by Ginny Gilder
I stood at the boathouse door, staring at the list of ten names. Mine was absent. I felt a flush of heat rush to my face and my eyes flood with water. I swallowed hard and blinked my eyes rapidly to tamp down my reaction—“You got what you deserved.”
I returned to the rowers’ group house to pack up. I just wanted to slink away without a trace, evaporate from the scene like morning dew. Unfortunately, my exit was more like scared sweat drying on a dress shirt, marked by stained ovals of perspiration and animal stink.
Loser!
Bouche came in while I was packing. She stood in the doorway and hesitated before speaking. I glanced up at her and then away, studiously focused on my task. “I’m sorry you didn’t make it,” she said.
Yeah, sure. I hated her, yet I had to say something that would not alienate her forever. She was my college teammate. We had a life together beyond the confines of this dreadful National Team camp, and I had to do my part to preserve our relationship.
I could only speak gruffly, in short bursts, “Yeah. Well. That’s how it goes.” I sounded so angry, as if it were her fault. I knew it wasn’t, that she shouldn’t have done anything different. It was ridiculous to expect her not to be a better rower than I was or to give up her seat for me. Winning required someone to lose; that equation is a fundamental law of sports. This was my first up-close and oh-so-personal lesson, and there was no place to hide.
Bouche was only the first person I wished to avoid. News of my failure was not a private tidbit I could stuff in a drawer and unfold when and how it suited me. Anyone who cared about the composition of the US women’s rowing team would learn I wasn’t on the roster. The rest of my college team would hear. I would have to tell my family; they knew where I’d been all summer. I had no control over my image, no way to package myself as a success. Everyone in my world would know I wasn’t good enough. My inferiority was now unavoidably public.
“You’ll never be good enough,” I said to myself. I shuffled around my small, humid bedroom, stuffing everything together willy-nilly into my suitcase. And I finally said to Bouche, “I hope you guys have a great time, and go really fast.” I couldn’t come up with a sentence that included “congratulations,” so stingy was I in my rage with Bouche and with myself.
“Thanks,” Bouche replied. She sounded like someone had died. We had never negotiated this unmapped territory. She had to figure out what to say to someone she’d just beaten out, who’d been summarily cut, essentially exposed as insufficiently qualified, not up to National Team snuff. “Tough shit, eat my dust” wasn’t the right expression of compassion. Of course, she was happy to have come out on top. She’d accomplished what she’d set out to do. Possibly she’d have chosen me as a teammate if she’d been in charge, but maybe not. This was a true zero-sum game. Some folks won and got to go on; most lost and had to go home.
Years would pass before I appreciated the courage of any aspirant, regardless of endeavor, who is willing to put herself on the line and take a public, steeply down-sided risk. Without people willing to subject themselves to public measurement, no competition could ever take place. Many more of us lose than win. The grace of all these people is what makes sporting events possible. Losers create the conditions for winning. Yet the myth is that only winning holds value.
The silence between us grew from awkward to unbearable.
“Do you know how long you’ll stay here before you head over to Amsterdam?” I asked as I glanced up at her quickly. As I kept packing, I saw her dark brows folding toward each other. There was no trace of a smirk, not even a smile, only concern and uncertainty from someone who by all rights could be dancing on the rooftops and singing that a dream of hers had just come true.
“No, not yet. I guess we’ll hear all about that this afternoon at practice, or maybe tomorrow.”
We had traversed the hardest part of the conversation. I didn’t break down in humiliated tears, and Bouche didn’t succumb to a glimmer of a gloat. Her decency was more magnanimous than my fury, which was sliding into despair. I kept my voice gruff to avoid tears and to stop my anger from wrestling free.
“Well, good luck. I’ll see you when school starts again after Worlds.”
“Yeah, sure. Have a safe drive back,” Bouche said as she turned and left my doorway.
As I heard her step away, I called after her, half-heartedly. “Hey. Congratulations.”
