I hold her for a long time.
As she sobs I tell her: Don’t worry, child. You didn’t create her—the storm, I mean, Angelita. You didn’t call her, she was there, long before, and all along, waiting. She took that man away. It was good for him to die. It was good for you to live. And everything good costs pain.
I watch her tears dry. Between us, the silence. Hear the measured breaths of this old black woman. Tragic young face of the young one beside her. Remember the crucifixion statue above a church altar outside of Havana, long ago, dimly illuminated by candles, dark streaks staining the ivory skin of Jesus as he hung there, sadly. But I was never ivory. And neither, my child, were you. There is no pure white sterile beginning to curl back into. Only blood of the innards, in all their difficult mingled pain and joy; hard work, scarred hands covered with dark, dark earth; dangerous, wholesome fire—which, now, you must learn to have and control—from the secret burning part of you. Only forward, is there. Into the suffering, and hope. Into the love. And the terror. The pity. The light.
Old twisted black hands. Crooked joints. Pink callused palms. I offer them to her. Saying, here child, hold these, take what they have to give. Out of the darkness, comes my light. Out of this darkness, yours.
She presses both hands into mine. Eyes glimmer shut. Pale lids over tears. There is fire in my hands. But it warms her, will not burn her. I can feel it come alive, now, in her hands too—after staying inside at the secret dark core of her for so long—the heat, the life. Fire doesn’t injure fire. And only dead wood burns.
I tell her it is time.
For what? she says.
To love, I tell her. Use this power for good. Do violence only to protect a beloved. Offer your care and your power to a living creature who needs it. Some child, maybe—one of your own flesh, or of another’s, or even a defenseless animal—what matters is that you give up a part of yourself to nurture it. Heal the sickness of human bodies and minds. Como una bruja. A big brown witch. Tender woman. Child no more.
The fire courses through us. Joins at the palms. Feeling it fully, for the first time, she is surprised, mistakes its raw energy for pain, and sobs out loud.
Bear it, I tell her. Woman, you must bear it.
For this you came back.
For this, was Angelita.
She grinds her teeth, and between wet gasps tells me about the crash, the sea, the storm. The light that was cold, then warm. Small, then all-surrounding. Gleaming from wrecked metal onto mirroring gems of water. Wanting to take her in.
I tell her of Guillo’s child, come out of me too early in a billowing wash of blood. Smoke of the fields. How I walked among stumps of cane. Walked through the miles. Arms outstretched, offering myself. How the flaming ground let me go—though I begged of it to seize me—let me go, and left no burns.
Go back, it said. The water next time.
*
Later, in sweating twilight, I show her how to touch her fingertips to the wicks of candles. She does. And speckles the room with light.
“I always wondered, Tita.”
“What, girl?”
“Why you never had any matches on the altar.”
“Sure,” I laugh. And snatch a drugstore matchbook out of my pocket. “But you have to keep them around. The Powers aren’t yours—they come and go. You’re just their vessel. And sometimes, who knows why? the magic doesn’t work.”
She pauses, unsmiling; “What do I do then?”
“Reason. Use your reason.”
Ah, she says, of course.
I boil water in the square place, making arroz con frijoles negros. We eat it with bread, and drink more soda. In the electric light she looks younger, beaten down.
“I think my mom and dad are breaking up.”
I nod.
“They’ve just been beating on each other since Christmas. Since before then, probably. It’s really depressing, Tita. Jack, and Roberto—and Teresa, she’s just a kid—they’re going crazy.”
“Pobrecitas.”
“Jack says they might sell the house.”
“Yes,” I say, “some things don’t last.”
“I’m missing lots of tests and practice, just coming down here. I mean, I’ve like really messed up.”
“Ah,” I say, “that’s not important.”
We go back to the room of candles, wiping off sweat with bright kerchiefs. We eat sugared fruit, drink strong black coffee. I search a drawer for hidden pleasures. Smoke forbidden cigarettes.
