Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton

  Lap 15, My dog: I walked my dog half of the two miles to the deli before remembering it closed at five p.m. on Sundays. We turned back and passed a woman getting into her car, who gave me a small smile. She put a bundle of paper bags into her trunk, which appeared to be stuffed with quilts.

  Lap 22, Annette: That time we went for a walk. As we were passing the graveyard she explained why she doesn’t bother to send us thank-you notes anymore, and I noticed a figure clad in camouflage walking behind us at a faster pace.

  Lap 31, Dad: He wore a black-and-orange-striped full-body snowsuit. On his head was a brown and orange balaclava, its eye and mouth openings folded up over his forehead. I know the smell of the inside of the hat, remember wearing it and scaring myself in the mirror. As we walked our road, my dad talked about his health and the health of his dog.

  Lap 35, Donkey costume: Laura and I decide to surprise James with his present: a donkey costume. Laura will approach the house from the woods wearing it, and I instruct Bruce to coax James into position at the window in exactly half an hour. Setting off, Laura holds the papier-mâché donkey head beneath her arm. In the woods she puts the head on, and turns back toward the house. Halfway up the hill Laura gets snared in a patch of hemlock, the needles catching on the furry donkey body.

  Lap 40, Derek: My brother prying the top off a can of honey-roasted peanuts, his double-jointed fingers bent almost backward as he does so.

  Lap 42, Shopping: The dusty beige-pink color of a pair of trousers I saw in Berlin but did not buy.

  Lap 43, Berlin: Jenny in the Holiday Inn swimming pool, grinning widely as she breaststroked up and down. Our flight had been canceled and we checked into the suburban hotel after a long day of hearing Delta employees tell us that what we wanted to do was not possible.

  The hotel pool has no gutter, so the waves I make are choppy. I glance at the clock from time to time as I switch from freestyle to backstroke, from backstroke to breaststroke, then kick for twenty-five lengths with a small red board.

  Lap 45, Sweaters: I like the idea of a V-neck better than the reality.

  Lap 49, Conditioner: That time Gus and Jason went to Korea to oversee the printing of Gus’s first book of photographs. Jason noticed that Gus’s hair was getting greasier and greasier by the day. After four days he brought it up. Gus told him he was baffled too, that he kept using the Korean shampoo and conditioner in the hotel shower. Jason told him the hotel didn’t provide conditioner, only hand cream.

  Lap 52, Hotels: With a finger, someone has drawn the five Olympic rings on the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Our team occupies ten rooms along a narrow hallway. In most of them, the bathtubs, plastic ice buckets, and sinks are filled with hot water. Thin white hotel towels and thick team towels are spread in front of and between the beds. We strip down to our two-sizes-too-small racing suits and unwrap multipacks of orange, pink, and blue disposable razors. In one room a portable stereo blasts a Simple Minds tape. In my room we play Tears for Fears.

  As we shave, the water in the buckets and basins gets cloudy and hairy, the carpets darken, drenched, are flecked with foam, and the rooms and hallways reek of Barbasol and Noxzema. Boys rush into our room with half-beards and half-hawks, strutting between the beds before skip-running down the hall. It is Friday, the first night of the weekend meet. The few swimmers who shaved before heats watch their roommates from the beds, wincing at the inevitable nicks. They offer to shave our backs, hamstrings, and the hard-to-reach parts of our upper arms.

  I am rooming with the three Marys. One shaves my back as I lie on my stomach and stare out onto the snowy balcony. We put our cartons of milk and tubs of yogurt just outside the sliding doors to keep cold, and the snow has piled like little hats on top of them. As Mary K. scrapes my shoulder blades and spine, I wonder if the milk will freeze and if my back hair will grow in dark and thick. I do my arms myself.

  The meet is a three-day short-course age-group meet, held at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, Olympian Alex Baumann’s hometown. Midwinter, Sudbury is like a lunar station. The ground is white, as are the steaming buildings, bricks, and rooftops. It’s a sprawling nickel-mining town, whose spirit feels mineral, scientific and cold.

