by Kate Gray
Around us that night on the lake in Massachusetts, there were tiny ripples against the dock, a bird’s call, cars in the distance. It was May, unusually warm for New England, muggy.
“I thought I was going to die today,” you said.
“Around 200 meters?”
That’s the usual place when we go into oxygen debt, like there’s a plastic bag over nose and mouth, and our lungs almost burst, and everything in us wants out.
“When we took the power-ten on Smith,” you said. “I didn’t think I’d keep going.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Good thing,” you said. Leaning into me, you thanked me with your back.
“Hey,” you said. You got up, and I could barely see your skin against the dark water, the dark night. “Try this.”
Getting up and walking beside you, I knelt the way you were kneeling. The length of my thigh, the same length as your thigh, kneeling.
I couldn’t see a thing, not the edge of water, not the edge of night.
Then, I felt your wet hand on my skin. If I didn’t breathe, maybe your hand would stay on my arm. “Tell me when your hand hits the water.”
Your fingers, all grip and sure, the calluses on your palms scratchy. And you pulled my arm down to where the water was, but I couldn’t see the water. My skin couldn’t feel it, either. The temperature and texture of the air completely matched the water. My skin in air, my skin in water. No difference. It was the ripple on my forearm that meant water. I said nothing so we would stay like that. Your hand on my arm. But soon something changed, and you let go.
This morning I couldn’t tell. This morning on a lake with fog on warm water, a lake built by Du Ponts for rowing, for farm boys to learn rowing, I watched my wrist submerge, and only my eyes could tell what was air, what was water. My skin couldn’t feel the difference.
“Checking the temp?” someone said behind me. There was a curl to her words.
A student faced me at the other end of the dock, a tall girl, black curls falling over her face.
“Bath water,” I said. The dock rose and fell with each step I took toward this girl. Her eyes moved from my top to my middle to my feet to my middle to my top. I wanted to cross my arms. Her legs spread, lycra shorts, maroon and gray tank top, her skin was tight on muscles and freckled and white.
Before I reached her, I said, “You’re Carla?”
“In the flesh,” she said. Her steps toward me, like a mannequin, her hands a different pace than her elbows, her forearms at odd angles to her shoulders. The previous coach, who left for a rival school, warned me that this girl was both impulse and force, the type of rower who could win a race with her drive or lose a race with her recklessness.
“I’ve heard about you,” I said.
“Who me?” She turned toward the water, her curls covering her eyes. She turned her back, her shoulders wider than her hips.
She was not you, not even close to being you. But there was a jab in my chest, the place that cracked when I heard the news about you.
Other girls walked down the dirt paths from the dorms to the cove where we were. A breeze came up and sent the fog over bare legs.
Song / Ls Are the Hardest
I didn’t used to be skin drag. In San Diego as a kid, I was uniform motion. A pool in the backyard. Dad, Mom, Kim, me. Five years old when we moved from Korea. My sister and me, as soon as we could swim, we were always in the pool, on the bottom, crossed legs, talking bubbles. One hand on the ladder to keep us down, one hand moving quick left, quick right, to make bubble-talk like real tea parties. We throw back our heads, laugh loud. Bubbles fly out our throats. Lots of air through open throats. Appropriate force through appropriate opening. We swim to the surface and gulp up air, then head back down to the bottom, hold ourselves down on the ladder. Cross-legged on the bottom, talking through bubbles, I could say anything to Kim. Our bubble-talk was animated and loud, more bubbles, or intimate and soft, few bubbles. Wish I could bubble-talk with her still.
At six years old, there were no more bubble parties. Dad said no more. Dad was bigger than Newton. Bigger than Mao. About as big as Lech Wałęsa. “No more pool until English perfect,” except he said it with Rs for Ls. Smart guy. Chemist.
So, every day that pool, that kidney shape taking up the yard. I sat in the living room with the tutor, Mr. Chan, Chinese, yelling over the oscillating fans. The day we met I thought he’d have a long, skinny beard and slippers. He was younger than my dad. Raced bicycles. Smooth legs. Smelled like sprinklers.
