This is the Water (10 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

T
his is Mandy sweeping the facility deck, thinking how can so many people, who must have some money because they can afford the facility membership, be such slobs and be so careless? There are candy wrappers left in the lockers and a pair of brand-new sneakers forgotten under the benches. Where she's sweeping now, on the other side of the glass wall where one can see the lazy river, there's a wad of chewed-up gum some pig spit onto the floor. Even if there are some members who haven't been raised with money, at least they should keep their facility clean and throw away their garbage. While she's trying to remove the gum from the broom's bristles, a little boy comes up to her and asks her what is under the big metal grate at the bottom of the lazy river. “That? That is the entrance to the tunnel that leads to where I live!” Mandy says. “Really?” the boy says, and Mandy nods, thinking she misses when her daughter was young and gullible, and she reaches out to pat the boy on the shoulder and reassure him it's all right when the boy runs away screaming, “She's going to kill me!” and the boy's mother marches over to Mandy and tells her, “Don't touch my child ever again,” and Mandy, holding the broom, thinks how she'd like to shoo the mother away with the bristles of the broom as if the mother were a mangy cat who had wandered inside the doorway. Now this is Mandy sitting in the facility director's office being read the riot act, which she doesn't listen to, instead looking at framed photographs on the wall of skiers going down mountains that look too big to be in this country, and she wonders why an aquatic facility director has pictures in his office of snow-covered mountains, and not pictures of large bodies of water that are tempting to swim in. This is Mandy not being fired, but being close to fired, and going back into the locker room to mop, but then going into a bathroom stall instead and sitting down on the uncovered seat while still wearing her jeans. She shakes her head, and cries a little, and then shakes her head some more. She cannot help but think of the girl Kim, who was murdered. Mandy has stopped at that rest stop many times before, usually when she and her husband were on their way to the lake for the weekend. She remembers the girl, Kim. She always smiled at Mandy, and said hello when she saw her. Mandy thinks how the next time she drives up along that stretch of highway with the rest stop, she will stop and leave a bouquet of flowers in a vase. Maybe she can even get her husband to make a wooden plaque with Kim's name on it and the date of her birth and death.

 

T
he dancing hippos enter the locker room noisily. The dancing hippos are a group of older women who take a swimmercize class. No one likes the dancing hippos, because they could just as well do their workout in the smaller pool with the lazy river, but instead they come into the competition pool and take up lanes and space and their hair spray gets mixed with the pool water and the cloying fumes get inhaled by all the lap swimmers. In the locker room they talk about Kim, how awful they feel for the mother, how they have told their own grown children to stay off the highways at night and, whatever they do, never to stop at a rest stop. Then they start chatting and laughing about something you don't want to know about. They can carry on that way for long stretches of time, discussing inanities such as where they bought a potholder or how to rid the garden of blight, all the while blow-drying their hair at the sink and spreading on lipsticks the colors of corals and flamingos and baby blankets. You don't have a garden, and anything to do with gardening usually makes you sleepy right away. You don't know how to recognize different plants raised for eating unless the fruit or the vegetable is hanging right off them. You don't know you need stakes for tomatoes or twine for training snow peas. You don't care. Why don't the dancing hippos just shut their mouths for once? Why are they always so loud about nothing? Why do they take so long to get dressed? Don't they have families to go home to and chores to be done? You know that the minute you enter the door at home you have to start cooking dinner and feed the dog that will be barking continuously until you do. You know you have to empty the dishwasher to load the dishwasher before you even have enough counter space to be able to chop the vegetables and start the dinner for the family, and your girls will be starving, of course. They'll tell you they are starving, and if you tell them to be quiet, they will tell you how many yards they have swum, and it will be in the thousands, and then you will feel bad for them because it is such a long way to travel, all those yards, without eating. Sofia will tell you exactly how far she has swum. She has been tracking how far and recording it in cyberspace. Already she is rounding the southern part of the island of Saint Kitts, and heading back north. You imagine her really swimming in the Caribbean. You see her amidst the blue and green clear water. You see her from up above. She is smiling. She is not concerned with taking out her first fifty faster, the way the coach has been telling her to do. She is just swimming at her own pace, occasionally turning her head to the side, admiring a nearby breaching dolphin, a pelican's impressive dive.

