Carry the Sky

by Kate Gray

  “I’ve been prepping for classes, of course,” I say to Sir Herbert of the Unwashed.

  “Not in my library you haven’t,” he says. “That’s the problem with education today, no real research.” Herbert’s jumping on his soapbox.

  “Now, Herbert, you know I won’t neglect your precious books.” He nods, and his chin has white stubble. His checked shirt is tight over his paunch. No bathing or shaving.

  “You should see the new set of encyclopedias,” Herbert says. His eyebrows, so disheveled, lift up. His focus shifts. He fixes on my glass. “Hey, Song, what are you doing with a drink?”

  “Relaxing?”

  “You know you Orientals aren’t supposed to touch the stuff.” Sir Herbert draws a breath.

  “Not quite, Herbert. We Asians do math, remember? Research, man, do your research,” I say. Herbert sways. He looks down at his now-empty glass.

  Before he decides to ask Mr. Leonard for another drink, I say, “Have you met the new teachers?”

  “Not the rowers,” he says. He leans too close. “I saw the girl earlier. You know, she doesn’t drink?”

  The sad sack. Entropy is taking its course. “No, really? An athlete who doesn’t drink?” I say into his bloodshot eyes. “Herbert, how will she get on?”

  He leans. “Well, she won’t,” he says. “That’s the point.” He walks off in the direction he was leaning. Downhill.

  I’m late. The circles have formed. The Sciences, the Humanities, and Rev. Moose pontificating. All East Coast. All white. Mr. Leonard and I stand out, and I’d rather stand with him. But now Mr. Rower-Man joins the party, bends down so Dorothy White, the headmaster’s henchwoman, can talk in his ear. She’s probably speaking softly so he has to lean his hard body in close. Hello, Mrs. Robinson.

  Will you look at that? Those kids can run. Two boys, one girl, right across the lawn, holding their clothes over their faces. And there’s Sir Herbert raising his glass to naked kids. Fit kids. That girl, unmistakable, that’s Carla. Nobody runs like that. Carla with no clothes. Long, lean. Those angles. I sweat. Every good teacher does fine. I’ve done fine not to see her all summer, but I am no good boy. Her fingers against my breath, the couch, my lips on her. The stress that shifted plates, stress too great causing slippage, slippage creating body waves and surface waves of seismic proportions. Earthquakes emit energy in all directions, and Carla streaking releases seismic energy.

  Everybody’s cheering the streakers.

  Carla has the lines of a treehopper. Different than a grasshopper. Smaller folds. I can fold one in about an hour. Origami, a good way to learn patience. A good discipline. Practice waiting. I keep telling her we’ll wait until after she’s graduated. Carla calls her graduating class, “19-fucking-84.” She has a way with words, that one.

  A couple of petal folds, a couple of rabbit ears, and I’ve got a treehopper made. What treehoppers do is they camouflage as thorns. Can’t tell when they’re on a quince. Carla’s like that. She adapts. How will she adapt to an earthquake inside her? How will I look at her again without seeing my own fault?

  Darwin is amazing.

  Taylor / Eight Moving as One

  Minutes after meeting Carla on the dock where water felt the same as air, I walked inside the boathouse. The varsity St. Tim’s crew, second-place finishers in the Stotesbury Regatta, the biggest high school rowing event in the world, were all over the boathouse. Three racks of eights, their honey hulls upside down, their riggers sticking into the air, most of the rowing shells were the boys’. The girls’ program was pitifully small: just a varsity and a novice crew. Like so many schools, St. Timothy’s wanted girls to win magically, to spring from some ribs and row. The eight varsity rowers and their cox’n were looking at the seats upside down, talking together and pressing their elbows as they laughed, walking over to the oar rack, the girls tipping their heads to look at the maroon and gray blades, thirteen feet up. These girls were muscle, long limbs, sure.

