Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton

  Twenty minutes into warm-up the music gets louder. The water is bobbing with team caps. One lane all green and a few yellow, another lane all white and red. Collisions during warm-up are inevitable: swimmers from opposing teams forced to share a lane take out their aggression in impatient glares, or pass each other with quick, vicious flip turns. The din grows, and the wet tile shimmers with unwinding, expectant energy. Sprints begin in the outside lanes. Coaches—hands cupped around their chins—start their swimmers off the blocks, ten seconds apart.

  A long whistle indicates the end of warm-up, and the surface returns to a glassy sheet. My cell phone buzzes in my coat pocket. A few races are swum; then the women’s 100 meter freestyle final is announced. Each competitor is named, and at lane four, the announcer remarks on the woman’s age: thirty-five. My age. I strain to hear her name and remember it from 1992. She has cropped blond hair, the slim hips and ropy build of a long-term athlete. I watch her pull on her cap, think the obvious thoughts, make the obvious comparisons. The woman looks good, fast, and she stands apart from the swimmers flanking her. Her demeanor is serious. She reminds me of a swimmer who practiced with our team in 1992, Kylie. She was in her mid-thirties then, and among the top five in the country.

  Kylie would sometimes room with a female coach at out-of-town meets. I wonder how it felt for her to be surrounded by us—flinging pancakes around the restaurant while she sipped tea. Girls who wiped snot gleefully on one another, who were closing in on her records. There were older men too—talented swimmers who’d immigrated from Eastern Europe with their wives and children, and who didn’t goof around.

  At televised meets, the commentators’ boomy, magnanimous voices declare any woman over twenty-seven a “veteran.” As she approaches the blocks they mention her age, some details of her life, a mother who is ill, a deferral to a top law school, adult sacrifices. Then the name of the woman in the next lane will be announced. The one looking to catch her, the one to watch.

  • • •

  The older woman wins her race and offers a graceful, tight smile. She punches the air quickly, but the punch seems private. I watch her lift herself out of the pool. Despite the busy deck, she looks alone. I pull on my coat and push out into the Toronto night.

  • • •

  The morning after the brownies, Derek wakes up early with his three boys, and hearing them through the walls, I wake up too. I lie there, easily, happily, listening to him talk to his sons, and I imagine a version of my own life had I stayed in that city, stuck with that boyfriend, and staked out a little front yard in Toronto’s leafy streets. It’s a nice life. My stomach grumbles and I remember the time Derek and I planned a night raid on our parents’ kitchen the year of the renovation.

  • • •

  I’m eleven, Derek is thirteen, and we share a bedroom while plastic sheets and spackled drywall make new shapes in our house. We prepare our raid carefully, trace our path to memorize the few creaking stairs and leave the spring-lock cupboards ajar. We test the batteries of the Maglites we will carry in our pajama pockets.

  Derek sets the alarm on his calculator watch for three a.m. When it goes off he complains into his pillow that he is too sleepy. I insist, bug-eyed, that we stick to the plan. When we get to the kitchen, we realize there isn’t much to raid. The jackpot: a box of granola bars. I take two of them and Derek quietly snaps two bananas off a bunch. He reaches into a cupboard and pulls out a bag of tuyo—dried, salted fish from the Filipino grocery—and holds it up in the halo of my Maglite, grinning.

  In our room, we place the food on Derek’s bedspread. Derek takes a banana and I take a granola bar. We eat our healthy snacks quietly, on our sides, under our covers.

  • • •

  Back in New York, I wake at four a.m. and can’t get back to sleep. I put the kettle on and let the dog out. With the oven preheating, I scrounge for chocolate and butter. I find half an ingot of Scharffen Berger in the fridge and twelve individually wrapped squares of Ghirardelli in the cupboard. Just the amount I need. I start melting the chocolate, I let the dog in, and he watches from across the kitchen floor while I mix butter and sugar. I taste a fingertip of it from the side of the bowl.

  The melting chocolate turns a lighter, shining shade of brown. I was envious of my brother’s hazel eyes, and I told him so once. He said that he’d rather have brown ones like mine. It blew my preteen mind that after I looked up to him for everything, he’d want something I had.