“Golf,” he said. Some weird sound came from way back in his throat.
“Guff,” I said.
“Guh,” he said. And he opened his mouth with his bottom jaw first. My sister’s face at the bottom of the pool behind bubbles and gibberish. I about laughed.
“Gruh,” I said. I talked bubbles, a language Mr. Chan couldn’t speak.
After Mr. Chan left, I told my dad, “It’s too hard,” and my dad said too hard equaled staying in North Korea, Communists, and praying in secret. He said hard was moving whole family to United States. What did I know about too hard?
Each night late my mom and dad came home, put Elvis on, opened cans of Bud. Mom and Dad sat on the front porch of our adobe, and they picked paint off their arms and legs. All year long, seven days a week, one house after another. Paint in their hair, on their eyelashes, on their teeth. Dad was no chemist any more. They spoke Korean to each other, laughed so loud their heads knocked the wall behind them. I tried to listen, but by seven years old, I lost Korean. If they heard me coming, they switched to English. And their cheeks caved in, their mouths didn’t open so much, and their throats didn’t hold low notes. English words pushed through their mouths, but their mouths resisted. Wave drag was English in their mouths.
For months from the living room window I watched Kim splash in the pool. “No more pool until English good,” my dad didn’t say any more. Didn’t need to. Mr. Chan’s wiry legs stuck out of his shorts. We sat at the card table practicing. My English still bad. Sometimes I gave him my homework folded in a rose, sometimes an elephant.
“Thank you, Mr. Song,” Mr. Chan said. “Now say, letter.”
Always the Ls: letter, last, too late.
When Carla slips through the door, when she puts her lips on mine, I lock the door behind us. Off duty, 10 p.m., the Kings of the Dorm put themselves to bed. The jocks back early showed the babies, the Second Formers, the routine. The summer didn’t drain every ounce of order from their jock brains. For three months of summer I tried to exert force and block the energy moving through me. Twenty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t fall for a girl, a student, no matter how smart or self-assured. The greater the distance the less the attraction. But no distance right now means great attraction.
Lips and mouths hook together, hands grabbing backs and clothes, we shuffle to the couch, fall on it. I’m on top, and there is no me. One light by the rocking chair lights up half her face, her curls falling to the side. Her eyes, big and dark, and she looks at me as if I am the world, and she barely has a hold on the world, and she presses up, meeting equal and opposite force pressing down.
I slide off. One loafer drops, then the other. At her middle, my fingers on her zipper; at her feet, my hands tug at the end of her jeans. She puts her hands behind her head and lifts her hips off the couch. She says, “Don’t you want to talk about, like, inertia, maybe centripetal force?”
“You’re funny,” I say, and her jeans come off.
And she gets still. And when my hands feel how soft her thighs are, when my hands cup her hips and draw her down the couch, I forget time and age and dorm rooms. I spread her legs, like paper I will fold. And I kiss her, kiss down her thighs. And she arches up, and we are objects in motion with the same speed acting in a balanced force. We are Newton’s first law.
But then her breath gets shallow, and these sounds out of her mouth are like a baby, and she makes sounds like she’s hurt, like I’m hurting her. The sounds are h
igh and rapid, too much air through too little space. And I stop, stop kissing her, stop before anything else.
Then she turns animal, wild, kicking, and I’m already not touching her, and she says, “No, no, no,” and I land on my butt. Tears shoot out of her eyes; she gets sweaty and curls up, puts her fists between her legs. She rolls away from me and turns her face into my stinky cushions. She keeps panting.
What have I done? is all I can think. What I haven’t done is this before. Talk was all we did, ever, and the force between us of negative and positive charges, the electricity in our walks around campus. What I’ve done tonight, the undressing, the kissing, is too much. So I say, “Carla, Carla” to her back, really quietly, but she doesn’t move. She rocks a little. Her hair is soft; her curls straighten when I put my fingers through them.
When I see her shake, I tuck a blanket around her. Out of my mouth comes the song my mother sang to Kim and me when we were new to San Diego, little, fresh off the boat. I don’t even know what it means. It’s the only Korean I have. My mother sang it to us to go to sleep, sang it to Kim in the hospital when she was weak.