  Later, in bed, after the first night and a spaghetti dinner, the sheets feel cool and smooth against my skin, feel as if I’m slipping through them, as if they’re blowing over my body in a breeze that gets gently warmer. I move my legs and arms slowly under the covers in the dark, hoping Mary L., beside me, won’t wake up, then roll onto my stomach and press my forehead into my fists. I quietly visualize my 100m breaststroke race with this new, seal-like feeling. I want to swim it in 1:11:00.

  When I do this at home, I take a stopwatch to bed, lie on my stomach and put my face in the pillow, tucking my head to make a pocket of air. I press my elbows into my sides, holding the watch in my right hand. Breathing as I do in the race, holding at the turns, I feel slightly light-headed, and a sensation of milky smoothness followed by sudden roughness creeps in at the edges of my perception. Sometimes I get the feeling that my hands are enormous. I near the wall and stop the watch as I hit the yellow touchpad. It reads 1:13:50. Again, 1:14:09. Then 1:09:67.

  I usually fall asleep with the stopwatch beside me, but in the morning sometimes find it on my hospital table, its nylon cord wrapped neatly around it. My father brought home two rolling hospital tables one day. They had plastic wood-grain desktops, and bases that rolled under the bed. He found them at Crown Assets, a series of weekend auctions of government-surplus material and seized and lost goods. The house was filled with things from Crown Assets: books, a Shop-Vac, Bombay Company side tables in need of a brass hinge or two. Our army-surplus Dodge van and Plymouth Caravelle (previously an undercover police car) were bought in the auctions. The Caravelle was brown and bulky, but could do over 250 kilometers per hour. The door lock knobs were removed in the back. When my dad locked the doors automatically on family outings, Derek and I would howl and pull on them like captured lunatics.

  The hospital table’s top panel flips open to reveal a shallow drawer and a small oxidized mirror. I keep my locked diary and some pens and pencil crayons in there. When I tidy my room, I roll the table to the foot of the bed and spread the top with a linen placemat from the Philippines. I have a poster of Alex Baumann in his Speedo, body tanned and shaved, taped to the inside of my closet door. He was Canada’s flag-bearer at the 1984 Olympics, where he won gold in the 200m and 400m individual medley, setting world records in both. I know his coach calls him Sasha, and he wears an earring. I imagine him kissing me while we are both wearing racing suits. I hadn’t kissed anyone at that point, having botched my first chance with a swimmer named Erich on the roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland. I had to wait two years before I got another.

  The poster makes Baumann look like a movie-star good guy, handsome and sweet. Luke Skywalker. But I am in awe of Victor Davis. Han Solo. I saw him once, at a big meet when I was fourteen. I remember a huge, hulking upper body and dark curly hair. It was like beholding a lion, the illumination of physical power, something both angry and contained rolling off and out of him.

  Victor Davis was raised by his father in Guelph, Ontario, and trained his entire career with one coach, Cliff Barry, a soft-voiced, sturdily built former water polo Olympian. Davis was indisputably handsome, strong, disciplined, and famous for his fiercely competitive nature. He would use psychological terrorism in the ready room before races, staring down his competitors. With a towel over his head he’d shadowbox his way to the block, and might spit into the lane next to his. His most notorious moment came at the 1982 Commonwealth Games, when, in anger at a relay disqualification, he kicked over a plastic chair in front of Queen Elizabeth. He is the closest Canada has to a John McEnroe.

  A 1983 documentary, The Fast and the Furious, presents Baumann as the Fast, Davis as the Furious. When I ask my old coach Byron about Davis and Baumann
, he rattles off a number of arcane facts, that Davis swam poorly in odd years—’81, ’83, ’85, ’87—and well in even ones, breaking world records in 1982 and 1984. Byron explains that Baumann and Davis were buddies, but that if Alex was the speedboat, Victor was the barge; he further compares Victor to a snowplow or a sixteen-cylinder Jaguar. Baumann and Davis were both tall, Davis just a hair shorter. Byron tells me that Davis was never described as a natural, the way Baumann was, that he considered strategy unnecessary but was a brilliant racer, a technically perfect swimmer, who never got caught from behind.