Tita, she says, show me more things.
In a while, I tell her. Next time you’re here.
She tells me that will be in the summer. Kenny’s parents are having him cremated tomorrow. No service. No invitations. And buried in the ocean, on his birthday, some time in July. She told them she would come down for that. Go out on the boat with them. Take ashes in her hands.
“So,” she says, “I’ll see you then, too.”
“Good.” I wheeze, blow out clouds.
Before she leaves I tell her to give my regards to the family. To eat good food, work hard, be kind to those who deserve it, fight those who are wasteful and cruel, even win more medals if she wants. I remind her about the fire. Patience, I say, use it in love. With age, it gets stronger.
She must go, get on an airplane. At the door our hands meet. Old fire. Young fire. Soon, I’ll pass it all to her. Then give myself up completely. To the ending, and the light. And feel my bones grow cold. Inside me, smoke and dust.
When you visit in the summer, I tell her, bring nothing but yourself. Go straight to Kenny’s parents. Don’t be afraid. Then travel out in a boat with them. On a bright, clear-sky day. With healing in your heart. Dig your hands in deep, and help throw his ashes on the sea. His weightless, well-burned ashes. The pieces of his poor tired body.
Be glad that you were broken, I say. In your body, and your heart. Be not happy, but glad. Which means accepting.
Accept, now, all the love and hate. The father and the mother. And black, and white. Accept, now, the suffering.
Be glad for Angelita.
Finals
(BREN)
Delgado does come back, finally, after missing too much practice and nearly all of her final exams. I know, because her teachers complained; word got around to a couple of bigwigs on the scholarship committee; and sooner rather than later—after being tipped off by a maliciously gleeful McMullen—I had a lot of explaining to do.
In the end, though, the kid’s rear end is saved, and so is mine. What it all comes down to—as I knew it would, after all the fuss and annoyance—is winning. She has been crucial to our terrific record this year. Her presence is necessary at the Divisional Championships. Number-one ranking is in sight. Alumni contributions are up. Babe Delgado is not expendable.
She doesn’t show up for her one-on-one chat, though—she is the only one of the team to miss it—and it makes me feel helpless, more than a little angry, like I have given her too much leeway and now have to pay back the Spoiled Brat Piper. In her appointed time slot, Ellie Marks shows up instead. My irritation cools.
“Babe says hi. She’s back.”
“Yes,” I say, “how are you?”
“Oh, well, feeling sort of like a jerk.”
I motion for her to sit. “How so, Ellie?”
“I don’t know. It just feels like the year sort of fell apart on me. I mean, it wasn’t all bad or anything, not by a lot, but it wasn’t what I expected, either.”
I tell her that I think I know what she means. Ask her is she ready to swim. Ready to watch, she jokes, half bitterly. No, I insist, to swim. She glances at me uncertainly.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re not looking too ill these days during workout. Neither are you tapered, granted. But do you have a four hundred IM in you?”
The young face stares back at me; I examine it for signs of distress or panic. There’s a moment, perhaps—when some of that flashes through the eyes, changes the set of her
mouth; and I recognize something of myself in the expression: a kind of pained excitement.
“The four?”
I nod.
“What about Potalia?”
“She won’t, Ellie. She’s pregnant. With some complications. I can’t really say that I blame her.”
She listens, then, when I tell her what I have in mind. Some paper will have to be shuffled. A couple of lies told. She has never seen this side of me—the sly and manipulative side—openly before, although she has certainty felt it; but a part of her, too, accepts it, knows that I’m presenting it to her as a kind of gift. I could tap Babe Delgado for the 400 IM, if I had to—even though it would be overworking her, even though she would hate it—or one of the good, promising freshmen; but I am offering her a place in the final competition, instead. It is her last chance, anyway. She knows it. Her face cracks into a painful smile.
“I guess I’m, like, suddenly not expendable.”
“You never were, Ellie.”
