Swimming (18 page)

I fill the refrigerator with organic eggs from cage-free hens and local-grown organic vegetables, packages of flattened organic turkey, packages of flattened organic soy, packages of grains and seeds that resemble bird feeder food. I take boxes of cereal down from the top of the fridge and crush them with my feet while Sunny looks on. I grab my Kit Kats, my turnovers, my doughnut holes, my bite-size Worldwide International Variety Grab Bag, my Cheetos, my yogurt-covered pretzels, and put them in a bag I take outside and bury in the garbage bin. I finish the last package of malted milk balls in my bedroom later, in silence, slowly sucking off the milk chocolate, letting the Styrofoam middle melt into my tongue, vowing not to buy another pack until the season is over as the moon spills in through the window in gentle streams of yellow and Sunny sings about how in Nashville love is just another day.

But avoiding sugar is like avoiding life; it is everywhere in everything, and I become more complex than the only sugars I can now consume. The new things sit around waiting for the new me to come cook them and the new me sits around waiting to want to. I awake each morning, crawl slowly on all fours through the dark sugarless tunnel that is life, sweating with an individual headache hammering behind each eye, and I’m afraid I’ll feel this for the rest of my life—a yearning for a sweetness that will not harm me; a yearning for a sweetness that does not exist. But Sunny stares at me, says:
You’re just changing, and changing’s uncomfortable. That’s why people don’t
.

It is a known communal team feeling that with my serious diet designed to remove the giddy inconsistency that characterized my swims of yore, I’m going to swim faster. Mankovitz is starting to apply the secret form of Mankovitz pressure that transforms people into fish.
I want you to swim it ten times under sixty this time, concentrating on the placement of your head. Hold it in a comfortable position, no straining, but I want you to be conscious of the waterline at all times
.

I grit my teeth, turning to grimlock as a last resort, try to remember the Dark Catholic recipe:
whey, curds, protein powder, vitamin C, kiwi, flaxseed oil, crushed walnut, holy premonition, dash of doom
.

I call Mona, desperate.
I don’t feel well. I think I’m one of those people who can’t live without …

If you feel like something sweet, have a yam
, she snaps.

Sunny finds recipes for yam-based soups, hosts Friday night yam bakes, flips Sunday morning yam waffles over the griddle until I pretend my crisis has passed so everyone leaves me alone. But without sugar fueling it, my regular personality grows old and tired and shaky. I fall asleep during fiery Chaucer discussions, jolting awake when someone slams a book in an excess of passion. I try to explain to a Chaucer person over coffee that striving to be the fastest person in the world isn’t any weirder than looking for love in all the wrong places, dreaming of a big car, watching television for three hours a day, sitting down punching things you don’t care about into a computer, helping two out-of-love people separate equitably, sewing up a cut from a bad wound, or stacking bananas so they don’t fall when people take a bunch.

Peggy looks me over in the locker room one day and says:
I do believe that what Glucogirl here needs is some good sex
.

My virginity becomes global locker room discussion, of interest to one and all, even the lady who cleans out the stalls.

There are stories. Peggy says she knew a girl who had sex with a carrot and had to go to the hospital because she got some kind of vegetable disease. Peggy says the first time she had sex it was in the back of her boyfriend’s car. She pretended she liked it by saying things like
ohhh
and
ahhh
, but she cried when she got home and the ever-alert Mrs. Peggy heard her and brought her a Tylenol and a bowl of lime Jell-O with green grapes suspended in the middle. Babe says the first time she had sex she was in her boyfriend’s newly dead grandmother’s apartment, that she too pretended to like it, but it was awful and she cried herself to sleep and woke up with swollen eyes and her mother made her stay home for two days, suspecting a hibernating fever. The lady who cleans out the stalls lost her virginity to a distant cousin.
We didn’t know until it was too late
. Sunny won’t talk about the first time she had sex. She closes her face like a door.
That’s highly personal
. Lilly Cocoplat says that the first time she had sex with the lawyer it was pure, squishy, orgasmic heaven. Peggy says:
Your dear friend’s lying
. But that breaststroker from Auburn says that the first time she had sex, her body trembled like a washing machine and she wanted to do it again but her boyfriend couldn’t. That chick from Arizona says the first time she had sex, she got mono and couldn’t swim for a year and didn’t have sex again until she was nineteen, but there was a girl from her high school who’d lost her virginity to her favorite dog. The first time Tanya Slaughter had sex turned into Glenwood legend: nine months later, she was weeping with triplets. Kyd says the first time she had sex, she knew for sure she was a lesbian. Peggy says:
Bet she knew before that
.

