by Laura Rock
He arrived at the end of the lane for the last time, vaulted from the pool, grabbed his flippers, and stomped toward the exit. Then he changed his mind and headed back, past Marta in the pool and Jill on the bench, to the window of the lifeguards’ office.
“Marta,” Jill said, “what are you doing?” but Marta was watching Jordan. He jabbed the counter as he talked, his stance spring-loaded, like a sprinter on the starting block.
She registered the pair of lifeguards approaching Jill. Tall and short, both blond with freckles, the head guard and a younger one, less sure of himself. They could be brothers. Jill crossed her arms, thrust her jaw. Marta felt sorry for those kids, not realizing they stood no chance.
Jordan walked the long way around the pool toward the change room. As he passed the first aid kit mounted on the wall, he whacked the metal box, producing a loud clang. The mothers in the wading pool grabbed little arms and angled their heads toward the threat, alert as deer. When the echo faded, they let go.
300 swim free, smooth perfect technique
Marta swam her lengths, forgetting about Jill and the lifeguards. She revelled in the disappearing act of counting metres, the increasing number a kind of chant. She aimed for a focus point beyond which thought softened around the breath, open and inward at the same time. Without losing the number, she checked her time. Never had she been so clear-headed. So fast.
As she stroked without a hitch, she reflected on how different swimming felt with the mask on. For that was the source of her invincibility, surely. With an avatar, she gained power. Sleek SKoggles. She should suggest that Jill broaden her concept. Try the cosplay market, she’d say, and the notion made her laugh under water. But really, she ought to consider how this insight might apply to life outside the pool. She had painted masquerade scenes, the visual identity gag. What would happen if she somehow escaped her public self? Was it simply a matter of crafting a persona and boldly inhabiting it, or was an actual change in appearance necessary? A hat, hoodie, or scarf, a burqa. Arm over arm, Marta crawled without intention; breathed without worrying about when the next breath would come, her technique smooth.
Rounding a turn, she saw Jill gathering her belongings with exaggerated precision. She seemed to be searching for something but perhaps was stalling. The lifeguards hovered nearby, and now they were waiting at the end of the lane. Waiting for Marta to stop.
She lifted her head. She knew the suspended moment before the lap period ended, when swimmers were not quite finished, and the lifeguards itched to get them out. They’d push the oversized metal caddy closer, play with the hooks where the lane markers were secured to the pool wall, and start rolling up the lanes anyway, cranking the handle. The most tenacious ignored the signals. A nod indicated that you were leaving in a minute. You’d be out before the next group claimed the pool, after another length, just one more, one last …
100 choice cool down
The head lifeguard knelt at the end of the lane. Marta was about to land right beneath him. He stuck a hand in the pool. She stopped.
Gulping air, she checked the clock and noticed the silence. Someone had turned the music off. Jordan stood on the deck, lurking. “There’s another hour.”
“Ma’am, you need to get out.” The lifeguard’s Adam’s apple quivered. He exchanged a glance with his sidekick, who was standing.
“I don’t understand.” She compared the boys’ noses and cheeks, noting the identical scatter of freckles.
“There’s rules,” the head guard said, pointing at the sign. “You’re supposed to follow the—” He made a circle with his index finger.
“Sure, yeah,” Marta said. “I got mixed up.”
The younger guard squatted. “That’s not all,” he said. “We’ve had complaints about that—what you’re wearing.”
Marta glanced at Jill, who was on her way over, using the crutches. “A complaint? Or complaints?”
The first lifeguard cleared his throat. “That’s an unapproved device. All equipment has to be approved.”
“By whom?”
Jill pushed in, standing over the boys. “Where does it say that?”
“Policy. And that other complaint we talked about already.”
Jill scowled at the wading pool. Three mothers had gathered their brood, swaddled in towels from neck to butt, to watch at a safe distance, mutely accusing. She raised her phone slowly.
The lifeguards both stood. “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the older boy said.
