This is the Water (13 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

T
his is you shaking your head while driving home, thinking of Chris, thinking you've got to hand it to her. How many women would bother to help find a serial killer? You realize you're almost jealous of her for being so involved.

When you get home and the telephone is ringing and the girls are practicing violin and the dog is barking and Thomas is standing on the log pile chainsawing, you think about the place you stayed in at the equator. At the equator, beaches stretched on for what could have been miles and there were no other people on them. There were a few caves you could walk into and hear your voice echo. At the bottom of the caves there were pools of water where small fish swam and sea urchins lay shored against rocks. In the water one day there were jellyfish. The sting of the jellyfish was not so bad, and you could pick up the jellyfish by holding your palm over their tops and then turning your hand over, and you could throw jellyfish at one another for fun. Your children liked this game, and Thomas liked to hold a jellyfish up to his eye and say, “Oh, darn, I lost my contact,” or put the jellyfish on the top of his head and say, “I think the water's lovely today, don't you?” Thomas also liked putting two jellyfish over his chest and asking, “Do you like my new bikini?” You wish that you were back at the equator and swimming in the ocean and riding the waves. You wish you hadn't met Paul and didn't think about him every night right before falling asleep. You should be thinking about your girls instead. Sofia's been reading too many YA books that are poorly written. You want to go through your own books and find one that's a classic, one you know she'd like, but lately you haven't had the time or the energy, the wherewithal to get up from your chair and do it. You'd like to take Sofia for a haircut. It's getting so long now and she keeps hiding behind it. Some days she pulls it so far in front of her face it seems as if it's just the tip of her nose that peeks out. How can you make her feel good about herself and at the same time suggest that she's got to change the way she wears her hair? You remember how at her age your brother also hid behind his hair and wore it so long that a big swath of it covered his eyes. If he ever wanted to see something he had to spasmodically jerk his head to make it flap away from his eyes. If only your father would have stayed with the family and been there those years to watch your brother switch from playing trumpet to guitar, how easily your brother did it, how beautiful he sounded in no time at all, then maybe your brother wouldn't have killed himself, you think. This is you thinking how Alex's birthday is only a few days away and you haven't begun to think of what to get her. Does she really need new sneakers? Can't she just wear the old pair another few months? She keeps telling you she needs a new racing suit, but you refuse to believe it. You bought one only a few months ago, right before the summer swim season. Could she have possibly grown so much? Shouldn't there be some kind of balance between the rate of their growth and the rate of how much the suits stretch out each time they wear them to race? The suit she has now, you're sure, fits fine. It fits the way it's supposed to. It digs into her shoulders and leaves a raw-looking red mark as much as it ever did, but not any more so. It cuts into her thighs as much as it ever did. It makes it as hard for her to breathe as it ever did, and it hurts your fingers as much as it ever did, but not more than usual, to squeeze her into the suit when you're standing in a bathroom stall, banging your elbows against the metal wall every time you get a good grip on the sides of the suit and heave your arms up to try and lift it over her rear.

That night you watch a movie with Thomas and the girls. In the movie a man is about to kill himself by putting a pistol into his mouth. Your daughters know what your brother did to himself. They came with you to your brother's funeral just two years ago. You were so thankful they were there. You slept with them in the same bed at your sister's house, and held them to you in the night. It didn't matter that Thomas thought your brother was an asshole, and that he didn't come with you to the funeral. You didn't think he could have provided as much comfort as your two girls did at that time. Nothing was more comforting than feeling your girls in your arms, watching them in their sleep, and seeing the smoothness of their skin, the perfect arch of their eyebrows, their high cheekbones slightly colored from the summer sun. “What a jerk. Why does he want to do that?” Alex says, watching the man on the television with the gun in his mouth, but it is not a question she is looking for an answer to. You are glad your daughter can say that killing yourself is stupid. You are glad she will not end up like your brother, with her blood forming another head like the head of a cauliflower. You want to tell Thomas that genetics isn't everything, that maybe, just maybe, this idea of killing yourself doesn't run in the family the way he thinks it does.

It's fungus we should worry about, Thomas tells you at night while you're reading in bed. The bats, the corn, the frogs, they're all dying from it. We know much more about viruses and bacteria than we do fungus, and it's the one thing that we should really be worried about. Out the window, you see the moon, and the way it lights up the field by the pond as bright as a searchlight. You are more worried about the killer than you are about fungus.

