by T. Greenwood
“Thank you,” I said.
I hoped that by the time I got back to Eva and the girls, Frankie would be pulling up. But he wasn’t there. The prospect of sitting there with this secret, our secret, was too much. I knew that if I didn’t move, I might crawl out of my skin.
“Okay,” I said after another fifteen minutes, trying to muster some enthusiasm. “Looks like we’re walking home.”
I expected gripes from the girls, but instead they just heaved their rucksacks onto their tiny shoulders and followed. I was grateful for their easy compliance.
“You don’t suppose there’s a badge in the handbook for this?” Eva said, trying to make me laugh, probably sensing that my whole body was tied up in knots. “Walking home because your husband forgot to pick you up? What do you suppose the emblem would be?” She nudged me playfully with her shoulder.
I smiled, aware of the spot of skin on my arm that she had touched.
“Imagine if we earned badges for all the things we do?” she said, grabbing my arm now. I felt a surge of something rush through my entire torso.
The girls ran ahead, skipping and holding hands.
“Stay over to the left-hand side,” I hollered after them. “That way the cars can see you.”
“A badge for ten consecutive nights without sleep because your baby won’t stop crying,” she said, laughing. “A badge for cleaning up after a sick kid!”
“Or a sick husband,” I said, playing along now, the words a welcome, small release of the enormous pressure building up inside me.
“Badges for making the perfect martini!”
“The perfect lasagna!”
“The perfect blow job!” she whispered into my ear, and doubled over with laughter.
“God, can you imagine that emblem?” I asked.
Just then a car came zooming up to us, my heart leapt, and I screamed again for the girls to get over to the side of the road. It was Frankie, and suddenly all that anger and frustration I’d been feeling at the campground came bubbling back to the surface, merging with everything I was feeling about Eva, and I thought for a moment that I might just combust.
“Hop on in, kiddos!” he said.
Sticking out of the back windows were two pair of cross-country skis. “Oh, dear Jesus,” I said.
This was not the first time.
Of course, it wasn’t. I’d be a liar if I denied feeling this way before. That what was happening between me and Eva, the way I felt about her, was some sort of anomaly, some variance from the norm. Some deviance. Instead, it was a longing so old and familiar, so primitive and profound, when it surfaced this time it took only a moment to recognize it for what it was: this desire, this terrible ache. It lived inside me, was part of me, but I had learned to neglect it. It was the monster in my closet, the insane and infirm aunt in the attic. It was my shame. My heartache.
Swimming. I had been swimming since my father threw me into the pond beyond our cow pastures and watched as I first sank and then surfaced, my legs and arms and lungs working hard to keep me afloat. To keep me from drowning. And soon, I was a stronger swimmer than my sister, than the neighbor boys we played with. Than my father himself. In the water, I was powerful. Certain. In the water, I knew who I was.
I used to blame the water for what happened the year I turned fifteen.
Miss Mars was fresh out of college, but she looked younger than we did, with a blond ponytail and bright blue, a chlorinated aqueous blue, eyes and a round baby face. She was hired to be the girls’ physical education teacher at our high school. She was also recruited to coach tennis, swimming, and cross-country skiing.
I joined the swim team my freshman year and quickly proved myself to be the best female swimmer in the school. Because most other local schools did not have their own swimming pools, our competitions were typically intramural. And so eventually, I ran out of competitors and was allowed to compete against the boys. Coach Norman, the athletic director, resisted, but Miss Mars, with her bright sky eyes, fought long and hard for my chance to compete for the school’s athletic records. My specialty was the butterfly, the hardest stroke but arguably the most beautiful.
Miss Mars spent extra time helping me train, subjecting me to an even more rigorous schedule than the boys. I was up with my father in the morning when he woke to milk the cows, furiously pedaling my bicycle into town to the school, where Miss Mars, who rented a room in a house near the school, would be waiting. I can still smell those chlorine mornings, feel the warm, humid air of the pool room. In the fall, my face would be raw and red from the windy bike ride. Stepping into the pool area was like stepping into the jungle. I swam for two hours before I showered and changed for school. And after school, I met Miss Mars right after the last bell and repeated the whole process again.
Miss Mars was soft spoken but tough. I wanted nothing but to please her. At that age, I found myself willfully disobeying most of my mother’s demands, but with Miss Mars, I wouldn’t have considered even the smallest rebellion. If she told me to do a thousand push-ups, I would drop to the cold concrete floor and do push-ups until I collapsed. If she told me to swim ten more laps, even as my legs were trembling with exhaustion, I would only nod and dive back into the pool. And while she was tough on me, training me as it were, I liked to think that our relationship transcended that of coach and athlete. She was closer to a contemporary of mine than any of my other teachers. She didn’t look much older than I did, and, besides her job, she didn’t have any of the trappings of an adult life. She was my mentor, but she was also my friend.
It was during those mornings that I began to appreciate my father’s work. There was something peaceful and magnificent about rising before the rest of the world, of engaging in backbreaking labor while everyone else slumbered. When I disappeared into the pool, and the only sound was the water resisting my body and the distant muffled sound of Miss Mars’s whistle, I understood how it was he could live his life alone, with only his labor, his breath, and the land. I would emerge after finishing my laps both more awake and more alive than I had ever felt. And Miss Mars’s smiling face would come into focus through the water in my eyes.
