This is the Water

by Yannick Murphy

  Since you are not timing today, you have time to think, which is not always a good thing. The first races are the five-hundred frees, and Sofia and Alex are not in this event, and it is a long event. You look around at the crowd in the bleachers, and as usual there is someone who reminds you of your brother. You notice a man with a chipped front tooth and it reminds you of your brother, but your brother only had a chipped tooth for so long. When he was older, after he married, he had the tooth fixed, but still when you picture your brother, it’s always with that chipped front tooth. Maybe it’s because when you played chase with your brother, that tooth looked sharp, like it could tear the skin on your back, on your neck, if he caught you. You try to stop thinking about your brother. You are always thinking about him when you are alone, when Thomas isn’t there talking to you about something he’s read in a magazine, when your girls aren’t there asking you questions, asking you to help with their homework, to tell them the difference between to, too, and two. You are alone because Thomas is too busy with work to come to most of these meets. He works weekend days at the lab, bent over proteins, fussing over radioactive isotopes, hearing outside his window the screech of plane wheels grabbing tarmac, the roaring of engines, the voices of people in a hurry, trundling suitcases with wheels over long distances of asphalt from car trunk to check-in. You lower your head while sitting in the bleachers, looking down at your hands, your signature veins popping out as if you just had too much blood running through you and the walls of your veins were on the verge of bursting. You remember what Thomas told you about a phenomenon, that of all the matter in the universe, we only see 4 percent of it. “Does that include air?” you asked. “Yes, it includes air,” he said. “We know what air is. We can see it. But there is so much we can’t see, and we don’t even know what it is. It’s invisible to us.” You knew you were supposed to be impressed by only being able to see 4 percent of what was around you and in front of you, but you couldn’t help thinking that for you it was less than 4 percent, because you couldn’t see air the way Thomas could see air. He could probably visualize water vapor and oxygen and CO2, but you could not.

  These are your fingers, sore at the ends from trying to pull up the competitive swim-team suit over Sofia’s body when you first arrived at the facility and you stood in the stall in the bathroom. This is you, dialing Thomas, who you think by now has left his work at the lab and gone home. This is you telling him you have arrived at the meet, telling him you guess you are lucky, you don’t have to time, and Thomas tells you he has been home already an hour and split wood, and that he has seen a fox come up close to the chickens. Already you have lost the duck and the rooster and a few hens to a fox.

  This is the fox, down in the woods that are not so thick, but the maples grow thin, and the pines only reach up to the waist, and the sun has a clear path to hit strong and full on the fox’s cinnamon-colored back. This is you telling Thomas that the girls here on the other swim teams look like Amazons, and that you are afraid for your girls, who are just of average weight and height, and the youngest, maybe not even average yet, maybe below average. This is the fox moving his ears from side to side, listening to Thomas’s deep voice as Thomas stands out on the porch talking to you, smelling on Thomas the chainsaw oil that dripped on the knees of his pants. This is one of the Amazon girls diving into the water, going down, so far down, on her dive, as if she is too heavy to control it, and then she comes up, breaches, is what you think, and you’re glad one of your children is not next to you, because if she were, you might say “breaches” out loud, and then your child would say, “Oh, Mom, how could you say that? You’re not supposed to say things like that.” Your children have been schooled in schools where guidance counselors give weekly lessons on bullying. Bullying is not what bullying was when I was a kid, you think. When you were a kid bullies were kids who threw another kid against the chain-link fence at recess and took the lunch money out of his pockets. Today, bullying is calling another kid a name, and bullies are kids who simply don’t want to play with another kid because they don’t like them. You know because Alex, your younger daughter, recently came home from school with a note saying her actions that day were considered bullying, because she and another girl openly agreed they did not want to play with another girl. The girls were overheard by a teacher. You felt then that you were only seeing a mere 1 percent of the universe. You reprimanded your daughter, and explained how that wasn’t nice, but then later that night, talking to Thomas, you told him you needed clarification. Since when did all this become bullying? you asked. Thomas shook his head while reading his science magazine. You thought he was shaking his head with you, telling you he didn’t know either when all of the rules changed, when what we could see in the universe started shrinking, but then he said, “Listen to this,” but you didn’t. You left the room. Some of his words, though, chased you down the stairs. You made out the words “quarks” and “particles” and “gluons.” Your house is like one big ventriloquist. There are open parts everywhere, so that you often don’t really know where a voice is coming from. You’d think a person was talking to you from the bathroom, when they were really in the rec room, or in the girls’ loft. His words chased you downstairs, and seemed to get louder as you entered the kitchen, even though he hadn’t moved from the bed. You had no idea what he was talking about and doubted that if you had read the article yourself you’d understand it any better.

