A Girl's Life Online (7 page)

“Is he going to be okay?” I finally asked.

“He is going to be fine, Katie. He is going for chemo this Friday. There is no possible chance that he is going to die.” Karen wiped her hands with a brown paper towel.

The truth was, Rob wouldn't be fine. Karen's mother had already called my mother to tell her that Rob's condition was quite grave. He had a serious form of adult leukemia for which the survival rate was not good at all. But I was led to believe that death wasn't a possibility, because they caught the cancer in a routine physical very early and he was getting treatment. Karen was fed the same deception. Her parents didn't want this to affect her education, soccer, and the rest of her life. Later on it would be obvious that it was a mistake to lie to us. It's hard to understand why the same parents who always tell you to be honest lie about the most important things. It never works.

Even though I didn't really understand leukemia or Rob's case, I felt there was something serious going on. I wasn't going to pretend that it was simple like the flu. That night I made it a point to talk to Karen about it. I wanted to be a good friend; however, Karen was insistent upon not talking about Rob. She had already gone over it and over it too many times. She was also tired of having to say everything would be okay, because then it made her question her belief that this was the truth. I told her I would do anything to help her. The best thing I could do, she said, was to wait for her to ask to talk.

That fall our swim team began extensive underwater training. Practices were like military camp, or perhaps an extended version of pledging for a sorority. We did everything they asked us to do.

One of the major goals in swimming is to keep the number of breaths you take to a minimum. Breathing slows you down. To train our bodies to need as little air as possible, we did a lot of underwater work. We would sprint freestyle for ten laps, until we were good and exhausted, and then do a flip turn followed by two fifty-yard underwater laps without a breath. If you came up to breathe, they made you do another underwater lap. I would struggle under the water, feeling like I was about to pass out, but refuse to surface. I always made it, but others got into trouble. Once the coaches had to pull a girl out of the water who was so blue they had to revive her.

We all tried as hard as we could to comply with the coaches' demands. We did everything they told us to do or else suffered verbal humiliation. Or worse. Worse happened to me on a fairly regular basis when one particular coach—Judy—came up from Florida to put us in line.

Judy was a demanding, screaming kind of coach. She would sit by the side of the pool with a canister of racquet balls in her hand, waiting to throw them at us. If I was too slow, or took too many breaths, or swam the wrong combination of strokes, she would bean me with one of those balls. Right in the head. At the same time she would yell something like “You idiot! Do the combination!”

You might think it was strange for the YMCA to allow this, or for a bunch of young girls to accept it, but it happened to almost everyone and after a while it just seemed normal. The chair incident was not normal, though. It happened late on a Friday night. Everyone was tired. I had had a lot of balls hit me that day. Judy was on the side of the pool near me, and she was getting more and more upset with something I was doing wrong. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her pick up a metal folding chair and come toward me.

“Katie Tarbox!” she screamed. “Get your act together now!”

She then threw the chair into the lane closest to me. I stopped, sort of shocked, and just looked at her. Everyone looked at her.

“Go get the chair off the bottom of the pool,” she said. And that was it. Another girl helped me get the chair up from where it lay, eleven feet down, and no one said anything else. Even my parents. When I told them about it they laughed a little and said it was good the chair didn't hit me. I think they believed I had done something to deserve what had happened. I know that they thought that Judy, who had been on the national team, was there to help us. She knew what she was doing, and it was all supposed to make us winners.

It was typical New Canaan. Train. Compete. Succeed. And make it look easy. Though I didn't realize it at the time, we received every bit of extra help that was available because our parents and coaches could afford to give it to us. The head coach of my team, Mrs. P., was extremely wealthy. Her husband was vice chairman of a huge company and had stock that did incredibly well. She didn't really coach, but without her—and her husband's money—we would have been nothing. Mrs. P. paid to bring nationally known coaches and swimmers like Judy, many with Olympic experience, to New Canaan, where they would spend a week or so training us. She also arranged for us to go to Olympic training facilities in Colorado and Lake Placid.

Kids on other teams had to earn money to pay for these kinds of extras. They had fund-raisers—spaghetti dinners, bake sales, car washes. The Santa Clara team in California had a big bingo hall where the mothers worked. It all sounded like fun to me, but we never had to do any of it. Either big corporations gave us the money, or our parents just paid for things. My parents even arranged for a personal trainer to come to our house a few times every week to help me train with weights.

His name was Doug. He'd come to our house two or three times a week and we'd work with weights in the basement. I did a lot of repetitions, at low weight, for endurance. Doug told me what I should eat—a lot of carbohydrates, but not refined sugar—and he would measure my body fat, which was always too high. When we weren't focused on the work we did together, we talked about everything under the sun. Doug was attractive, so much so that he probably drove some of his women clients to distraction. But what I liked about him was that he spoke to me as if I were an equal. I found it easy to feel like we were friends. When I was twelve, and I was still considered to be someone with a big future in swimming, I thought it was cool to work out with Doug. But by eighth grade, as it became clear to me that younger swimmers were passing me by, I was thinking it was a bit too much.

