Swimming (19 page)

Downstairs, Dot’s face is still and hard.

I try walking the path of good-natured forgetfulness.
What’s up, Buttercup?

She is tired of walking the path of good-natured forgetfulness.
Shut up for once, will you?

I change the subject.
Mom says I’m supposed to be the leader of the family now …

Her eyes are tired.
Sick to the end
, she says, and I wonder again what’s happened to her.

But she can’t resist becoming the moral leader of the family, calling me up and demanding things in a strict
rat-a-tat
voice.

How could you have given Roxanne cash?

What did you say to Mom?

What were you thinking?

How can you tell? How do you know? That is unacceptable as an answer
.

Are you still dating that boring guy you don’t even like?

No one wants to go to church, so Mother goes alone, coming home with a closed face before hitting bed. I have dinner with the Cocoplat, who insists on bringing the lawyer. He’s gained weight but only in the head area; his legs are still pegs. He squints at me across the table, making heavy eyes at his watch as Lilly looks on helplessly.

There are things I know I should do but don’t.

Go to the cemetery
.

Visit the nuns
.

Find out where June is
.

Say hi to Dr. Bob
.

I lie on my bed staring out the window until I can’t stand it anymore. Then I visit Father Tim, have talks with new Dolphins and the Holy Name swim team, who manage to maintain their healthy twenty-year losing streak. They weep, tell me how much they love me. I feel a weep in my throat, but stuff it down, telling them how much I love them with a froggy voice. And it’s true, I do.

Secret Message Shush

She’d called me a year before with the orders: (1) I will stuff my shoulders into a lilac dress with an asymmetric ruffle. (2) I will walk down the aisle with the best man, standing directly to the left of Father Tim. (3) I will be perfectly calm. (4) I will hold a bouquet of calla lilies or long-stemmed white roses or maybe something with color. (5) I will not become antsy, will barely move except to wipe away the occasional stray tear. (6) If I do weep, there will be no convulsions. (7) All notion of laughter will be permanently suppressed. (8) If I do feel a laugh rumbling, I will do anything it takes to stop it, even if I have to think about horrible shit.

I stuff my shoulders into a lilac dress, am not pleased with the asymmetric ruffle. I walk down the aisle with the best man, step and pause, step and pause, standing directly to the left of Father Tim, who winks. When Father Tim winks, I remain perfectly calm, but when he talks about unions and duties and eternity, I become antsy. I stare at the back of Lilly’s veil until I am absorbed by sheet upon sheet of sheer ivory net that falls behind her to the floor. I blink, lasering the lawyer’s profile: forehead
ledge
, nose
potato
, chin
bucket
.

Lilly’s diamond engagement ring flashes for a second. I look at it and
think flashy
. She’s got a new name now, but I will never use it.

I accidentally date swimmers who equate love with saying yes all the time. There are no fights, no scenes in public places, no biting jealousies that make me sit in a chair with my face in my hands, tears sprouting through my fingers as the people who don’t like me watch with pleasure and the people who do squirm with shame. My boyfriends and I agree with everything I say and sex is sweet, like riding a speedboat on a fresh green lake, nothing like the heaving sweaty stuff Peggy describes. Peggy seethes with passion, her heart constantly smashed into a million smithereens before it regenerates in a process that Sunny calculates to take between eleven and twenty-three days. Even Babe creates havoc when she dumps her boyfriend from forever for a newer, faster one who waits for her every evening after practice. He sits outside by the doors patiently reading medical textbooks ten times thicker than the Glen-wood Yellow Pages. We call him Dr. Babe. And Sunny, who irons everything so carefully it never wrinkles, is now dating a guy who makes her late for practice. She’s been late
more than once
, has been singing “Misery Means Business” in a sweet, whispery voice, keeping her cards close to her chest.

I plunge into the pool and concentrate on form, lengthening my extension, prolonging a powerful glide, the white doves of Seoul flying through my mind, their beaks filled with gold. I’m twenty-two years old. That’s eleven twice.

