The Sea of Light (51 page)

Still, the stands will never be completely full. This is not a top division. I’m used to it—and so are most of the kids on the team—but I find myself wondering how it will strike Delgado, after all; she’s so used to playing to a full house at big meets—will this be better for her, or a letdown?

This, which is almost the pinnacle of accomplishment for my team, and for the likes of me; may be child’s play to her. Something not quite serious. Maybe she’ll try to slide through. If I were her, I might.

Standing there, I will her to do her very best, no matter what.

She faces me, gives a thumbs-up.

“My brother’s here—and my dad came—”

“That’s great!”

“Um. The hundred’s
first.”

I shrug and smile with a calm relaxed confidence that I definitely don’t feel. “Good. Get it out of the way, Babe. But there’s plenty of time—look, easy warm-up, you know what to do.”

She nods, looking terror-stricken. Etta gestures with the ever-present clipboard, taps her shoulder. She has already rounded up everyone scheduled for early warm-up and they stand there nervously, weight shifting from foot to foot.

“Warm-up pool’s this way, ladies, let’s go. As ever I shall act as your very own personal escort.”

She ushers them all in the right direction then, like a domineering mother bird. Turns around, once, to wink.

The next half hour is a daze of damp air, sweat, nerves crackling at each announcement, switching from my role as bad cop to my alternate role as good cop, then psychologist, then big sis, friend, commander general, supplicant. Some of them are mired in the paralyzing agony of taking it all too seriously; which is bad for them. Some of them are too loose, too blasé, too giggly, and don’t take it seriously enough; which is bad for me.

I turn around to see Delgado, newly returned, breathing unevenly, her warm-up sweats soaked.

“How’d it go?”

Her face is strained, uncertain. “I don’t know. I was just thinking, you know, like, if I blow it, I’ll be stuck over in lane eight or something tonight.”

“Whoa, whoa. First things first—first, we
qualify,
Babe. Now, remember the plan. Tell me about it.”

“Nothing cagey. Even splits. Go out fast and hold it—”

“And?”

“Face down, down, down off the walls. Pull! Stretch.”

“Good. Go on, enjoy yourself.”

There are announcements. The two massive electronic timers on the walls zero out, blink ready.

First qualifying heat for the women’s 100 breaststroke, says a mechanical male voice. And begins to drone off the lane assignments. There is some applause. Then a collective rise of voices; then a hush, in which the sound that has just ceased echoes.

I stand there, arms crossed over my chest, watch her head for a center lane starting block. She peels off her sweats, rotates shoulders and arms and neck, stretches out the legs, torso twists. From a distance, she looks smaller than she is; only the basic blueprint is visible: tall young woman, broad shoulders, narrower hips, lengthy torso, long arms and legs.

From a distance, even one this short, you can’t see the fear frozen into her face, the large young dark eyes blinking sadly out; you can’t see the crisscrossing lumps of scars around ankles and knees, reaching out across the shoulders from beneath both straps; and you cannot see the rest of the body under the suit, scarred by injury, by surgery—yet, miraculously perhaps, healed enough to move nearly unimpeded, to race strong, and fast; at times, almost, to fly, but through a medium different from air.

She lets the shell of sweatpants and jacket fall away from her. Does not look to acknowledge us. Back turned, for a second, she appears broad and invulnerable. She climbs onto the block.

I watch. I don’t move. It courses through me, so much of it, all in a second: How much shit she has been through, and how hard she has had to work; and how much shit
I
have been through, for that matter, how hard
I
have worked; and now—for her, and for me too—it comes down to a little series of efforts, most of them lasting a minute or so.

It is utterly ridiculous. Absurd. Unnecessary.

Unless you begin to recognize it, in your heart, as part of something larger. Of which the minutes and the seconds are mere pinpoint manifestations. A way in which we limited humans, tied to our limiting bodies, can capture and record a sweet, timeless explosion—that, in its potential, is beyond all limitation.

SWIMMERS TAKE YOUR MARKS,
blares the voice. Loud. Disembodied. Vaguely distorted.

God’s voice, I think.

