The Sea of Light (52 page)

“What do you
mean,
what bothers me? Because it’s the real
race,
for God’s sake!”

“Yeah, but how come that’s so frightening?”

She turns over to glare at me in frustration. Then rolls her eyes. I sit cross-legged on the bedspread, trying to explain—to myself, I guess, as well as to her.

“Look, Babe, it’s like, sometimes my parents won’t do certain things, you know? Like, Lottie won’t ride in elevators. Zischa crosses the street, even when it takes him out of his way, to avoid policemen. And neither one of them will sign a petition, ever. And when something weird like that comes up, I know, I just know in my heart, without anyone having to tell me a thing about it, that it’s because of all the shit they went through during the war. So I’m just wondering—I mean, everyone gets pretty nervous before an important race, right? But it usually doesn’t ruin your whole life—is there something about racing that reminds you? Of the crash, I mean, of this storm—”

She waves a hand dismissively. And there’s that smile again, not exactly spreading across her face but in reality covering it up, hiding whatever pain might be there with the big dumb jock sparkling white shit-kicking grin she pulls out sometimes like a trump card.

“I don’t know, Ellie. What is it about Jews?”

“Huh?”

“You’re all such a bunch of psychoanalysts.”

She laughs, teasing, and I straddle her, pin her arms down at her sides, ride her like a kid playing horse and tell her she is an anti-Semitic rice-and-beans eater, and she tells me so what, I am racist as hell underneath all that Commie shit I get from Zischa. And it occurs to me that there may be truth in what we’re both teasing about: maybe she is an anti-Semite; maybe I am a racist; how, in this world, could either of us help having a vestige of each deep, deep down inside? But maybe there is something more to it, too—something that goes beyond this notion of prejudice and hate: maybe, with love, there is this anger—this rage at the separation between us, which is symbolized by our two separate and different bodies; this rage at the differences themselves, of color, of habit, which act like masks to confuse us sometimes, and cover up our inner natures, and stop us from recognizing each other.

Zischa always said the terrible thing about Nazis was not that they were so different from people you loved, but so similar.

“What if I’m right, Delgado?”

“If you’re right—I don’t want to talk about it. Ellie, come here.”

I bend down to listen.

She tells me, then, how tired she feels. How she is looking forward to the summer, and thinks a lot about spending it together with me; but she has to get through these things first, so could I just shut up and love her?

*

Finals can be terrifying, for sure; sometimes you just shut yourself into inhabiting this numb, mechanically moving body for the duration: cold flesh and muscle moving through the damp air, bright lights, sudden enveloping shock of the water. You are obsessed with small things. Will that annoying fold on the back of your favorite cap curl up behind? Will you lose your goggles on the dive, just this once? Or false start? Is your left buttock dimpling out of your suit, for all to see?

This is the first time I’ve come to a big meet in really lousy shape, though; and, somehow, that takes the pressure off. No one expects me to produce miracles, or even good times—and I don’t even have to worry about qualifying heats for a day or so—but, for Babe, and for most of the rest of them, it’s different. Maybe that’s why I hang back, a little, with Etta and our Coach, when everyone walks out before the spectators.

I hear the sound of my name being called, faintly, and look up. It’s Danny, watching and standing and waving. For a moment, I want to clamber over all the tiers of heads, and jump at him, and hold him. He smiles, broadly. There are tears in his eyes. I wave back, I love him again, and smile. And I notice that next to him, sitting quietly and stubbornly, with his little blue eyes squinting behind thick metal-rimmed spectacles, is the wretched Gary Hesse. I wave at him, too—and he grins, then—and I blow them both a kiss.

Later, it will not be a blur to me, but a silent, slow-moving bright-lit room inside a cavern of human sound echoing against the walls. I’ll remember how her face looked, chilly and determined, dripping warm-up water. How she peeled off her sweats, one by one—calmly and steadily, though her hands were shaking—and took some time, a long time it seemed, to fold them, and then handed them neatly folded to me. How I held them against my chest. Their smell came up to me: chlorine and water, a faint hint of this perfume she said her mother gave her once, and the sweet, warm musk of her flesh.

