This is the Water (2 page)

This is you in the foyer, thinking about how the burnt rubber smells almost like gunpowder after a shot has been fired, and this leads to you thinking about how your older brother, who was fifty-four, shot himself in the head two years ago because his wife had told him that week that she wanted to leave him. This is you wondering how he was able to do it, having teenage children he would leave behind, and how much blood there was, and how fucking stupid he was. His family never guessed he was capable of it, but maybe there were previous signs. Your brother could not stand it when your father left your mother for another woman. He could not stand it that your father never visited you or your brother. Your father never came by or called, and your brother, being the only son in the family, thought it was up to him to be the man now. But he could not be the man. He was still a boy. He played baseball on a team called the Cougars and collected buffalo nickels inside of binders filled with blue-colored cardboard pages, fitting the coins into rigid slots shaped like half moons. He played trumpet, his lips after practice puffy and red, and your ears ringing with the brassy notes of “The Carnival of Venice” long after he stopped his practice session. He played monster in chase, you would scream when he ran after you, because he had that chipped tooth that looked like a fang, and he was so much bigger than you, you knew he could catch you. It was just a matter of time before he grabbed you and threw you down and tickled you until you cried. Now you are not so young, and being not so young, you think you shouldn't be thinking about milk that can't be unpoured, so you stop thinking about your brother, and think about the bathing suits for sale at the facility instead. There are suits so low in the back they look as if the dog from the Coppertone ad on the billboards were biting and pulling down on them.

This is you watching Kim, the girl who did not swim her hundred fly as fast as she thought she could. Her tears mixing with pool water dripping from her hair, which she just removed from her cap. Her shoulders heaving, the sobbing visible, even though the sound of it can't be heard. The voices so loud in the stands because spectators are cheering on other swimmers in a race after hers. The swimmer who wins in the race after hers raises her fist in the air, smiling.

CHAPTER TWO

T
his is the killer. Our killer, not the killer from out west. He is in the stands watching Kim. He is a man with dark, wavy hair and a forehead with wrinkles so thick they look like steps. He has also read the article about the strangler out west. He thinks the killer was stupid to be caught, but he is also jealous of the strangler because it has been a long time since he himself has killed. He notices how even from far away he can see Kim's heart beating through her swimsuit. He can see how her cheeks are flushed from breathing so hard. He looks to see if her neck flutters. Can her pulse be that strong beneath her ivory skin? He notices how bright her eyes are, how the tears welling up in them have made her look so alive. Is there a way to have this light for my own? he thinks. This is Kim not noticing the killer. Not many people do. He is quiet. He does not cheer. He just watches what's down on the pool deck.

This is Kim thinking how much she wanted to win the race, how if she had won she could go home and place the blue ribbon on the string that she has strung from one wall to the other across her room. She could hang it beside all of the other ribbons strung up on that string from all of her six years as a swimmer. After only her first year she was able to cover the length of the string with ribbons, and now she has so many that she tapes them to the bottoms of the ribbons already hanging. Her mother refers to it as her “wall of ribbons,” and thinks that if Kim cared less about the ribbons and more about improving her technique, then she'd actually win more ribbons. To Kim it's not a wall of ribbons but more like a curtain of ribbons, because when the window is open, letting in a breeze carried across the tall grass and daisies that dot her side yard, the curtain of ribbons shudders and flaps. Kim likes the curtain, thinking how one day, when the ribbons reach down to her bedroom floor, then she might pull the curtain aside, step out from behind it, show the world who she is, but right now she likes hiding behind it because all that it says about her is that she's a champion swimmer, and maybe that's all she wants people to know about her because right now she's not even sure herself about who she is, and she learned long ago that you don't make the mistake of telling anyone how you feel. Once, when she was a girl of ten, she told an older girl she knew that she liked the girl's brother. Kim and the brother were friends. They lived down the road from each other and played in the stream for hours at a time, creating dams and waterfalls with rocks that fed into crystal clear pools where she could see the reflection of the two of them working, their knobby, scuffed knees sometimes touching. When the older girl told her brother that Kim liked him, he stopped coming over. After a big rain, the rocks they had moved to create the waterfalls fell out of place, and white water whooshed by full force, without stopping, without creating calm pools of water Kim could see her face in. It was then she joined a swim team and swam as hard as she could to forget.

Do you know how the strokes are performed? There are officials who know if you don't. They will tell you the rules. A child doing breaststroke has to double-hand touch at the wall. A child doing butterfly cannot kick like a frog. A glide to the wall in the backstroke can't start before the flags. A wiggling foot on the blocks at the start is a false start and allowed only once. A fall where the swimmer enters the water is also a false start and allowed only once. One false start in a relay is a DQ for the entire team, a disqualification.