  “Good morning,” I said. The girls in clusters made a circle inside the center bay. They knew who I was from the letter their families received over the summer. Not just anyone could coach St. Tim’s girls, but never had a woman been a St. Tim’s coach. The parents expected the Stotesbury Cup, nothing less. By 1983, women had competed in Olympic rowing exactly once, but because the U.S. had won, parents of rowers expected their girls to be Olympian. I didn’t know what to expect. Sure, I knew seat racing and time trials and 500 meter splits, but I didn’t know Delaware, the mansions of Wilmington, the elite families whose men commuted to D.C. and Philadelphia, whose women ran charities and prepared their girls for politics. These girls, their bodies muscled but soft, their teeth perfect in their perfectly-timed smiles, were smart, the type of smart that gets ahead, that steps over or on. This type of Adam Smith smart works against the selflessness needed to win the Stotesbury Cup. Rowing is the fierce abandonment of self in the service of winning. St. Tim’s hired me more for coaching than teaching, and coaching was all about pushing girls to abandon what they knew in their heads for what they could overcome with their limbs. The trick was willing the body to go past the limits of the mind. Magician as coach. Pulling a winning crew out of a hat. Magic was not what I knew.

  “Let’s start,” I said. “Each of you introduce yourself and describe your workouts over the summer.” Two girls rolled their eyes and giggled into each other.

  “Never mind,” I said. I faced the two girls full on. “Say your name, and lead an exercise that everyone else will do. You two go first.” I backed away from the eye-rolling girls.

  It went around the circle: jumping jacks and Emily, Buttons Daley and crunches, and Carla and real push-ups.

  After hands on waists and bending at hips and breathing, breathing, I said, “Starboards this side, ports that side.” The girls separated to either side of the bay, into an even number with a cox’n in the middle. “Any strokes?” I said. One girl stepped up, and another girl was pushed by her pals.

  “Okay,” I said. “Most noble strokes.”

  You were our stroke all four years. There’s nothing a crew won’t do for a stroke. Our backs match the pace and angle of the stroke’s back. All we watch is the pace of her body moving up the slide, her back, her blade. We’d die for her.

  These two were both thin, not as tall as the others, one eager, the other shy. “We’ll start with Buttons, and try Amanda this afternoon. Everybody else pick a seat, and let’s get hands on the boat.”

  “Okay, Alicia, cox them out,” I said. Last year Alicia had been the cox’n for the Junior National eight, and her voice alone could take the girls to first place. The other girls started chanting something I couldn’t make out.

  “Coach?” Alicia said. She stood four foot ten, probably ninety pounds. The chanting grew. “Everybody calls me Rambo.”

  “Okay, then, Rambo,” I said, “cox them out of the house.” Eight girls lined up along the shell in the rack. They faced Rambo, their backs to the open doors of the boathouse, and waited for her command. Rambo saw the girls, the boat in the rack, the riggers jutting out, the door where the girls would carry the boat, the dock beyond.

  “Count down when ready,” Rambo said.

  From bow to stern, each girl called her seat number, “Bow,” “two,” “three,” each number said high or low, soft or mocking, each a measure of the girl.

  After Buttons said “eight,” curt and sure, Rambo said the next commands, “Hands on. Slide the boat out of the rack. Gently.” And the hull moved slowly out of the rack.

  “Easy. Watch the riggers,” Rambo said. “And up.” As if the eight were hydraulically powered, the boat rose with eight girls beneath, four on either side.

  “Face out of the house.” All the girls turned.

  “Walk it out,” Rambo said. The boat with its eight pairs of legs moved toward the port side of the dock.

  “Way enough,” Rambo said. The girls stopped. They put both hands on the shell. With the cox-box and extra clothing in her han
ds, Rambo ran to the bow of the boat. She said, “Ready to lift, and lift. Up over your heads, and up.”

  The boat didn’t move the way it was supposed to move. Three hundred pounds and thirty-six feet long. As soon as I saw the boat hesitate, move an inch up, then down, I ran. Under four seat, I grabbed the sides, bent my knees, and pushed. When I straightened my arms all the way, my spine took the load. The boat rose above our heads.

  The two lines of girls stepped together beneath the boat, lifting three hundred pounds of wood, fiberglass, and metal overhead.

  Rambo said, “One hand in. Roll it to waists.”

  And we did.

  “Way out. Gently,” Rambo said, “And down.” All nine of us lowered the shell, bent with the boat.

  The thirty-six-foot shell, the composite Kaschper eight came down one end first. It landed on the water with a smack. It didn’t crack, but that smack wasn’t safe. The girls in the bow couldn’t slow it down. Some girls stood up, ready to get the oars.

  “Again, Rambo,” I said. “Do it right, Saints.”

