Swimming (6 page)

We stare at the stars for a minute. She turns to me and says:
Wanna get stoned?

I don’t do drugs.
Swimmers don’t do drugs
.

She doesn’t seem surprised.
So that’s what you are …

This makes me mad.
You got a problem with that?

She sighs.
No … no
.

Pot’s making you … weirder
.

She says:
Take a look around, Phil … I’m not that bad
.

I don’t look around; I look at her instead and I’m surprised—she’s not that bad.

Leonard pulls up to the curb with a lurch, sets his chin, and sighs, opening Mom’s door and pulling her carefully from the front seat as though she were a precious old lady. The theater is dark but empty—not many Glenwoodians want to see
The Blue Lagoon
, Bron’s film of choice. I sink into the red velvet chair, stretch my legs into the row of seats in front of me. I slump next to Leonard, who falls asleep the minute that blond, fluffy-curled, girly-guy dives into the water, coming up seconds later with a big fish in his little hands, and Bron gets in a bad mood that lasts, more or less, until the day she dies.

A is for airway, make sure it is free
B is for breathing if life is to be
,
C is for circulation to make your heart thump
D is for death to avoid like a chump

The first time I saw Manny, he was blind. He was crawling on top of his brothers as they fed, driven by a mixture of survival instinct, stupidity, and an innate ability to do the wrong thing. He stopped at the top of the pyramid, nestled in, began to suck on a tuft of his mother’s fur with all his vital energy, as though if he were patient enough, he would eventually draw milk.

That one
, I said.

Which one?
asked Leonard.

The one on top
, I said.

That one? Are you sure?

Yes
, I said.
I’m sure
.

The dog lady’s son pulled him off the fur and he mewled like a kitten. I held him in the palm of my hand and knew love.
This one
, I said.

Our yard is covered in the bushes that attract the fireflies Manny tries to catch in his mouth. I’m sitting outside, skin tanned taut, the muscles in my shoulders and legs aching with every breath, following him with my eyes. He jumps. Gets nothing. Jumps again. Gets nothing. He trips over a log, falls, rolls down the hill, gets stuck in some mud, yelps. He’s six years old now and is, as Leonard says, as dumb as a turnip.

It’s summer and I’m free. One of those anonymous balloons someone has let loose to meander across sky. The days start when I want them to—early, ending when I fling myself across my bed, eyes shutting of their own accord. Everyone is leaving me deliciously alone.
O Gloria in Excelsis Deo
. We don’t go to mass every Sunday; sometimes weeks go by with the absence of nun, priest, long, achy minutes on our knees spent in the confessional, papery wafers stuck on the roof of our mouths until we make enough spit to pry them off with our tongues. After week upon week of scorching heat, five tornados tear through the state, killing twenty-two. All we get is an intense steamy silence, trees so still as to be frozen, a hysteric cacophony of nervous birds that make June crazy, followed by the absence of bird, which disturbs her. New storms follow; massive black thunderclouds moving in slowly like zombies, needles of rain falling down hard, arrows of lightning springing up from nowhere. Roxanne and I stand under it getting pelted until June opens a window yelling:
Electrocution, you idiots
. Now a cooler, farther-away form of the sun is back in a flat blue sky and all is well. I love these atmospheric conditions; it is the only time of the year the air is cooler than the water in the outdoor pool at the Quaker Aquatic Center, or the Quack as I now call it, my home away from home. I put my face into Manny’s burry neck. He stinks like socks.

I’m learning CPR with Coach Stan and the members of the Glen-wood Fire Department. We have a mannequin named Doug with wiry brown hair and a long, dead-looking face. When the firefighters turn their heads, Lilly Cocoplat French-kisses him, making sure spit splatters everywhere with rabid use of her tongue. She gets more daring with each day that goes by. We’re split in two, laughing in a roar, as Stan and various firefighters look up from their Styrofoam cups of steaming black tar and shake their heads, unaware of how awful we are.