This is you, Annie, at the facility, looking in through the glass windows at the pool where a boys' race is being swum. The swim team is coed, but there are not as many boys as girls, so the boys' heats are fewer in number. It must be a first heat you are watching, because so many of the swimmers are inexperienced and swimming poorly, and you see at least three officials in their white polo shirts and their blue shorts raising a hand in the air, letting the judges know a swimmer performed a stroke incorrectly. This is you with your thoughts wandering while watching the boys. This is you remembering how hard your brother laughed days before he shot himself when you saw him on his birthday at his house. Your parents, both dead a few years now, of course weren't there, but his children were, and you noticed how it was easy to see how your kids and his were related. They shared the same dark features and olive skin. Their laughter even sounded similar to you, their voices sounding in the same range. But whose laughter was like yours now? you thought.  Your parents were gone and now your brother. You realized then you were the last one left in your family, and in that moment, where you were completely feeling sorry for yourself, you felt like an orphan.

This is you now bent over the water fountain at the facility. The hot air makes you so thirsty. You wish the water could enter your mouth more quickly. You wonder why water fountains have to move from the bottom up and why they can't come from the ceiling down, straight into your mouth, where gravity would probably be on your side and help quench your thirst that much faster.

This is you minutes later up in the bleachers, the boys' heats are over, and now you are watching your daughter Sofia swim a one-hundred free. You notice how she still isn't using her walls and streamlines, and those turns that when you straighten out and push off the wall you are not breathing, and it isn't until you are at the flags again that you come up for a breath. The turns are hard to do, but the coaches want the swimmers to use them because they save so much time. Even though Sofia isn't using those turns, she still has a faster time. You write her time down on the heat sheet you bought that lists all the entries and heats of the swimmers. The heats are being run with the slowest girls first and the fastest girls last, so that for example if you have sixty girls in the race and a ten-lane pool, you'll have six heats of ten girls each, the last heat being the fastest and the overall winner most likely coming out of that race. You like watching your daughters swim, but if they don't swim well in a race, you don't mention it. You are always proud of them, even when they don't lose time, because they always work hard in practice and try to swim their fastest in a race. Thomas, your husband, thinks that you have the girls on the swim team as much for your benefit as for theirs. This is true. You like being able to swim when your girls swim and you like talking to the other parents on the team. It's a social place for you. You also like seeing your girls progress and cheering them on at a meet and being involved in their lives and speaking their language about workouts and strokes and technique. You're even in their social sphere a little more because you know the other girls on the swim team they come home and talk about. You know Hayley's mother's a rock singer in a band and that Hayley can sing pretty well herself and takes chorus and that her class was invited to D.C. to sing on the Capitol steps. You know that Kali's mom gets migraines and that she's allergic to gluten. You know that Chris, Cleo's mother, is a professional artist, because your girls are friends with Cleo and you've been to Chris's house to drop off the girls and she's shown you her studio and her canvasses heavy with oil paints depicting dark assemblages of wildflowers sprawling on the surface without reference points, as if the flowers were stars almost, growing without being tied to the earth, and floating in space. When you want to talk about how you freelance as a wedding photographer in order to supplement the family income and be able to afford the family vacations, you can talk with Kali's mom. You can talk to her about how it's sometimes difficult to deal with soon-to-be brides and their families because Kali's mom is the owner of a five-star inn that hosts weddings and serves organic fiddleheads. When you want to talk about how the skiing was great over the weekend after a huge snowfall of heavenly powder, you talk to Emma's dad, who also skis. When you want to talk about the new curriculum the state is adopting for the school system, and the new assessment test they'll use that has to be taken on a computer and how you're nervous your girls don't type well enough, you can talk to Nick's mom, who's a middle school teacher. And of course, if you want to talk about swimming and your own children, you can talk to anyone around you, even the mothers and fathers you don't think you have anything in common with, because every parent there can talk swimming. They understand what a fast fly time might be. They can make a remark about how a certain stroke-and-turn official might be inattentive during a race and never catch a DQ. They can look at a set of twenty-one one-hundred frees on a 1:20 that the coach wrote on the board for her swimmers to swim and know that is a tough workout.