  The girls stopped, faced me flat. I looked at them. This was the moment to win them. They didn’t know what winning required. They turned to their places on the boat. I leaned into the shell, took hold.

  Rambo said, “Ready to lift, up and out of the water.”

  Then she said, “Lift to the waists, and lift.”

  “Up over the head,” Rambo said, “and up.” We pressed the boat up. The boat over our heads, the girls’ arms shaking made the boat shake.

  Rambo said, “One hand in. Back down to the waists, and down.”

  “Set it down, way out.”

  And the boat came to rest on the flat water.

  No sound.

  “Good job,” I said. Bow four jumped to their feet. Altogether, they made the Nadia Comaneci both-hands-in-the-air, backs swayed, hands above their heads, four girls, breasts to backs, first facing bow, then spinning at the same speed to stern, butts to laps, falling into giggles. Bow four was always like that.

  “Coaching gymnastics?” Alex said behind me. His voice was a stiff wind. “We don’t have all day,” he said. And then I saw all three boys’ crews in the boathouse, boys with hands on hips, boys on the ground, all boys staring at the one girls’ crew.

  “Adjust seats on the water,” I said to Rambo. To Alex, I said, “Guess you boys better get out of bed a little earlier.”

  Rambo and the crew tightened oarlocks. Away they went. I stepped into my launch and started the motor and took off. I wanted to wake the dock.

  We didn’t practice much that day. Five hundred meters down the course, I called, “Way enough,” and Rambo echoed the command. I killed the motor in my launch, floating beside the eight. What I had seen was an accordion, girls opening backs at different times and at different angles, girls bending their knees and rolling their seats up the tracks at different speeds. They were supposed to be one girl, eight moving as one.

  The middle of a lake with no roads or motor boats nearby got quiet quick. Sounds fell away like a cloak, and the girls’ Varsity eight and I were left with the splash of the waves on the boats, the slosh of fuel in the tanks, a coffee cup rolling in my boat.

  On the Friday before, I took the launch out and filled the lake with the roar of the motor. There were no students, no impatient boys. You had died two days before. August 24, 1983. With the throttle open full, I made white water crash into cottonwoods on the banks. The race course on the lake, the sheltered cove, the starting platforms, the grand tour was pretense. I made wakes. I cut the lake. I carved your name in water.

  “That’s enough for today, Saints,” I said, and the girls broke their formation to look at me.

  After Rambo had turned the boat around, she let the boat come to a stop. Then, she said into the PA, “Sit ready.” All the oars moved to the catch position. The girls slid up to the start, rolled the blades up, and buried them.

  “Ready to row,” Rambo said, “and row.” The blades dug into the water, burying too much of the shaft, and the eight moved slowly past me. The girls bunched, and the boat lunged side to side. We had work to do. In each of us, we had to find the compassion, the willingness to sacrifice ourselves for each other. We had to find the heart in order to win.

  Song / Earth Calling

  Folded a brontosaurus. Dinosaurs are cake. Folded a water beetle.

  Carla and her bugs. Sometimes I leave little ones in the tree outside her dorm room. Only at night. Sometimes I leave them on the trail to the boathouse. Left one yesterday after whatever it was that happened in my apartment. Somehow she made it back to her dorm without the dorm parent noticing. The start of every year can be a little rocky.

  After her practice with Excessively Tall Alta, Carla should find the bug I folded. Newton must have rowed. Take a rowing shell moving across the surface of a lake. Take eight oars and a bunch of overachieving girls, and what do you have? Uniform motion.

  The major source of resistance in rowing is drag. Misfits of Science know the idea as wind resistance. Think badminton shuttlecock versus baseball. The shuttlecock has greater drag. Now, think rowing shell. The surface of a rowing shell, the tiny slivers and divots in the shellac, the grain of the wood, creates friction, hinders the movement of a solid through liquid. The viscosity of the surface moving through the liquid or gas is the skin.

  I’m all skin drag. I’m resistance. I’m the thing that slows movement. What I’ve done to Carla. What I did to Kim when she ran to catch the phone. What people do in relationships. Drag. The force that weighs down, works against the uniform motion of objects in action.

  The lab reports I was working on, the lab I hoped the Misfits of Physics would grasp, was Newton’s First Law: An object in motion continues in uniform motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.