Roxanne says the first time she had sex, she was so drunk she couldn’t for the life of her remember who it was with. She looked deeply into her own forehead and said it could have been this one guy, or that one guy, or maybe the guy with that cool earring. Dot thinks that sex is no laughing matter, that the first time she had sex she hadn’t planned on it. It was up against the golf shed at the Glenwood Country Club; she’d lost control of the situation and it had happened like that, fast and furious. She said she’d felt so bad she thought seriously about leaving her tattered life on the shores of the murky Lake Shawnee, but in God’s Book that was worse than having sex.

The idea of having sex fills me with a cool, specific dread. I’m afraid it will be embarrassing, that I will die of embarrassment—not literally, of course, but in an English major way. I’m too tall, too strong, too gangly. I laugh at the wrong moments, have breakdowns at the wrong times, am always the last at everything except a good race. But Peggy says there are important milestones to be crossed, that I should quit avoiding them and cross already to the non-virgin side of the road like the rest of the team (except the lesbians).

Sunny says:
Do what you want, Pip. Take your time
.

I start looking around for candidates, make out with some nice swimmers here, then there. Strategies are discussed.

Don’t tell him you’re a virgin; you’ll freak him out
, says Peggy.

Don’t mention your problem with yams right away, unless you really like him
, says Sunny.

Don’t laugh, even if it’s funny
, says Lilly Cocoplat, from her dorm room in Wichita.

And don’t cry either … That’ll make him feel bad
, says Peggy.

She should cry if she feels like it, Peggy
, Sunny says.

Don’t cry, Pip. I know
, says Peggy.

Cry if you need to, Pip. Just let it out
, says Sunny.

I have the facts. There will be pain, but just for a second. Peggy says it’s like ripping off a Band-Aid on an almost healed sore. Peggy says:
Don’t be afraid; a girl in Mexico lost her virginity to a can of refried beans
. Babe says:
Don’t tell her things like that
. Peggy says:
It happens to be true
.

I wear a tube top and tight jeans to a major barbecue. I make a nice ponytail, gloss my lips in a sparkly way, try seducing a swimmer with a boomerang-shaped scar above his left eye and a barely perceptible stutter but end up scaring him with my advances and he runs away.

I change tactics, blow-dry my hair and part it on the side, holding it in place with a sexy black barrette. Sunny carefully lines my eyelids in an Egyptian way. I buy a black dress with two thin gold chains holding it up and a pair of strappy sandals that emphasize my toes. I go to another major barbecue, lean into a palm tree, ignoring everyone with America’s saddest sweetheart face. I have a package of purple condoms in the first handbag I’ve ever owned, black with little gold chains that match my dress. I drink two frozen margaritas so fast my hot heart cools down.
There will be blood, but less than a period
. I make eyes at swimmers who bore me because you can’t die if you don’t care.

It is Tom who rescues me under the tree dripping with fake sadness, a frozen margarita thumping in my chest. He’s wearing his glasses with the black metal rims that make him look plain yet interesting. He didn’t brush his hair when he got out of the pool and it’s dried into shapes I find comforting. Some guy is singing about diving for pearls and I take it for a sign and say:
Hey, that guy sounds like a sad Adam Ant
and Tom looks at me and laughs.
That’s Elvis Costello
.

I assess him out of the corner of my eyes. Like most swimmers he has a beautiful body, wide shoulders, narrow hips, long legs. We have another frozen margarita and I’m now officially drunk enough to make out under the palm tree, then in his car. We make out in the driveway, then on my couch. I’ve memorized the phases of sex like the moon: (1) mental stimulation, (2) manual lubrication, (3) gentle penetration, so when things get too hot, I solemnly take his hand and pull him to bed.