She winked once. Then turned, leaned down slightly, and whispered something to Coach, I don’t know what, and Bren nodded and said something back.

She headed for the starting block that marked lane four. Entrance to the imaginary donut hole in the water that, to do it right each time, you must consistently dive through. She shook her head, shrugged to relax her shoulders, before stepping up on it. There was something tired about her, now—about the slope to her back—a tired strength; the strength could not mitigate the tiredness, nor the tiredness mitigate the strength; both were her, inexorably, along with all the other things that she was, to me, to everyone else, to herself. Seeing, I felt tears in my eyes, and closed them.

I wouldn’t watch—I felt it too hard and too deep; and, in a way, I didn’t have to. It was my race, too.

I could feel the tense shatter of the explosion inside when they went off the block. Glance up and tuck slightly, looking for the hole—and, like it always seems when things are perfect, the seconds slow, there is plenty of time to find it, to reach for it the way a jaguar stretches with its paws for prey, and glide right through.

It was my race, too, and she knew it; she knew it, and I could feel it. Because with the one pumping, gliding kick, reach up and break through, shoulders over the crest of the water, and breathe, I felt the two of us together, and I felt her love me, felt her carry the weight of her love for me, the way she had meant it when she winked, the way she had meant it when she said it that first time—Hold on now love, hold on now love, I am taking us home—only, back then, I hadn’t understood from a place in me so close and open but so dug down deep and far away, too; the weight of us both made her stronger, in a way, but in another way slowed her down.

It was my race too this time, and both of us felt it. Here was my chance, blindfolded, moving inside while I stood there still, to swim in a way I never had before: with a big big talented body that had been cracked and damaged but functioned still; with a heart that had been broken badly, and still beat on with love and with rage, giving everything, a warrior heart.

We bounced on the line of electrical energy that flowed down lane four, keeping delicate balance as we rocked and rolled, gasped for breath, puked out air bubbles back underneath water—more difficult now, more exhausting somehow, than in the qualifying heat where a miracle happened; because we were very tired tonight, and had been sick, and hurt, and had had to grow up anyway, but there was no profit without that immeasurable investment of pain; so we just let it spill, and it was like giving, not taking.

As we reached hard for the wall, sprang back reversed and set the bottoms of her feet against it for just that fraction of a second, then powered off, perfect streamlined glide and pull and kick and up, I felt how hard this was for her, for us, how hard she was already fighting for breath. How it was not her conditioning any more, or her strength any more, but her form that took over—not an art, but a craft built up with years of effort, become second nature, consummate enough to hide all the wounds, and then to contain them.

She was carrying me with her, carrying the best part of me: the part of me that was wordless, that beat with a warrior heart. I gave it to her completely now, for safekeeping—because she needed it during the last fifty, more than ever—not in time for the Worlds, or the Olympics, or the Pan Ams, maybe, but in time for her to use it and love it and feel it, yes, for the rest of her life.

I was not afraid of losing it myself. There was plenty more to spare.

I knew, too, that I loved her; not just for the day or the month, but for my soul and for my life. I knew it would not be easy, not if I wanted to love her right, or be loved right by her; but maybe this life was my working life, not a life for ease or relaxation—and there was so much work to do, so far, so very far, to go.

The last fifty was hell. I kept my eyes shut. At one point, terror and doubt set in. But we smashed it away, said silently, savagely, oh no you don’t, fucker. It was around the sixty that muscle spasms lurked, were driven off, came back in a wrenching grip of vengeance when we hit the wall for seventy-five; so that, gasping up and out too soon, we almost came to a complete stop, saw blurs of white wake approaching each side, remembered that we were not alone, there were seven others trying to get to the end first; and, for ourselves, and for each other, and for Brenna Allen too, we had come here to win. Twenty more yards of pain, Babe, I said. What
can’t
we stand for a few more seconds? Then the frozen muscles moved, protesting; the brain knew that if we were hurting this bad, everyone else must be, too; the heart opened up, and the guts did too, and the body went forward.