  It’s like this. A person is strapped into a vehicle, therefore one with the thing. The vehicle moves, the person moves. So, if a person is stupid and doesn’t wear a seatbelt and the vehicle hits a wall, boom. Person and thing are no longer one. A person becomes a projectile. Bye-bye.

  People are supposed to be smarter, make choices. Asians are supposed to be smarter than anybody. In a relationship, both people are strapped in. If one stops, the other goes bye-bye.

  Planes being blown out of the air are a different thing. Say, people are flying to Seoul. Say they’re moving 500 miles an hour on a Korean airliner, and boom, a Soviet missile hits them. Imbalance. They and plane become a million pieces. All 269 lives shattered. Bodies in pieces. Nothing to bury. Koreans caught in the Cold War. Who knows what Reagan will do. But the U.S. and Soviet Union? They are a different law: equal and opposite reaction. Can’t touch without being touched.

  Carla and me? We hurtled a million miles an hour together for an instant, but then, I stopped. Imbalance. She is now a projectile, and no origami bug will help her. And it’s like this: No one who causes her pain can help her out of pain.

  Newton is amazing.

  First time our paths might cross is dinner. That mural in the dining hall gives me the creeps. Truth is, light reflecting off paint can’t make eyes follow the viewer, but that one boy in the mural follows me to my seat at the dinner table.

  I’m assigned to chaperone dinners with the rower, Taylor, Queen of the Tall Girls, cross-dressing tonight, skirt, pressed shirt, Eddie Bauer jacket, no tie. Good thing. A tie would make students talk. They’d call her weird but wouldn’t have the word for the other thing. Tall, no boobs, deep voice. Got to be. Newton never had a law for that. Sir Herbert of the Encyclopedias could look up laws. What do you call a woman who dresses in sweats, runs ten miles a day, and has no boobs? Doesn’t take a rocket scientist.

  But what was she doing with Mr. Rower-Man coming out of the bathroom at the faculty party?

  Of course, Sir Alex of the Tall Boys swings by our table tonight. Positive and negative valences. Attraction. Predictable.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” Mr. Clean-Machine Alex says to me. He sticks h
is hand across the table, and his hand is the size of a shovel.

  “Yeah, Jack Song, Physics,” I say.

  “Hey, nice to meet you. Never could figure physics.” He thinks he’s being cute. He turns toward Tall Girl and flashes a Mr. Clean grin at her. The two of them are teeth and meaning.

  Since she’s been here, Tall Girl has been wave drag, slow and steady friction, something heated and magnetic and sad. She’s barely holding on and leaving a wake. She’s how I was after Kim. Grief is like that, dead weight in the water. Maybe rowers know that type of drag. Maybe Mr. Clean knows it, too. Whatever they have between them, the kids at the table are watching. In a moment they’ll make two and two go five.

  “Tommy Underwood,” I say, “Prince of the Untucked Shirt. Dress yourself, young man.” My voice comes out big, low frequency, air pushed through appropriate passage. Tommy looks quick, like his fly is down, turns toward the mural, undoes his belt, unzips. He tucks front-left, front-right, tucks back-left, back-right, zips up, tightens his belt, and turns quick around. He’s blond, and his fat cheeks are burning red. The boys on either side jab him.

  The bell. Dorothy White, Mrs. Headmaster, dings her dinner bell. All heads drop. Except Taylor’s. She’s looking around. I catch her eye, blue eyes, big circles, grief reflects in the face, and my head exaggerates bending.

  Dorothy White’s voice is flat, crackling, not enough air through not enough throat, “For what we are about to receive . . .” and I catch Carla watching me two tables over. Does she think no one is looking?

  At that god-awful weekend in Rehoboth, with a towel around me, I came out of the bathroom with another towel to dry my hair, and there she was in bed, looking at me, assessing. The sheet draped over her, it showed her feet, her hips, flat stomach, breasts. Her one arm up over her head on the pillow, her muscle and freckles, her curls all over her face, the pillow. She looked at me, those brown eyes following me out of the bathroom, magnetic, in Rehoboth that one weekend, the weekend we slept in separate beds, slept with no sex. Couldn’t do it. Too often I forget Carla is a kid even though she’s eighteen. Her brown eyes tonight are different. They’re small, a child’s. I am Mr. Lecherous. Mr. Loser. I am now wall, the unbalanced force. She is motion, projectile. Bye-bye, Carla.