He can’t see without his glasses, so I take them off and hide them under some sweaters. His hands are rough and sweet, following the length of my body like a road on a map. And I am pleased to note that I am soon (1) mentally stimulated, (2) physically lubricated, and (2+) squishy, and that everything should go according to plan—but that is before I drive my hands gently down the length of his body and discover a pulsing, extra-gigantic, yam-slash-genetically-enhanced-cucumber-slash-living-softball-bat-slash-spicy-sausage and I almost have a nervous breakdown, but talk myself down.

Life is a series of complicated errors. Life is all about gliding through angles with curves. And I have real proof, once again, that my mind cannot prepare my body for anything outside a pool, so I close my eyes and swim into sex in a ghostlike glide, knowing that with time this will be funny, that one day in the vast and glorious future, I shall be sitting on a beach outside of the Sydney harbor with Peggy. We’ll be tan, exhausted, exhilarated, watching tight, energetic waves dance deep into sand, horizon blend into water, water lap into sky, and Time will wave her magic green wand and we’ll laugh so hard we’ll end up crying.
His thick glasses, that hair … those socks, his white teeth, that baby skin, his creased jeans, those hiccups, that huge, horrible penis
.

And Lo We Offered Our Thanks to the
Savage Shawnees Before Stabbing Them
Repeatedly in the Heart

I like asking E. Mankovitz non-swimming questions just to see what he’ll say.

Don’t the years tick by like seconds?

He thinks about it absently, says:
Yes, I believe that they do
.

Don’t you think the notion of God is ridiculous?
I ask.

Not so sure about that
, he says.

Do you ever lie?

No, not usually
. He sighs.

So you really think anything is possible
.

Yes
.

Anything?

Within reason
.

So that rules out God
.

I didn’t say that
.

I swim nine miles a day, hold seven U.S. records and twelve U.S. national titles, set my first world record in Madrid. We’re NCAA champs two years in a row; Peggy sticks her naked butt out the car window and spends an hour in jail, gets an $80 ticket and a serious, embarrassing warning before they let her go. Sunny learns forty-three new folk songs that explore the subtle variations of human misery. Technique is tightened. To strengthen myself I experience pain; pain is accepted because it means speed. I stand in front of the mirror studying my strong naked body. Dot secretly marries a major squint. They meet in Costa Rica on a humanitarian semester abroad and it’s sick love at first sight. There is something wrong with him in a Damien kind of way, but she’s so worried something’s wrong with her she doesn’t notice. She’s wearing a peach backless dress and no underwear, confusing the sadness of sex with the sadness of love. Stan takes a job coaching women’s swimming at the University of Iowa; his wife, Emily, has a baby boy. Roxanne goes to university. Quits university. Goes to university. Quits university. Mom has difficulty locating her.

Mom says:
Come home
.

I say:
I will
.

Mom says:
Come home
.

I say:
I will
.

But I don’t.

Another year passes. I spend Christmas with the Peggys, spring break training in Colorado, summer break training in California.

Mom puts her foot down, locates Roxanne, says:
Come home
.

I say:
I will
.

Sister Fergus takes her glasses off, makes the sign of the cross, fingers her rosary, prays for good health, new admissions, a state-of-the-art water heater, the end of famine, the destruction of ignorance, universal peace. She wipes her forehead with a cotton handkerchief she embroidered in bluebirds when she was a novice, joins God in His Kingdom quietly before dawn. A mystery town in southern Florida absorbs June, no one knows where.

Father Tim is called upon. Guilt is evoked through a short speech whose underlying theme is the brevity of life.

He wins.

It’s November 23, 1987, and I have three days of pure non-swimming freedom marked in on my calendar with a red X: Glenwood one, Glen-wood two, Glenwood three.

Mom takes a blue pill; pulls herself down the stairs; opens a freezer the size of a small pickup truck; roots around for a while, clutching the edge of the door to keep her balance; finally pulls out a roasting bird she bought on sale in July. She drags it upstairs to the kitchen, dumping it into a basting pan. She takes another blue pill, puts her arm up into the bird, rips the gizzards out, setting them aside for Manny until she remembers he’s decomposing outside along with everything else. She has a nervous breakdown up the stairs, dials 911 from the phone near the bed, convinced this time it’s Her Time. The ambulance rushes to the house with its lights off. Technicians take her pulse and blood pressure, shine a flashlight into her eyes, give her a shot of a powerful tranquilizer, holding her hand until she calms down and falls into a dreamless sleep.