The mothers pulled their children into a group embrace, shielding them. They shook their heads in disgust and gestured at Jill. She photographed them rebuking her.
The older lifeguard stepped between them. “I’m filing an incident report on this. You are barred from the premises for thirty days.” Jill opened her mouth to argue, but nothing came out. Jordan took a step closer.
“And you,” the lifeguard said to Marta. “That mask is scaring the children.”
“This is adult lap swim, is it not?”
“Shh—” Jill hissed. “What are you saying, exactly?”
“Until it’s approved, you can’t use it here.”
“What?” Jill stomped her cast and moaned in pain. Marta was glad she couldn’t see Jordan, behind her, listening intently.
“I told you, policy,” he said, shrugging. He and the younger boy left to give a report at the lifeguard window.
“Little dictators,” Marta muttered.
Jill turned on her. “What’s wrong with you? I do you a favour and you act crazy. Now you’ve damaged my brand. You managed to get my amazing”—her voice quivered—“product banned.”
Marta sank to her chin. She opened her mouth, allowing a stream to flow in. The mask kept her nose dry, as advertised, and gave her an altered vision of her sister: a person who would always seek an adversary, creating one, if necessary. Opposition fuelled her.
“I thought you were getting your shit together.” Jill pushed a kickboard into the pool with one crutch.
Marta ripped off the mask and let it float like a dead fish. She turned away from her sister to face the nightmare mural. Jordan, standing against a wall by the lifeguards’ office, hovered at the periphery of her vision.
“Ugh, I can’t talk to you. You’re impossible.” Jill spun on her crutches, passing Jordan on her way to the exit. As she neared the wading pool, someone catcalled, and she paused long enough to lift hand from crutch to give them the finger. A lifeguard stepped forward, brandishing a clipboard.
Marta looked at the mask just out of reach. Its development, approval, reception in the marketplace—none of this was her concern. She couldn’t ruin Jill’s plans any more than she could ensure Jill’s triumph. Her actions didn’t lead to clear outcomes; just look at the year she’d had. Attachment to outcomes was futile. Studying to be a painter didn’t make one a painter. She needed to leave. She was already gone.
On the pool deck, Jill read what was on the clipboard but then brushed past the lifeguard, refusing to sign. Instead of leaving, she approached the diving board, lowered her backpack, and dropped the crutches. They hit the tile with the clatter of a miraculous cure.
Marta remembered Jill’s extraordinary will as a child. At the cottage, she ruled the dock, despite being younger and smaller. Marta would throw her overboard, thinking: victory! But the game wasn’t over until Jill said so. She always got the last push.
Jill hopped one foot up the ladder, holding the rails. By the time the lifeguards got there, she was already on the board, inching forward with her arms out, the skirt of her dress swaying. No one climbed after her or tried to talk her down. Jordan didn’t move.
Marta admired her balance. It took strength and mindfulness to stand lopsided on a diving board that flexed with every twitch. She covered her mouth when Jill bent her knees for a little bounce and almost fell sideways, pulled by
the cast. At the second bounce, Marta retrieved the mask. Still watching Jill, she secured it around her head.
She missed the jump and the fall. She heard the shriek but had no chance to consider whether it was a sound of defiance or hurt, because she was already speeding toward her sister, guided by the instinct to rescue Jill from her first self-defeating impulse, an action that was never in the business plan. Or maybe it was the unfinished argument, the urge to shake Jill and be right, to have an opponent and pull her close. As Jill hit and sank, Marta gulped air and dove. Peering through the mask into the cloud of plaster around her sister, she swam downward as she had done a hundred times before to retrieve stones from the lake bed. She found Jill, scooped her under the arms, and pushed off from the floor. Jill tried to help with her arms and good leg. They made a cumbersome pair, as likely to work against each other as to find a rhythm. Marta knew the cast would slough off eventually, lightening their load, but she had no idea how long that might take. If it was anything like dissolving a hard edge of difference between sisters, they didn’t have that much time. Her lungs burned with her last held breath. She tightened her grasp and kicked as hard as she could until slowly, together, they began to rise.
