an empty space that should have been full. I think Bron will be with me forever, part of my landscape, and although I know war isn’t good, any-thing’s better than that look she gets on her face when she wins. I pull myself from her grip, giving her one of my mean looks with a sick feeling in my gut as the mangy bear jumps in front of our table, grabs its fake banjo, and begins to play

I-da-ho Po-ta-toes
Arizona Cac——tus
The Dolphins Gonna Swim You
Just for Prac——tice

A northern wind is blowing across the plains, down into the Shawnee valley, whipping up snow against the side of our rented school bus, pushing it aside in gusts as we speed along Highway 5. We’re eating candy on our way home from an out-of-town meet, muscles relaxing into box seats, hair drying under wool caps. We’ve drawn motivational images on the humidity of the windows. When we were younger, we drew happy fast dolphins, number 1! the best! winner! Now it’s our competition riddled in fat with tufts of body hair sticking out of their suits, slumped on the starting blocks like sick snails covered in inflammatory acne with Shawnee arrows running through their flabby asses. We can wipe it out if Coach Stan decides to walk back, but he sticks to the front, checking stats. We sing and stomp with both feet for maximum auditory impact:
Oommm chagga chagga chagga oommm chagga cha
as the bus coughs through tunnels of snow and the sky darkens around the edges before slipping completely into black.

There’s a sword above my head just waiting to fall. Leonard let it be known that as soon as I reached junior high, education would take priority and my Dipping Dolphin Aquatic Club days would be reduced to summer hobby. This is my last full year of exciting Dolphin weekends and I’m pretending to know it.

Coach Stan clicks his penlight on and calls us up one by one for our evaluations.

He looks at me, sighs:
Sit down. Inconsistent. Apt to have an amazing set on Friday, then a perfectly lousy race. I was expecting something different from you today, thought maybe for once you’d break away … use some of that energy—

I interrupt:
We won
.

Did we? he
says.

My heart sinks; this is going to take a while.

Did you lower your time?

No
.

Improve your technique?

I look out the window as the car passing below gets illuminated in a flash by a yellow highway light before disappearing back into empty road.

And how about the breathing …

I sigh.
I was breathing
.

He looks at me. I can’t be trusted. Not until I face the truth.

I look back.
We won, Coach Stan. They went down
.

He clicks his pen on and off with his thumb, thinking. You can see the reddish tinge of his blood through the warmth of the light.

You’re not hungry
.

I am hungry
, I say, the half-chewed Neapolitan caramel in my mouth clinging to my teeth.

That’s not hungry. When you’re hungry, you’ll feel it, and when you feel it, I’ll feel it
.

In the locker room Lilly Cocoplat and I like to keep close track of Dolphin developments. Lilly uses her shampoo as a microphone. We’re surprised if someone cries; it’s just for fun. Lilly Cocoplat is older than her years and has always made me older than mine. When fellow Dolphins aren’t laughing, they’re hating us.

Listen up, Dolphins. Poor Kelly continues to house one bald vagina between surprisingly hairy legs
. Lilly’s talking into a bottle of Herbal Essences shampoo.

I jump up.
I agree with you there, Lill; it’s quite a shocker and I’d have to say: Kelly Hill’s naked vagina looks like an itty-bitty foot
.

A baby’s foot
.

And then we laugh so hard it’s impossible to stop.

Coach Stan separates us as much as possible. If I’m in lane five, she’s in lane one. If she’s doing sit-ups, I’m treading water with weights on my ankles, but I still have laughing fits that almost get me killed. I say:
I can’t help it. She just cracks me up
when Coach Stan pulls me choking out of the water with one strong arm. But we have too many things pulling us together for anything to pull us apart. We put the same Adam Ant song on our Walkmans at the same time, pushing play at the count of three, then we sing and dance.

