The Sea of Light

by Levin, Jenifer

  “Wow.” He chuckles, happy.

  “You know, you’re full of love. And so is Angelita.”

  “What’s that, Babe?”

  “Wind,” I say. “A storm.”

  “Ah. You know, Babe, I could make you happy.”

  “Um. I don’t think so.”

  “I could hold you in my arms. It’d be nice, naked.”

  I reach for his hand and he gives it openly. Open Hand Boy, I think. Remembering. But it took pills for him to be this way; he isn’t really Kenny.

  He caresses my thumb, my palm. Gently, full of love. “We could be tight, Babe—we could, you know, be lovers—”

  “No, Mike, that’s not what I want. It isn’t your fault, okay? I just don’t want to be with you. I mean, we can’t fuck any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, I really don’t like it.”

  “Oh, wow,” he says. His face is open, hurt. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You are, like, my angel. I can’t explain. But I want to thank you. You’ve been really good to me.”

  “I have?”

  “Sure. And also—look, don’t take this the wrong way—”

  “Yeah?”

  “You need and deserve new friends.”

  In the living room, someone snorts. MTV flashes on, off. In between the lyrics, which are rushing by my ears now and make no sense at all, I hear kissing sounds and giggles.

  I move to a vertical position, tread lightly, very lightly, through the gentle glow that is soft and almost soundless. My coat and boots and bag are stashed away under a bunch of other things; I search the mound to find them, feeling how special, how fully textured and pleasurable, each object is within my hand. I fade down, and up. Sitting. Standing.

  “Hey,” says Emma, “don’t go. It’s cold out there.”

  Jeff laughs. “Babe’s darker than you, Em, don’t worry. Night is night. She will fade right in.”

  I squish my feet around in socks and boots. Pleasure. Warm, sweatless glow. Push an arm into my coat. Another. Muted sound of buttons. I clench a fist. Fit on gloves. Swing my strong arms. Loving. Strong. Fearless. And, for a moment, feel awash with pity. I’d really like to help them.

  “Jeff.”

  He glances over the back of the couch,

  “See a doctor, Jeff. You’re in desperate need of help. I am not kidding. Seek immediate medical attention for your hatred and your fear.”

  He chuckles in a way that is surprised, but also somehow unperturbed. “Screw you, Babe.”

  “No, no, I don’t think so. Even that wouldn’t cure you.”

  “Yeah.” Emma grinds her teeth. Smiles. “She’s right, you know.”

  I step out into the hall, down some stairs, floating. There is snow on the ground. Halfway home, I roll in it. Not too hot, not too cold.

  Angelita, I say, who are you. Teach me things.

  But the light is all outside me and, after a while, starts to recede. I sing softly as it goes, try to hurry back before I feel it leave completely, get into my room and turn on a lamp just in time. Then I make myself some tea. I feel a headache rise, and pound.

  *

  The next morning, my limbs are like rusted metal wedges in the water. Really, my heart is in it. But the rest of me malfunctions.

  No one says anything. At least, not at first. For that, I am grateful.

  After practice, I crawl out of the pool last and limp past Etta and Brenna Allen with a kickboard, hoping for more mercy.

  “Uh-uh,” says Etta. “Where you going, white girl?”

  “Shut up,” I snap. “Just cut it out with that white girl shit, okay?”

  She frowns. “Someone’s going to spank you, kid, sooner or later. But I don’t have the time.”

  At the locker room door I am confronted by lady Coach. She crosses her arms, looking exhausted and deadly serious, blocking the way. When she speaks, her voice is firm and quiet.

  “Whatever it is, cut it out.”

  I refuse to meet her eyes.

  “Whatever you took. However you got it.”

  “Yeah.” I nod, feeling fried. “Okay, Bren, I will. I mean, I already have.”

  Back in my room I get the first big engulfing wave of panic: the meet is next weekend, I am fucking up school big-time, and Ellie’s nowhere around. I stare at the phone and tell it, Fuck you. Fuck you, I won’t call. I will get through it all myself, understand? I am strong enough now. I am well enough. I can get through some homework and a busy swimming meet on my own, thanks; I can do fine, just fine, without you.