  As I scrub a dirty pan in the sink, I get the fishy whiff of last night’s halibut. It brings me suddenly to the edge of a dock on Lake Ontario: a dark spring school night when my father took us to the waterfront park to watch the smelt dipping. I ran up and down the dock in my brother’s rubber boots, “helping” my dad and other dads scoop the tiny silvery fish from the black water. We lugged a reeking white plastic bucketful home to my mom. The body of a classmate’s father would be found off the same dock a few years later. I think about this, and about the bottle of opalescent pink nail polish that classmate once gave me, as I crack three eggs and a yolk into a bowl and beat them with a fork. I remember that that classmate, in fifth grade, played Estragon in the Toronto Young People’s Theatre production of Waiting for Godot.

  I knock a bag of sugar to the floor, spilling it. There’s still some clumsy sleep in my limbs as I wipe up the mess. For a brief moment I consider scooping the crystals into my mouth with a spoon, the way I did when I started swimming.

  My tooth is always sweetest in the mornings. When I swam I was attuned to appetite and fatigue in a way I probably never will be again. I spent hours submerged, holding my breath, deprived of taste, scent, sound, and most sight. After practice I’d stare into the fridge, looking for leftovers, and sneak slices of butter. If I was sent to the kitchen to fetch something, I’d stick a soup spoon in the sugar bowl and then into my mouth before returning to the table.

  I’d forgo all dessert and candy in the two weeks leading up to a big competition. It was part of my tapering routine—my coach would build in less difficult practices for those of us competing, so I would try to restrict my sugar intake to design a bigger rush during the meet. It was more superstition than nutrition, a mini Lent before my races. I still tend to consume sugar when my body is at a threshold.

  Derek didn’t have the same cravings; he could make his February birthday box of Toffifee chocolates last until Halloween.

  • • •

  I clean the countertop and put ingredients away. My cupboards, seen through the eyes of a kitchen raider, are groaning. Boxes of crackers, bags of nuts, a butter-biscuit Ritter Sport, maraschino cherries, a jar of Nutella, a box of organic peanut butter cookies. Derek and I abandoned the raids when we moved back into our separate rooms. Then he took a trip to Germany with my dad and his college students, and returned taller and cooler.

  • • •

  When Derek gets his driver’s license he reluctantly agrees to help my mother drive me to my morning practices. He slouches down to the kitchen, pajama legs sticking out of the bottoms of his jeans, grabs the keys to the station wagon. Backing out of the driveway he puts on a tape, which, in my memory, is always Billy Bragg’s Talking with the Taxman About Poetry. The car warms and my brother turns up the stereo volume.

  The drive feels like a movie. We don’t talk; we just listen to the lyrics, to the guitar—loud, plangent—and watch Mississauga landmarks pass. An amputated lighthouse, the cornstarch factory. The funeral home where we once stared into our next-door neighbor’s open casket, Port Credit marina, Pizza Pizza. I long to say something to Derek as a friend, an equal, to dissolve the feeling that I am a child needing a ride, but can’t think of anything. We have less in common since he quit swimming. I took it up because he did, so when he quit, I wondered if he knew something I didn’t. I inspect the tape case in the dashboard light and sniff the liner notes. Blueberries.

  W
e loop the Burger King drive-thru. Derek orders: coffee and a Croissan’wich. I order the only thing I can think of: hot chocolate, separating us even further in age.

  The road gets hilly as we pass wealthier neighborhoods. Porcupine Avenue, Tennyson Avenue. A talented butterflyer named Doug, who has long blond bangs and will become a Buddhist, lives there, as does Duncan, whom I have a thing for. In a year I’ll spend a blissful hour sharing headphones with Duncan on a drive back from Ottawa. We’ll listen to Billy Bragg then too. I’ll drape my arms over the back of his seat, one arm on his shoulder, my fingers brushing the front of his T-shirt as the van jostles us. In three years he’ll kiss me at a Billy Bragg concert and my feelings for him will fade.