The dancing hippos cackle, at least that's what you hear, a high-pitched cackle that sounds like blackbirds or angry seagulls. You wish you were back on your vacation at the equator and not in the locker room with the dancing hippos, who are now talking about church. At the equator, from a great height overlooking the ocean, you saw a pod of whales that looked just like a breeze ruffling the water here and there. You ate a strange red fruit that looked like the inside of a fig when you bit into it, but almost tasted like a tomato. You used soap on your body provided in the shower that was in the shape of a seashell. You never wore a sweater at night or a wrap. You saw a snake rising from its own coiled body on the driveway to look at you in the headlights of your rental truck. You picked up a crab on the beach with a body as yellow as the sun and legs the color of Japanese eggplants. You stepped on stingrays that slid out from under your feet and made you jump on your surfboard and paddle hard away from them in any direction you could. You breathed in the air deeply while watching stars, and thinking what you were breathing in was some of the light from the stars as well. They were vast, expanding breaths that you thought made you think more clearly.

Now the dancing hippos are talking about food, which they always do after their aerobics class. They trade recipes back and forth that do sound good. Swedish meatballs and Brie cheese baked in puff pastry. This is not the talk of the swim-team parents. We, the swim-team parents, talk of roasted edamame beans for quick protein. We compare organic chocolate milk brands that come in convenient containers. We cook fava beans. We make quinoa pilaf. We flavor with sea salt. We bake with flax. We fry in cast iron. We create salads with fiddleheads found on our land or in our neighbor's fields. We berry-pick at local farms. We meet the steer we'll consume throughout the year. We raise our own hens. We raise our own turkey. We make our own ice cream. We know the horrors of the levels of the saturated fats in the nearby chain's doughnuts. We extol the local Japanese sushi joint. We do not talk of the bag of peanut M&M's we buy to get us through the long day of working at a swim meet. We will not talk of the Diet Coke we drink, perfectly timed to be drunk after our coffee and before the lunch hour, but never in front of our children, lest they see how we drink soda, and we never let them drink it themselves unless it's soda water flavored with natural juice high in some kind of element or vitamin they wouldn't normally get in their daily diet and packaged in a can whose design wipes out any image of an industrial facility spewing smoke, spinning the dials of the electric meter, and hiring immigrants at low wages. Instead the can design screams healthy, whole, natural, good for you, flowers, fruit orchards, and sunshine. As if the cans themselves were just plucked from trees.

You wish the dancing hippos would talk more of food. You'd like to ask them the perfect recipe for a piecrust. You have been trying to perfect your own. One recipe you know calls for vodka instead of water (vodka doesn't evaporate during baking). One recipe asks for lard, not butter. One recipe asks specifically for vegetable shortening to ensure flakiness. One recipe says keep the butter cold with ice before you use it. One recipe asks for baking soda. One recipe asks for ground almond bits. Which recipe do you choose? you want to know, but don't know how to interrupt. Do you just barge in on the conversation, smiling, asking if they could share their favorite piecrust technique? Do you not interrupt, because you feel guilty that when you saw them in the pool, in the end lane, smelling up the water with their hair spray, you wished them, and their ludicrous weight belts for jogging and their foam noodles wedged between their legs for floating, out of the pool and back where they came from.