It was also during this time that Gussy met her Frank. I watched her fall in love with him with both fascination and trepidation. Her sudden vulnerability scared me. She swooned, and my heart pounded with fear. As with any kind of falling, I worried that when she finally landed, she might shatter into a thousand little pieces.
I hadn’t dated any boys yet. My father wouldn’t allow it. Not until we were sixteen, and then only reluctantly. Besides, boys didn’t swarm about me the way they did Gussy. Boys didn’t know what to do with me.
I’d always swum (in creeks and rivers, lakes and ponds) and I’d always played baseball. For four years, I was the only girl on the local baseball team, something unheard of, but they’d been so desperate for a good pitcher, the coach had finally relented and let me join. I pitched our team to a nearly perfect season that first year and every year afterward. And so the neighborhood boys saw me as a teammate. And I saw them as the brothers I didn’t have.
But Gussy had suitors. Boys were rendered stupid and doe-eyed around Gussy. While I’d inherited my father’s red hair and coarse features, Gussy looked like our mother. She was soft, with sunlight-colored hair and a fine nose and chin, kind blue eyes and an equally gentle disposition. There was a new boy trying to carry her books to school almost every single day. And I watched this, mesmerized by her obliviousness to their affections. She was friendly to those lovesick boys, but she was also aloof, which made them want her all the more. Until Frank.
When Frank came along, the old Gussy began to disappear. It was not in any way that anyone but her sister would notice, but I saw it, this strange and slow disassembling. She was suddenly concerned with her clothes, her hair, her face. She fussed in the mirror. She worried over the smallest things. I watched her face shadow with concern when Frank was late for a date, and the way she lit up when the doorbell rang
. Her mood, while usually cheerful, was now dictated by something outside of her rather than that terrific inner light she’d always had. I couldn’t imagine ever giving myself over to someone like this, to surrendering myself in this way.
And then Miss Mars came along. And how was what I felt about Miss Mars different than what Gussy felt about Frank? I lived to please her. I swam harder so that she would smile and pat my back with her small, soft hands. I woke early each morning, not caring that my body still ached from the prior day’s session, that my eyes were still sealed shut with the debris of sleep. Wasn’t it her face I imagined on those long, cold rides from the farm to school?
I was so confused and consumed by thoughts of Miss Mars, juxtaposed against thoughts of Gussy and Frank, I stayed awake at night worrying, sleep eluding me completely on the worst nights and proving fitful on the best. Miss Mars noticed. She noticed when I wasn’t eating right, when my mother and I had squabbled. She could see it in my tired strokes and labored breaths in the pool. Of course she would notice if I wasn’t sleeping.
One morning after practice, she asked me into her office. I had changed into my school clothes, but my hair was still wet. I had a towel around my neck to keep my shirt dry. I sat in front of her battered desk in a metal folding chair, looking at the trophies on the shelves, the certificates, her diploma. There was one framed picture of her standing with two little boys on either side. They were her brothers; she’d told me about them.
“Is everything okay?” she asked, sitting down at the edge of her desk in front of me, her hands on her knees. “You know you can tell me if something is wrong. At school? Home?”
I didn’t know how to tell her. I didn’t have any words for what was happening inside my head, inside my heart. I shook my head, but tears were already springing to my eyes. I was mortified by my body’s betrayal of me.
“Hey,” she said, leaning toward me. “Billie, are you crying?”
I could smell the dried chlorine on her body, as well as that citrus smell of her that reminded me of summertime. Her eyes were wide and concerned. She reached her hand out and touched my shoulder, and it felt like I’d run into our electric fence in the pasture.
Crying, I leaned into her touch, and before I could stop myself, I was reaching for her mouth with my mouth. When our lips touched, I let out a small gasp at my own audacity, but Miss Mars simply shook her head and pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay, Billie,” she said. Her face was red, and she looked like she might cry. But her voice was calm, even as always. “You’re having a rough time. You probably just need a good night’s sleep.”
I left her office that day feeling trampled, as though a stampede of horses had run across my back. I didn’t know how I would face her again. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to return to the pool. The horror of what I had done was so enormous, I didn’t know how I could ever look her in the eye; I could barely confront my own reflection.
The call from Principal Hilton came that evening. I watched my mother hand my father the phone and collapse into one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs. I watched her put her face in her hands and her whole body tremble. I heard my father’s words. “What do you mean, an unnatural attachment to Miss Mars?”
I was sent to a therapist to help me process this unnatural attachment . And after ten meetings, meetings where I nodded and said what it was I knew he wanted me to say, denied all the awful things I knew to be true, he declared me cured and sent me on my way. My parents, still not convinced, sent me to church. My mother made me sit with her each night, forgoing homework for Bible studies, the passages proving her point underlined angrily in pencil.