You read the paper in bed. There is a picture of the same trooper with the battered nose who came to the pool to talk to the coach. The picture was taken on a rainy day. The trooper is wearing a plastic covering that fits with elastic over his hat to keep it from getting wet. The trooper says that the public should not be worried. They are working hard on the case. They will find this man. You feel confident when you look at the picture of the trooper. If he is the kind of man who cares enough about his hat to cover it with plastic so it will not get wet in the rain, then you are sure he will find this killer. There is no need, you think, to have Paul get involved in the case. He's right. It would just complicate the search. This man, this trooper with his hat encased in plastic and his strong, square shoulders, will find the killer. Even Chris, with her paintings, is helping to find the killer. The killer will surely be found.

You find yourself the next day at practice asking the water a question while you swim. Will the killer be found? You strain your ears to hear the answer, but all that you hear are swimmers splashing the water. It's someone's birthday, and so for fun the swimmers all sit on one side of the pool and the swimmer whose birthday it is has to swim the pool's length while it's being furiously kicked by thirty or so swimmers, who are churning the water so that it's white with froth.

 

T
he next day at practice you wish you had not fallen asleep so early the night before. You wish you had moved close to Thomas and reached out for him and stroked him the way he liked, your fingertips moving in an upward motion. You wish you were not seeing Paul walk into the facility right at this moment. You think he's smiling at you and then you realize he is actually smiling at Chris. You wish you were done with your laps already so you could stay and talk to Paul, but you have not swum yet. While swimming, and lifting your head to the side for a breath, you see Paul and Chris in the stands, sitting close to each other, watching their daughter. You see Paul put his arm around Chris while they watch Cleo, his fingers dangling close to one of her perfect breasts. You wish they did not look like such a perfect couple.

This is you at home trying on Sofia's racing john. The suit has legs that reach to just above your knees. The children are out playing in the stream and Thomas is at the lab. You try it on in front of your dresser mirror. Since Sofia is a few inches taller than you are, and the size is bigger than what you would order for yourself, you think it might possibly fit. You want to see if it sucks in all of your fat and makes you look as thin as Chris is. You wonder if one day Paul would somehow want to see you in it. You do one leg at a time. Just getting the legs on takes you a good two minutes, now comes the rear. You tug and pull to get it up. As you're struggling your rear gets compressed upward, and your cheeks rise up above your waist looking like two bubbles on your lower back, looking like two of those Styrofoam life preservers in the shape of an egg that mothers from your mother's generation put on their children when they were first learning to swim. You begin to sweat all over and at once, as if you were seriously ill and had a high fever and your fever just decided to break now. For a moment you think you might rip the suit by mistake, but then you remind yourself how much the suit cost, and how the seams are ultra-reinforced, and how there is no way it could rip. You think you might faint, but you take a deep breath, exhale it slowly, and then get back to work. You tug. You pull. You extend your buttocks forward and back, a rocking motion to help slide it up and over. Pop, you think you distinctly hear when the suit finally does go over your rear. Now for the body and the straps. With the body on, you feel your chest being compressed. You wonder if this is how the women hunted in the Salem witch hunts felt when they were stoned to death. You have to suck in your breaths so deeply just to get some air down in your lungs, and you have to work so hard at exhaling. You reach down to slide the straps over one shoulder. You have to bend over to the side with your whole body to provide enough counterforce to lift up on one strap and get it over your shoulder. The strap digs in hard the entire time you're sliding it across your skin. With just one strap on, your body is forced down on that side, and you are standing crooked, one shoulder higher than the other. You try to bring your shoulder down away from the overbearing pressure, just to relieve it. When you have the whole suit on and you can barely breathe, and your genitalia feel as though they've been pushed up inside you, you look at yourself in the mirror. You are a panoply of red marks and scratches. Your legs look as if the claws of a cat have raked them where you've dragged the bottoms of the suit up to the tops of your legs. Your arms, which you pulled the straps forcefully across, have the top layer of skin scraped off in intermittent sections. Your chest, neck, and face are all blotchy from the exertion and heat, and you still feel as though you're going to pass out because you're not getting enough air, but the way you look, ah, the way you look, you think. You are as thin as Chris now. Your breasts, which you once thought were too big, are now pleasantly rounded and squashed behind the black polyester fiber. Your rear sits tight and high. And most of all, you feel faster, even though you're just standing in a room. No wonder all the girls like these suits. You feel that if you dove into water and kept going, you'd go down as fast as a bullet. Then, if you touched pool bottom and turned around for the resurfacing, you'd shoot straight upward, coming up a few feet out of the water like a great white after it's grabbed its prey. You think of taking a picture of yourself. If you can't believe it's you standing there looking so thin and firm, then nobody else will either. What stops you is the location of the camera, all the way downstairs and in a hard-cased bag on the floor by the door, where you left it the last time you came back from a shoot. You're scared to bend down. Just bending over slightly you feel as if your organs are rolling one on top of the other and you're cutting off some blood and other necessary fluids from your tissues. You think how you might just buy a girdle, not a girdle like old ladies wore when you were a girl, but the new kind of girdles, the girlie girdles that all the brides you photograph are wearing these days, the girdles called body shapers that come in styles like corsets and bodysuits and waist shapers and are made of comfortable spandex guaranteed to firm what you've got and add cleavage to what you haven't got. You feel younger, it's true, and even though it takes you almost as long to get the suit off—your top layer of skin gets even more damaged and your rear swears it will never take the suit off and protests and protests and fights back every time it hears you grunt and groan to work the fabric off your hips—you love yourself in the suit. Paul would love me in that suit, you think. Once it's off, you put it back in Sofia's closet, where she dutifully hangs it up after each meet. It still has the shape of your rear inside it, and it's damp from all of the sweat you lost in your bathing suit battle. You avoid looking at your body free of its suit in the mirror. You don't want to see how badly your muffin top is drooping toward the floor. If you don't look in the mirror, then maybe you can keep the image in your mind of how you looked when you were in the suit. You can keep that image in your mind when you speak to Paul next, and you can feel okay about feeling sexy when he talks to you, because you know that anytime you want to, anytime you have, say, an hour free, you can squeeze yourself back into Sofia's suit, and you will fit the bill. You will really be that sexy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