This is Dinah, seeing how your daughter Sofia out-touched her daughter Jessie in the one-hundred free, even though Jessie used her streamlines and turns. This is Dinah coming up to you while you're about to go down the stairs to the foyer saying that she did not see your Sofia using her streamlines and turns, and that she thought all the girls were supposed to be using them now. This is you shrugging, saying, “I suppose she'll start using them one day, but can you blame her? That's a long time to hold your breath and swim hard at the same time.” This is Dinah thinking how when she talks to the coach after the meet, she will let the coach know that she noticed Sofia is not using her walls and streamlines. This is Dinah thinking how she hates it when others don't do what they're supposed to do, and how Annie and her daughters always seem to be doing what they're not supposed to do. For example, Annie, because she couldn't afford all the equipment, never bought her girls the required fins they need for workouts, and instead, before a kick set, lets them dig through the bin on deck filled with ones that were left behind from swimmers years before. Dinah thinks how that's not right, especially when it says right there in the handbook that the required equipment to purchase is a water bottle, a kickboard, and fins. Then there are the instances, Dinah thinks, when Annie asks the coach for special permission to age her youngest daughter up at a meet so that her youngest daughter can swim in the same session as her oldest daughter, just for convenience's sake, so that Annie won't have to be at a swim meet for two five-hour sessions back to back. This is frowned upon, of course, because it means Annie's youngest is swimming with older swimmers, and usually, therefore, faster swimmers. Dinah doesn't approve of this at all, since it means the afternoon session goes that much slower because there is a slower swimmer entered. Then there are the required parent meetings that Annie doesn't go to some of the time. Instead, on those days, Dinah sees Annie swimming in a lane in the pool, while almost all the other parents are packed into a stuffy utility room off the pool, sitting on folding chairs and listening to a lecture by the coaches about volunteering for the team, or listening to a guest lecturer about the importance of feeding your swimmer carbohydrates and avocado the day before a meet, when that's the last thing Dinah wants to serve her daughter, Jessie, who, like herself, is already carrying too many pounds. Dinah once told the coach afterward that she saw Annie in the pool swimming while the rest of them were in the meeting. The coach sighed. “There's not much I can do,” she said. Dinah told the coach maybe there was something she could do. “Maybe you could kick her kids off the team,” Dinah said, to which the coach replied, “Dinah, it's been a long night and I am going home now.”

CHAPTER THREE

T
his is Mandy, the cleaning lady. She has always been concerned about her teeth. They cross over in the front so that they look like a row of theatergoers in the first seats with all of their legs crossed. Of course it would be a summer show, everyone in shorts with legs exposed. A showing, maybe, of
Showboat
, or some other summertime show. Maybe
West Side Story
. This is Mandy sweeping the floor in the locker room, seeing if what she should be sweeping into the dustpan can be swept down into the drain instead, thinking about Natalie Wood, how she drowned in the sea, and what a shame that was.

Some of the swim-team mothers talk to Mandy, and some pass her by, and some just nod slightly when they see her with her mop in her hand, pushing the water that has come off their daughters' bodies and onto the tiles. Some know all about Mandy and how she and her husband go fishing and how their daughter works at a clothing store selling clothes she would never wear because they are all clothes for outdoor enthusiasts and Mandy says her twenty-year-old daughter's idea of outdoor enthusiasm is firing up a barbecue and grilling a few sirloins. Some don't even know that Mandy's front teeth are all crooked because they have never looked up at Mandy to see her smiling. Some assume that because she's at the pool her income is the same as that of everyone else who can afford to pay the six-hundred-dollar individual membership for the facility, or can afford to pay over one thousand dollars just to have her child swim on the team for one season. Some confuse Mandy with the other cleaning lady, or even with the cleaning man, who is as round as Mandy and who also wears glasses. Some think Mandy is part of the coaching team and they ask Mandy questions like when is the next meet and what time does it start. Some think Mandy is another swimteam parent and they ask her which one is her child and which squad does she swim on: developmental, juniors, or pre-seniors? Some think Mandy works in the snack bar, and when they see her in the bathroom or in the hall, and there is no one working the snack bar, they wish she would just get back to her job selling snacks because they'd like to buy a bagel or a chocolate milk or an electrolyte vitamin-fortified drink for their swimmer. Some think Mandy works in the weight and exercise room and writes your name down when you enter the sweat-smelling room and adjusts the fans so that they blow on you while you run on the treadmill and programs the two overhead televisions so that one is always airing a talk show and one is always airing sports. Some think Mandy works the front desk and checks your ID card and holds the key to the glass case that sells goggles and water bottles for an exorbitant price. Some think Mandy is just a gym fanatic who comes every day but never looks any thinner, despite all that spinning and sweating.