I tell her, then, some of what I really think: that she is very strong, and growing into completion, and brave, and deserves a shot at something. That, in the end, there is a kind of detriment to grandeur and to winning, anyway. The bigger things get the broader they are, the more complex; the farther back from them you have to stand to see them; the easier it is to superficially admire and the harder it is to genuinely love—because grandeur in and of itself is incapable of the small, essential effort, the intimate urge to get close, proceed, to survive; it must always be propped up by smaller things.
Oh, she says. Oh, wow. And we’re silent.
How are things, I ask her, after a while. How’s your life?
“My life? Ah. I think—I mean, it’s good these days, really good.” And it’s obvious, from the hot pleasurable red flooding her face, that she’s discovered love. Watching, I feel like an intruder. But it also makes me quite happy; and the shock of the sensation—happiness, I mean—ripples through me. It has been a long time.
“I’m glad, Ellie. I am very glad for you.”
“You are? I mean, you are, aren’t you.”
This is teasing, forthright and tender, surprises us both.
She tells me, then, that she thinks she has known me in a former life.
What? I say.
She blushes. She is taking a class in World Religions, she says. And she likes it. She believes a lot of it. Hinduism and Buddhism, reincarnation. Karma. It’s the only thing that makes sense—to her, anyway; otherwise, we wouldn’t necessarily be who we are, and love who we love, would we? We’d just be simple products of our environment in this lifetime. But, in so many ways, we are not. And there’s so much suffering, so much—if it’s all random, in the end, if there’s no meaning to it, if through suffering you can’t balance some kind of cosmic scales for yourself somehow—then what is the point? So she believes in that stuff, yes. In stuff that does not require faith, really; but only a sort of spiritual common sense.
I don’t respond. She doesn’t ask me to. Just looks at me now, fully, a little shyly.
“How are you?”
“Fine,” I say, too quickly. And want to follow it up: Just fine. But I realize I’ve pressed a hand to my mouth, to hide something, and my face has gone numb, and I can’t lie any more.
“Actually,” I say, “I’m not fine. Although I am getting better.” Don’t cry, Coach, I tell myself. I don’t. “I’ll tell you something, Ellie, since you ask. Recently, I lost someone—no, not someone, Kay, I lost Kay Goldstein, my lover of many years, she was very ill, and she died. So, last season and this, I think you can understand now, have been very tough for me. It was quite—it was the most difficult thing in the world. Sometimes, I still don’t believe it actually happened. And I think I’m going to be all right; in fact, I know I will, eventually. It’s all just a matter of time. I guess that’s partly why I believe—about life, I mean—that it’s all time, anyway.”
I wonder how I can speak these words, now, so calmly, so simply. But maybe the truth is always simple; never as nerve-racking as artifice; and, I know, we should carefully choose our lies, be sure they never own us.
“Your lover,” Ellie says cautiously, “must have been a very wonderful person.”
“Ah. She was.”
Papers rustle under my hands on the desk. My phone buzzes suddenly, insistently. Five rings, six. I let it go unanswered and then it’s silent; and we wait, watching each other, little separating us, in this moment, but the years. She stands and puts her hands flat on the desk, leans suddenly across it. I don’t think, or pull back. She kisses my lips firmly, chastely. Then she stands apart blushing, and looks away.
I swivel in my chair. Right. Left. Back to center. Finally, I clear my throat for attention, and face her with a stern expression mitigated by vague embarrassment.
“That,” I say, “is something that will not happen again. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Bren.”
“And as long as you swim for me, you will refrain from addressing me informally again. Even in private. Even face to face. We may some day be friends. But that would be later—much, much later.”
“I know, Bren. I mean, okay. Okay.”
The mantle of authority remains perched perilously on my damaged shoulders. I can feel us both relax.
I tell her I’m glad we talked. That I expect to see her, and of course Babe Delgado, on time tomorrow morning.
She blushes. Faintly resentful.