We’re at training camp on the island of Kauai. We train, talk about love and love’s cousin, sex, and sex’s cousin, betrayal, and betrayal’s cousin, boredom, and boredom’s cousin, blind infatuation, until I can’t take it anymore and leave the room. When I get back everyone is lounging on the porch talking about love again. Babe lies in a hammock and talks about her and Dr. Babe’s plans to work on Indian reservations for free. She gets choked up, and everyone becomes quiet, lost in their own love and their own love’s future plans to do great things together in a sexy fun way. I listen to the rhythm of the faraway waves, feel the energy of the green weaving palms, the ease of warm sand under my feet, the vibratory underbuzzing of the overfed bee clash with the continual threat of lava, not missing my boyfriend the way everyone else misses theirs. I’m dating a swimming architect. He has floppy hair and deep green eyes, soft hands, a pale, muscular body. He sits at his drawing board creating impossible buildings the wind will pull down as I recline in my recliner in a post-practice slump. He’s so kind that to balance him out I have to be an asshole. He says:
What can I do to help take some of the pressure off, sweetheart? And
I look at him and say:
Shut up, that’s what
, as I stab a pair of golden yam balls sitting on a plate of bitter greens.

Here in the land of the powerful wave, all I do is sigh when I think of him, that and stare at the huge clouds lit by a sun so white my eyes sting.

Mother informs me that she’s been changing cognitively, miraculously making it out of bed with a spiral notebook in her hand noting (a) her feelings and (b) the validity of her feelings and (c) possible other feelings and (d) ratings on the basis for rational reasonableness on a scale of 1 to 10, I being stupid. There she is, dating a dancing golfer—3! She buys brown and white leather brogues that grip the earth, is following the white ball with light blue eyes she’s hidden behind a pair of sunglasses that take up half of her face—7. She’s pretending to enjoy but is watching other participants enjoy and wondering why she cannot—I. She has decided to be secretive about this—
o
. She’s cut her hair short like Peter Pan; it gives her nose a depth and dignity it did not have before—9! There she is, running out the door to a big dance with the dancing golfer. He’s short, so she’s not wearing pumps, but ballerina-type slippers she’s chosen for their festive shade of gold—7. They’re twirling around the floor under a canopy of stars as select pieces of beef roast in a special sauce containing one pound of brown sugar—2.

The Superior E. Mankovitz has me in the Mankovitz observation tank at the moment, sensing that my mind is floating on another plane. He puts his lips together for a moment before squinting.
The more success you have, the harder you work. Nature wrote the book; read it, and you will see that it applies to everyone and everything
. It’s part of a new coaching phase he’s going through that involves saying things out loud to annoy me and infuse what he calls my current
lackadaisical swim
with zest. I flip him off in my head and work so hard that days turn into blurry resemblances of light, as if someone’s holding a camera out a car window and all it captures is ribbons of color.

But I almost hate swimming and I’m afraid it’s going to slow me down. My fellow team members are starting to grate; their voices scratch the inside of my ears like chalk. They put their faces too close to mine and yell, laughing at something I hadn’t heard because I was not listening on purpose. And certain teammates are taking the low road, choosing to hate me so they can get mad enough to win. They think I won’t notice, stuff their ferocious animosity behind friendly seeming eyes, easily finding fault in my simple gestures, looking at each other knowingly when I slam a locker, spend too much time putting gloss on my lips, dump yet another kindhearted swimmer. They do not like it when I partake in lengthy arguments with the coveted E. Mankovitz. They feel the time I spend with him takes away from their time, that they are lesser swimmers because of it. They do not like it when Arch Naylor smiles a rare smile at me, revealing a set of creaky white teeth. I feel their glare when I turn my back, but the time it takes for me to turn around has them looking heavenward with vacant, dreamy smiles.

One of the younger, vacillating nuns stops believing in God and becomes a legal secretary instead, eventually stealing Mom’s dancing golfer from right under her feet. A terrible relapse occurs somewhere in the scaffolding of Mom’s mental structure: she burns her notebooks in the fireplace—
o
, pretending she prefers life inside her own walls—
o
. Now the minute she tries to leave the house, her heart flutters and she has to take a pill—
o
. It’s autumn in Glenwood, the wind cool and clean, the trees so orange, so yellow, when she draws the curtains, her light eyes smart with the sunshine. She sighs and holds her own hand for a second.

Dot is secretly struggling with the psychological traps the husband we will never meet is arranging in her path, but she’s convinced he’s the only rubber raft she’ll ever have on this ratty ocean. Out in the world, her face remains resolutely rational, her hair right, but when she’s home, her personality wavers this way and that. When he’s nice, she evaporates in a fizz, like bubbles in a crystal glass; when he bangs the door a certain way, she liquefies, spilling under the floorboards, stilled into invisible; when he watches her quietly, his face an unreadable mask, she freezes into a block of opaque ice unless he smiles, and her body melts into itself with relief. Her coworkers roll their eyes when she turns her back, mouthing
B.I.T.C.H.
while she complains bitterly about the coffee mugs with the permanent stains even as she tries to remove them.

