Flat Water Tuesday (20 page)

She pushed it back down, hard. “Ionic Greek, if it’s any of your business.”

“You speak Greek?”

“They stopped speaking Ionic Greek about three thousand years ago, give or take a few hundred.”

“How come you’re not studying any languages you can use?”

“What are you studying?”

“Spanish. Because they make me.”

“Are you doing well?”

“I’ve been able to speak it since I was ten. It’s a blow off. Some of my father’s workers are from Mexico. I was thinking of taking up French.”

“Why?”

“It’s pretty suave.”

“You’re pronouncing it wrong. You don’t say ‘swave.’”

“How do you, then?”

“Do you plan on flying to Paris after graduation?”

“You never know. I might. The world championships are in Belgium. They speak French there.”

“They speak Flemish, dummy. And Paris—okay, forget Paris. I hate that city. It’s not worth it. And you’d get along without French anyway. My mother doesn’t speak the language and she has a pied-à-terre there.”

“A what?”

“You know. An apartment. She got it from her first husband as part of the settlement. Lucky her.”

“So you speak French. You could have helped me pass.”

“I had a French tutor until I was sent here.”

“Why didn’t you stick with it?

“I had learned enough. And he kissed me in my mother’s living room. And I hate Paris. You don’t listen, do you?”

“What did you do when the guy kissed you?”

“I hit him where men don’t like being hit. Then I ran downstairs and had the doorman come up and throw him out. Then I called his wife.” She closed the book softly, kept it before her with her fingers gently upon it, like a hymnal. “What do you want?”

“I came down here to apologize for being such a jerk in the tanks.”

“Am I supposed to be impressed? Is that what you thought? Connor covered for you, you know. Channing was pissed. You just can’t do that stuff, Rob.”

“I know it. I screwed up. I nearly didn’t go at all. Seriously.”

“Don’t be dumb.”

I picked up the little bowl of sugar envelopes sitting before her, ripped one open and made a pile in the middle of the table, stirred it with the red stick from Ruth’s coffee. I drew a boat in the sugar, made marks for every oarsman.

“Oh. I get it,” she said. “You wanted to make a statement. You wanted to be a rebel.” She leaned over and gently exhaled, scattered sugar across the table. “I don’t like that kind of attitude. Can I ask a stupid question?”

“Go ahead. There are no stupid questions, or so they tell me.”

“Do you really think switching from a single to the four is going to be so hard? I watched you in the tanks. Your problem isn’t your rowing. You know exactly how to use that sweep oar. Your problem is that you’re angry. You started out angry. At Channing, at Connor. Maybe you’re angry with me, too. It’s as if you think we want to take something from you.”

I scratched the table with the stick, tried to etch in my initials. She cupped her hand and brushed the sugar into it, poured it into her empty mug. “You came here to row with us, so you’re going to have to be on our team. And you’re going to have to go to our training sessions. And wear the tie and observe all the silly traditions. Anyway, you were only asked to the tanks. You weren’t asked to race. Not yet. There’s a difference.”

“I wasn’t mad down there. Channing, Connor, you, the others … rowing in the tanks … I don’t know, you were all only a few feet away. I was … afraid I guess. I kept thinking that Channing was going to look real close and see that I’m a fraud. That he’d know there was no secret sauce.”

“What secret sauce? What are you talking about?”

“You know, the secret sauce at McDonald’s. The secret herbs and spices in KFC, the secret formula in Coke. The whole reason people buy that stuff is there’s a secret ingredient that makes it better. Even the scientists can’t figure out what it is. But it’s in there.”

“There’s a secret sauce in McDonald’s and KFC food?”

“Yeah. I mean, no. I mean, nobody knows. That’s the point.”

“Carrey, you aren’t making any sense.”

“How could you not know about the Colonel’s secret recipe? That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

She blushed. “Here’s what I do know. Boys who row in the God Four are cooler than scullers. That’s what I know. So, good luck.”

“I don’t need luck. I told you that. I don’t need them to like me, Ruth.”

“But you want them to. Everyone wants to be liked.”

“You don’t.”

She scowled into her book. “Winning isn’t everything. I never thought I’d say that, but it isn’t. And no one likes a sore loser.”