“Love and work are the same thing, Ellie. You don’t have to understand that right now—just remember it, will you?”
“I guess. I mean I’ll try.”
She leaves. But halfway down the hall, starts humming—happily, it seems, on key—and, sitting at my desk, I hear it.
* * *
On the bus, at the airport, I’m a nervous wreck but do not show it. The kids have all dressed identically, for a joke: striped gray-and-white pants, gray cotton shirts, white Aerobics shoes. Over the weekend, they have all shaved down. Somehow, too, they have each streak-bleached tailing strands of hair along the backs of their necks and above each ear. I detect the unseen hand of Ellie Marks in this. A cabal, for sure. Passing by on their way to the departure lounge, as Etta and I take count, each says a too-jolly Hi Coach! while the next echoes, in turn: Hi Coach! Hi Coach! Occasionally, there is a whisper or a giggle.
When I’ve taken the right count twice, I sit among them, next to Etta, who is fiddling with her engagement ring. It is a modest, thin band of delicate matte silver with a single, tiny, dainty diamond embedded, and against the darkness of her skin it glows. I notice, glancing at her face, that she seems happy these days—and I am glad for her. This thought crosses my mind: Next time I’m married, we will both wear rings to declare it. I don’t know where the thought comes from. But although brief, it makes me happy for a moment; for a moment, gives me hope, and a sensation of physiological warmth and comfort that I never believed would be mine again.
They look at me expectantly, with teasing expressions. One of them cups her hands, whispers to someone else; there is another giggle, and then they all watch me with sly grins about to burst, in their matching pants and shirts and shoes, their matching strands of hair.
“Very teamlike,” I say, finally. “Nice sense of unity. Love the decor.”
One by one, the bubbles of tension prick into laughter that is entirely female, and soft, but tinged with an element of hysteria. I look around at the faces, each flushed and damp. They are all trim, tapered, full of energy and restless calories, ready to burn. They’ve exceeded themselves over the past few months; and, now, it comes down to this, this attempt at a perfection of readiness, of will, this stillness before action, this waiting.
Then it will be over. And whatever happens is a truth they will have, inside, for the rest of their lives. Some will not surpass it. Some will never redeem it. But others will. And, in that way as well as in many, many ways, all these lives will diverge, continue, crisscross again or not, s
hrink and grow, and ultimately end.
On my other side sits Karen Potalia. She is silent, fully made up. Fiddling with her engagement ring. I am sandwiched between two straight women with engagement rings, one black, one white; across from me, feet cluttered with luggage, Ellie Marks and Babe Delgado sit side by side, carefully not touching, glancing at each other to share some ineffable sensation when they think no one is looking. It’s amusing—in a gentle way that is also somehow painful—because here, among this group of alert young women, whatever they believe they are hiding is an open secret. As I have been to them, myself, all along: a walking secret utterly unveiled, an open wound.
Well, probably.
But in some way, maybe, it has made me perfect for this job. Because I know what it is to love them.
A modulated mechanical voice spills over intercoms, announcing the flight boarding. With sighs and shrieks, all the gray-shirted, striped-trousered, white-shoed hordes stand. Except for Babe Delgado.
“Rules, rules!” Etta demands. “No booze, no drugs. Cool it on the sugar and fat—moderate caffeine.” She waves her clipboard—always an implicit threat. “Anyone who doesn’t deal straight with me around the stuff will sooner or later—and probably sooner—have to deal with Her Majesty”—and she gestures my way.
There is a collective groan, the fear only partially faked.
They line up to board. Out of the corner of my eye I see Ellie Marks leaning down, hand on Delgado’s shoulder, insistently whispering. Babe doesn’t look up.
I approach. “Let’s go, you two.”
“She won’t.” Ellie blushes, agitated. Delgado looks up to meet my eyes. Everything’s written across her face, suddenly: grief, exhaustion, fear.
“Come on, Babe. What’s up?”
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