Most members of the team have been growing into something I have not. They’re slowing down, don’t care, one eye on the cute boys plunging through the lanes next to ours. When Stan blows his whistle, they sigh, plopping back into the water like well-fed sea lions. We have casual meets against country clubs and some rural summer clubs, beating them easily and getting home late. I learn the Heimlich maneuver, cardiac massage, pupil-reading techniques, exploding-vein indicators, how to tell when a person is finally dead.

The Cocoplat and I bathe in the joy-tinged disrespect of referring to our parents by their first names when they’re not around. Lilly slips a turquoise eyeliner under her bra in the Woolworth’s beauty aisle and whispers:
Roger would definitely not be pleased with my outrageous behavior
. Later, I contemplate a pair of $70 sneakers.
I’ll have to ask old Mother Mary what she thinks about these
. We Dolphins will become licensed lifeguards, will spend two weeks as trainees under a real lifeguard at one of the Glenwood outdoor pools. We draw straws; I get the uptight Glen-wood Country Club, Lilly gets the fun Beaver Park. My shoulders are a wide brown triangle.

I can almost save people now
, I announce over dinner.

Bron looks at me, holding a wing of bronzed chicken between her fingers, and says:
My guess is you’d freak
.

That’s the first thing they teach us: Don’t freak
.

Leonard is impressed.
I’d like to sign us all up for that
.

Roxanne kicks me under the table, mouthing
MFPF,
which means
motherfucking prissy fuck
.

Bron’s eating again and holding it down—not a lot, but she chews and swallows. The droning vibrations of cello sound up from the basement; the telephone rings with her voice singing
I’ve got it
. She lets her friends come back. They push me out of the bedroom with both hands, lock the door, speak in whispers with the music on high so I can’t hear a thing. When they come into the kitchen to get something to eat, they laugh hysterically at my flat ponytail, my pole chest, my pole legs, and I fear my secret’s been discovered. I cover my tracks by loudly asking Bron for a maxi pad. She says:
What’s wrong with you? They’re in the bathroom under the sink
. But I catch her studying me later with a question mark in both eyes and my heart starts to twitter.

Mom sleeps, wakes up in the morning, does things to her hair, buys new chalk for her lips, marinates vegetables in ceramic bowls. Dot has stopped the incessant praying; the bruises on her knees lift back into skin. Roxanne takes advantage of the relaxed atmosphere in the house, crouching under the willow tree in the garden with a one-hitter and a lump of hash.

Leonard’s flying regularly again but mostly with Dr. Bob and Ahmet Noorani. He talks Mom into going away for a weekend. June orders deep-dish pizza two nights in a row and we sit watching TV until we can’t stand it anymore. When Leonard and Mom return, they’re back to normal, holding hands in the car. Colleagues are invited over for annual BBQs. They drink German beer with sliced lemons, standing next to ribs Leonard has rubbed with a disgusting red paste. All things are exclamation worthy. Astronomer Gerald overindulges. His voice gets louder when he’s drunk, wobbling up the air into our open window.
And that is why, dear friends, the moon keeps missing the earth. The simplicity is genius
. Bron says:
He’s wasted
. I make no comment, eavesdropping until their voices tune together and warble like birds, singing in my ears until I fall asleep. In the morning, Leonard tries to coerce me out of practice.
Come on, Boo … let’s go for a fly
. I pay him back for all the trouble he’s caused with a steady boycott I deliver with a shrug and an apologetic smile that does not reach my eyes.

Usually we spend a couple of weeks soaking in black rubber tires on the green waters of Lake Shawnee, but this year they’ve planned a trip to France, the proud home of my mother’s ancestors’ ancestors. We’ve been taking French lessons with Sister Belly since we were five because there are Bouviers buried deep in the foliage of Mom’s family tree. A worn dictionary comes out at the dinner table. Corn is
maïs
. Hot dog is
‘ot dog
. Rice is
riz
. Water is
oh
.

I’m okay. But sometimes I laugh so hard I feel weird and have to lie down.

Mom and Leonard clasp their hands together and make their eyes wide when they speak to us, as if somehow we’ve lost the capacity to understand the normal speech patterns, the usual eye language. Everything starts with a
let’s: Let’s swim at the QAC. Let’s have melon for dessert! Let’s take the top off the car!!!

This annoys Bron.
Quit talking to us like we’re retarded
.