This is Kim in the warm-down lane still crying over the race she just finished and trying to correct herself, trying to lift her rear higher out of the water thinking that because her sixteen-year-old body's changing, and her bottom half's getting heavier, it's causing her to sink more, but when she lifts her rear higher, her arms go deeper, which causes her chest to dive deeper, which makes her recovery all that much slower because her arms encounter that much more resistance.

This is you timing with Adam. This is Adam telling you how his boys don't even like to swim on the team but would rather play in the locker room and fill their swim caps up with shower water and throw the water at each other. You know his boys, you have seen how they like going down the slide in the water park next to the competition pool with their eyes closed and their arms crossed in front of themselves like dead people in open caskets, only they're alive and doing it for maximum speed. Together you and Adam look up at the timing board when the names of the swimmers appear, and you wonder what officials at Ellis Island would have renamed these kids if they had just walked off the boat. Lipshutz would be “Lips,” you think. This is you forgetting to press the plunger and stop your stopwatch when a kid comes swimming into the wall for the touch because you are thinking of last names the kids will never have. This is you writing down a time for the kid anyway, looking at Adam's time and changing yours a few tenths of a second so that it looks believable, because even though the times of the swimmers are important to the swimmers, this swimmer will not have a competitive time. It will be enough for the swimmer to know that maybe she knocked off a few seconds from her seedtime, but that is all.

This is Adam asking you if you happened to hear the news about that awful strangler out west. This is you saying, yes, how awful. This is Adam saying, “Thank God we live here. I mean, that's why my wife and I moved out of Boston, to get away from exactly those kinds of horrors.” He says in the rural town where he lives, a town similar to yours and also an hour away from the facility, the school board member is the greengrocer who is also the animal control officer who is also married to the postmistress, who herself is head of the recreation committee and whose brother is the volunteer fireman and the select board member and the general store owner, and that brother's wife is the town clerk and the PTO head and the notary, and her brother is the librarian of the one-room library that's open only two afternoons a week and boasts a working fireplace, one computer for browsing, and a perpetually filled barrel of oyster crackers for the taking of patrons who come up the porch and pass through the pleasantly creaking screen door. This is you agreeing, saying, “Yes, we are lucky to be able to raise our children here.”

This is Chris outside, the air on her wet blue jeans feeling good. She breathes in deeply—all the other fathers are watching her breathe. Her jeans fitting well over a small round rear, over thin legs. Her blond hair blonder now in the spring sunlight that makes water droplets on new grass glisten. Her breasts through her thin jacket almost visible, she isn't wearing a bra, she doesn't need to.

This is Dinah telling her daughter, Jessie, that in her next race she has to swim harder than she's ever swum before. This is Jessie, a big girl whose practice suits stretch so tightly against her big belly that the polyester is almost see-through and one can see the white of her skin, telling her mother that she was singing, “This old man, he played one,” in her head while she raced. This is Dinah groaning, and saying, “Sing something else. Anything else. Sing some rock. Sing some AC/DC.” This is Dinah's daughter saying she doesn't know any rock or ADHD. This is Dinah saying, “It's AC/DC.” Then saying, “Forget the song. Swim like a great white shark is after you.” Dinah's daughter says, “But there isn't a great white shark after me.” Dinah sighs, “Okay, if you drop your time I'll give you a dollar for every second.” This is Dinah thinking how she cannot imagine how overweight Jessie would be if she did not swim. Dinah herself never did sports as a kid, and maybe if she had, she wouldn't be fat like she is now, and maybe she would have friends, because all of the girls on the team seem to have friends. She has seen Jessie and her friends stopping at the wall between sets, talking to each other, laughing with each other, and splashing each other. She has seen them before practice huddled next to someone's locker, showing each other their latest clothing purchase, the latest series book to read.

This is Dinah hoping her daughter Jessie doesn't turn out to be a bumbler like her father, Joseph, a man Dinah married years ago because she thought he'd be a good father, which he is, but that was the only reason she married him. This is Dinah hoping her daughter doesn't turn out to be like Dinah either, an overweight woman who has almost no friends and knows that she has almost no friends because she is critical of everyone else's behavior and doesn't understand why people can't live by high moral standards and beliefs the way she always has. To Dinah, all things carry equal weight: Writing thank-you notes by hand to people who give you gifts ranks up there with not stealing from a store. Hanging up on a telemarketer is just as disrespectful and deplorable as cheating on a spouse. The few friends she has made over the years were always subject to her wrath when they made the slightest mistake in her eyes—“What? You keep in contact with old boyfriends? You might as well be having an affair with them!”—and they gradually stopped being her friend. That was also a mistake in Dinah's eyes. If they were stronger people, they would see that she only made comments to help them become better people. Dinah knows she's uptight, but doesn't feel it's right to deny that part of her. It would be like cheating on herself. Dinah's husband is someone who always defends people like Annie, who don't see the importance of following all the rules to a T, and he says that other mothers on the team, who are so uptight about doing everything the team asks of them, could learn from Annie's more relaxed attitude.

