Lottie’s teeth are false. So are Zischa’s. The old ones rotted away from hunger long ago—the roots so frail, they told me, you could reach in and twist a molar out. There wasn’t even any blood. And the roots were dark coils, like tiny worms. Odorous. Dying.
After Marachietti there were other coaches. Public school guys. YMCA teams. City league. The kids came from good schools and bad. Some of us qualified individually for the statewides in high school one year. I went up to Albany alone, and came in last in the consolation final of the 100 breaststroke. At the end of it my lungs and arms felt like they were filled with thumbtacks. But qualifying, I told myself, that was the main thing.
Afterwards I went into the locker room and sat on a bench. Just plunked. The floor was solid wet gray. Every other locker was painted orange, alternate ones yellow, and for some reason only the yellow ones were rusting around the edges so they looked like old egg yolks streaked brown. The rasping pains pinched away from my shoulders and thighs and ankles one by one, like insects departing on poisoned feet. The long aching burn in my chest eased. On my skin, drops of water turned to sweat. Tactility, disappointment, reality and the capacity to hurt in a beaten, throbbing way—all that returned to my neck and arms, fingertips, the backs of my hands. My eyes were a little puffy from the goggles, I’d had this leak in the left one and some chlorine had gotten in, blurred my vision, temporarily obscured things inside a rainbow-tinted halo.
I felt racing-suit Lycra soak into the worn-down wooden bench between my legs, leaned back against concrete and thought about how I’d done it, done the main thing. How I ought to feel more pride. And I watched some girl at the mirror, all showered and dressed, her hair dry, putting on makeup. A subtle powder-puff swipe upwards at the cheekbones. Definite cherry-red heart shape of the lips.
The door opened, air blew in and out. For a moment, with the waft of hot damp, I could smell her: baby powder and a tonic-like perfume over flesh. There was something else, too—a darker smell—something deep in a way, like a permanent musk. It was almost bitter, I guess. Sour. It made me want to taste it.
Not that you can taste a smell, really. Or give it a color. But I breathed it in as deep as I could. Then leaned my dripping head back against the concrete wall and shut my eyes, and for the first time since very early childhood no images came to me of railroad boxcars or molars or tattoos. I did not see little Oskar eyeless on the ground. No stained, ruined lace, no skeletal limbs bulldozed into mud.
What I saw instead was this thing, sort of, that was like a combination of color and smell and taste put together, and I didn’t fear it but wanted it. It was deep, sour, musk red, floating outside of me but also down inside, in a place that had not been touched, and it was surrounded by a brightness. By this color-tinted light.
The door opened again, different air blew through. The cherry-red lipstick girl picked up her bags and left. But my new image remained. And I understood. In that moment, many things about my life made sense.
Consolation finals are sweet sometimes, too. Even when you come in last.
*
Later, when I met Coach Allen, she looked at my distinctly unimpressive, definitely supporting-cast-quality record and laughed. But she said, very seriously: Will you work this hard for me? Will you maintain this consistency? If you do doubles, if you always make practice, I think we can improve your times. I think you will add something to our program. My program—credit where credit is due. You will get your college degree, too, and maybe an education. But stick to the program, okay? Work hard. A few years down the line, believe me, your time will come.
Can you work that hard?
Yes, I promised, yes. I would work that hard.
Thinking, all the time, that the reason I would was because I’d seen something about her face, about the way she walked and talked, that reminded me of consolation finals. Maybe some time long ago she had rolled a dripping head back along concrete, in a rusty old locker room after a race, after finishing last, and the deep, sour, red musk thing had come to her, too—and maybe, in that moment, it had given her wisdom, and peace.
*
On the second-floor landing I wobbled. Danny grabbed my arm. Saying Easy girl, easy. Seventeen steps just four more times. Take them one by one. And by the way, amiga, you should tell them pretty soon. They’re not, like, spring chickens any more, you know. Sixty-five years old—whatever—don’t you think that at their age, after everything they’ve been through, they can stand a little truth?
*
“Move it, will you?”
“I’m trying.”