Don’t drink don’t smoke what do you do
Must be something la la

When I close my eyes, I’m saturated in a deep, peaceful, perfectly entitled, one hundred percent natural love of life and all life’s things. I’m pulling myself through water at the end of a long swim, reaching for the endorphin torpor as the fatigue washes over me. Lilly Cocoplat makes me laugh so hard I choke on my own spit. It hurts to write with a pencil, to sit down on a chair, to pee, to take off my sweater, to run up the stairs, to answer the phone, to open a book, to get in a car, to get out of a car, to take off my shoes, to lie down on my bed. The ache is proof of an efficient swim; the more I ache, the faster I become. But when the sun cuts through the atrium and the steam rises up from the pool, the water takes on a bright, edgy haze and I lose myself. I watch my shadow crawl across the tiles below and don’t feel the pain of doing as many as fifty sets although all the other Dolphins bitterly complain. All I feel is the sweet shuddering relief with each breath I draw and the relentless silence of my mind. I don’t mention these bouts of timeless love of the infinite universe to anyone, not even Lilly.

Lilly started swimming when she was diagnosed with asthma, but I don’t have anything specifically wrong with me yet. I just like swimming and all the things that happen around it. A cute collegiate swimmer comes out on deck to talk to one of the assistant coaches, some kids are making out in the parking lot and don’t care who knows, a Dolphin brings a
Playgirl
hidden in her backpack and we take turns looking at sad guys with happy sausages looking out the windows of their unzipped jeans. And when there’s a sleepover at a Dolphin’s house, no one sleeps, but we wake up at six and swim for two hours anyway because the harder it is, the more we suffer, and the more we suffer, the closer we become.

Coach Stan stands next to the edge of the pool with a whistle in his teeth and a grim look in his eyes. I love training in the Olympic pool, watching the big shots work out, listening to their coaches scream
MOVE YOUR ASS; THIS AIN
‘
T YESTERDAY
.
We look at each other and laugh—
He just said
ASS
—
then we swim for an hour, an hour and a half, and dry off eating the healthy fig s’mores that Lilly Cocoplat’s mother made. In the summer I’m a free agent, in the water so long my hair emerges from my head like strings of nylon.

At the annual banquet last year Coach Stan took Leonard aside and said:
I’d like to see what would happen if Philomena trained seriously for one second instead of partaking in these perpetual shenanigans with Lilly Cocoplat
, as Leonard half listened with polite disinterest.

Before a major meet, Stan slaps his clipboard onto one bent knee, lowers his voice, and speaks to us as though we were listening.
Young swimmers: The essence of potential. When this pool is combined with the best an individual has to offer … listen up, Lilly … with the best collective effort, anything is possible. It is an arena …
Lilly and I get bored, make vagina faces, yell:
Go, Coach Stan! Dippers Forever!
Coach Stan ignores us:
But you better make sure that you really integrate technique. I’ve seen world-class swimmers revert to faulty technique in times of stress, going back to their days in the pool with their first coach, and their swim falls apart just the way it did then
.

I make my eyes into big
Oh reallys
behind his back, flashing the peace sign, which is in fact
V
for
vagina
, as Lilly Cocoplat falls over herself. The idea that one day I will be standing next to the East German world-record holder Fredrinka Kurds as she spits chlorine out of the corner of her mouth and twenty zillion people scream does not cross my mind for one second. I don’t even know where Moscow is exactly; I just know it is bad.

After practice we’re in a hurry to go home; there’s homework to finish and we’re hungry again. Some Dolphins take the time to dry their hair, flipping their heads upside down then swooshing the hair up again so it frames their faces like nice fur. I don’t; I stuff it under a knit cap and let it sit like that until it dries into funny shapes. This drives my mother nuts.
Dry your hair, for God’s sake; it’s twenty below
.

