This is the Water (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

S
itting in the bleachers, trying not to turn around and yell at the parent sitting behind you who yelled at you in the first place, you imagine the sounds of the air conditioner that was in the house you rented on vacation at the equator almost a year ago. You close your eyes and imagine also the calm blue light that would come on the control panel of the air conditioner when it was turned on. You think how you loved that trip. Thomas surfed with you then. He wasn't thinking about his failing lab on the trip. You would see him riding a wave and then falling over backward when he had ridden the wave as far as he could, landing in the water with a yelp and a hoot at having had such a good ride. He walked with you on the beach at night, then stopped and held your arm. He was smiling, amazed, holding out a flashlight into the shrub-covered dunes, where hundreds of orange and purple crabs crawled, their movement sounding like pattering drops of unceasing rain. But now, since you've been back, and the problems at his lab haven't disappeared, the bacteria still aren't growing, the planes by his office at the airport are stilling screeching on the tarmac out his window, he hasn't reached out for you once, and what does it take, you think, to make him reach out to you again? This is when you hear, “Hello, Annie.” It's Chris, with the perfect breasts and rear. “Hey, have a seat,” you say. You then proceed to move your purse and your book to make room for her. Chris has no bags with her, not even a purse, as usual. Because you have known her a few years now you know most of her clothes. She is wearing her faded blue Levi's jeans rolled up to the ankles, tennis shoes, and a white V-neck tee shirt. Her hair is kept back with a simple black ponytail holder, and she wears no makeup. You think she is the most beautiful woman at the meet today, and then you turn around and look at all the other women in the bleachers and think you are right. Chris always smells faintly of mint, not like toothpaste mint or breath-freshener mint, but like the real mint, the kind that grows wild in your field by your house. Whenever you take a walk to the stream through the fields, you break a leaf off and pinch it and smell it.

“Cleo just told me she wants one of those suits,” Chris says. “Like the ones Alex and Sofia have.” With a lift of her chin she points to your girls, who are on deck.

“Oh, those,” you say. “They are the biggest marketing scam. The least expensive of them costs a couple of hundred dollars, but do they really make the girls swim faster? They're so tight the girls sometimes say they can hardly breathe, but without them the girls don't think they can win the race, and if they don't think they can win it, then sometimes they don't,” you say. Chris nods. You feel as if you've hurt Chris's feelings somehow. “I mean, that's great that Cleo's that into swimming that she wants one. Now you too can experience the joy of having to help pull, tug, squeeze, and jam your daughter's rear into a suit in time for her first event when her body's still wet from having swum warm-ups.” Swimmers can't wear the suit during warm-ups and then also for their events that day, because that's too long to keep on a suit that sadistically tight and uncomfortable. “Welcome to the torture club,” you say. Chris laughs. Her teeth are very white, in perfect rows. It is not a full-hearted laugh. It is a polite laugh. You've heard Chris make it before. She does it when she's not really listening, when she's worried, for example, about where Cleo is, if she has taken too long in the locker rooms and hasn't yet come out. But what did I expect? you think to yourself. That wasn't very funny what I just said. You pull out grapes and offer some to Chris. “They're already warm,” you say. “It's so hot in here I think they're turning into wine.” Chris nods, but she does not look hot at all. She is not sweating at the temples the way you are. Chris takes one grape, and then doesn't take any more. “Where's Paul today?” you ask.

“He couldn't make it,” Chris says. “He's got papers to correct.” You nod. Chris doesn't ask you where Thomas is, even though you are ready to tell her that he's cutting wood and splitting wood and stacking wood, and that really, for all you know, he could be eating the wood, because on any given day that he comes home from the lab, if he's not mowing the lawn, then he's doing the wood, because in the winter, all you heat with is the wood because wood heat feels warmer and saves money. This was Thomas's idea, not yours, as most things to do with the house and the family usually are, except the swim team, of course, and joining the facility, which were your ideas. Concerning the wood, you would have been happy with walking over to a dial and turning up the heat. You could have done without hauling in wood at six in the morning in the dark while trying not to slip over ice-encrusted snow. You could have done without always having splinters and small bits of wood embedded in the weave of your sweater fronts from holding the logs to your chest on your way to the woodstove. Who knew that your wrists would hurt from picking up the wood at one end and tossing it on a pile to be stacked after it was split, that it would make them inflamed, and that swellings the size of robin's eggs would appear on the inside of them? You could have done without never having the chance to read the entire paper because its pages were needed to start the fire every—