She calls me late that night to double-check on my arrival, mentioning only that she’d had a slight spell, but Lilly Cocoplat has moved back to Glenwood with her lawyer, has her finger on the pulse of Glenwood, and has already called to give me a detailed everything.

Mom gets up the next day, grits her teeth, takes half a blue pill, pulls herself down the stairs, washes her hands up to her elbows, and relentlessly stuffs the bird with enough mixture of crumb, cranberry, walnut, and butter to clog the arteries of a dinosaur.

We sit at a full table with red candles burning sinister orange streaks across our thankless faces. Roxanne brings a glass of wine to her lips and takes a slow draw, her red eyes shining out over the rim. Mom can’t stop talking about Thanksgiving fatigue.
Whew, this is exhausting. Whew, I’m exhausted. Whew, Thanksgiving is a lot of exhausting work that does me in. Whew, I wish I were in bed with a good book
.

Roxanne nods like a puppet, says:
What a drag, Moooooommmmm
really slowly as though she were an estranged whale swimming in the depths of her own private sea.

Been dabbling in ye old bong juice again?
I say to Roxanne when Mom leaves the table.

Roxanne is a great liar, but like all great liars, she often makes me think she is lying when she is telling the truth. When she lies, she is perfect, sincere, spontaneous:
New York is full of opportunity
. She holds my eyes in her eyes and the words slide out of her mouth as if they haven’t spent any time at all twisting around in her mind. When she tells the truth—
I need more money for food—
she looks up, as though the words were floating like a hummingbird somewhere above her head. We fight when she’s telling the truth, but I accept more than half of the sneaky, horrible, ulterior-motive-driven lies she’s told me.

She looks at me, laughs, stops, laughs again, stops.
Bong juice. Like … you … are always … Bong juice … why do you … I do not
.

Living with a nutcase and doing good things for the unfortunate of Costa Rica have given Dot a hard voice.
Finish your sentence, Roxanne
, she says, snappy.

Roxanne takes a swig of wine like a pirate, rubbing her mouth with the back of her sleeve.
Okay … like if it’s going to be one of these crappy bong juice Thanksgiving piece of finish-your-sentence dinners … I’m outta here and I don’t care what Mooommmm …

I’m watching Dot. Something has happened to her, but I can’t tell what. She’s lost a lot of weight and it’s taken most of her boobs and parts of her personality with it.

She looks at me and starts to mock.
And yams are nature’s answer to sugar addiction … Look how white my teeth are now that I’ve worn my plastic thing … Francesca Keds has buffalo shoulders … Have you seen my new watch that can plunge 250 meters into the depths of the deep dark sea
.

I am surprised.
Kurds, Fredrinka Kurds. Why are you talking like a … like that, Dot?

Just trying to help you listen to yourself go on and on about bullshit
, she says, tucking hair behind an ear.
Anyway, I just want everyone to understand that it ends here and now. I am no more Dot of all, no more Dot’ll do it … that Dot is gone. Does everyone understand? It’s over. The cycle ends here. I’ve had enough … enough … playing mommy
.

No one understands. This is something only hindsight will reveal, but I put an understanding look on my face anyway. Roxanne keeps the
like I give a fuck
face that works well with her New York haircut. Mom sits down hard, putting both elbows on either side of her plate. She’s rolled up the sleeves of her sweater into the crux of her elbows like a pastry-making woman. Her face looks the same as it did before the new Dot started talking to it. Not bad exactly. But not good either. She’s gotten so used to her solitary library Dark Catholic life that she wants us to leave. I could tell the minute we found ourselves in the same room together, all of us, looking at each other as weary as old hogs before slaughter, then shifting the attention toward her, the mother, lasering her up and down with our daughterly eyes, measuring, recording. She’s as round as a hen, wants her house back so she can skim the walls the way she likes to, slipping away upstairs into her room as quiet as a Shawnee. She will lie on her bed, read about someone who doesn’t exist until she doesn’t exist. It’s written all over her newly minted moon face as clearly as ink; she was dying for us to come, and now that she’s seen us, she’s dying for us to go.