Back in my rocking chair by the one light on in the room, I rock forward, backward. This young woman who holds on to the world through me, who opens before me like something raw and faultless, some equal force, is a girl. An eighteen-year-old girl.
Mr. Chan taught me to say Ls: lewd, loser, lecherous.
Taylor / Out Loud
The first week of crew practice was the week before the rest of the students arrived and before classes started. The first week of crew practice was also the first faculty gathering at St. Timothy’s. The lawn party was beige: khaki pants, cotton button-downs, ducks embroidered on belts with D-ring buckles. It was late August, and the lake was too hot. The smell in the breeze was cottonwood. It stuck to the back of my throat.
I looked for you. It wasn’t the first time I looked for you in the wrong place. If I had found you at the party, I might have told you about the ways that scotch singes on the way down, like you think love might, but all it is is desire. You see, I needed you to be there for that evening and for the rest of the story.
There’s a crack I carry around, and the only thing that fills it is you.
The dining hall was behind me, the one with the mural inside, all the white boys turned the same direction. Andrew Wyeth painted it. He used the same face for every boy. There wasn’t one face with brown or green eyes, just blue, and in every face, there was boredom in the corners of the eyes.
Outside the dining hall, the first table with a white tablecloth was the bar set up. An older African American man waited for me to say what I wanted to drink. “No, thank you,” I said, and kept walking as the lawn sloped down to the lake, the muddy lake. Teachers talked in little circles. Women in skirts, men in pants. Men with short hair, women with long. New teacher, dyke in khaki pants. The seventeen-page St. Timothy’s dress code meant I left my jeans and flannel shirts tucked behind the new L.L.Bean and J.Crew clothes, the brands specifically named in the dress code. In my apartment attached to the dorm, in my bedroom with a dresser issued by St. Timothy’s, the soft clothes I like to wear were tucked in the drawers, and the stiff clothes I have to wear to be a teacher stuck to me like plastic wrap.
Some old teacher walked up so close I could smell his clothes. His checked shirt, stretched over his belly, was orange peels in garbage cans. He said, “Don’t you drink?”
“Excuse me?”
“You will,” he said and nodded. His chin moved farther into more chins. He turned and walked away.
My button-down shirt felt unbuttoned, a breeze in my breasts.
As soon as the smelly teacher walked away, Dorothy White, the headmaster’s wife, turned from the little circle around her and gathered a small flock of older teachers, dragged them up the lawn.
“Taylor Alta, English, Geography,” she said a few feet away from me, “I want you to meet Tom Francosi, Mathematics, Stuart Applebaum, Economics, and Reverend Bill Moose.” Trailing behind her in a line, each man wore khakis, button-down shirt, tie or collar.
Tom Francosi said, “Nice to meet you.” His handshake was a short up and down.
Stuart Applebaum said, “Glad you’re on board.” His handshake matched mine, and his blue eyes softened as we shook hands.
“My, my,” Reverend Moose said. “What do we have here?” He bent back to take a big breath. “A rower, by the looks of her.” The steps up the hill winded him. Reverend Moose was slow curves, an arc from neck to knees, a profile like Alfred Hitchcock’s. The softness around his eyes, in his belly, made the faculty party spread out on this lawn much easier. I could breathe.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I’ve rowed.” They knew I was on the 1980 national team, the one that didn’t go to Moscow.
“Taylor, it occurs to me,” Mrs. White said, her head shorter than my shoulder, “that girl, the rowing coach who drowned in that accident on the Schuylkill last week, did you know her?”
She knew I did. She was drum roll and clashing cymbals. Her blue eyes were denim, old-people blue, the people who say things too loud. Tom Francosi’s eyes were blackboards. Stuart Applebaum’s were glass. I couldn’t look at Reverend Moose.
“Yes,” I said. “My friend.”
Stuart said, “Did they find the body?” He leaned his question toward me.