  I was always watching Derek for signs of what was possible, how to make decisions, what to like and how to tell. I knew he wanted to lose me, and I tried to keep my distance, but I wore the same Converse All Stars as he did, the same jeans. I was a smaller, androgynous version of him, except I was starting to like shoulder pads. Around this time we got our family portrait done at The Bay Portrait Studio. When we returned to pick out our photo package, the clerk gestured to a picture of me and my brother and said, “Here’s a nice one of the two boys.”

  • • •

  We turn back onto Lakeshore Road. Derek takes two huge bites of his sandwich, offers a bite to me, finishes it in four. At a stoplight, I roll down my window and pour an inch of my scalding hot chocolate out onto the pavement so I can drink it.

  We pull up in front of the pool doors. I turn to him:

  “Are you going to pick me up? Or is Mom?”

  Derek shrugs.

  “I hope you do.”

  He makes a face. “Why? I’m going back to sleep.”

  This time I shrug.

  NIGHT KITCHEN

  February 1987. At the 4:25 alarm my routine is this: From the bed, reach for the two damp swimsuits drying on the bedroom doorknob, take off my pajamas, and pull the suits on halfway. Under the covers, pull on track pants, three T-shirts, a sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, which have been piled at the foot of my bed the night before. Once dressed, switch on my bedside lamp.

  The hour between four and five a.m. is dreadful, especially in the dead of Canadian winter. Knowing I have to get into a chilly, overchlorinated pool and endure two hours of unrelenting muscle pain makes it worse. The hour is redeemed by the quiet, the bluish-blackness out the window, less menacing than midnight dark. I ride, next to my mother, through our suburban streets, bundled into a team parka, listening to the tires squeak over the packed snow.

  • • •

  My mother’s car. When Derek and I were in grade school, my mother worked Tuesdays and Thursdays. We would head to the public library at three-thirty and stay till it closed at six. The children’s section had a picture window, where I’d watch for my mother’s round Oldsmobile Cutlass headlights to turn onto Atwater Avenue. As I got older, I’d look for the wide, squarish beams of her Chevy Malibu station wagon to turn into the Terry Fox Memorial Pool parking lot, and then, a few years later, wait for her four-eyed Ford LTD to pull up to the Olympium doors.

  • • •

  Sometimes on those mornings, waiting for my mother to come downstairs, I make something I call a “muffin-in-a-mug”: Quaker instant bran muffin mix, half a cup of milk, stirred, nuked for two minutes, and then eaten with a spoon. It will be half bready, half raw, but sweet and warm. I bring it along in the car if we are running late, spooning the stuff into my mouth with mittens on, as I watch the icy streetscapes swoosh past.

  This was my ritual: I put the batter-filled mug in the microwave and set the time to 1:11:00, the time I want to swim the SC 100m breaststroke in 1987. Then I cover my eyes with one hand, finger on the start panel, imagining my starting block and the pool: a vast table of water, still and clear. I see the dirty grout between the small white tiles. The lane ropes pulled taut along the surface. I can hear teammates in the stands and families in the gallery. A long, sharp whistle calls us onto the blocks. The quiet is sudden. My hands reach to touch the front of the sandpapery block, between my toes.

  I push Start on the microwave. Breathe, dive. In the kitchen, in my track pants, there are eight or nine strokes the first length, a two-handed touch, and silence again at the turn. I hear a faucet upstairs turn on, then off. In my mind I am ahead, no one in my periphery. My legs start to tire. I lay a hand on the countertop at fifty meters, knees and chest hurting. When I breathe I see the officials dressed in white at the end of the lanes, legs apart and hands behind their backs, looking grimly down into the pool. Halfway down the pool on my final length I hear sharp beeping and open my eyes—the microwave is flashing 00:00:00. Too slow by about five seconds.

  Other times I prepare my mug, set the microwave to 1:11:00, and sit at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. I don’t look at the timer. I look outside at the dark wooden deck and icy trees, I look at my knees in my gray track pants, I pick some lint off, I think about how I like my track pants to be either gray or, gun-to-head, navy blue. My mind wanders but maintains a loose grip on the seconds. When I sense the time is close I shut my eyes and imagine the last five or six strokes to the wall. I finish—imagine slamming my arms dramatically into the yellow touchpads—and look up at the microwave. Sometimes this works, but most of the time I’m too early. I watch the last numbers count down to 00:00:00, the light inside the oven clicks off, and the long beep indicates the time is up.