Leonard wants me to be a mini-Bron, but I won’t. He wants me to be an intellectual success, skipping entire grades like rope, wants me to bring home prizes from French clubs, wants to display my medals, ribbons, shiny cups from tricky debates and interscholastic spelling bees. He wants me to look out at the world, curious and smart, then he would like to talk to me about it, over dinner. He’s not the least bit interested in how fast I swim, barely listening when I explain how I lowered my personal best once again. He reminds me, on Sunday afternoons, during short trips to the grocery store.
You’re eleven now
. He reminds me when he picks me up, when he drops me off, when we fly, his voice cutting through the static.
Well into the double digits
. He reminds me during commercials, when he’s boiling water for
tea. Junior high is serious business
. But I am so overinformed that the end is coming, I don’t believe it, just keep hoping that something miraculous will happen and I will be back, like Jesus. I am shocked, sickened, stunned, and amazed when I find myself standing by the pool on the last day of my last workout of the last season. I have no idea how right I am when I get dramatic:
Pieces of my heart are being ripped up and, and, and it’s all downhill from here. I just know it. It’s all downhill from here
, snot gushing out my nose as I weep myself into convulsions that get the Cocoplat and the few girls who can still stand me going. Coach Stan purses his lips, clicking his stopwatch on, then off.

Downhill

When Sister Nestor’s face fills with displeasure, she looks uglier than she ought to.

Late
. She’s a mathematical nun with little patience for words outside the Holy Scripture.

I look up at the clock with the big round face and the steady black hands, the stubby one on the eight, the slender one getting ready to hit the fifty. Water is dripping down my ponytail onto the floor, making a puddle I try to swipe away with my shoes. I’m wearing a pair of navy blue Keds that match the stripes in my socks. I look down at my hand. I’m clutching my dripping backpack so hard my knuckles are green. I feel the palpable glare of teenage X-ray vision cutting through my flesh and finding all the weak spots. It lasers in, heating up my face, following the line of my wide shoulders, stopping to laugh at my flat, caved-in chest, swooping down my pole legs to gasp at the giganticness of my feet. I pull my backpack up over my shoulders, closing my navy blue sweater over my secrets with one cold hand.

Sorry, Sister
, we say in unison minus one.

Late. Again
. She’s deciding what to do to us.

Bron’s standing next to me. This is her fault, but I keep mum, avoid trouble. Nestor avoids trouble also, pointedly ignoring Bron and keeping her eyes on me because I’m now the tallest and they must have received instructions to steer clear of the evil one. Dot and Roxy are examining their shoes. We’re standing in front of the school during morning assembly. Nestor stopped it to make a point. I hope Bron ignores her so intensely my heart moves into my mouth.
O Gloria in Excelsis Deo
.

I’m so sick and tired of this petty … crap
, Bron says.

Her words snap across the gym like electricity. Nestor pulls both eyes slowly over to the direction the voice came from. So far I’ve been successful at not really looking at her, but now my head is being lured by a magnet of greater force. I suck my breath in.

Leonard told us Bron’s just about cured, that the cause of a languishing fatigue that culminated in a bump on her neck the size of a fist has been located and that now it shall be eradicated. She doesn’t look just about cured, and the only thing that’s been eradicated is all her good moods. Her face is dark yellow, eyes billowing smoke, lips pressed together so hard her mouth looks gone. She’s recently been threatening to tell the nuns
to put their money where their mouth is
. I study the wet laces of my shoes, cursing Leonard in my head. This was his doing; he insisted she finish her last year of high school even though I’d warned him:
You better not. She likes hair too much. You better wait until it grows back in again. When she hates things, you know what happens
. He’d said:
Hogwash
, and at that her fate was sealed and here we are.

Nestor weighs the situation, finally nodding our dismissal with her terrible chin. We join our homeroom classes in the bleachers and everyone starts to sing again.
This land is your land, this land is my land, from California, to the New York island
. I mouth the words, don’t feel like making sound. Lilly Cocoplat is sitting behind me directing a false contralto toward my ear:
This land is your land, this land is my land, from Vagina to the Pussy Islands, from the clear brown poop balls to the spermy waters, this land was made for you to peeeeee
. I laugh a fake laugh, don’t feel fine. Sister Augusta pulls me aside, says:
Don’t think I’m not looking
.