Leonard’s temper surges at the strangest times. He gets up, slaps both hands down hard on the table, opens his mouth, closes it, looks at her, looks out the window, pounds his hands down hard on the table again, leaves. Mother refrains from both eye contact and speech.

Bron looks at me.
What?

I look at her.
What, what?

She makes her eyes unusually round:
What what what what what what
.

She’s very unpleasant, but I won’t take the bait. I stand up, grab my jacket, lace up my sneakers, and go. I walk down to Indian Creek. There’s a small stream there with frogs that blend into the grass so well you don’t even know they’re there until they croak.

Paris Is as Paris Does

We’re on our way to Paris to uncover our inner Bouvier. Bron’s sitting next to me writing in her dream book, long fingers forming long words, wrists as slim as pencils. She covers up the page with her hand, says:
Do you mind
. Jets start reverberating in my innards, decibels rising as the hostesses strap themselves in, their orange faces set underneath their triangular caps. Leonard looks at me, nods.
They’re revving the jets
.

The guidebooks he’s checked out are lying on his lap, and although he can stretch his legs out in the aisle, he doesn’t; he’s sitting straight up in his seat, exactly where they put him, thinking we’ll confuse his outward calm with a certain form of inner serenity. We don’t. We make looks over his head. Roxanne says:
Don’t you find Dad unusually boring?
She’s wearing a striped shirt, a striped skirt, black-and-white bowling shoes, fingerless gloves, a red beret.

I hold my legs in a bent-kneed, open-armed, slope-shouldered surf stance so I can ride out any unexpected turbulence. I stand in the aisle looking down at them and say:
Look at what gravity has done to my face
.

Bron says:
What are you doing? You look like a … Sit down and shut up
.

Roxanne says
: Your face looks like modeling clay
.

I say:
Like I don’t know it, twerp
.

We look like a game show family flying to Paris with tokens in our pockets—except for Dot, who sits between Mom and Leonard sketching animals in peaceful positions. Mom’s motion sickness miraculously disappears upon contact with jet. She’s dressed in a pair of white jeans with a colorful smock, lips chalked peach. She looks up from her magazine and waves at me as though I were far away.

I find Paris stinky, unusual, exciting. It doesn’t seem part of real life but like a funny parallel life where I don’t exist, thus nothing real can happen, good or bad, happy or sad. I take a break from caring about my absent womanhood, pick my nose in public because I don’t know anyone, thus don’t care. I travel well, like a sophisticated thoroughbred, but Bron is too tired. Too tired to eat breakfast. Too tired to take the steps down into the metro, too tired to walk back up. Leonard changes the subject by offering $20 to the first person who spots a Dalí mustache in the flesh. The competitor in me awakes and I concentrate on the hunt, looking through a swamp of naked faces, searching for the waxed tendrils under some unknown nose. My eyes start to roam museums, skim the city, hunting.

We are staying in a snazzy hotel off the Champs de Mars. One-third of the Eiffel Tower shines through our window before the Eiffel Tower tenders flip the switch and turn it off. We sleep heavily at the wrong times, lightly when it’s dark. Bron’s restless. She moves her feet around, is prone to violent flips, her thin appendages knocking into me like cruel hammers. She is one of those sleepers who emit heat and wake up sweaty. I’m a cool sleeper who drools. I can’t stand it.

I push her:
I’m going to sleep on the couch
.

She pushes back:
Like I care
.

I pull a sheet over myself and sleep until bells sound from some distant church, dawn lifts the gray out of the black, and the edges of the Eiffel Tower turn into bronze iron flint.

It is not a good trip, although technically I love it. There is no real reason for this love other than the freedom of not existing, the brief suspension of real time, and being able to tug at my underwear right inside my jeans in the metro at high noon without having to worry about a dry maxi pad popping out and exposing me for the liar I am.