Dot has always been Mother’s number one champion daughter, daughterly in the best of all ways, deeply attentive to Mother’s changing humors, encouraging, listening to her woes, concerned, a fat frown between her big eyes. She is classically show-champion daughterish— shiny of hair, pink of gum. The nuns love her, the non-nuns love her; she greets friend and foe alike with bright eyes and some kind of physical sign of affection that illustrates without excess the brotherhood of brother, the sisterhood of sister, the universality of all human humanity, one for all, etc. How many times did I see Mom grazing words in a bed of book with her glasses on as Dot handed her a hot cup of tea she’d taken the time to sweeten? How many times did I see her in the kitchen measuring and stirring to get it just right?

Sunny told me that this is a case of classic mother/daughter role reversal, that Dot was not acting the role of a perfect daughter, she was acting the role of a perfect mother, without having given birth, which turned her into a minor modern Mary.

She’ll crack one of these days
, she’d said, looking up from Lancer’s
Dictionary of the Ancient World
.

Dot? No way. She won’t
, I’d said, clipping my nails.

Well, I hope she does for her sake
, she’d said, looking back down into Lancer’s
Dictionary of the Ancient World
.

If you really want to die, Roxanne, it’s easy enough
, Dot is saying in a calm creepy voice.
We’re in Kansas; they’ll sell guns to any idiot here, even the ones with ridiculous hair. People do it every day. You don’t need to go to New York to do it, unless, of course, you want the
company. Her mean face is becoming meaner by the second.
But … you’d rather torture us, wouldn’t you? How could we, insensitive fuckfaces that we are, possibly understand it, your grand-ass suffering? How could we imagine how much you fucking feel? Go out and get a gun, risky woman; live your life like a wild fucking animal for all I care. I have other things to think about
.

I try to change the subject.
Grand ass?

Perhaps it’s time you stop that
. She swivels so violently the table trembles.

What?
I say, yam purée stuck in my throat.

What. That little smile thing, that’s what
. She’s knifing a poor avocado.

Ridiculous hair?
I
have ridiculous hair?
says Roxanne, lost in her time warp.

It is true that Dot was always fine and always-fine people eventually become semi-invisible holographs that float around the complaining ones. She is better off mean; it puts people on edge, forces them to look at her, and I rather like the new Dot, although she does, at times, frighten me, but it appears to be a very difficult task reversing a classic mother/daughter role reversal without any casualties.

Mom grabs me in the kitchen.
Why is Dot being such a … There are
seeds
on those salads and
special water chestnuts
and
avocados.
I had to go to the
store
and you know I don’t … I had to put them in
brown paper bags
to ripen them … you’d think she’d have … What’s wrong with
her
? What?

Her claws are ripping into my skin, churning up bad memory.
You don’t leave the house, Mom … and that medication stuff you’re on makes you … You call us acting like you’re normal when we know perfectly well you’re not. It’s insulting. You can’t keep treating us the same way. Things are different. Sunny says you’ve got a major …

She lets go of my arm.
What are you talking about?

I rub the welts.
You know what I’m talking about. You don’t leave the house. Admit it. And you take pills. To live
.

I can go out if I feel like going out
, she says, lying to herself and thus lying to me.
I just don’t feel like going out. And I know what
this
is. Girls turn against their mothers. This is—
she looks into her forehead—classic.
After everything I … I … we … I didn’t think it would happen to me. I really didn’t. After everything I’ve had to live through
. She gets mean.
I let
you
do whatever you wanted, getting up at the crack of dawn preparing all those sandwiches … You had a great life. Just you wait. Just you wait …
she says, backing out of the kitchen and pulling herself up the stairs as quickly as she can without having a heart attack. When I get back to the table, Roxanne is gone and Dot has locked herself in her room.

You’re the leader of the family now. I’m not putting up with this anymore
, Mom says to me the next morning, lying greenish on her perfectly made bed. She’s put lipstick on her lips to give a good, normal effect, but the lipstick’s so old it’s cracking.

I sit down on one of the heavy dining room chairs that a lazy Dark Catholic brought up during the months of heavy surveillance.
Listen, Mom, next year is an Olympic year. I can’t be the leader of the family
.

She turns her face to the window.
No one listens to me. No one knows what I’m going through. And frankly I don’t think anyone cares
.

I do care, but don’t feel like telling her anymore.
And it was
June
. Poor old June made my sandwiches
, I say, leaving the room.