  In a Montreal street in 1989, Davis, on foot, flung a bottle of orange soda at a black Honda Civic driven by a man who had been pestering Davis’s girlfriend. The Honda accelerated, hit him straight-on and sped off. Davis, twenty-five, was comatose for two days before he died in hospital. The driver of the car served four months in prison.

  Mary L. sits up in the dark and looks at me.

  “Why are you breathing like that?”

  “I’m visualizing.”

  She rolls over. I turn onto my back and do mini snow angels in the sheets.

  Weeks later, bored in French class, I’ll put my head on my desk and rub my prickly forearms against my cheek and try to stay awake.

  OTHER SWIMMERS

  Aidan gives me his U2 War T-shirt, unlaundered, and I keep it that way. Before I got it I was mortified by body odor, but I sniff the shirt possessively as, day by day, the smell fades alongside Aidan’s interest in me.

  I befriend Kate, who moisturizes her hands so much they glisten, and wears her hair pulled into a small, high bun on the top of her head. Between sets, she gets out and stands in the open double doors of the pool. The billowing steam rushes past her into the frozen parking lot and beyond that to the blue fields, train tracks, and breaking winter morning.

  During team meetings, when his name is called or he has a question, Misha will raise his fist, index and pinkie extended. He’s into straightedge punk, writes “H/C/T/O” (Hardcore Toronto) in marker on the back of his hand, and wears black concert T-shirts while the rest of us wear the team uniform.

  I am not crazy about Stacy since noticing that she copied onto her own shoes the piano keys I drew on the inside of my sneakers.

  Mina wears earrings when she races. Christine has an attractive overbite, and her large, well-formed head looks good in a swim cap. I think Renata, who has dark eyebrows and wavy Zelda Fitzgerald hair, brassy and greenish from chlorine, is the prettiest girl on the team.

  When I drive past the last house on the edge of a suburban development and see the windowless expanse of brick and aluminum siding, I think of Peter with the perfectly parted hair. He was small and kind (he gave me a Kit Kat once), and he always asked me to dance at the Saturday-night parties in his basement. His family owned two shar-peis.

  Colleen is skinny, but I overhear Julia saying she has “smiley butt.” When I ask what that means, Julia says her butt cheeks, when they poke out of the back of her suit, look like they’re smiling. After that I avoid Julia. I don’t warm to Colleen either after she announces, out of the blue, how good two-percent milk tastes on her cereal after drinking only skim for a year.

  At a meet in Bradford, Ontario, Deena writes “BARCELONA ’92” on her back and down her arms.

  As I’m sitting in the bleachers, stuck in a stare toward the pool, a swimmer from another team climbs up the bleachers beside me and puts his hand absentmindedly on my shoulder as he steadies himself past.

  Mary K.’s father works at Apple, and a lot of her clothes have the bitten-Macintosh emblem on them. Mary L. leaves her pastel underwear hanging on a peg in the locker room, crotch exposed. I notice Mary S.’s armpit hair the same day I notice my own. Practicing dives, I tuck my arms behind my ears and glance sideways at my coach from the block.

  Stan tells me that you can check if your breath is okay by licking your forearm and smelling it.

  At a meet I see a woman in the showers, soaping her body, completely naked, with a white tampon string dangling between her legs. I shower with my suit on, startled by nipples and pubic hair. My prudish edges are eventually buffered down by my teammates. At one meet Nuala yanks a paper-wrapped tampon from her duffel, waves it in circles like a magician’s wand, and hollers: “Time to pull de plug!”

  Agnes has paper-white skin, long red hair, and a deep voice. She is sarcastic and talks back to her coach. We swim the same events, and I want to be faster than her. She holds me off for a year before I start to beat her.