  You remembered to take a vitamin, and then felt guilty remembering, because you hadn’t remembered earlier to give your children their vitamins, and they were the ones who needed them the most. All the growing of the bones, the laying down of the platelets, and your older girl, Sofia, who recently started her period, she would need more iron now, you thought. You thought of the other things she might need, things not for purchase, but intangible things like compliments, and feeling the eyes of others on her, noticing how she looks good in a dress. She might need you and Thomas to tell her how pretty she is, how strands in her hair in the summer sun look gold. You once had these things yourself, these compliments, and maybe it was not so long ago, but now they are gone, and you think maybe that is not so bad, because in a way it’s as if you have given them to your daughter. They are hers now. You wonder what it was that your father once gave to your brother when he was a teenager, or was that the problem, he gave nothing to your brother at all, and your brother walked through his teenage years without this kind of passed-on gift from your father. Your brother did not take on the posture of a man who was proud. His shoulders stayed rounded. His eyes darted in conversation rather than frankly holding someone’s gaze. His voice, even, still broke, rather than taking on a mellow, basslike tone.

  This is the killer, our killer, at the meet watching Kim. He holds a heat sheet that he bought for three dollars from a parent sitting at a desk at the entrance to the bleachers. On the heat sheet he can see that her fastest time for her hundred fly was 1:08.74. He watches Kim behind the blocks. She is not like the other girls. She does not turn around and high-five other swimmers. She does not wave to someone who may be watching her from the stands. She stares straight out while waiting for her race, and she jogs in place and loosens up her arms, not seeming to look at anyone, not even when she hears her name being called by her teammates, who cheer her on before she gets ready for her dive. When she’s on the blocks, she easily bends the top half of her body over and holds on tight to the edge of the block, so tight our killer is surprised that when she dives in the platform of the block doesn’t come off in her hands and end up with her in the water. He watches how she moves, how her slender neck reaches up and out with every upswing of her arms. He wonders if today will be the day she beats her record, because that is what he is waiting for. He is confident she will do it soon. No one else focuses as hard as she does before her race. On her last lap, though, it is obvious this isn’t the day. She seems to tire, either that or the other girls swimming with her get a burst of energy. She ends up touching the wall
with a 1:09.75. She has gained time. When she gets out of the water she does not even go up to her coach for a bit of advice. Instead she goes right into the warm-down lane, her head sunk low between her shoulders. The killer sighs. He was looking forward to the way the blade of his knife would cut through that throat, sending all of that red blood that would be pulsing so hard from her athlete’s strong heart down her shirtfront. (He couldn’t understand why that strangler out west bothered to strangle. What a waste of an experience, not seeing the blood, not letting the blood do what it most wants to do—flow.) Especially, though, he was looking forward to how she would look, all of the excitement and satisfaction and energy in her eyes from having beat her record suddenly leaving, suddenly his for the taking.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Sitting in the bleachers, trying not to turn around and yell at the parent sitting behind you who yelled at you in the first place, you imagine the sounds of the air conditioner that was in the house you rented on vacation at the equator almost a year ago. You close your eyes and imagine also the calm blue light that would come on the control panel of the air conditioner when it was turned on. You think how you loved that trip. Thomas surfed with you then. He wasn’t thinking about his failing lab on the trip. You would see him riding a wave and then falling over backward when he had ridden the wave as far as he could, landing in the water with a yelp and a hoot at having had such a good ride. He walked with you on the beach at night, then stopped and held your arm. He was smiling, amazed, holding out a flashlight into the shrub-covered dunes, where hundreds of orange and purple crabs crawled, their movement sounding like pattering drops of unceasing rain. But now, since you’ve been back, and the problems at his lab haven’t disappeared, the bacteria still aren’t growing, the planes by his office at the airport are stilling screeching on the tarmac out his window, he hasn’t reached out for you once, and what does it take, you think, to make him reach out to you again? This is when you hear, “Hello, Annie.” It’s Chris, with the perfect breasts and rear. “Hey, have a seat,” you say. You then proceed to move your purse and your book to make room for her. Chris has no bags with her, not even a purse, as usual. Because you have known her a few years now you know most of her clothes. She is wearing her faded blue Levi’s jeans rolled up to the ankles, tennis shoes, and a white V-neck tee shirt. Her hair is kept back with a simple black ponytail holder, and she wears no makeup. You think she is the most beautiful woman at the meet today, and then you turn around and look at all the other women in the bleachers and think you are right. Chris always smells faintly of mint, not like toothpaste mint or breath-freshener mint, but like the real mint, the kind that grows wild in your field by your house. Whenever you take a walk to the stream through the fields, you break a leaf off and pinch it and smell it.

  “Cleo just told me she wants one of those suits,” Chris says. “Like the ones Alex and Sofia have.” With a lift of her chin she points to your girls, who are on deck.