“Come on, Nan, burn. I thought you lawyer types were sturdier.” But on the downside of the trunk, which is definitely moving too slowly up a clattering staircase, I weigh pros and cons and reconsider everything. Like, this upstairs room will exile me from life on the ground. Downstairs, Nan and Jean have access to the kitchen at all hours. Which is unfair, because they already have each other, whereas I have no one.
On the other hand, I will no longer be directly below a bedroom active with nightly passion, tossing and turning in frustrated loneliness—curious, impatient, full of aching envy—while two lovers proclaim their mutual ecstasy upstairs. Because that’s what the hurt is for: a lover. Someone worthy. Although, at this point, anyone may apply.
“Ellie, cut it out!”
“Come on, Nan. Otherwise I stay downstairs this year and make tape recordings of you two going at it.”
I push harder until the front of my T-shirt’s drenched. Nan staggers to the second-floor landing, the chest crashes there, and she plops heavily on her end, shoving glasses back up her nose with one perspiring hand, saying Thank God. I remind her she’s an atheist, has never believed in God. That’s not it, she tells me, she just always thought that God didn’t believe in her. But if she gets through this year with passing grades, she says, she is prepared to change her opinion.
I pull the T-shirt out and flap it to wash air over my breasts. They feel clumsy, untouched. My voice sounds sullen.
“To think that you used to be such a raving radical.”
“Well what about you, young’un? Miss Lady Regimented Swim Team Co-Captain Drill Sergeant of the Year.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“Coach’s pet.”
“I wish.”
I do wish.
Even though Coach is such a pain in the ass. Uptight. God, is she ever. But very, very hot in this cool kind of thirtyish Puritan jock bitch way. Basically I guess just a closet case. Must be all that suppressed passion. Maybe that’s why she went psycho on us last year. By midseason everyone hated her guts. At the same time, we all felt basically willing to die for her. You’d hear it in the locker room after some practice where she’d really tightened the thumbscrews—everyone would bitch about her, someone would imitate her, and someone else would chime in from the shower steam: Aye-aye, Captain. Underneath the jokes, they meant it. And as far as I know they’re all straight chicks, too, so go figure.
My new bedroom’s small and narrow. Standing in the middle with arms spread I can almost touch the opposite walls. When I tug at the jammed-shut window it opens with a shriek, chips of ancient paint falling everywhere. Hot sunlight burnishes the tops of trees and you can hear insects buzzing, a bicycle squeaking by on the sidewalk, a stereo blasting from blocks away, car wheels churning, but no air blows in to cool the sweat.
The term starts in a week and a half. Pretty much everyone who hasn’t moved in already is doing it now.
Nan squeezes my arm, gently. “Don’t worry, rookie. It’ll happen, you know.”
“What will?”
“Love.”
Sure.
But this familiar shadow sweeps right through me—of yearning, of solitude. So that I want to blurt: It’s easy for you to say, you’re older, you’ve got Jean, and you know what you’re doing. I keep it to myself.
The shadow feels bigger now, my parents in it. I want to take time back for them, before the piles of leathe
r shoes, jewelry cases, perfume bottles, golden teeth, tattooed numbers on flesh spiraling into puffs of smoke in the sky, long before my birth. Before the act of love, or need, that produced me thoughtlessly—someone, anyone. But, like cowboys in some movie falling to their knees at a desert oasis, what they didn’t see was the sign with skull and crossbones. End of the line. Seed of their loins gone queer.
Still, here I am, wanting my own acts of love. Or need. Like my body and heart would emerge scot-free. Like any of me could ever detoxify.
I remember, when I pat Nan on the back, to do it lightly. The weights have made a difference—I’m definitely stronger, faster; Miss Lady Regimented Swim Team Co-Captain Drill Sergeant of the Year. And okay, yes, I have this minor thing for Brenna Allen. Minor.
“Love, huh?”
The words sound so bleak.
“Yes,” Nan says firmly. “Come on, kiddo, let’s grab some lunch. Jean’s coming back soon and we’re going to have to get to the library.”
“Already?”
“Already.”
“Is that what it’s like?”
“What what is like?”
“Love. You bump in the library with your books.”
“Sure,” she teases, “exactly.” Then tells me maybe I ought to just take it easy for a while, it looks like my face is still kind of swollen and shouldn’t she get me a washcloth. I say no, it’s my badge of honor. Even though the cheeks feel bad, and those holes in my gum hurt like jagged metal at the lightest tongue touch.