“Winning
is
everything here. At least as far as crew is concerned. They want to win the Warwick Race so badly it’s like an obsession. Nobody has said they’d be happy with a loss. That’s for sure.”

“We want to win against Warwick, yes. But you don’t need to win at
everything
, Carrey. You don’t need to beat Connor on the water every time you two go out in your dumb sculls. Or sprint faster than him on every single training run. Or kill yourself trying to better his erg scores. Or act like a prima donna in the tanks. Talk about an obsession … I mean, what is it with you and him anyway? The guys on the team
like
you, Carrey. But they’re starting to think you’re kind of a jerk. Like, worse than Connor. And that doesn’t work for me. I have enough jerks to deal with.”

“So what do you think I should I do?”

“Calm down. Just calm down. Be cool. Like when you first got here, before you even knew there was a Warwick Race. Before you met Connor and he started running around in your head. You seemed much nicer then, okay?”

“I’ll give it a shot. I can’t guarantee anything, though.”

“Well, that’s the best I can hope for, then. Now, go away. I need to study and you’re distracting.”

I checked her out, this fragile-tough chick with her Greek book. Wendy would have liked Ruth, and that is high praise indeed. She turned a page and I saw that she was smiling. As I walked out of the room I gave The Coffee Guy a thumbs-up. He didn’t respond, but I was pretty sure Ruth watched me do it.

15.

I sat behind Ruth Anderson for an entire year, just two seats away, watching her work, listening to her in class, and then saw her almost every day through winter training and, of course, in the boat. Why I was so drawn to her remains a mystery to me. My memory of her is of a girl far more complex than she ever could have been, given how young we were and the restricted environment we lived in.

Even though I was something alien and new to the team, at least I could earn acceptance in the traditional ways respected by rowers. But Ruth, the first female coxswain of the God Four, had to forge her own way into that rarified world. No other sport at Fenton had girls competing equally alongside the boys. We would be the closest thing she could call friends, but even once she was valued as a full-fledged member of the team, she remained something of an outsider. While I could wander over to West Dorm to shoot the breeze with Jumbo or play cellar soccer with Wadsworth after study hall, Ruth was literally not allowed that closeness with us as teammates. The boys’ dorms were off-limits to girls after dinner, our rooms always forbidden territory for members of the opposite sex. She made that exclusion seem utterly natural, a privilege she bore with grim pride. I admired her for that and always thought of her more as a quiet ally than a buddy or even a girlfriend. She had been swallowed whole by the crew but had still managed to stamp her own identity upon it.

I’d look for that kind of independence in the women I met after Fenton, and would find it in Carolyn. In the five years I lived with Carolyn, I never once thought she’d want to share her life with anyone but me. But I always felt I was competing against that instinctive solitude.

*   *   *

Autumn began to turn relentlessly into winter at Fenton. Every morning I would open the curtains in my dorm room and bathe in the symphony of color that the fall brought to the valley. Those millions upon millions of turning leaves marked the end of the season. The brilliant colors in the cold light against those gothic buildings and the darkening grass seemed at once beautiful and forbidding. Real cold was coming soon but the leaves held against it. Route 7 was a flaming tunnel of overhanging leaves. They blew across the practice fields in golden red swirls, sprites searching for summer. They floated down the river in pockets of yellow and brown and gathered in huge, inviting piles all around the campus. The boardwalk began to smell of arboreal decay. For the first time, I felt that a significant portion of my life was ending, and that the ending was natural.

I knew that I had started falling for Ruth just a day before the strength testing for the God Four really began. I had run along Route 7 to the boathouse and was stretching in the drive when I saw Ruth and Connor walking across the field by the river. Connor was on the riverside, bundled up against the cold in a long camel coat and a plaid scarf and boots, kicking leaves as he went. Ruth was dressed almost identically, her long, black hair streaming behind her and ubiquitous leather satchel slung across her body like some kind of armor. The leaves scattered across the fields glowed ethereally in the half light of the afternoon. The whole tableau was like a glimpse into another world I was not meant to see. A mirage of privilege.