Bouche flew to Amsterdam with the US team and I flew to Stockholm for a reunion with Mom and her extended family. Peggy was turning twenty-one and my mother’s baby brother, my uncle Bo, was newly forty, so aunts, uncles, cousins, and the four of us American kids congregated to celebrate on the island of Furusund, one of the many that make up the archipelago along Sweden’s southeast coast. Bo and his family had a summer cottage there, remote and peaceful, on a slice of high bank waterfront that offered a stunning view of nearby islands and easy swimming access to the pristine and chilly waters of the Baltic Sea.
A week of midnight suns couldn’t blind me to my mother’s drinking, however, and my trip ended in embarrassment and rage. Just like the long summer days, Mom’s drinking hours monopolized much of the twenty-four-hour cycle. No one could ignore her disheveled appearance, constant slurring, and unsteadiness. Nonetheless, she tolerated no discussion of her behavior, not from her siblings, and certainly not from her children.
On our last morning together, as I said good-bye, I couldn’t contain myself. “I can’t stand being around you when you drink,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” Even in denial, she couldn’t stop her words from running into each other as she tried to control her speech.
“I don’t want to see you again until you stop drinking. I can’t stand this.”
“I’m fine. Just fine.” She couldn’t look into my eyes as her head wobbled on her neck. It was well before noon.
“I hate you! I don’t ever want to see you again.”
“Ginny.” She reached out for my arm, but I stepped out of reach.
“I mean it. Leave me alone.” I left the cottage and got in the car with my uncle to drive to the airport. Can’t she just die? Get her out of my life. I’m sick of this. Yet beneath the rage, my fear rampaged. Could I end up like her? Could I end up hating myself like I hated her? I didn’t know the answers, but I knew I had to keep my distance.
Meanwhile, the US crew that I had not qualified for finished DFL—dead fucking last—at the World Championships in Amsterdam. How embarrassing. I couldn’t land a seat on a dead-slow crew. Double failure.
There was only one thing to do: keep training. Harder, better, more. I pressed the pause button on my classes for the fall semester, which allowed me the luxury of a singular focus, at least regarding juggling academics and rowing. My anger at my mom didn’t dissipate, nor was it helped when I received a card from her with a single sentence scrawled in her illegible handwriting: “The door is open from this side.”
I fumed at her card. She hadn’t shut any door! Of course, she would ignore the one step she could take to open the door I had slammed: quit drinking. I bristled at her stance as a helpless victim suffering my unjust anger. As far as she was concerned, if only I could calm down, we could resume our relationship. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t risk allowing her back into my life. I ripped up the card and kept my distance.
My college years were flying by. I had already passed the halfway mark, yet felt far from ready for the real world. I decided to take the fall term off from school, but live off campus, get a job, and continue training with my crew.
My decision allowed me to focus solely on training for four months, which was good timing. The new academic year brought more challenge on the water, as now Anne Warner had graduated. We had no more Olympians, but we had Bouche, a newly crowned National Team member and only a sophomore. She was younger, stronger, more experienced, and more accomplished than I. She was fabulous. She wasn’t cocky, didn’t brag, was a model teammate, worked hard, and didn’t rub an
yone’s nose in her superiority. I dreamed of crushing her.
Seven varsity rowers had returned from the Sprints-winning crew. We intended to repeat our previous year’s performance and go undefeated and triumph at the Sprints again. Also, we would attend the National Women’s Rowing Association (NWRA) National Championships for the first time. We planned to win those, too—a tougher challenge, as the elite eight race would include club crews, not just college programs. All the post-college National Team aspirants trained at those clubs. The prospect of pitting ourselves against the top competitors in the country gave me added training motivation.
Not that I needed more. This year I intended to transfer my crew’s streak of success to my individual performance. I was determined my name would not be missing from a National Team list again.