  Broken Down

  (ELLIE)

  It seems that our Coach has decided to teach me my new events the hard way. I basically just hate her now, more than anything or anyone.

  The distance workouts are murderous. Half the time I walk around feeling like I’m crippled. The rest of the time I am convinced that I ought to check into a hospital emergency room and get them to x-ray my shoulders.

  My insides are in rotten shape, too, from cranial to cardiac region. I’m kept pretty busy attempting to hide the truth about Captain Hammerhead’s pathetic psychological and emotional state from my pigheaded team mates. So that I’m learning, with every miserable minute of workout, locker room, and the rest of life—if you can call it a life—all there is to learn about pain.

  Pain hurts. But that’s the good news.

  The bad news consists of everything else.

  “Hmmm.” Jean dumps a grocery bag into my arms. “Sounds like love to me.”

  Who asked you? I say.

  She tells me I am awfully touchy these days. Moody. And rude. I take things inside, spill them on the kitchen counter without apologizing.

  “Ellie, let’s talk.”

  I ignore her, head upstairs. And run into Nan, who looks steamed-fresh perky, wet-haired, towel-wrapped, whistling on her way down from the shower. She flicks sliding wire-rims back up her nose and winks.

  “Hey. I like your new girlfriend.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  I lose it. Totally. Standing on the stairs screaming like a maniac about how much I hate everything—their false and insensitive assumptions, and this stingy, mediocre place, and Brenna Allen, and swimming, and love, and fear, and life itself.

  Wow! Jean yells from the kitchen. Better call an ambulance!

  I push past Nan, get to my room and smash the door shut behind. Then I let it happen—what I’ve been wanting and dreading all along: the crumple, the fall. But the mattress is comforting somehow, between me and the floor, and I feel my cheeks sink into pillows that will absorb every tear. Because here, all alone, I can cry.

  *

  Dinner was the last straw. Perfect punctuation to what has so far been a perfectly miserable autumn.

  But the truth is that it started before then, started when I recognized the sway of things.

  That’s what I began to call it, anyway—silently, almost without knowing it: this feeling I get toward the end of my main set each morning workout—usually during the third to the last repeat, so no matter how bad it is I know there’s plenty more to go. When I start to believe that things just cannot continue like this—my arms turn to lead in the water, shoulders protest that they are all used up, and the right side of my neck feels as if someone’s been banging on it with a nightstick. When I’m wrapped inside this pitiless wet blanket of sorrow, and hurting, and rage, I can’t fight the slowing down any more, I know my splits have deteriorated and my stroke is falling entirely apart. But at the same time the pain changes, reveals a different piece of itself. Becomes buoyant somehow, and rhythmic. So that I just keep moving—slowly, futilely, but forward. And that, that is the sway.

  Later, after the last repeat, after swimming down, after shower and hair-dryer and powdered skin and dry clothes, there’s the walk upstairs, during which I notice that I am still in its grip. Moving in the rhythm of the rhythmic part of pain. And there’s this blurry halo over
everything: eyesight a little hazy, sounds ringing as if they’re too far off, sense of touch gone slightly numb. But somehow the organism still works, moving me forward, a kind of coordination in the motion of each bludgeoned muscle.

  It’s like being encapsulated in something. Insular. Remote. Inside a stream of aching, and sadness, and loss, that no one else can really touch or understand. But you’re traveling ahead despite yourself—you don’t even know why. Everything visible and invisible just more or less conspires to make you proceed. Like what it must be when you’re dying.

  *

  I recognized it, this sway of things, some time toward the end of our third week in the water. That’s when Brenna Allen pulled me aside and said to bear with it, for a while I was just going to have to do these punishing sets of nothing but distance, distance, but it would make me strong in the end. I smiled and said fine. But I said it like a robot, and could tell that she knew what I really felt inside. A little whirlpool now, she said gently. Next week we’ll get you a massage. Good work, Ellie. She was looking pretty beat herself, a lot older, kind of tired and thin. Not that I gave a damn.