T
his is Dinah deciding to lose weight. She's tired of seeing her daughter grow as large as she is even though her daughter swims a two-hour practice every day. Dinah decides she'll set an example for her daughter. She learns of a new regimen to lose weight that requires human chorionic gonadotropin. She's not sure what that is, but thinks it has something to do with babies, and every day she pours drops of this stuff on her yogurt and she lifts the spoon to her mouth thinking she's eating failed pregnancies and intended abortions. The taste isn't so bad, especially since she mixes maple syrup on top of the yogurt as well. She starts losing weight, but the down side to that is her husband is becoming more attracted to her, and because he is losing his hearing, he talks to her loudly in the night, pleading with Dinah for love, while Jessie, who shares a bedroom wall with them, can probably hear what he's saying.

Dinah knits in the bleachers, the needles swishing together, as her daughter swims her practice. Dinah has, by accident, knit some of her hair into a pink-and-brown-striped scarf, but she leaves the hair in the scarf anyway, wishing she knew of a person who would want such a personalized gift from her. She can't think of anyone right now, except her husband of course. Right now she wouldn't want to give any gift to him. Dinah's husband blames his going deaf on one day—the day he shot a buck and the rifle report in his ear was much louder than usual, because at the exact same time another hunter shot the same buck. It was never decided who made the kill shot, and Dinah's husband didn't take up the other hunter's offer to split the buck, because he didn't want to partake in the venison anyway. “I just want the antlers,” he told the other hunter, and so the rack of six points was given to him and it now hangs above his bed and Dinah tells him how the antlers drive her nuts because the board they are mounted on bangs against the wall, making a rattling sound every time her husband rolls over, and making her think the buck has come alive and is ready to trample her with its cloven hooves in her sleep. “I can't hear the rattling sound,” Dinah's husband tells her. “I'm going deaf, remember?” Then he walks away, knowing that if she answers him he will not hear her anyway. Dinah's husband hates going deaf. He tells everyone that at least he won't have to hear his daughter's pop music and he won't have to hear all the loud, obnoxious mothers who cheer for their children from the bleachers during a race, but then he also tells everyone that what's terrible about going deaf is that not everything is tuned out, you still hear muffled sounds that make you think you're going insane because you're always trying to make sense of them, as if they're everyone's voices telling you secrets or telling you what to do, but you can't understand them.