The two of them might have been speaking about anything but it seemed to me, looking at them from a distance, that they were commiserating. They could have been talking about rowing. Or New York. Or Paris. Or how to arrange a private flight to Cape Cod, or possibly just about the video showing in the dining hall that night. But seeing them from two soccer fields away I felt an exclusion that I had never felt in my life. Fenton would be the closest I’d ever come to an existence they took for granted, to everything I hadn’t even known was there to aspire to. Rowing had brought me here, washed me up against these people and given me that blushing afternoon when I watched my two teammates walking beside a darkening river. It was a day, I am sure, of no consequence to them, but it is one of my strongest memories of the school.

As they shrunk into the distance I wondered if there was anything between them, then pushed the thought away. I still had to beat Connor on the bench pull test. Acknowledging the idea that there was something else he could take from me was not going to help.

*   *   *

The bench pull station is a marvel of Inquisition engineering.

It’s a thick wooden plank, shaped like an ironing board mounted on stout wooden legs. You climb up on the bench and lie facedown, your chin against the grooved, bitten, blood-and spit-stained tapered edge of the wood. The board is narrow enough so your arms hang on either side. If you drop your hands down your fingers just touch the floor and your shoulders are fully extended.

You reach down and pick up a seventy-five pound bar. You are meant to pull the bar all the way to your body and knock it against the bottom of the bench. Any pull that doesn’t knock, doesn’t count. If you lift your chin from the bench at anytime, the pull doesn’t count. If you lift your feet from the bench, the pull doesn’t count. Everytime you pull the weight up into the plank, it jolts your stomach and bashes the wood into your jaw with a dull thump. That Saturday we had five minutes to produce as many pulls as possible. Seventy-five pounds isn’t very heavy for an oarsman. It’s deceptively light. I could reach down and crack the bar into the bench ten, fifteen, twenty times before the task became difficult.

But everyone on the team wanted to go for at least a hundred pulls. If you went out too fast, lactic acid built up in your muscles and within a minute your shoulders felt as if they were on fire. I have seen kids who started out with sixty pulls in the first minute drop to thirty in the second, ten in the third, and then lie there, red-faced and straining, unable to move the bar at all for the last two minutes.

Connor and I filed into the basement of the boathouse where two bench pull stations had been set next to each other in the erg room. Connor was slated to take his test right next to me. Like an opera singer trained in the arias of torture, Ruth was drinking lemon tea for the sake of her precious voice. She had a yellow legal pad on the bench before her. Channing was simply waiting, idling away the time, drawing on his immense reserves of patience. The basement was cold; all the steel in the place made it look and feel like an industrial storage locker. I stripped off my down coat, my hat and gloves, threw them in the corner. I was wearing my sweat suit for the test. Connor, in a Russian bearskin hat only he could wear without looking ridiculous, had on his trau and FSBC sweatshirt under his charcoal coat and plaid scarf.

“Good to see you two,” Ruth said. She looked different in an atypically tight red sweat suit I had never seen before, though I knew better than to make any sort of comment. She held her white Styrofoam cup in both hands as if praying to whatever pagan god evil little coxswains worshipped. She regarded us through the steam. Connor began to exhale heavily, stretching his arms to stuff oxygen into his muscles. I did the same. Perry would compete against Wadsworth next, but the two of them had been told to wait upstairs. Members of the lesser orders would file down later.

Channing gave us a few moments while we wheezed and puffed in the concrete gloom, then spoke. “Gentlemen, I would like to see you both go over a hundred and seventy pulls today. I will count for Mr. Payne. Ruth will count for you, Robert. Is that acceptable?” It was not a rhetorical question. “I’d appreciate some competition,” he added and smiled his yellow, carious smile. Connor rolled his neck, shoved his sleeves up over his forearms. Ruth carefully set her tea on the floor and unhooked her timer that was clipped to the waistband of her sweatpants. “Okay. Five minutes of fun and diverting entertainment. Let’s see what you guys can do.”

Channing stepped away from the stations, his hands in his pockets. He had a magical way of disappearing into the scenery when the pain began. And the more grueling things were set to be, the more pleasant the man became. I could have sworn he was humming to himself.