The principal, who despite my troubles was reluctant to give up a star athlete, paired me with Coach Norman for my early morning lessons. But Coach Norman was a football coach and didn’t know the first thing about the backstroke, the butterfly. And because I had no choice, I got up each morning that winter, walked through the freezing cold to the school with Biblical admonishments echoing in my head, peered longingly at the pale yellow light in Miss Mars’s house, and then disappeared into the depths of the pool.
I have always been a swimmer. But while I had been treading water for the last twelve years with Frankie, just bobbing and floating along, now I felt the familiar terrifying but irresistible pull: the soaring, sinking, stupefying feeling I’d disallowed for the last decade. The siren’s song, beckoning me. But this time, the voice calling me into the water belonged not to Miss Mars but to Eva.
I try to remember the camp at Lake Gormlaith, but here my memory sometimes fails. Memory is like that sometimes, protecting us from the most painful things. But then the most beautiful things sometimes disappear as well. All of it is like water slipping though a sieve. There are pieces though, pretty shells, that are captured. That remain. I collect them. Treasure them. I think of the shells the children line up along the railings of the cottages, and I wonder if my suitcase is big enough to carry them home.
I know that I will not sleep tonight. I am nervous about the airport, about the flight. I am worried Juan will forget to pick me up, that Johnny will change his mind, or worse, that I will. And so instead of climbing under my covers and disappearing into sleep, I decide to swim. An eighty-year-old lady swimming alone in the ocean in the middle of the night might seem more dangerous than any sort of flight. Even Lou used to insist on accompanying me, watching from the shore, as if she could save me were I to sink. But I don’t need saving. I am a swimmer. Water is where I feel most at home. It is where I go when I cannot sleep, when I cannot think, when my nerves are raw.
It is chilly out, so I only plan to go in for a quick dip. Just long enough to clear my head. I pull on my suit and walk down the stony path from the cottages to the beach, aware of my body in a way that is impossible in the light of day. I feel the ocean breeze on my bare shoulders, feel it rushing into my ears. Sea grass brushes against my ankles and then the sand is soft beneath my feet. This is what it must feel like to be blind, I think, to be enclosed in the universe. All of it touching all of you. The same might be said of swimming. This complete and blind immersion.
The water is indeed cold, but welcoming, as it always is. I wade out, letting the water circle my ankles, my knees, my hips. I ride some waves and dip under others until I am past the break, where the water is suddenly and strangely still. Here I swim, until my legs and arms are numb and fatigued. Until I’ve forgotten where my flesh ends and the sea begins.
It takes every ounce of my strength to pull this old body from the water. I collapse on the sand, wrapping my towel around me, and looking with wonder out at that vast nothingness before me.
And later, to my surprise, I sleep the sleep of the dead.
I expected to lose Eva too. I waited for her to retreat, to disappear. To turn into a pale yellow light behind the closed door of her house. But oddly enough, after the camping trip, our lives simply resumed. As though what had happened between us was perfectly normal. As though I hadn’t stepped through Alice’s looking glass into an upside-down world. We didn’t speak about what happened, but there was something else between us now: a shared secret, one that belonged to both of us. And somehow, despite our respective silence regarding what had transpired inside that tent, I knew that things had changed.
Every afternoon, we walked together to get the girls from the bus stop, little Johnny tagging along behind, pulling Rose in her wagon. While the children played, we listened to music and folded laundry or baked cookies for bake sales or planned our Girl Scout meetings for the following year. But all those old habits and routines and chores were suddenly imbued with an added layer; the very air had a new texture to it. My senses were heightened. I clung to the scent of Eva’s laundry detergent, to the husky sound of her voice, to the beautiful ghosts our cigarettes made, the separate specters merging together between us over the kitchen table. I was aware of the heat of her hand on my back as she showed me how to get a blood
stain from cotton sheets. It was a time of anticipation, a time of portent. Like the electric feeling of the air before a storm. Like the smell of rain before it falls.
We didn’t even need to touch.
When the first heat wave of summer came early, in June, Eva, sitting with her feet soaking in the baby pool, leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially, “I want to go with you to the lake.” And these nine words, this simple sentence, was like the first crack of thunder in my chest. A promise so big, so dangerous and thrilling, I felt my entire body pulse.
And so, like someone battening down the hatches for a coming storm, I moved quickly into action. First I called Gussy to see if it would be okay to have Eva and her children join me for two weeks of our visit. Though I knew she wouldn’t say no, I was ready to argue my case, to plead if I needed to. Frankie too was easy (so easy it made me feel an articulate and vivid flash of guilt). I’ll certainly worry about you less, he had said, if you’ve got a friend there with you. And for a brief moment, I felt overwhelmed by remorse. But like a bolt of lightning, my shame disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I needed to focus. We still had one more person to convince.
Eva came to the house distraught one morning after Ted had gone to work.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“He doesn’t think we should be alone at the lake without a car. He’s worried about what will happen if Johnny falls out of a tree or something.”
“He leaves you without a car here every day!” I said, feeling desperate. Frantic. “Besides, my sister and her husband live only twenty minutes away. We have a telephone now. We have neighbors.”
But Eva kept trembling, even after I handed her a cup of coffee, loaded with milk and sugar like she liked.