“What's the matter?” you ask Chris, because you have just noticed that Chris has a tear sliding down her cheek. Instinctively, you look toward the water, to see if it's Chris's daughter, to see if Chris's daughter, Cleo, has lost her race and that's why Chris is crying, because you remember from past meets how you have seen tears in parents' eyes. You have seen tears in the eyes of Dinah, for example, who cried with joy a few years ago when her daughter made it to age groups, a more competitive division, in the fifty breast. You thought then that for Dinah Jessie's success was more about her than her daughter. You've seen plenty of girls cry too, and even boys, when they've lost races. You have seen parents cry when their children who have lost a race cry. You have seen parents cry because the coaches have yelled at them, telling them they have not honored the swim-parent's code, that they have overstepped their boundaries and taken the sacred job of coaching into their own hands. The parents, apparently, were guilty of telling little Mary that she has to bring her arms up out of the water faster in fly. They told her in the car ride home that her rhythm was off, they told her that her legs were spread wide on the entry, they told her before a race to not forget the two-hand touch, they told her to keep her hands in prayer position for the pull out, and they told her to, for crying out loud, breathe on both sides in the free. But it is not Cleo that Chris is crying about, you realize. Cleo is just sitting on deck on her towel reading a book. She's not even swimming the event that's taking place. Chris can't answer you yet. Now more tears are sliding down her cheeks, and the tip of her nose is turning red. You don't have a tissue in your purse to offer her. Unused ChapStick, yes, but not one tissue. You try not to ask Chris any more questions. She will tell you if she wants to. You think how you have been friends for a while but never cried in front of each other before. You realize this has suddenly changed your friendship, turned it up a notch. You are now closer whether you want to be or not. You wonder if someday you'll cry in front of her too and she will look at you with those blue eyes and put her thin, long-fingered hand on your arm and tell you it's going to be all right. You look at the timing board. The five-hundred frees are over and now it's the relays. Your daughters are walking with their relay teams to the blocks. Your older daughter, Sofia, walks half the distance with her book in her hand, still reading. When she realizes she can't dive into the water with the book she runs back to her towel and leaves it there. Chris wipes her face with her hands, making her face appear shiny, and even prettier, you think, and then you think how when you cry, the skin around your eyes puffs up, and your whole nose turns beet red like a seasoned alcoholic, and the skin on your face and your neck gets red blotches in irregular shapes resembling the outlines of the fifty states. Once you stopped your crying completely because you happened to look at your reflection and saw the perfect outline of Texas, and could not believe it was there on the side of your neck. You thought maybe it was some kind of a sign, that you should go to Texas and start life anew, but then you realized you had no desire to go to Texas, and that life anywhere else, except maybe Florida, would be better.

“Darn,” Chris says. “I didn't want to do this.”

“Do what?” you say.

“Cry,” Chris says. “It's just that there are so many people I can't tell, and it's so hard not telling anyone.” You eat another grape, wishing this time that they really had turned to wine. You could use a drink. For a second you think about inventing a wine product in the shape of a grape, where the outside of the grape is made of something edible, and the middle is filled with wine. You could keep them chilled. You could take them with you and pop them into your mouth at sporting events. You could use them as ice cubes in seltzer to have as spritzers.

You are confused. You aren't sure if you want Chris to tell you exactly why she is crying. You get the feeling, the once-in-a-lifetime feeling, you think, because you've never had this feeling before, that what is going to come next out of Chris's mouth here at the dead pool is going to change the world as you know it forever. You watch your girls lining up for their relay heats. Your youngest, Alex, your ten-year-old, has her elastic goggle straps set way too long. You can see that they will drag in the water and hit your girl's arm as she swims, probably keeping her from swimming her best time. You are disappointed in yourself for not remembering to cut them earlier, when you were at home. Do you have something in your purse to cut them with now? No, of course not. Along with the ChapStick you've never used, you have click-button pens whose points are stuck in the on position so that the inside lining of your purse is riddled with what looks like a secret code of dashes and dots of black and blue ink. You have nothing that could cut. “Have you got scissors?” you say to Chris, or maybe you think you say it to Chris, but you can't be sure, because Chris doesn't answer you, and instead she says, “I think Paul is cheating on me.”