As far as the adults were concerned, nothing was too good for New Canaan's swim team. Mrs. P. hired the same speaker that the New York Giants football team used for inspirational talks. He was over six feet tall, had brown hair, and was an ex-baseball player. “You have to have goals. You have to envision yourself reaching those goals. You must have weeklong goals, monthlong goals, year-long goals to reach your aim.” I didn't go home and write down my goals, as he recommended. But I did think about what he said.

Unfortunately, no amount of inspiration was going to change the fact that at the age of thirteen I was beginning to plateau as a swimmer. When practices resumed in September I began to notice that the coaches were losing interest in me. I was getting less private time with them, and they were shifting their attention to other, younger girls. They were always interested in the girls who had the most potential. They develop a master plan, which they did for me, with the goal of making you a national champion. If it looks like it might not work out, they drop you.

Knowing all this, and suspecting that they were in the process of dropping me, I began to hate swimming more than ever. Of course, it wasn't as simple as that. I mean, I had made such a commitment to the sport, and to the team, that I constantly questioned my own feelings. I got down on myself for feeling bad about swimming. I even worried that there was something wrong with my attitude. After all, we were winners and all the coaches were having fun. Maybe my feelings were wrong.

Wrong or not, my hatred of the pool grew stronger as fall wore on. I began having nightmares about it. My biggest fear was that someone would see me naked, so of course I dreamed about being seen naked in the pool. I didn't quite know how I got there without a suit on, but there I was standing in front of everyone naked. I didn't know what parts of me I should try to cover up with my hands. Should I grab my chest or cover the southern part? Even in my dream, I was most upset about the idea that the other girls would be talking about what happened, how I looked, how I acted. I awoke full of anxiety.

Fear of being completely naked seems like a pretty universal thing, but some girls I know are so adjusted to the locker room that they will strip down without a care. They would just drop their clothes to the floor and walk to the shower. These girls weren't necessarily the ones with perfect bodies. They just didn't care.

Not me. When I undressed, I managed to keep a towel around me at all times, carefully shifting it so it fell down to cover any strategic area that was about to be exposed. When it came time to get dressed, I just reversed the process, pulling clothes up under the towel so that they covered me before the towel had to be dropped.

This fear of nakedness was just one of the anxieties and frustrations that I kept secret as I began training for the local meets that would help us get to national meets in the spring. There were both senior and junior nationals, U.S. open, and age-group nationals. We went to all of them. At each meet, the team's performance determined seeding for the next one.

Practices seemed endless, and since I always got yelled at, the pool was a very loud place. The screams from the coaches pierced through all the other sounds of the pool—the waves slapping the sides, the hum of the filter system, the echoes of voices. Most of the time I couldn't figure out why I was being chastised. And I kept thinking that since I was pretty good at this—I had actually won some pretty big races—it didn't make sense that the coaches would work so hard to make me miserable. Maybe I was just an easy one to pick on. Or maybe it was because I did talk back on occasion. That fall, when I was alone, I began to cry about swimming.

I was frustrated with the hours, and it ruined my social life. I didn't have time to attend the Friday-night parties that Karen talked about. I especially longed to go to the girl ones, where I knew all the juicy conversations were happening. I was always invited, but could never go. My parents didn't hold me back, but swimming did.

I was missing key opportunities to compare myself with people my age, to talk about what was ahead of us in high school, and to try to figure out if I was normal. After all, I had very few sources for this kind of information. Karen was heavy into her “relationship” and her brother's illness, and I was too busy to spend much time with other friends. Abby was gone from home, and serious discussions with my parents about this kind of thing were not really on the agenda. As a result, like a lot of kids, I found that TV offered the only steady stream of data. I knew it wasn't all reliable. But it was there.

I watched
Beverly Hills 90210
or
Melrose Place
. I would laugh at the episodes, but at the same time, I thought that the characters were showing me what life was really like in high school. The kids were mostly either jocks or babes. And there was one girl—Andrea—who was really smart, but not beautiful like the others. No one ever asked her out. You get the message.

Of course, none of the high school girls I knew had a full body like Brenda's on
90210
. But I thought that the situations and relationships on the show were probably close to the real thing. I was looking for signs of the future. And I thought that the show would apply to my life because it was set in Beverly Hills and we lived in New Canaan, which was a lot like Beverly Hills.

Before my mother worked so much, we used to watch these shows together on her bed. I loved those times. She always said that she watched in order to censor what I saw, but I know she liked these shows just as much as I did. She never censored anything. It was kind of funny, though. Right before someone hopped into bed, she would say something like, “That is so bad.” I would then tell her it wasn't appropriate for her to watch and
I
would cover
her
eyes.

By the time I was thirteen, there was hardly ever any time for us to watch TV together. That fall Carrie and I would watch TV and eat dinner. David came home around eight o'clock, or later. Sometimes he would yell hi as he walked up the stairs, and my mother arrived home long after. September, October, and November were her worst months at work, because of a dreadful thing called “year-end.” Because she worked on the financial side of the company, she was responsible for composing a year-end report. Sometimes she would come home as late as one in the morning, and she went to the office on weekends.

The combination of work, school, and extracurricular activities meant family time came second. Home was a place where I always felt alone.