The 1978 World Championships were scheduled for the late fall in New Zealand, instead of late summer in Northern Europe, so attending the selection camp would mean missing a semester of school without any guarantee of making the team. As many National Team aspirants were in college, the US Olympic Rowing Committee decided to fund a summer program for a select number of athletes. A European tour would provide international racing experience to a group of rowers viewed as Olympic potentials: the selection process for that tour would immediately follow the National Championships, scheduled for mid-June in Seattle.
The US Olympic Committee named Nat Case the sole selector and coach. His mandate was to choose athletes who possessed the potential to make the US Olympic team two years hence and then accompany the team to Europe and prepare them to race against many of the world’s best.
Abbreviated and completely subjective, the selection process would involve no seat racing, an on-the-water tool that allows direct comparison of two individual rowers’ boat-moving abilities. The invitation-only tryouts would last less than a week. The compressed timeline allowed Nat less than a dozen practices to sort out the top collegiate athletes who would most benefit from the European Tour experience, while optimizing the United States’ chances to win medals at the Moscow Olympics in two years.
Despite the drawbacks of its selection process, I decided to compete for a spot on the European Tour. Trying out for the New Zealand team seemed too risky, as I would have to skip another semester of school, win or lose. The summer camp represented my best chance for breaking into the top tier of women rowers and establishing myself as an up-and-comer.
I kicked into a new gear and worked hard the entire collegiate season. I added in double workouts throughout the winter, lifting weights many mornings and packing in massive quantities of endurance-building workouts in the afternoons. I stayed healthy, took my meds, avoided the emergency room, grew stronger, and improved my fitness.
Not only that, life started looking up on dry land as well. After two years, thanks both to rowing and the natural process of growing up, I had not only learned to pull hard, but found my place on campus, too. My sense of belonging on the women’s crew gave me sufficient confidence to explore life beyond the boathouse. Many of my friends were rowers, of course, but some weren’t. I maintained my friendship with David, who lived off campus in the University Towers apartment building beyond Chapel Street, where Route 34 segued into Frontage Street. I often tramped to his place to enjoy homemade suppers, bringing a pair of pints of Häagen-Dazs ice cream for dessert and listening to his never-ending tales of woe. Either he was flunking one of his classes because the work was too boring to finish, or he didn’t like the professor, or he was dying of loneliness because the boyfriend pickings were too sparse for his tastes, or he just had to tell me about the new guy he’d met in a bar and what had happened next.
Besides making me laugh, David’s stories offered me glimpses of a life that traveled along a different dimension than mine, and I often felt thankful to be spared the struggles he contended with as a gay man. We didn’t discuss his fears about the world’s view of his homosexuality, but in his own way, he tried to maintain a low profile, dreading the embarrassment that could come as a result of people knowing too much about him. Of course, that proved a challenge for someone who prided himself on expressing his individuality, who sought attention and loved to worm his way into the center of a room, whose flamboyant behavior—raspy and loud voice, booming laugh, flirtatious charm that worked magic on both women and men—marked him as noteworthy. Besides, his consistently well-coifed appearance and elegant, slightly effeminate mannerisms branded him as gay to anyone who was at all astute in that regard. Still, David maintained his own boundaries, steering clear of the on-campus gay organizations and avoiding any public affiliation with the gay rights movement.
Nonetheless, privately, he was so calm about his gayness and never questioned or decried it. David didn’t simply restrain from self-denigration; he accepted himself without question, without a shred of self-hatred. No denial, no guilt, he knew he was different, but special, too. I wondered how he could live in the world as such an obvious outlier and not absorb its assessment that there was something fundamentally, irretrievably wrong with him.
While David may have thought he was closeted in public, to me he was fully out, not just in private. His truth was impossible to hide, given his personality, and I admired him. Although he may have disputed that he was living out and proud, he was. Doing so demanded a level of courage and self-acceptance that, while I marveled at it from a distance, I knew I would never successfully muster. I had no problem associating with David; he was a good friend, loyal, affectionate, bitingly intelligent, and funny, but I thanked my lucky stars I didn’t have to walk in his shoes.