Parisian girls are growing up faster than us; they wear their hair in ratty chignons, blow thin streams of gray smoke out their trim nostrils. They turn their bored llama eyes on us, giving Bron’s scarf, our flat shoes, our ringless fingers, our naked faces the once-over. A look that dismisses in one rapid glance. I don’t care about them, my eyes screening crowds for mustache, absently say:
What bitches
, but Bron’s face hardens into her hard face and Mother and Leonard make like they don’t see. They hold out their maps with wide-open arms while people stare at Leonard’s gigantic height and funny pants. Bron’s French-club French doesn’t sound French even though she’s gotten straight A’s since the beginning of time. A red rash appears on her neck when she has to say something twice, victim of her own perfection. She quits.
I’m too tired to talk anymore—-you talk
. I don’t care, speak in whole paragraphs, point with my finger or my chin, pulling people where I want them without asking their permission first. I can tell by the look on their faces that they are amazed.

We spend two days in the Louvre. A short Japanese guy moves in right in front of me as I’m staring at the
Mona Lisa
, breaking the spell I’m supposed to be under. I find the
Mona Lisa
small, oblong, slightly yellowish, relatively humdrum. The Japanese man has zero manners, a long torso, two short legs tucked into a pair of baggy American pants. I laser two holes into the back of his head with my opaque glare:
The Japanese Have Zero Manners
.

Just look at the detail on this ceiling
, shouts Leonard, and up our eyes flip to gilded naked angels riddled in fat and God pointing One Finger down below.

That’s my next trip
, Bron says, laughing so hard she has to sit down on a wooden bench, and we have to stand around waiting until she recovers.

Flashy synthetic clothes covering people who don’t matter to me move in front of the backdrop of the glues and the inks, the plasters, marbles, precious metals, and woods, while God up in His World looks down upon ours—newer, faster, hotter, keener, with a furrow in the middle of his gold face. Still no mustache anywhere. My eyes cut through crowds of people roaming, feverish with hunt. Dalí is luck. Luck bring me Dalí.

At the Rodin museum, I stand on the second floor looking down on Bron and Leonard, who sit under a tree drinking water from a small bottle. Bron leans her head back, exposing her throat to the sky. Mother has a quick nervous breakdown next to the bust of a child’s perfect head— she says
oh oh oh oh
while the museum guard pretends her flashlight is interesting and I slip out as quiet as a Shawnee, calling:
Come to me, mustache, come to me now
.

It starts to rain. We order crêpes and eat them standing up.

Bron made a list of things she wanted to taste before we left: a real crêpe suzette, a real café crème, a real croissant, a real baguette, a real glass of wine, cassis sorbet. But now that we’re here, nothing appeals to her. We wait as she stares silently at miles of pastry in pastry cases and the pastry woman’s daughter twists her eyebrows into question marks and Parisians start to shuffle and sniff, their way of signaling dissent, until finally she says
Rien
and the pastry woman’s daughter says
Pardon?
and her neck flushes red and she says
Rien
again.

She sits in restaurants in front of plates of delicately seasoned fish with open gills like angels caught mid-flight, says:
I can’t do this
.

At one restaurant, the waiter who seated us without a word and took our order with a sigh removes her untouched plate, bringing back a soft-boiled egg without being asked. It sits in a small silver cup next to a folded linen napkin and six strips of perfectly grilled baguette. She eats the egg slowly with a silver teaspoon. Pleased.

Roxanne spots the Dalí mustache on the Boulevard Beaumarchais. It’s on a tight-bellied biker with an old-fashioned face and funny James Dean hair. I see him first, but Roxanne says:
Isn’t that weird little guy over there wearing a Dalí mustache?

Leonard opens his wallet with a
Bravo; some said it couldn’t be done, but here we have our Dalí mustache winner
.

At the end of a quest, a trip loses flavor.

We take the boats weaving through the center of the city, the sky so low it touches water, city birds flapping by with city-bird faces. Roxanne falls asleep with her head on my shoulder. I jab her hard with an elbow.
I saw it first
.

Mom starts counting down, pushing the present into the past with the future. No sooner here than gone. Over breakfast she
says: Just think, tomorrow we’ll be home
, and home looms colorful and wise, simple and good. On the plane, Bron says:
Well, that sucked
and all loud voices are discontinued until further notice. I look out the porthole at the darkness swirling below. Sometimes a lone spark of light appears, here, then there.