This is Dinah, who has put down her knitting and is now looking through her opera glasses at her daughter swimming, or not swimming, really, she thinks. Her daughter is a cheater, as she can see through the lenses smeared with what must be her own oils, from her hands and her face. Her daughter pulls on the lane line to drag herself through the water when she's tired. Her daughter is not doing the entire set. Dinah can tell because she's been counting, she's even ticked off on a sheet of paper how many two-hundred IMs her daughter has done and she has only done seven and the coach told them to do eight. Dinah thinks she should go down there on deck and tell her daughter to knock it off, to finish the set like the rest of the girls or she'll never get faster. She'll threaten to take away her novels if she doesn't. Dinah then realizes she doesn't want to go down on deck. She doesn't want to burst through the double glass doors and have everyone notice her, even though she has lost weight, a lot of weight. She's still not sure she wants to be seen crouching by the end of the lane and admonishing her daughter while the other swimmers and the coach look at her. She doesn't want the coach to see her and then later call her into her office and give her a talking-to, because she has been called into the office a few times before, for various actions that the coach said were over the top, not necessarily against the rules the way Annie would go against the rules, but they were not how a swim-team parent was expected to behave. Once Dinah ran through crowds on deck before a race to get to her daughter and scream at her to get up to the blocks because her heat was about to begin, and she pushed her daughter from behind to get her up on the blocks, and she was wrong. It was not her daughter's heat. She has been called into the coach's office for calling the director of an away swim meet and entering her daughter into a meet that her daughter's team, as a whole, was not going to attend, and therefore her daughter wouldn't have the coaches there representing her. She didn't know it was against the rules. She just wanted her daughter to attend the meet because Jessie had a good chance of winning some of the events there. She has been called into the coach's office for sending too many e-mails telling the coaches what events she thinks her daughter should be swimming, which is not against the rules, but, she was informed, was uncalled for and meddlesome. She has been called into the coach's office after a swim meet at which she organized the concessions stand and then—when she felt there weren't enough people helping her sell the gooey mac and cheese, the brownies in baggies, and the cold tasteless pasta salads—she sent a mass e-mail to all of the parents telling them that they weren't pulling their fair share, that the proverbial scales had been tipped, and not in her favor, and that they had better volunteer more and harder next time or there would be no concessions stand. She wrote that it would be a devastating disappointment to their team as well as the other teams who came to the meet. Imagine, she said, arriving at a meet and having nothing to buy for your child. Imagine no Ring Pops, sodas, bagels, or oat granola bars to tide them over throughout the long grueling day. The e-mail was lengthy, at least a page. She did not check it first. She did not think the other parents deserved that much consideration. Let them be assaulted by bad grammar and typos, she thought while emphatically hitting the send key.

Of course, there are a few parents in particular she doesn't care for. No, that's wrong. There are a few parents she doesn't like at all. There's Annie, whose daughters often lead the practice lanes and are always ahead of her daughter. Annie, who doesn't entirely play by the rules. Annie, who went off with Paul and hung out in his hotel room while their kids watched TV together in another room. And what was that remark she made to her about her bathing suit being very Marilyn Monroe? On the surface, you'd think Annie was being nice, but Dinah wasn't fooled. Marilyn Monroe had killed herself. More likely Annie was hinting that the suit made Dinah look pale, and corpselike. She's probably sleeping with Paul, Dinah thinks to herself. I should tell her husband she's having an affair. People think it's not their business to tell other people things like that, but it is. If you see blatant injustice like that staring you in the face, it's your duty, your obligation to report it. She told her husband, Joseph, that she was going to tell Annie's husband, Thomas, that his wife was having an affair. Joseph rarely becomes angry, but when she told him she planned to tell Thomas about Annie's affair, he promised her that if she told him anything, he would tell Thomas not to pay any attention to her. He would tell Thomas, he said, that Dinah had finally come “undone, unhinged, in-fucking-sane.” In that moment, Dinah felt that she could honestly say that she didn't love Joseph anymore, so she told him so and asked for a divorce in the same breath. She felt that telling the truth to those who least wanted to hear it was what she was probably best at. Even to herself, she was good at telling the truth. When she first got the idea to lose weight, she stood naked in front of the mirror. She made herself look at her reflection for a solid hour. She started with her feet, the flab on her ankles that hung over her ankle bones, that made her look like a doll made of nylon stockings and stuffed with pillow filling. She made her way up to her legs, which were riddled with varicose veins, and then to her waist, where the fat hung over her hips, and then up to her neck, with its three rolls. She held up her fingers to the mirror, and they were so swollen it looked as if her wedding ring would never come off. And it didn't with just her pulling on it, so then she went to the kitchen sink and squirted dish soap onto it and ran warm water over it, but even then the ring would not twist off. She would need a jeweler's saw for that task, or better yet she would need to lose weight. So she did. It was when she reached the twenty-five-pound goal after seven weeks that the ring fell off by itself while she was washing her hands in the restroom at the facility. She could hear it clink its way down the spiraling pipe for the first few seconds, and then she could hear nothing but the water running and the distant sound of children playing in the current of the lazy river and the coach on the main pool deck yelling, encouraging her swimmers in practice to “Pick it up, pick it up,” and quicken their pace.