It's work for Dinah to drive Jessie forty-five minutes to the pool every day after school and sit and wait for the two-hour practice to be over, but in the long run she feels it's the best gift she can give her daughter, like a get-out-of-jail-free card allowing her a disassociation from those twisted strands, those DNA, she inherited. Joseph is not especially handsome or smart or funny (he looks and acts goofy, always tripping on stairs and hitting his big square-shaped head on low doorways), but he has been a good father—always there to scoop their daughter up in his arms after a fall or to whisk her off to the doctor when need be, with a trip afterward to the ice cream parlor. But now that Jessie is older and doesn't need that kind of fatherly attention anymore, Dinah feels she doesn't need Joseph either. It's as if both daughter and mother have outgrown him. To make matters worse, he's losing his hearing, a condition caused by one too many deer hunting trips during which he's shot a rifle off close to his ear, and as a result he's yelling more because he can't hear himself and thinks no one else can hear him either, so now Dinah's yelling more too, trying to get him to understand everyday things like, “I'm taking Jessie to practice tomorrow, you make the dinner,” or “We'll be home from practice late, be sure to take the roast out of the oven.” What's made him even more annoying is that in the past few weeks he's asked that she become some kind of a translator for him. When he talks to people and he can't understand them, he turns to her and says, “What did they say?” His hearing is affecting his work as a real estate salesman, and he's asked Dinah to come along with him a few times on a showing to help translate, but she's now refusing to do it. A part of this has to do with time—being a manager of a prosthetic supplier, she has to work nine to five shipping off artificial arms and legs gently packed in Bubble Wrap and Styrofoam popcorn. A part of it has to do with her not wanting to have to take care of him in any way, and a part of it is her not wanting to have to meet rich couples touring high-end houses.

This is our killer. He drives fifteen minutes from the facility back to his home. He lives in an apartment he has lived in for twenty-five years. He has lines in his forehead so deep they could serve as stairs for a small doll. He has a washer and dryer in his kitchen, and when he eats meals he usually starts a load to wash or dry so that he has the sound of one of the machine's drums turning to keep him company. As a killer, he has pride, he thinks, and does not want to be caught, the way so many experts think serial killers want to be. He is not like that careless killer out west all over the news who, as a matter of fact, made this killer want to kill again, just to prove it can be done right. It has been so many years since the last time. It makes him hungry again. Why shouldn't I be able to once again see the light go out of a young woman's eyes? he thinks. He thinks about Kim. He has been watching her for a few months. He thinks how Kim's eyes, once she starts winning again, will be fever-bright with excitement and satisfaction. All he has to do is wait for that moment.

This is Kim at home at night watching butterfly technique videos and practicing, lying chest-down on the ottoman, trying to imitate the swimmer on the screen. The ottoman's fabric has a coarse weave almost like a burlap sack and is uncomfortable on her skin, and her little sister, who is eight, keeps telling Kim how she swims butterfly and that maybe Kim should swim it more like she does, which doesn't help Kim since her sister is like a rubber band and has such a flexible back she sometimes walks around the house in a backbend, reporting on what she sees on the ceiling, just for the fun of it.

While lying in bed that night, behind her curtain of ribbons, Kim thinks about how her dream for years has been to go to age groups, zones, sectionals, then junior nationals, then nationals, and then of course the Olympics. Things looked as if they were headed that way for a long time. Every season she improved her times, and every year she was going to more age-group meets and then zone meets, and sectionals, and even out west to California for juniors, but this season she's slipping backward. She thinks she should get out of bed and sit at her desk and study for her history test tomorrow, but she's too tired. Who cares, anyway, she wonders, if Caesar was a villain or just ambitious? “I care,” she responds, and she means it. She wants to keep getting all A's in school, so she turns on the light, gets up, puts her robe on, and opens up her history book. When she falls asleep reading at one a.m., her pale blond hair, which she wishes were blonder, more the color of corn silk than what she thinks looks ghostlike and wispy, is spread across an illustration of Caesar crossing the Rubicon.