The New Kitten
Jamie shifts on her bank-teller stool, waiting while Mr. Ludder stacks change on the counter. A crabby customer with a quarter-million snoozing in low-interest accounts, he searches pockets for missed nickel. He prefers her to take his coin deposits, waving others ahead of him in the lineup until she flips on the light signalling she’s free. She’s never hit that switch without mentally reciting free/someday free, a fragment she’s saving for one of her poems. A poem contrasting Tellers past, prim ladies trapped behind gilded bars, with today’s Client Advisors, who work beneath the all-seeing gaze of ad-playing giant TV monitors, screens beyond Orwell’s imagining.
During the micro-moments of transactions, Jamie thinks. Between ignoring the pop-up order to cross-sell a TFSA and printing the receipt, she scans the lobby for bank robbers, twitchy Tobias Wolff gunmen with no mercy for literary types. And sometimes she’ll pick a Stephen Leacock character from the queue: the young rube clutching his $56 deposit, who’ll be mortified no matter how kindly she treats him.
What she tries not to think about is her husband. Now that she knows about Todd’s slush fund, the next move is hers, but what to do? He pushed her into this job, crying poor, yet hides a six-figure sum she discovered by accident, running address updates.
Learning they were rich—had been rich all along—was the wrong kind of epiphany. Moaning, she ran the report again. Bank figures don’t lie, but people do. Where did the money in that account come from? What’s he up to? Daily, she checks the account activity trying to figure out who he is.
Jamie’s first day: the branch manager welcomed and oriented her, but it was big, brash Sadie who woke her up. When Maureen introduced her around, Sadie boomed, “You must be the new kitten.”
Her co-workers, all women, tittered. She fought the urge to kick off her pumps and run; the tour continued.
“That’s Sadie for you,” Maureen said. “I expect you’ll catch on. You’ve graduated university and now it’s time for real-world schooling.”
The new kitten—how to parse the phrase in a twenty-first-century workplace? Cuddly plaything; cute baby animal; sex kitten. Wrong on every level. And that was before she’d even met the grabby regional manager a month or so later. The other kittens failed to warn her about him, but one flesh-pressed “excuse me” as he slid past provided an instant education.
She followed Maureen around as if tailing the mother cat and returned home to a husband well pleased. He hadn’t expected her to accept the entry-level job in financial services, her only offer.
“Vino for the victor,” he said, holding up a wineglass. A muted proclamation, soft-pedalled to placate her. Todd was known as a top closer at his industrial equipment firm. “Not like grad school, is it, Jame.” He feigned pity and kissed the top of her head, a kiss that praised results.
At first, she sucked at everything. She told herself English majors weren’t meant to type strings of numbers with 100% accuracy. When people huffed about long lines, she tensed. And the analogue clients paying their bills in person, pushing sheaves of paper across the counter. She was supposed to shift them, gently, to online banking, but they resisted.
“Right, more fees,” they said. “Highway robbery, no thanks.”
Dealing with the public exhausted her.
“Why do I have to pretend the customer’s always right?” she asked Todd. “They’re idiots.”
“C’mon, you’re a rising star. I can totally see you fast-tracking to VP.”
Why did he have to blow sunshine? Salesman of the year, that’s why.
In the staff room, she forced herself to socialize instead of reading. Despite never having envisioned herself in a job like this, she wanted to fit in. The first week, Sadie pounced on Jamie’s left hand, squeezing it between plump palms.
“Look at the rock on this gal. Caught yourself a winner, eh? What’s hubby like?”
Everyone listened as she stammered that Todd was hardworking. That’s all she had. Afterward, that pained her. And how backward the conversation was: marriage as currency, her face value.
Sadie’s teeth flashed. “Hardworking in bed, sure.” She’d already overshared her history with Jamie: married twice, not making that mistake again. Her man visited weekends, the perfect amount of time. Jamie learned what he liked to do with Sadie, how often, which rooms. She didn’t invite this information, but she didn’t stop the flow, either.