But that mother and the father of that poor girl Kim, who was murdered, Dinah liked them. At away meets, the mother, Gina, would always save seats on the bleachers for the other parents by putting down extra sweaters or jackets. Poor Gina. Dinah can't imagine what she's going through, having a daughter who was murdered. Dinah feels glad she doesn't know what Gina is going through. At the moment, it's hard enough to be going through what Dinah is going through herself, watching her daughter cheat in her workout. Her daughter is getting out of the water and heading toward the bathrooms, though she just visited them not even half an hour ago. This is another tactic Dinah knows her daughter uses to get out of doing the complete workout. Dinah, not having her daughter to look at through her binoculars, uses them to look at the other parents sitting in the bleachers. She doesn't see the usual suspects. Where are Paul and Annie? She thought for sure they'd be sitting together, their knees touching, Annie tossing her graying hair behind her shoulder like a teenager, and Paul the whole time not looking at anything else but Annie. They are not here tonight. Neither of them. Dinah is tempted to go out and see if they are together in the lobby, talking at one of the high café tables with the high chairs that once took such an effort for her to lift herself up onto. Or maybe they are sitting outside in one of their cars. Dinah has noticed how many parents do that. They sit in each other's cars with the lights on and chat with each other until their children are finished with practice. She can see them in the dark some nights, lit up by their overhead ceiling lights, eerily glowing from within, laughing, talking, sharing snacks that are meant for their children but that they can't resist partaking of themselves, the dinner they will eat still a long way off considering how far they live from the facility. Dinah is almost ready to go outside and check to see if Paul and Annie are in a car together, when her daughter comes back from the bathroom and dives into the pool to finish her workout. Dinah fixes her binoculars on her daughter now. The set is a breaststroke, her daughter's best. She is gaining on the girl who has already taken off from the wall and is ahead of her daughter in the next lane over. Dinah wants to call out her daughter's name, and then she wants to call out, “Go, Baby, go!” and she almost does, until she remembers that this is not a meet and this is not a race, but only a practice, on a rainy Monday night, just hours after she has told her husband, very loudly so that he could hear, that she is through with being married. “Done,” she said. She wanted to add, “Up to here,” and motion to her neck with a hand that looked as if it were slicing her head off, but really it is higher, where she is fed up. It is way past her neck. It is as high as the bit of stray hair that stands up from her head, and then some, that she is fed up. It is up to the rafters of the facility, where the ventilation ducts cross. It is through the sliding-glass roof that is opened on warm, stultifying days caustic with the smell of chlorine, and it is all the way up to where the glorious china-blue sky can be seen. Dinah puts down the binoculars now and slumps slightly in the bleachers. The practice isn't even halfway over, and she is so tired. She just wants to go home and sleep, but the first thing she will do before going to bed will be to take those antlers off the wall above her four-poster. Tonight, she swears, she will sleep for once without hearing deer trampling through her dreams.

 

T
his is Paul trying to decide what to do. He is sitting with his hands on the sides of his face looking at a painting of the man his wife calls the killer. It has been months since he has been in her studio, but he is in her studio now, wanting to ask about who is going to drive Cleo to the next meet coming up. No one told him when he was standing before the priest on his wedding day that someday he might have to consider whether or not she needed mental help. “This is insane,” he says, and gestures toward the painting. He doesn't like how the eyes of the man in the painting stare at him. What has gotten into her? “It's him. I know it's him,” she says. “Chris, what's gotten into you?” he says. It's so difficult talking to her these days. She doesn't seem to answer him when he asks simple questions. She almost imperceptibly inclines her head toward her shoulder, as if there's a small person perched there whom she's acknowledging, but she doesn't open her mouth to speak. If only it were Annie he was talking to instead. From her he knows he could get a straight answer, and Annie, at least, would be looking directly at him when he asked the question. He thinks of Annie as his muse. It was after he met her that he started writing the Bobby Chantal story in earnest. Before that he was just staying late at his office toying with a way to approach it. The actual writing of the story didn't start until after he met Annie. Annie's gray hair, almost white, framing a face that seems younger than the hair surrounding it, reminds him of his own mortality, reminds him he only has a finite time in this world to write fiction that matters before he too starts to turn gray and, eventually, dies. Annie is also so grounded and strong, so much the opposite of Chris, who right now is grabbing her car keys, saying she just needs to go for a drive.