  While two of our teammates swim a long-distance event, Jen and I pull on their track pants and wide, dirty sneakers, zip up their parkas—Joe and Conrad embroidered on the shoulders—pull the damp hoods low over our heads, and walk quickly through the men’s locker room. Afraid to raise my head, I see only bare feet and more wide, dirty sneakers.

  Ian was the first one to wear mittens on the pool deck like the swimmers from UCLA.

  Jon and Desmond play with a stopwatch, trying to get as low a time as possible by starting and immediately stopping the clock. They have both hit the same plateau, 00:00:05. I once did 00:00:03, but I stay silent, watching from the corner of my eye. After two minutes I pull off my headphones and wind the cord around my Walkman. Jon holds out the stopwatch: “You want a go?”

  STUDEBAKERS

  When I was six, my mother bought my father a giant chocolate-chip cookie for his birthday. She had the bakery pipe To My Studebaker Nut with Love on it in chocolate icing. There is a picture of my brother, my father, and me on the chesterfield, gathered around it, mouths gaping, as though we are about to take huge bites of it.

  Before Derek and I start to swim, our family holidays are planned around car meets. My father, an active member of the Ontario Chapter of the Studebaker Drivers Club, packs us into his white 1964 Gran Turismo Hawk, the 1963 Raymond Loewy Avanti, or my favorite, a graceful green 1953 Champion Starliner Coupe, with mothballs rolling back and forth across the parcel shelf, and drives south to the States. I watch as the landscape changes from Canadian to American, watch the brick houses become wooden ones, watch the signage crank up in volume, the sidewalks buckle. I prop my legs on the cooler in the backseat and sniff my knees, or sit cross-legged, lean back, and stare up at the perforated white leather of the car ceiling, until the dots float millimeters from my eyeballs. Our summer weekends are spent walking up and down chrome rows of vintage cars, parked tidily on grassy lawns. Sometimes Derek and I play with American children in red and blue Studebaker Drivers Club T-shirts identical to ours.

  I feel deep boredom most of the time, the boredom of being small and herded, the boredom of backseats, and the boredom of chrome car parts, displayed on the grass or in greasy lumps on tables made of sawhorses and doors. I get a strange feeling when I see, in the window of a gleaming Studebaker Lark, a pink card that coyly pleads: Please don’t fondle my parts . . .

  My father promises to buy me a 1957 candy-apple-red Corvette if I win an Olympic gold medal. In the corner of our dining room he keeps his collection of Matchbox cars, Studebaker Dinky Toys, and other small trinkets in a six-foot-tall display case. When it’s plugged in, it rotates, shelves illuminated, the cars driving clockwise in a slow loop. The Timex sign that once crowned the top has been replaced by one that reads STUDEBAKER in tidy blue Helvetica. After dinner I like to lie on my side and watch the driverless parade.

  • • •

  In the spring of 2010, James and I live in Berkeley for a few weeks, while he works on a farming project. I buy a ten-session adult swim card for an outdoor public swimming pool near our rented house. Every morning at seven, I pull on my suit and jog over for the seven-thirty lap swim.

  This morning it is raining steadily, making the surface of the water pocked and opaque. When I breathe to my right going up the pool, and left back down, I see a black chair at the side. Someone has spray-painted green loop-de-loops on
its padded backrest. The pool has a wide concrete deck, surrounded by stubby pines and a chain-link fence woven through with green plastic ribbon. I take my kickboard from the end of the lane and lift my goggles onto my forehead. Two swimmers occupy each of the six lanes. The Berkeley Aquatics masters coach, who keeps inviting me to practice with his team, stands at the shallow end in rubber boots and a long red parka, holding a green-and-yellow-striped umbrella. He competed for the Moroccan national team and plays North African music from a boom box while he watches his swimmers. The steam coming off the water’s surface is thin; it skims down the lane and blows east. As I kick I watch the masters swimmers train. I complete four hundred yards kicking, then switch to four hundred pull.