  That’s when Babe started waiting around for me after morning workouts, too. She was looking better and better all the time—starting to take on the shape of a real bona fide national-class act now: slimmer, ruddy-skinned, bright-eyed, muscular—while I kept getting weaker, paler, less significant. Like something you’d find squirming under a rock.

  *

  You’re pretty buddy-buddy with Delgado these days, Karen Potalia said in the free weights room that week. Why don’t you ask her if it’s true?

  If what is true? I grunted.

  We finished one set of push-ups and took a long rest, cheating.

  “That she died on her way to the hospital and, you know, came back to life. It’s what I heard, anyway. They gave her one of those electric shocks or something—you know? Like the bride of Frankenstein. I mean, God, have you seen all those scars? Barf.”

  “Fuck you, Karen. Why don’t you just ask her yourself, if you’re oh-so curious?”

  “Wow, Ellie. Didn’t know it was such a touchy subject. I apologize.”

  But a nasty flicker remained in her eyes. It’s a part of her that flares up occasionally and makes me uneasy, and I saw it flare higher when the whole giggling mess of them poured in from swim bench and Nautilus, Babe tagging along silently, bigger and taller than the rest.

  Karen did more push-ups, huffed, puffed and stopped, then sat cross-legged on the mat wiping sweat from her cheek. I watched her with a sudden sick feeling in my throat. Watched Babe, across the room, fitting plates on a barbell.

  “Yo, Babe.”

  She was fiddling with clinch pins and, when she heard her name, looked over.

  “Ellie and I were just doing our push-ups here. And I was wondering.”

  Karen’s tone teased. But the sharpness underneath it, if you noticed, would shut you up and make you watchful. For some reason, everyone had noticed. The noise level was considerably reduced. And they were watching.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  Babe shook her head. I hung mine in dread.

  “Have you ever had an after-death experience?”

  Somewhere a bolt dropped, rolled against metal.

  “No,” Babe said quietly.

  “Not ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  No one moved. The attention seemed to feed Potalia in a way. Her voice got stronger, she smiled.

  “Well, maybe you’ll tell me if all that Sports Illustrated stuff was true. I mean, can you really do three hundred push-ups nonstop, every day?”

  “Oh, that.”

  “And bench two hundred pounds?”

  “No,” said Babe, “not any more.”

  “But you could? I mean, once upon a time?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there’s sort of, like, a before and after—right?”

  The air was silent, sweaty. I could feel my face change from bitter icy pale to the scarlet letter and I glared at Potalia, furious, telling myself I should have stopped this at the beginning and had at least better do something about it now, even though it was too late. But when I looked across the room I saw that Babe was still crouched there calmly, cradling a five-pound plate in her hands. She didn’t seem upset. When she spoke, her voice was even.

  “Right. Maybe there’s sort of a before and after in lots of people’s lives, Karen. Maybe you’ll have that in your life, too.”

  “Hear, hear,” I said. ‘‘But not soon enough,”

  Potalia blushed, stared at me with real dislike, then shame, and looked away. I became team captain again. Stood and clapped my hands, trying to get things back to normal.

  “Okay, role models. America’s finest physical specimens. It’s caveman time. Huh! Pay no attention to that child behind the mirror! The Wizard of Oz has spoken.”

  They started moving then, giggling a little with relief. Iron scraped aluminum. Palms smeared mats, left damply outlined fingerprints behind, and metal plates rattled up, slammed down.

  I knelt next to Babe.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. She adjusted one last pin, stood to snatch the bar expertly until it rested beneath her chin, then heaved it up and around to press along the back of her neck, so emphatically that you could hear something like metal creaking in her joints—and maybe that’s what it was, because she’d been totally bashed up, after all—but she made it look easy. I thought, for a moment, that there was pain in her eyes. Not hurt feelings, or anger, but a real deep physical pain; and because I was so consumed by it myself these days I recognized it, saw it give her pause, and stop her very briefly. Then she shut her eyes so I couldn’t see. Saying Shoulders, Ellie, shoulders. Spot me, all right?

  I did.