My button-down shirt was cellophane. The crack in my chest was dark and deep. The crack came with the phone call last Wednesday night from our teammate. I didn’t know how she got my number since I had been here only two days. But that’s not what I asked. I asked her twice if she was kidding, but she wasn’t. I fell on the floor in my apartment when she told me you drowned. The carpet smelled like mildew.
Mrs. White said it out loud, in front of people. She said you drowned.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said.
Uphill was quick. I swung wide the door to the dining hall. The slam of the door, the dark of the dining room, and the stares from white boys in the mural were sucked into my chest instead of breath. Both my palms hit the girls’ bathroom door, hit the stall door, stopped only by the tile wall. My knees went to the floor, and my hips slumped between the toilet and the wall. I couldn’t crawl under the toilet tank. In one breath I brought cold toilet, ceramic bowl, and tile down into my lungs. The cold was quiet and good.
The quiet turned to a soft sucking sound. The bathroom door pushed the stale air inside.
“Taylor?” a man said from the bathroom door. My cheek resting on the stall wall, cold and damp.
“Taylor, it’s Alex Jeffers. I know the guy who tried to save your friend,” he said. The door to the girls’ bathroom closed behind him. “He’s fine. He made it. I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Thanks,” I said. I sat back on my heels. I was church-kneeling inside a bathroom stall. When you went to coach the novice crew that day, you had the crazy autumn current and a waterfall meters away and your youngest high school girls being swept toward a waterfall. That’s what you had when your motor conked out. Alex’s friend had tried to reach you in the river, tried to keep you from going over the falls, but his motor conked out, too. He and his boat went over the falls. The river didn’t keep him, just you. You were caught in the turbine of the falls. And they didn’t find your body.
“Mrs. White is a pain in the butt,” he said. “I was coming over to see how you’re doing. I heard what she said.” He stood outside the stall. “I’m sorry.”
My hand on the toilet seat, I pushed off the floor and stood up. I turned around, and there was Alex’s blond cropped hair above the stall door. No eyes, but hair. I opened the door to his pink polo shirt, collar up, his arms crossed over his chest. His forearms were layers of muscle laid one on top of the other. He opened his arms to me.
Song / Newton’s First Law
In that Wyeth mural in the dining hall the eyes of each boy with brown hair and blue eyes follow me around. Wyeth wasn’t paid enough by the parsimonious Du
Ponts. Thought he’d fix them, paint the same face for every boy.
Every good boy does fine. Sound waves in parallel patterns. Every good boy does not come out of the girls’ bathroom. Two new teachers together? Been here a week, tops. Rowers, both of them. Excessively tall. There’s a big wet spot on his pink polo. Over his heart. How touching.
They split directions, she somewhere else, he to the faculty party. Skip Newton’s second law and go to third. Equal and opposite reaction. You can’t touch without being touched.
Old Mr. Leonard, the one black face at this party, wears his white apron, tends bar. “Afternoon, Mr. Jack.”
“Five years here, Mr. Leonard,” I say, “and you can’t call me Jack?”
“No, Mr. Jack.” Delaware is hardly enlightened. The Mason-Dixon line is too close.
“You are the King of Courteous, Mr. Leonard. How was your summer?”
“Same as my spring,” he says. There is no irony in his voice.
“And your family? How are the grandchildren?”
“My pride and my purpose,” he says. At the thought of his three granddaughters and five grandsons, Mr. Leonard shakes his head and smiles. He has worked at St. Timothy’s as a custodian and sometimes bartender for thirty years or more. To the few black students, from Philadelphia and Wilmington, he is preacher, father, mentor, and coach. He knows more about the goings-on inside this little bastion of turpitude than anyone else who works here.
“Just so. For this occasion, I better have scotch, don’t you think, Mr. Leonard?”
“Fine choice,” he says. Mr. Leonard’s hands are swift. His hands, dark like my father’s, are lined from hard work.
“Hey, Jack Song, where have you been?” Herbert, the librarian, has spotted me. Can’t believe he stinks so badly. I nod to Mr. Leonard whose return nod tells me he’s seen too much of Herbert this afternoon.