Now the dancing hippos are singing. It is from a musical. It is from
My Fair Lady
.
“With a Little Bit of Luck” is the song. It is from when Eliza Doolittle's father danced through the streets, weaving in and out of bars, singing that all he needed was a little bit of bloomin' luck. You dress so quickly to get away from them that you don't even bother to brush your hair in front of the mirror. You brush it while running out of the locker room door. You are fighting a knot in your hair so snarled it seems to have claws and be fighting back, when you see Paul waiting in the foyer. The minute you see him you want to do an about-face and go back into the locker room and finish brushing your unruly hair. You want to apply eyeliner and lipstick to spruce yourself up. You'd even use a coral-color lipstick like the dancing hippos use, anything to avoid having him see you the way you look now. Your graying hair bushy around your temples and your eyes with rings around them from the impressions your goggles left on them. You don't turn around, though, and he waves to you and smiles and walks toward you. You can't help but smile back. Maybe your hair doesn't look that bad after all. He puts his hand on your arm when you get close enough. “Hey,” you say. You begin to blush. You can feel your face turning hot, even though your hair's still wet from your shower and the rest of you feels refreshed. “What are you doing here? I thought Chris dropped Cleo off today.”

“She did. She left early, though, and asked me to swing by and pick Cleo up after work. It's on my way.” Just then, the troopers walk out of the facility, their radios crackling against their hips and their shoes squeaking loudly on the polished floor.

“Did you hear about the girl on the team?” you ask Paul while watching the troopers as they leave. The old trooper, the one with the nose that makes him look like a prizefighter, gives one last look at the people working at the front desk before he leaves the facility, as if wanting to memorize their faces.

“I did,” Paul says. “It's incredible. The same rest stop, and everything.”

“Do you think it's the same man?” you ask.

“I don't know what to think. The car's got to be different, though. That was a long time ago.”

“What do you mean, the car's got to be different? Did you see a car that night?”

“Yes, didn't I tell you? It was a red Corvair. It would be a classic by now. It was probably a classic then.”

“But you said you didn't have any information to give the police. You said you wouldn't be able to help them in any way,” you say, suddenly feeling very tired, almost sick from feeling so tired, and thinking maybe it has been a while since you have eaten, but the last thing you want now is to eat. The facility smells like onion bagels being toasted at the snack stand, but toasted too long, almost burning. You wish you could go outside, but you have to wait for your daughters to come out of the locker room.

“Paul, a car? Really? You saw a car all those years ago?” you say, almost with a pleading tone in your voice, wanting him to tell you the truth, to clear things up. You are confused. If only you were back on vacation at the equator, on that long stretch of beach where at night the stars were so bright that when you breathed in they seemed to clear everything up for you. The coach of the team then comes out of the pool area. She has a duffel bag over her shoulder and a light jacket on. She is obviously done for the night and going home. She doesn't say good night or anything to Paul or you as she walks out. She walks with her head down and her lips pursed.

Paul speaks quietly. “I think we should talk about this some other time. Not here.”

You are waiting for him to suggest another time and place. What if he asks you what you are doing later on? Sleeping, I'll be sleeping, you think, and for a flash of a moment you think of your bed with the flowered cotton sheets that look like wild flowers and vines and you wish you were in it right at that moment, on the verge of the sweetness of sleep. You are not in the least bit free later on. You have to go home and make your family dinner. You have to do dishes and put clothes in the dryer and a new load in the washer. You have to choose photos to send your client from your last photo shoot. You see the hours spanning in front of you. You have to read about what's going to happen to Anna Karenina. Of course you know the ending, everyone knows the tragic ending, but maybe somewhere along the way, in all of that text, you'll find there's a way she could have avoided her death—a place where she could have changed herself. You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That's all there is to it. Paul never suggests when and where another time would be. “All right, some other time,” you say. And then your eye begins to twitch. It sometimes does this when you are tired, or when your goggles have pressed on the side of your eyelid for too long. You turn away so Paul won't see it and think you are spastic or have neural problems. Luckily, Cleo comes out of the locker room. She is showered and dressed, her swim bag slung over her shoulder. Paul smiles at you. “Have a good night, then,” he says, and touches your arm before he looks at Cleo and asks her if she is ready to leave.