Roxanne’s been missing for months. When I talk to Mom, I get the updates: Roxanne sightings, old Roxanne letters, things that happened to Roxanne when she was a child, Roxanne’s harsh reaction to hardship, her attraction to the bad man. One by one, Roxanne’s wild moments are taken out and scrutinized, the first of her wild trends examined. The creation of a possible toll-free Roxanne hotline is discussed.

Just let her be, Mom …
We’re on the speakerphone. I’m lying on my bed, my feet on the headboard.
She’s always been reactive and she’s been addicted to drugs for a long time now…
.

She feels things more…. She always has since the very beginning. She used to cry all night long. Leonard put her in the basement …

The downstairs bathroom, and that was me
, I say.

That wasn’t you
, she says.

That was
me.
He’d read that article on total extinction
.

No, no, you were a bit on the hyperactive side and you hated your playpen, but a bottle of warm chocolate milk would make you happy every time…. Roxanne, she was my feeling child. And she was always antsy. She almost got electrocuted …

That was
me, Mom.
I was antsy. And I’m the one who bit through those wires. That’s why you took me to the pool. It was me, the antsy one. The nuns wrote it on their reports, remember? Flitty … giddy … antsy. Roxanne was
sneaky.
She was the
Sneaky One.

I was the one up all night with her. Maybe when they interview you, you could say something like “Roxanne, call home,” or “Roxanne, we urgently need to talk” or “I’m having a bit of a problem with my sister Roxanne.” Just explain the situation … People understand these family things …

Are you kidding me? Tell me you’re kidding
.

I have a Roxanne theory that Sunny qualifies as a series of stupid thoughts.

I think:
Let her sink to the bottom. There she would open her eyes, feel the pressure of not breathing and either push herself up toward the oxygen or lie there and drown, and since no one would overtly choose to be dead she would hit the point of no return and return
. But Roxanne is unpredictable. She sinks to the bottom, feels the pressure of not breathing, the lack of oxygen, says:
Fuck the point of no return; I’m not returning
until someone vigilant notices her shadow on the bottom of the pool and dives in to pull her out. She is one of those people who slap and weep after mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

But underneath my series of stupid thoughts I am worried, and when I am worried I usually break down and call Dot, who says:
I’m living my
own life for once. Does this pose a problem for you?
I ignore her, think about something else, have a feeling that fast swimmers are getting faster and will soon make themselves known. They’re out there, somewhere. Fredrinka Kurds’s times have started to falter and I think that whatever they’ve been doing over there is starting not to work or maybe she’s in the middle of a burnout. Burnouts are fierce and inexplicable; sixteen-year-olds who beat the world, then disappear as suddenly as unhappy men.

Olympic years are different from normal years; they bring out the worst before bringing out the best—the cadence of training peaks, then ebbs—and I seem to be having trouble trying to hide the fact that even the Mankovitz has turned into one of those books I don’t have enough patience to read through to the end. I watch him speak like I watch a foreign film, guessing, because I’m too lazy to read the subtitles. I climb into stinging water and sink into it like a lead pellet and the last thing I want to do is pull myself through. And it’s cold. If I don’t slurp enough grimlock for breakfast, my legs turn blue.

There is no room for complacency in any sport. Just ask the champions
, says the Mankovitz one morning at the breakfast buffet.

Quit saying things
, I say, holding down the bird I cannot flip.

I’m giving you the facts
, he says, leveling his eyes on three palm trees dancing on the horizon.

E. Mankovitz likes to stress that just because I feel as though
I
am swimming through moist cement does not mean that teammates or competitors feel as though
they
are swimming through moist cement, that the twenty-fourth Olympiad is only a matter of months away, which means weeks, which means days, which means hours. He caught a cold on the plane over, is a baby about it, sucking on some kind of noxious mint I can smell in waves.
Never underestimate anyone or anything. Nothing must be deemed too insignificant for your esteem
. I get back in the pool and Bron drives a navy blue convertible along the bottom, a bullhorn to her mouth. She turns it on and yells:
You better listen to him; when he’s gone, there won’t be another one
.

Along with outdoor practice, body surfing, stretching, hiking along the Kalalau trail, we sit in the glassed-in atrium of our hotel listening to a most famous eight-foot-tall life coach motivate us. He has a long, cordy neck with a little chin stuck in the middle and J. Caesar hair. He bounds onto the stage, bounding off again when he wants to make a point, and even though he hops like a little girl when he gets excited, I can tell Peggy wants to sleep with him. She sits next to me, her long legs stretched out under the seat in front of her, listening.