Nuns never exercise, don’t care about swimming or swimmers, don’t believe in bodily exertion, don’t think that sports are important, with the possible exception of softball. And just because they don’t sin doesn’t mean they aren’t attracted to harmful things. I’m sure not all the donated cakes are presented at the cakewalk, that they prepare more caramel apples than they serve, that the cotton candy machine works overtime late into the night. At fairs, they meander, eating triple-scooped ice cream with small plastic spoons, their eyes hidden behind large glasses with butterfly frames that darken automatically in the sun.

After school I eat cake, and, although she loves cake as much as I do, Bron does not. She is also not preparing an article for Holy Name’s student paper,
Spotlights
, not standing in front of the mirror brushing her hair so that it falls from her head like a shiny blond curtain, not singing songs up the laundry chute because she thinks it makes her voice sound famous. She’s not stuffed into the jam-packed cars with her best friends, who whiz by honking as I walk home alone. She holes up in our bedroom, lights off, door closed, not to be disturbed. I don’t even hear any music. When I put my ear to the door, all I hear is nothing, as if she’s not even there. Dot’s sitting at the kitchen counter, perfecting herself through knowledge. Roxanne is in the basement figuring out how to build her own pot pipe with a toilet paper roll and duct tape, aluminum foil, and a toothpick. I don’t know where my parents are; they’re gone. When they’re gone, June, a troubled parishioner’s wayward daughter, takes care of us. She cleans the oven, folds clothes, talks on the phone, twitching with the genetic energy that keeps getting her entire family into trouble with both God and the Law. June swears when my parents aren’t around, says:
I wonder where in the hell all that damn cake goes
. I shrug. She shrugs back. We have things in common. We like packaged foods, are never tired, can do many things at once, and she, like me, constantly walks into things, trips on stairs, or falls into space until one of her bony knobs hits something that leaves a mark. We compare bruises. She cleans the house in a spastic way, running the vacuum cleaner in looping disorganized lines that I follow like crazy trails. When she’s finished, she sits on a bar stool twirling, reading magazines, watching TV.

Don’t you get sick of swimming?
She’s watching me forage for food.

No. Three times a week is practically never. Most swimmers my age are swimming twice a day
. I’m unwrapping the aluminum foil around a marbled Bundt cake with white creamy frosting.

I’d be sick of it already …
She’s picking at a frayed edge of her jeans.
What do you think about when you’re swimming anyway?
She’s fingering an earring.

Nothing. Swimming
. I lie, pulling cream out of cake with my pinkie.

When Leonard shows up, he’s incredibly busy; on the phone, buried in a book, intently staring at the wall with a posture that defies interruption. Whatever feelings he has are hidden, but his inside face is starting to show. The new one is stiffer, quieter, more alone. I interrupt, walking into his study and staring at him until he can’t stand it anymore, has to look up.

Dad, can I start swimming with Coach Stan year-round again? The Sisters say that I’ve mostly stopped all the excessive flightiness. I’m almost thirteen … And I’m definitely not falling asleep in class. I have a feeling I’ll never fall asleep in class again …

He stops me with one hand.
No
.

I find my mother in the living room tracing back time with her favorite friends, a pot of tea and a plate of old cookies from the tin canister above the microwave sitting untouched between them. I listen as she swirls back to her pregnancy searching for odd meals, strange yearnings, one cocktail with hard alcohol, secondhand smoke, synthetic clothing, bug repellent, moments of close proximity with the Glenwood power plant. I listen as she examines the history of her dead relatives. She stares at me with narrow eyes and a flat mouth when I break into a space she hasn’t filled in yet with words, explaining earnestly with many hand movements the huge hole that not swimming for the Dolphins year-round has made in my now empty-feeling life. She stops me mid-sentence, says:
Be quiet
in a voice I’ve never heard before that must have hurt her throat to use.