Then sneer at myself, inside. Because I don’t believe in God. Or, rather, I am a skeptic. Believing that, first: if there
is
God, its voice is neither male nor female. And, second: If there is God, it will prove itself—in action, in manifestation—which are the only ways I know. Or, at any rate, the only proofs I accept. A limited human, I can do no more.

But Kay believed in God.

I stare at the starting blocks. Eight bodies, crouching, gripping edges. There is Babe. Feet parallel. She has eschewed the runner’s start; maybe it would get her off the block more quickly, she said, but in the end she would sacrifice power; she would rather work on her squats, and her walls—could she? and, trusting her instinct in the matter, I told her yes, of course. She seemed relieved, grateful.

Now,
I think.

Even so, the loud echoing disembodied mechanical beep—like the first, suddenly cut-off signal of mortal alarm—surprises me, so that I cannot help but blink, and shudder, and hide it by moving my shoulders raggedly up and down.

“Go
BABE!”
someone screams. Someone from the team, I think at first. But it’s a male, teenaged voice and, glancing up at the stands, I see her brother Jack on his feet, hands pounding the air, face flushed and serious.

She’s off the block, barely in time—starts always and forever her weak point, I guess. But she hits the imaginary hole in the donut perfectly, and dives right through, farther and deeper than the rest of them, long, powerful kick and fierce pull, and she loops up for air, arching out and forward with the scars across each shoulder already bulging muscle, skin and veins flushed a deep, dark red; and, in that second, lunging in a perfect curve, like a fish, or a wave, out and up but ever forward and over, she looks like a terrible powerful breath-sucking monster, goggle-eyed, hairless, indestructible; of whom, I think with satisfaction, the rest of them should be afraid. But whether they are or not doesn’t really matter; they can’t catch her, anyway. She is at the wall, propelling in perfectly. Touch and spring, like electric shock you must quick, quick, turn away from. Feet to the wall and big quads flex, and shoot out straight, like an arrow. Pull. Face down, down, down. Reach like a spear. Stretch. Then pull, kick, recover, emerge breath-sucking, almost monstrous. She is now one length ahead. Abnormal, in the 100—to be a full length ahead; and, for a moment, I’m afraid she’s gone out too fast. Then I relax. She knows just what she is doing. Her best. And, for a minute and some seconds, as in years now past, her best will be magnificently abnormal—better than the rest.

There is a rhythm that takes over, in this sport: a reach, a roll, an undulation. On good days, it’s like a wave you just wait for, poised, and you catch it at the perfect point of entry, immediately in tune with its music and its pace, and, focused not on effort, but on form in the moment, you ride it.

You can also win sometimes when you miss the wave—at these times you race through sheer effort alone—but it always leaves you drained and sorry, takes much more out of you; and, if it happens too often, it makes you afraid. Because nobody likes suffering; everyone works for happiness, in the end—and for these moments of pure rhythm, of ecstasy.

She rides her wave into the wall again, touches and springs off for the turn perfectly; I clock her at the fifty, find her ahead of pace. And worry again—reverse, feet meet wall, quads flex, calves stretch, and like she says:
Puh!,
shoot on, perfectly streamlined, javelin getting ready for the throw—will the perfection stop now? wave dissipate? leave her with nothing but a long, dark look down the barrel of forty or fifty yards of sheer effort, exhaustion, pain? Yet it doesn’t seem to stop; there is no catch, no brief cessation of the flow of movement under, and over, always forward. Her walls have been perfect. She is almost two lengths ahead. It’s still absurd; embarrassing, frightening, exhilarating. As if she has hidden the possibility of this moment from everyone all along—including me—and, now, can laugh at our surprise.

Reach. Pray. Ride over it. What, at her best, years ago, she had notably mastered: the undulation that is a combination of thigh power and gut power and chest and arms and neck and shoulder power—rocking so fluidly under and over the surface that, deceptively, the motion appears to go up and down instead of perfectly, insistently forward. Clear water. No one is near her. The crayon blue still, unrippled, smooth, not a touch of turbulence to disturb this even, perfect, savagely coiled spring and drive. Into the wall before anyone else. I clock her again, at the seventy-five. Third lap has been a negative split. I let the stopwatch collapse on its string against my chest, bounce there, ticking silently, electronically away; I glance at the big bright silent wall clocks matching it, hear dimly, as if far off, the yells and screams of people watching, and, helplessly, I laugh.