  • • •

  February 1991. I take my mountain bike out into the snow for a ride and, halfway down a steep hill, resolve to bicycle to my best friend Chris’s house twenty-five kilometers away. The winter afternoon quickly blackens, and I am about three kilometers south when it starts to blizzard. I’m afraid of strangers who might stop to help me, so when I hear a car approach I hide behind a bank of plowed snow on the shoulder. I’ve been gone two hours. One car slows as I am ducking behind a frozen drift. I poke my head over the top. It is my father. I roll my bike out and over the bank, and he puts it in the back of his Suzuki Sidekick. I get in. We drive back silently. A few weeks later he asks if I think I might like to see a psychiatrist.

  I haven’t been swimming for two years, and am due at McGill University in the fall. During these years, I ping-pong between my age and my swimming age—the number that coaches, teammates, competitors, and I unconsciously and automatically consider in relation to Olympic years, to puberty, to age-group rankings, to height, weight, strength, and development. After quitting in 1989, I voraciously try to catch up on the rituals of being suburban sixteen, seventeen, filling my head with steep French literature and new music, notebooks with bad poetry, gut with crushes, sketchbooks with agonies of dragons, raccoons, and smudgy Gothic calligraphy. Chris and I write out an urgent vow—something about making the best comics and stories in the world—that we place in a peanut butter jar and bury on a slope beneath a boulder.

  But after the long bus rides home from high school, I retreat to the basement in my shorts, loop a pair of surgical tubes around an iron pillar, set my stopwatch, and do an hour of resistance-band training. I listen to the thrum and squeak of the rubber and iron in the windowless room, sweating into the mustard-swirl carpet. I continue dry-land workouts like an automaton, simulating swimming in a basement on the edge of the Niagara Escarpment. I yank on the tubes hoping they might give me a clue—tell me what I’m doing—willing my swimming age to remember what it is capable of.

  When I graduate from high school in May, my step-aunt Pamela, a glamorous, single career woman with no children, invites me and my friend Jane to stay with her for the summer, in a town outside Leeds, England.

  From Pam’s house, Jane and I take trains to the beach at Southampton, the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, the Brontë house in Haworth. We punt in Cambridge, stay in youth hostels. I start to long for larger experiences I have no idea
how to acquire. At one hostel, in Brighton, I hear a young woman’s voice beneath my window singing “Off to Dublin in the Green,” heartbreakingly, drunkenly, and I have a feeling that things will be—as the song sounds—complicated, mostly sad, and mostly beautiful.

  When the singing stops, I keep listening at the window from my bunk bed:

  “Oy, Tracy, get me top off, it’s all I got to wear tomorrow!”

  “Surely you’re joking.”

  “Nuh, I mean it, git it off! Do us a favor.”

  We stay with Jane’s cousins in Birmingham, and she transforms: her Brummie accent emerges, her neckline scoops, her posture becomes defiant. She borrows their tight jeans, jerseys, and hair spray. I watch her, wearing a wool fisherman’s sweater and vintage pajama bottoms, then go back to underlining my rancid paperbacks. At a campground in Ayr we part ways, planning to meet at Pam’s in a week. I go to Edinburgh and Glasgow, eat spoonfuls of peanut butter on park benches. Jane returns to Birmingham, goes to clubs, and does a lot of drugs. Later, back on Pam’s high, flowery-sheeted bed, Jane whispers that she slept with her cousin’s friend. We shriek for a while; then I lie beside her in the dark as she snores softly.

  Jane flies back to Canada the next day, and I stay on another few weeks with Pam. While she works, I sketch in her garden or take the bus into Leeds to walk around. It’s different without Jane. We rifled through the charity shops, drank barley water in pubs, giddily went to see a band called the Pooh Sticks. I walk to the university pool and watch the City of Leeds swim team practice. The coach, Terry Denison, coached breaststrokers Adrian Moorhouse and Suki Brownsdon—names I know from the international rankings. I lean over the railing from the stands and listen to Denison give his swimmers sets.