Without Sadie, though, she would have quit. Once, converting American dollars, she became flustered. A woman rattled her keys as Jamie stared at the frozen screen.
Sadie reached over to rescue her. “This entry here,” she murmured, typing. “Smiley face, honey.”
Later, she said, “Rule number one: they’re always watching.”
“Security cameras? They’re for our security, surely?” To stop a bullet in the brain, she added silently.
“Nah. They capture keystrokes, facial expressions, tone. Performance reviews, you get a list of deficiencies. Data from cameras and mystery shoppers.”
“Who?”
“Paid spies who report whether you used their name three times, were you fast enough, did you cross-sell, up-sell.”
“Side-sell,” Jamie said.
“You got it. My advice? Memorize procedures cold, and you’ll be fine. You’re not the first kitten I’ve showed the ropes to. I trained Maureen, back in the day.”
“Really?”
“And look how they promoted her over me.”
Almost a year later, Jamie fits in, undeniably a favourite, especially after she planned a baby shower for Kerri, the Customer Care Coordinator. She organized food, decorations, and gifts, and she didn’t flinch when Sadie said, in front of everyone, “We’re waiting for you to get knocked up next, lil kitty.”
Conception seems unlikely, given her flat-lined sex life. Since joining a bike club, Todd takes eight-hour Saturday rides with a crowd she’s never met. Fun people, he says. Interesting and fit. Three high-end bicycles hang in their garage, and she happens to know, from studying his secret account, that he paid $3,000 for the cheapest one.
Closing her cash drawer at night, she counts bills, tallies the balance. Why is she the one worrying about what’s gone wrong in their relationship? Why doesn’t he?
Sadie fluffs her hair and sits at the next drawer over. Jamie gives her a wan half-smile.
Maybe she should join Todd’s club. Shock therapy. How would she look in goggles and Lycra shorts with a padded butt? Like a bloated tropical bug. She’d rather be no fun.
“Got a romantic evening planned?”
She shakes her head, envisioning her welcoming books, Todd away again.
“Y
ou should follow the example of your elders.” Sadie stands, shaking her hips. “David’s coming this weekend. We’re going to have so much fun rolling around.”
Like Jamie needs to be confronted with gross middle-aged sex. Glancing at the poster-filled windows, she’s startled to see her reflection superimposed on an advertisement showing joyful models caught mid-recreation—biking, hiking, planting flowers that will compound and grow. The cyclist resembles her husband; she hadn’t noticed it before. He exudes Todd’s bluster, smiling at the camera as if to indicate that he’s such a good rider, he doesn’t need to watch the road.
She scrolls through the transactions: bike shop, bike-trip lunches, normal stuff. Then, a meta-narrative in numbers. Charges from Vancouver when Todd said he was in Regina on business. Manhattan restaurants during the Winnipeg week. Florist, lingerie, liquor store, jeweller. She kills the screen. So banal, Todd’s infidelity. So romance-novel. And he still has scads of cash.
Her new job affords more time to track him. With Kerri on mat leave, the branch needed an Acting Customer Care Coordinator, a position that comes with a glass-walled office.
Jamie’s flattered that Maureen chose her for the role. Her less-experienced self might have missed the opportunity by indulging in wordplay—what about the Screwing the Customer Over Coordinator, is that job open? She held her tongue and was rewarded.
The office displays her like a museum specimen under glass, but she can swivel around, showing the back of her chair, while she talks on the phone to prospects. She swivels for difficult conversations.
Dialing his office, she tells herself it’s just another cold call. Cold being the operative word. This will be an accounting, not a climactic scene of love and despair. She scans her memory for stories of wronged spouses and rejects the only one that comes to mind: the farmer stumbling into a prairie blizzard after seeing his wife and her lover, the paint on his hand an unanswerable message from the dead. Too subtle for this situation. She’s alive, and she isn’t in the mood for self-sacrifice.