  *

  That was the week I fell, once and for all—right down into the sway of things. The week Potalia stopped talking to me. Not that I cared. And Brenna Allen pulled me aside, to make more promises.

  And Babe started waiting for me after morning workouts.

  Something weird was happening. I’d try, but couldn’t any more—I could not meet her eyes. When I tried, I’d break out in a sweat. I didn’t know why. Until that one morning, walking next to her down the hall. Feeling the quiet, tired glow of pain that had trapped me every minute of the past three weeks, and this growing sensation of being touched, thoroughly touched, by a sadness I could not explain. Words came up from inside, out of nothing, swelled naturally to the tip of my tongue, so that I almost said them out loud but then recognized what they were with a shock, and trapped and silenced them just in time:

  I think that I love you.

  She, of course, strode right along in the invisible sway, many inches taller, much much stronger, miles above me, awesome, emergent. Not even knowing about the sadness. Or that maybe she herself was a reason for it; which was why I could not look her in the eye any more.

  But how would she have known? I’d just sensed it myself.

  “Are you okay, Ellie? You seem really tired.”

  “Oh I’m great. There’s nothing wrong with me that a variety of addictive drugs won’t fix in a jiffy. Whereas you, on the other hand, are looking really awesome in the water, Delgado. Really strong and beautiful. I mean, totally.”

  She didn’t respond, and I wished I hadn’t said it. We walked along smothered by one of her deadly silences.

  Then I was saved by the bell. Or, in this case, by the dumbbell.

  “Wait up, girls.”

  Canelli bumped his way between us, slapped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed until it hurt.

  “Two gorgeous ladies. God, can’t stand it. Makes me want to jump right in.”

  His hair was buzzed close on the sides. He’d dyed a Mohawk streak of black right through the gold, from forehead to his wisp of a pigtail.

  “Hiya, Ellie. How’s our new distance queen?”

  “Funny you should sho
w up, Mike. I was just talking about drugs.”

  “Shame, for shame. Drugs are illegal. What about introducing me to your friend here—”

  “Babe, this is Mike Canelli, Coach McMullen’s current hardship case, rumor has it a good breaststroker when his arms aren’t broken. Mike, this is Babe Delgado.”

  We stopped in the middle of the hall, they said hi and shook hands, and he leaned over to kiss her knuckles.

  “My hero.”

  She pulled back a little, blushing. He hung on to her hand until his arm stretched, then dropped it with a reluctance that was almost all for show—almost—but, for a second, the thick blond eyebrows rose with something like acknowledgment, or admiration. He was tall, taller than her, much taller than me. Inside the baggy school sweatshirt his shoulders, chest, neck were a lot smaller than they’d been last year, and he was dragging around the remains of a sizable pot belly. But he is a big enough guy to carry all the defects without looking too bad. He tugged my hair, which he always does, and for some reason I let him. Maybe because I was feeling utterly underneath the heel of everyone and everything, and figured it was all that I deserved. Or maybe because Mike is one of those creatures who is always right in someone’s face, anyway, so by the time he lands in yours you don’t even notice. It’s a kind of gift, actually: when other people let you have your absolute way around them, without beating the emotional or physical crap out of you. A gift that I often have dreamed of possessing. And never will. But Mike Canelli does.

  He glanced at Babe, who was watching quietly. For the first time in memory, I saw Mike Canelli turn red—a quick burst of embarrassment that whipped his features scarlet and passed immediately away. Strange misery seized my innards. And the morning loomed ahead like some devastating gauntlet: full of torment, impossible.

  “Babe, I can’t do breakfast.”

  She gave me a questioning look.

  “But I can,” he said.

  “Listen, Ellie, what about dinner?”

  “Yes,” Mike echoed, “what about dinner?”

  I ignored him and told her that would be fine, she could come over to my place after workout.

  Then I left as quickly as possible. The sway let me do it—just walk forward, down the hall, past people and glass cases and lobby bulletin boards without looking back to see any of them. It carried me through swinging doors, out into browned trees and fresh cold air. I breathed with relief. But there were tears in my eyes, I don’t know why.