As my social life developed, I even found a boyfriend. He was on the heavyweight men’s team, but he wasn’t a rower: he was the varsity coxswain, a swarthy, scrawny guy who starved himself to drop his weight below a hundred twenty pounds and maintain an ideal physique for the racing season. No crew wants to carry any excess weight above the minimum anchor that a coxswain represents. He was a sprite of a guy, but he seemed to like me and swaggered as if he’d hooked a hot girlfriend. For the first time, I had my very own cheerleader; he grew close enough to me to hear some of my witheringly negative self-talk and cared enough to challenge some of the claptrap he heard.
By university policy, I had to move off campus when I didn’t enroll for fall semester. I took a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a two-story house on the corner of Dwight and Elm Streets, three blocks from the Yale gym. I decorated the two rooms to suit my preferences and learned to cook. I read Diet for a Small Planet, which entranced me with its thesis on the inherent inefficiencies of consuming animal protein. I swore off meat, became a vegetarian, and spent countless happy hours learning to cook and bake. Many loaves of bread proved more useful as doorstops than sandwich fodder, but I could whip up a mean carrot cake. Lisa, my best friend from Dana Hall and now at Yale, moved in upstairs with her boyfriend, giving me the equivalent of dorm life without the hassle of a roommate.
My mother, looking for a way to return to my good graces and nervous about my living off campus in a shaky neighborhood, insisted on buying a dog for me—despite my severe allergy to animal hair and my lack of enthusiasm for her solution to a problem I regarded as nonexistent. Nonetheless, when the German shepherd puppy arrived all the way from Washington State, I picked him up at the airport. He wriggled his soft, furry body against me when I put him in the car and lay beside me for the drive home, nosing my leg and panting quietly. By the time we got home, I was sold on him. I gave him my favorite name, Max, and he, in turn, with his spirited personality and relentless affection, set me on the path to reconciliation with my mother. Feeling angry and grateful simultaneously was impossible; I couldn’t help but appreciate how Max had come into my life and the difference he had made.
At the end of the winter, as the ice broke up on the Housatonic and the end of our grueling indoor workouts beckoned, I steeled myself for my next leap of faith. I had kept my mouth shut long enough: now I had to come clean to my coach.
“Nat, can I talk to you?” I asked. He was leaning against the railing, baseball cap pushed up high on his forehead, watching the day’s final tank session. He turned in my direction without shifting his attention.
“Yeah, sure.”
I swallowed hard. “Hey, I wanted to tell you. I’m going to try out for the European Tour.”
Nat straightened up and looked at me directly. I felt the heat of his sudden stare and made myself keep going. “I’ve decided to train for the Olympics.”
He looked down at the floor, rocked back on his heels, and plunged his hands into his pockets. Milliseconds stretched beyond their limits. My heart pounded in the silence and seemed to crawl up my throat.
“Ginny, you’re a good college athlete on a strong crew. That doesn’t mean you have what it takes to be an Olympian.”
The punch in my stomach had come as predicted, but I was still unprepared for the pain. I flinched on the inside, but maintained my tough stance on the outside. My anger flamed to the surface, rescuing me. “Oh, come on. Look how much progress I’ve made this year.”
“Yes, but this is just one program. There are strong programs all over the country. Rowers who have trained longer than you, who are taller and heavier than you …”
His voice trailed off, as if he knew he’d said enough. But he hadn’t. I had hesitated to confess my dream because I’d feared exactly this scenario, but I was still shocked. “Are you kidding me? I’ve done every workout you posted, and more! My erg scores have been competitive with Bouche and Cathy. What do I have to do to show you I can be good enough?”
Nat shrugged. He looked at me steadily. I saw something like certainty flash across his face. He crossed his arms. “Ginny, you’re not cut out for the Olympics.”