  “Oh, those,” you say. “They are the biggest marketing scam. The least expensive of them costs a couple of hundred dollars, but do they really make the girls swim faster? They’re so tight the girls sometimes say they can hardly breathe, but without them the girls don’t think they can win the race, and if they don’t think they can win it, then sometimes they don’t,” you say. Chris nods. You feel as if you’ve hurt Chris’s feelings somehow. “I mean, that’s great that Cleo’s that into swimming that she wants one. Now you too can experience the joy of having to help pull, tug, squeeze, and jam your daughter’s rear into a suit in time for her first event when her body’s still wet from having swum warm-ups.” Swimmers can’t wear the suit during warm-ups and then also for their events that day, because that’s too long to keep on a suit that sadistically tight and uncomfortable. “Welcome to the torture club,” you say. Chris laughs. Her teeth are very white, in perfect rows. It is not a full-hearted laugh. It is a polite laugh. You’ve heard Chris make it before. She does it when she’s not really listening, when she’s worried, for example, about where Cleo is, if she has taken too long in the locker rooms and hasn’t yet come out. But what did I expect? you think to yourself. That wasn’t very funny what I just said. You pull out grapes and offer some to Chris. “They’re already warm,” you say. “It’s so hot in here I think they’re turning into wine.” Chris nods, but she does not look hot at all. She is not sweating at the temples the way you are. Chris takes one grape, and then doesn’t take any more. “Where’s Paul today?” you ask.

  “He couldn’t make it,” Chris says. “He’s got papers to correct.” You nod. Chris doesn’t ask you where Thomas is, even though you are ready to tell her that he’s cutting wood and splitting wood and stacking wood, and that really, for all you know, he could be eating the wood, because on any given day that he comes home from the lab, if he’s not mowing the lawn, then he’s doing the wood, because in the winter, all you heat with is the wood because wood heat feels warmer and saves money. This was Thomas’s idea, not yours, as most things to do with the house and the family usually are, except the swim team, of course, and joining the facility, which were your ideas. Concerning the wood, you would have been happy with walking over to a dial and turning up the heat. You could have done without hauling in wood at six in the morning in the dark while trying not to slip over ice-encrusted snow. You could have done without always having splinters and small bits of wood embedded in the weave of your sweater fronts from holding the logs to your chest on your way to the woodstove. Who knew that your wrists would hurt from picking up the wood at one end and tossing it on a pile to be stacked after it was split, that it would make them inflamed, and that swellings the size of robin’s eggs would appear on the inside of them? You could have done without never having the chance to read the entire paper because its pages were needed to start the fire every—

  “What’s the matter?” you ask Chris, because you have just noticed that Chris has a tear sliding down her cheek. Instinctively, you look toward the water, to see if it’s Chris’s daughter, to see if Chris’s daughter, Cleo, has lost her race and that’s why Chris is crying, because you remember from past meets how you have seen tears in parents’ eyes. You have seen tears in the eyes of Dinah, for example, who cried with joy a few years ago when her daughter made it to age groups, a more competitive division, in the fifty breast. You thought then that for Dinah Jessie’s success was more about her than her daughter. You’ve seen plenty of girls cry too, and even boys, when they’ve lost races. You have seen parents cry when their children who have lost a race cry. You have seen parents cry because the coaches have yelled at them, telling them they have not honored the swim-parent’s code, that they have overstepped their boundaries and taken the sacred job of coaching into their own hands. The parents, apparently, were guilty of telling little Mary that she has to bring her arms up out of the water faster in fly. They told her in the car ride home that her rhythm was off, they told her that her legs were spread wide on the entry, they told her before a race to not forget the two-hand touch, they told her to keep her hands in prayer position for the pull out, and they told her to, for crying out loud, breathe on both sides in the free. But it is not Cleo that Chris is crying about, you realize. Cleo is just sitting on deck on her towel reading a book. She’s not even swimming the event that’s taking place. Chris can’t answer you yet. Now more tears are sliding down her cheeks, and the tip of her nose is turning red. You don’t have a tissue in your purse to offer her. Unused ChapStick, yes, but not one tissue. You try not to ask Chris any more questions. She will tell you if she wants to. You think how you have been friends for a while but never cried in front of each other before. You realize this has suddenly changed your friendship, turned it up a notch. You are now closer whether you want to be or not. You wonder if someday you’ll cry in front of her too and she will look at you with those blue eyes and put her thin, long-fingered hand on your arm and tell you it’s going to be all right. You look at the timing board. The five-hundred frees are
over and now it’s the relays. Your daughters are walking with their relay teams to the blocks. Your older daughter, Sofia, walks half the distance with her book in her hand, still reading. When she realizes she can’t dive into the water with the book she runs back to her towel and leaves it there. Chris wipes her face with her hands, making her face appear shiny, and even prettier, you think, and then you think how when you cry, the skin around your eyes puffs up, and your whole nose turns beet red like a seasoned alcoholic, and the skin on your face and your neck gets red blotches in irregular shapes resembling the outlines of the fifty states. Once you stopped your crying completely because you happened to look at your reflection and saw the perfect outline of Texas, and could not believe it was there on the side of your neck. You thought maybe it was some kind of a sign, that you should go to Texas and start life anew, but then you realized you had no desire to go to Texas, and that life anywhere else, except maybe Florida, would be better.