We were careful not to look. To the right. Or the left. Because you never do that in the 100—never.

We made an on-the-spot decision, though, that countered traditional wisdom. We stroked up for one last breath. Sensing that, contrary to what all the coaches said, the breath would help us; that air was good, our human element after all, and to get as much of it as possible gave us power.

Then, all agony, all exhaustion, all focus, we concentrated with our mind and with our heart, and kicked forward, as hard and as strong as we could, forward, glide, touched firmly into the wall.

I opened my eyes.

I could hear her, or thought I could, anyway—beneath the rumble of voices, and applause, the beep of the time clocks, click of Brenna Allen’s stopwatch, cheers of women all around me, and the thin, tenor voice of her brother yelling All right
Babe!
—I could hear her sob for breath. Feel her lean her forehead against the slippery cold wet wall. Hands clinging. Trying desperately to breathe. Every rib and chest muscle expanding, throat sucking, and the pounding, lightless, dying feeling the 100 can give you inside.

Out of the water, you say.

Into air. Give me air.

Let me live.

We were separate now; I had my heart back, she her suffering body. She rested it against the wall. Cried because she hurt so bad. Laughed because she’d won.

Left to myself again, in the time between her winning and lifting herself out of the water, I have my comeuppance. I hear the tough, mature, wise voice in my head—the voice that is not quite mine yet—telling me the truth.

Ellie, it doesn’t matter that no one expects much of you.

It doesn’t matter that you’re hurt, and sick.

It doesn’t even matter that you qualify.

But, Ellie—if you don’t get in there tomorrow and swim that heat as hard and as fast as you can; if you don’t dig way down deep and spill out all of your guts for it; if, success or bust, you don’t crawl out of that pool with every shred of desire and effort left behind—then, then, you will never be able to look at your face in the mirror again without a mask of doubt; and you will never be able to hear the word Hammerhead again without shuddering; and you will never be able to wear the jacket they gave you, to glory in the dark blood-red of it, with the ugly proud ornate letters over the left breast that say
Captain Marks.

Fear thuds cold boot soles over my insides. Babe’s old fear—of finals, and of qualifying heats—I understand it, deep down, for the first time; but, also, there is something about it that I think I love, that I think I know already. So that, shaking with a joy for her and a terror for myself, I am looking forward to it like some mercenary soldier in the front lines; or a boxer, maybe, waiting for the very first punch.

Babe approaches the bench. She’s stopped, for a few seconds, by some anchorman from the definitely obscure cable TV station covering this meet. I see him say something and wave a microphone in her face, see her shrug, reply briefly, turn away.

As she gets closer, I see that she’s still breathing very hard. I try to read what’s on her face—disappointment? because even though she won the time was slow, slower than her qualifying time, and the seeds in lanes three and five gave her quite a race. But maybe it’s not disappointment, or even doubt, maybe it’s relief. And maybe not even that, but just pain. Yes. She hurts bad. Coach stands to greet her, and then something happens that I’ve never seen before: she opens her arms, and Babe steps inside them and puts her head on her shoulder, and cries. Brenna Allen just stands there, patting her back like she’s an infant who needs burping. For a second, I am jealous. But then glad.

She sits next to me, dripping. Someone hands her a towel. Someone else smacks her shoulder, someone her other shoulder, saying Nice work, Babe. Congratulations. I realize that I’m still clutching her folded sweats to my chest. She’s still sniffling tears and chlorine, chest still heaving, cheeks and forehead flushed with effort. There are veins in her neck, and one across her right deltoid, that still throb, bulging out against the skin. She sets her hands on her knees. Both forearms are shaking. She glances over.

“Oh. There they are.”

“Want them on?”

“Sure,” she says. “In a minute.”

Someone is standing next to us, suddenly, on the deck: a young male, definitely trespassing, in worn jeans and brand-new very expensive aerodynamically designed basketball shoes. A T-shirt displays his skinny arms, over one of which is draped a black leather bomber jacket.