Dirt sifts off the window ledge to grass and cement below. Some guy from crew runs by, panting heavily in the still afternoon, strides long and muscular. It reminds me of weight-room sessions at the Y with Danny, him being so proud of his thighs getting bigger, and all the rest I can’t ever think of giving up, but somehow must.
Another Indian summer, early September, with things about to start but not really moving yet. Like my love life, maybe. Or lack thereof.
He’s right. I’ve got to tell them.
Lottie. Zischa. Listen—
But I can’t. I just can’t hurt them.
Sooner or later, got to.
They will feel so bad.
*
The high point of the week would definitely have been my evening těte-à-těte with Coach Allen. For which all of those long-suffering team ingrates are, without knowing it, in my debt.
Would have been, but wasn’t. Because now—when I have worked all summer to get my sprint times down, and am poised for vast improvement in the one and two—now, my last year with this team, the year she promised all along would be mine—she is changing everything around. Saying: Sprints, the fifty, the hundred—they’re really for nerve-racked perfectionists, Ellie, talented neurotics whose systems are geared for one perfect blast of effort. Form. Intensity. But longer events require more—what’s the word? Equanimity? Inner stability. Maturity. Mental technique. You have these qualities, I think. That’s why I want you to try IM. And maybe, when it crops up, some distance free—
Distance? Free? That was news to me. I started to resent her then, but said nothing.
“We’ll change your workouts,” she said, “and see which way to go. And another thing.”
What now?
I cringed a little, sitting there.
“Karen Potalia was nearly put on academic probation last year. I’ve talked with her about it, and she’s getting it all together a little better, I think. But we both agreed that being co-captain is too much of a responsibility for her right now. I am not replacing her, though. That leaves you. It will mean more work. Can you handle it?”
“Yes,” I said numbly.
For you.
“I want you to keep a hand on the pulse of this team. Let me know what you feel there.”
Sure, Coach. Just pile it on.
*
But the week’s real low point is buying books. Especially for this regrettable lit course I have got myself into—as luck would have it, its many, many assigned readings stacked high.
The temperature is an even hundred degrees outside. The bookstore a swirl of insanity-provoking, falsely lit activity. Day-Glo highlighters and the flaming-pink 350-page notebook with optional binder are apparently their hottest-selling items. Meanwhile all the zit-faced freshmen flashing parentally bestowed credit cards are shoving me aside.
Part way through my book-buying spree, which I cannot afford if our phone bill is also to be paid, the air-conditioning blows out. And I realize that I’m fighting with this tall, very hefty girl for the last remaining copy of some 800-page tome. She actually got to it before me—by a mere second—but here we are, sweat trickling, paper rustling, her holding one end of the book and me the other.
I look up. Thick shoulders, puffy face. Big dark eyes set in olive-gray sockets—it’s the kind of flesh you have after you’ve been totally, totally sick for a long time. And the face seems strange being so pale. Odd somehow. The lips are slightly African-looking, and the nose—like she ought to be brown instead. She just lets go.
“Um—sorry.”
“No,” I say, “go ahead, my pleasure, I mean, take it, it’s yours. The bitch is dead, anyway.”
“Huh?”
I drop it into her basket. Which sets off a chain reaction, causing everything else in there—pens, highlighters, notebooks, paper clips, Scotch tape, and what seems like several dozen thousand-page novels by these nineteenth-century bores who simply could not shut up—to spill over the sides, hitting the rim of my own basket, creating a regional disaster between us. Heat gets under my skin, makes my gums hurt more. For a moment I want to jump up and down and stomp on things. Then I just want to cry.
“I’m sorry!” she blurts.
“Well, chill,” I hiss, “it’s not your fault.”
I remain relatively calm, though. It’s that childhood training. Not a peep, Lottie would tell me, good girl. Not a sound. And I’d sit, very still, trying not to breathe. Waiting for her to come back from the vet with some small salvaged creature. So quiet you could hear flies land on the fire escape.