“No, he's not,” you say.

“I think he is,” Chris says.

“I'm sorry, but I just can't believe that,” you say, because you can't.

“Well, there's so much I can't explain,” Chris says. “So much he can't explain. It's got to be the answer.”

“You're wrong,” you say. Chris swallows hard. You can hear the swallow. You are afraid the tears will start coming down again. “What man in his right mind would cheat on you?” you say.

“He's started working late. He comes back and it's after midnight. He says he's working, but he never used to work this hard.”

“That's it?” you say. “He works late and you think he's been cheating on you? It doesn't sound like enough to hang the guy.” You really don't believe Paul is cheating on Chris. You realize all of a sudden that your daughter Alex is swimming her leg of the relay. She's anchor and freestyling with all her might toward the wall for the win.

“I'm so sorry, but I just can't help thinking that it's a misunderstanding,” you say, touching Chris on the elbow just after your daughter touches the wall for the win. “I'm positive.”

You wonder why you are defending the man. You've never really had a conversation with him, you've never even talked to him up close, you just know him by sight—he's come to a few practices and meets and you've seen him in the stands—whereas you and Chris have known each other for at least three swim seasons. She's been to your house a few times to drop off Cleo to visit with your girls, and you've been to her house to drop off your girls to visit with Cleo. You've never seen Paul any of these times. Maybe he is cheating on Chris. Maybe he is banging one of his college students, a student who stays after class and leans over his desk asking him questions about things she knows he loves to talk about. It's just hard to believe, considering how all the husbands you know let their tongues drop to their knees when they see Chris.

Sofia is in the next relay. She is standing with her shoulders hunched, and you wish she would look up in the stands and look at you so you could mouth the words “back straight” to her, and so you could throw your shoulders back too, demonstrating. You think that ever since Sofia started her period her posture has been worse, and you wonder if it's just because the girl is that much more tired.

When she started her period she held out a panty liner and showed it to you. “Is this blood?” Sofia asked, and it was, the blood had stained the pad in the shape of an hourglass, and you looked at the design and considered how you were looking at it as if it were a Rorschach ink blot, and you wondered, if your girl kept showing you the bloodstains on her pads throughout the rest of her cycle, what more would you see in their shapes? Would you see a bird with its wings folded in? A hammer? A footbridge?

“I'm sorry to put this on you,” Chris says. “It's just that I couldn't talk to my family about it. They all think Paul and I have a perfect marriage, and that he's a saint. They'd blame it on me.”

“Don't be sorry, especially since I'm sure it's nothing at all,” you say. “Sometimes I think Thomas is losing his mind. Just the other day he talked for hours about the decline of civilization, how he believes we're going through it.”

Your daughter's dive is beautiful—high and long. She's the leadoff, and what a lead she's given to her team before she's even entered the water.

“How can I be sure it's nothing?” Chris says.

“Don't think about it, that's all,” you say. “And watch Cleo swim. I see she's up next. She's a good swimmer. She's graceful, like you. Sometimes I don't care how fast a swimmer can swim. Sometimes I just like watching them move in the water. It's as if the water makes way for them, like it's taken aback by how good a swimmer can be. Do you know what I mean?” Chris looks at Cleo, and her daughter looks up at the stands, looking for her mother. “Wave to her, she doesn't see you yet,” you say, and Chris waves to her daughter and then the daughter waves back and forth, smiling, and you think if you put your hand up in the air, in the space between where the two hands are waving at each other, you could feel some kind of a force, maybe Chris's mother energy. You don't know what the name of it is. Maybe it's something Thomas would know. It's a quark, a pulse, a gravitational field, a gluon of extreme magnitude.