Off the wall, she passes everyone else, in all seven other lanes, going the opposite direction. Now, pulling out a final hint of effort and of manic pride, a few others are hitting the wall perfectly, uncorking some last unimaginable reserve of speed, expanding and stretching each muscle in pursuit. And the pursuit is not of her, but of a qualifying time—which, now, has been thrown up in the air as a wild card, almost out of their league, its only limit the sky—in which anything might happen. I think, for a moment, that it’s unfair. Remind myself that, in the end, she will only take up one lane after all.

Approaching the finish she does everything right, pure concentration, no glancing to either side, streamlined straight ahead, kick up pull and over, and again, and she skips a breath, head down, ankles snap together and toes point with a last perfect kick, and she touches right in.

I stop my watch, but don’t bother to look.

There is a big clattering swell of human-voice noise that echoes around me and, for a moment, makes me feel like I’ll drown in it. As the rest of the field begins to touch in, she is already pulling off her goggles, squinting up at the clock, breathing hard and grinning and then tossing her goggles, ducking in and out of the water as if to cool herself down, throwing up both arms in a big wide gesture of triumph. There are, here and there, the flashes of cameras recording this for college newsletters and obscure swimming magazines; and, somewhere, the silent whir of a very small, very local cable TV channel’s video unit. The mechanical voice announces it, with a surprising crack of emotion: she has broken the meet and division records, each by more than five seconds.

Later, tunelessly somehow, dripping, veins outlined against the effort-reddened flesh, muscles quivering, still breathing hard, she comes back to us all in our specially set-off tiered section of bench, and for a moment everyone engulfs her in towels, embraces. I stand a little apart. When she looks at me, we both burst smiles.

Congratulations, I tell her. Then send her off to the recovery room with Etta leading the way. Check out the knees and ankles, I advise Etta. She’s been limping again. And both shoulders, please. Then bring her back alive. In something dry. But not for too long. That final is tonight.

I turn my attention elsewhere. There are other swimmers to worry about, other qualifying heats; she may be the best right now, but she isn’t the only one. I busy myself with the rest of them, being stern or warm as the case requires, going over race plans, double-checking lane assignments, soothing nerves.

Still, I’m proud. In the midst of this new flurry of necessary coaching activity I catch a glimpse of her as she passes by the spectator stands, towel over one shoulder. I see Jack on his feet, fists still in the air, jumping up and down; and Felipe, standing now, reaching to touch her raised hand in passing, and he is crying.

Finals

(
ELLIE
)

“You didn’t come kiss me.”

“I was up there on the bench, Babe. I mean, I couldn’t exactly parachute over, you know. But I made a big fuss—I blew you a major, major kiss—I
know
that you saw it!”

“Or hold me,” she complains. “Like you promised.”

“Well,” I say, “I am holding you now.”

She rolls away, dragging me along. I hold her from behind, my hands warm bunched in the folds of her new dry sweats, and I smell shampoo, clean flesh, powder.

“I’m freaking out, Ellie.”

“Chill.”

“The knee’s about to blow—”

“No way. It’s all massaged and whirlpooled and braced and taped up and safe—”

“—I can feel it—”

“Hey,” I tell her, “quiet.” I stroke her hair and neck and, after a while, I can feel her relax.

Our room is the worst. Squeaky mattress, tag-sale pastel still life and velveteen landscapes on the wall—I’ll bet there are jail cells better than this.

“It’s all crap, you know.” She sounds glum now, resigned. “Everything they tell you. Relax, it’s just another meet, it’s just another heat. Bullshit!”

Something’s knocking at the door to my brain—something almost familiar. Makes me feel hesitant, a little shy, but also knowing somehow; and I hear myself asking, tentatively: “What exactly bothers you, Babe? About finals, I mean—”