I kneel in the aisle and sort things out. My basket. Hers. Everything’s together in a heap. I start separating books. Hold up the ill-fated paperback, its cover this incredibly rotten picture of some blond sailor, with a boat and a fish in the background, and reach up to hand it to her.
But she’s gone.
There are only other people in the aisle, buying texts for Journalism 458. Japanese 202. Advanced Javanese.
Her books, markers, pens and tape are stacked next to mine now. It strikes me that in some way the ashen face looked familiar. But I can’t really place it. For a moment this weird thought occurs to me: to wait, kneeling there, until she comes back. Small and still in the sweaty afternoon.
Not a peep, schatze. Not a sound.
But I stand instead, put my stuff in my own basket and then, seeing that she has been so kind as to leave it, take the last copy of the book that started everything and tuck it under my arm. The front cover’s bent backwards from the spill, a bunch of page corners twisted down. Maybe they’ll give me a discount.
* * *
Karen Potalia whispers that she has something to tell me. I rub her back gently and say I already know. There are tears in her eyes. I like Karen-—another hard worker, from a big family down in Boston—she does a pretty decent 200 breaststroke and fly. Always puts on perfect makeup before and after a meet. Last year she got engaged to this guy who goes to school in Rhode Island and wants to be a teacher.
Our locker room has been steamed, scraped, repainted. Every locker a fresh-coated shining white. Even the showers are drip-less, the walls sharp and dry, the only smells clean gusts of chlorine and pH factor, pine disinfectant, Windex.
“You may ask yourselves, What’s in it for me?”
Brenna Allen is stalking. Each year, a different theme. Back and forth in front of the benches. Eyeballing every face to make sure we are all riveted, simply riveted.
“What
’s in it for me if I help my team win—if I help even one other person win—at a cost to myself? What if I do so many relays there’s nothing left in me for my own individual race? Or I work, and I work, and I cheer on everybody else, maybe I get thrown into a new distance, a new event, and I just don’t seem to improve? Now, where is that at?”
I gaze at her, wide-eyed, as serious as possible, kissing my last chance for a reprieve good-bye because I know exactly who this particular speech is aimed at. Then when her eyes fix on the next tensely eager face I zone out a little, let my glance wander sideways.
She is here. That girl from the bookstore. Looking taller than ever, ill at ease. Drops of sweat on her chin. Extremely familiar. But the name slips away—disturbing, almost there—and I try to catch her eyes without even wanting to, still embarrassed about the bookstore scene.
She doesn’t look my way, doesn’t seem to know I exist at all. And even though she’s sitting on a bench with other girls, it seems as if the others are not even there, that she’s all alone, big and uncomfortable in this clean white place. The place itself seems much too small for her.
“—Or you might ask yourselves: Who cares if I miss a couple of workouts? It isn’t exactly a sin, is it? Certainly, God doesn’t care—”
No, Coach, you’re right about that. God doesn’t.
“—about me—little me all alone in the water here—” This gets a big laugh “—trying to make good time, trying to win, trying to make the next repeat—”
Despite myself, I feel my face crack. Then the thing I hate worst begins—a violet blush, what Danny calls my scarlet letter. From the tits up, until my forehead pops out in a bright red sweat. Next repeat. She said that for me. I always do make it. Sometimes with half a second to spare—my trademark. Hammerhead Marks, Make It Or Drown Trying, some of them wrote once, in indelible ink, on the T-shirt I used for drag-weight. And we all had a chuckle. But I never wore it again.
“—Or maybe just trying to get out of bed in the morning when your alarm rings. But what I want you to begin thinking about is this: The caring, the will, has to come—not from the outside, not even from supernatural forces, no—it has to come from you. From some place deep inside you—from a place inside every one of you.” She’s in good form this year. I watch her move. Strong. Graceful. Her torso is looking great now—must be the weights. “How do we get to this place? For one thing, we train. See, when the chips are down, you must learn to preserve yourselves. To stabilize. To concentrate on what you know—on your form, and on your strength. We maintain self-integrity by maintaining the integrity of our mental and physical effort. We learn how to do this by training—training hard. That means practice. Because, eventually, you will find that no matter what it is you’re going through, as long as you are alive in this world the truth of any experience is expressed in the body—and the body tells no lies.”
The Sea of Light Page 9