The Sea of Light (55 page)

It doesn’t. Save her, I mean. Although, after the turn, into the 275-yard leg, she has closed up more space between her and the rest of the field; and looks tired but somehow more on top of things than she looked just a few seconds before; and by the time she hits the final breaststroke turn and pulls ahead more she has narrowed the gap to about a body length. I figure if her freestyle’s any good at all, and if she doesn’t croak or totally fall apart first, at least she’ll be able to finish just behind everyone else, and maybe she won’t be totally, totally humiliated.

For some reason, I don’t want her to be embarrassed. Or maybe it’s myself, somehow, that I don’t want to embarrass. After all, I have run a few stinkaroo races in my day. And, while I never came in last, I remember one cross-country race I ran against this team that totally outclassed us; I never was in contention from the starting gun on, even though I ran my guts out, ran much harder than I think I ever had to do before or since; I finished pretty much near the back of the field, and when I crossed the finish line I got down on my knees and puked, and pissed in my shorts, and then I cried. One of those days when you give your best, but your best is nowhere near good enough, and there’s nothing more you can do. I mean, it’s no tragedy—maybe on some level you can even feel proud—but it is also no fun. No fun at all.

They start the final 100 yards—freestyle—pretty much flat out. There’s more spacing between the others in the rest of the field now, too; some of them are fading, looking tired; some of them are battling it out in the middle, not knowing what the hell place they might finish in. Lanes three and two and six are almost neck and neck to the end. The water becomes a slipstream of blue-white turbulence trailing behind each set of feet, and they kick, and kick, and pull, and pull, and pull and breathe as hard and as fast as they can. I watch each flip turn—perfect—I love how they do that. Ellie is trailing badly again. I can tell by the way her head kind of bobs jerkily up for a breath with each stroke that she’s exhausted. She seems to make a superhuman effort at the 375, closing a little on the rest, springing off the wall and not breathing for a few strokes, then barreling it down the final lap of the race like a little cannon drooling out the last of its shot, like a toy that’s broken but still kind of works, looking weird smashing away at the water, as if she hates it, wants to kill it. Until, many seconds behind the next to last finisher, she touches in.

I’m not even sure who won. I’ve been too busy watching the loser. Who doesn’t even bother to take off her goggles, or look up at the time. She just clings to the wall, bows her head against it. For a second, it looks like she’s going to sink.

I sort of sit there, staring at her, ignoring my father, wondering what to do.

But you’d think, from the reaction of her teammates—the most prominent, visible, and embarrassingly vocal of whom is my sister Babe—that she had won first place. They are all jumping around screaming and hurrah-ing, running over to cluster around the block at lane eight and lean over like a bunch of birds clucking over a nest, helping her out of the water and covering her with hugs and kisses. Every once in a while you can hear a particularly high-pitched shriek.

Something you would never hear on a men’s team, believe me. Women, females—they seem foreign to me, sometimes. There is no way I could ever really, really understand them; I mean, I know we are all similar as human beings, in a lot of ways, and that, like, we all of us have feelings; but I’m talking about the differences—and I know, I know in my heart, that the gap between me and them is a gap that will always be, that will never close, no matter how much I am in love.

I wonder if it’s the same for Babe, and Ellie—do they have gaps? but thinking about
that
is disgusting, so I stop.

Finals

(
FELIPE
)

We had to be there, she told me over the phone, had to be there for the 400 IM, even though she herself will not swim it. And watch lane eight. Lane eight. The swimmer in lane eight is her best friend. Someone very important to her. Then—later, after the swimming is over for the night—she and this friend will meet us for dinner. But only then.

She makes it sound like a reward. Her presence, and the presence of this other girl, a gift to me, her father, for doing the right thing. And maybe, in a way, it is.

At any rate, I am guilty as Judas these days, where my family is concerned; a man with no right to object—especially not to the whims of his handsome, spoiled, distraught children. Spending time with them already feels like borrowed time; it feels like visiting rights, hours bowing under the weight of limitation, darkened by grief unexpressed.

Mostly, I don’t know how I’ll get through them. The hours, I mean; the minutes, and the days. I only know that I will, somehow I will.

The pain is too unbearable to allow itself to be felt. If it did that, it would destroy the organism. I clench my teeth and close my eyes against it. Banish feeling from my day-to-day existence. Skirt Barbara, when she is there—as she avoids me—wander the house like a ghost when she’s not, grateful for the freedom, sick to death of everything else. Knowing only that it is what I have to do. And that, later, somehow, I will let myself feel it.

For now, I am a drowning man, on a crowded raft built for one. I must push everyone else off this raft, in order to survive myself; hoping desperately that they, who can swim so much better than I, will swim and not sink, that they will find land or a lifebuoy, or that a rescue ship will pluck them out of the water; but knowing against love itself that if I do not slice them adrift I myself will surely die. And, still, seeing forever the expression on their faces—an expression of anguish, and rage, and betrayal—when I finally cut them free.

*

I have sat here for some time, now—next to my son, dimly watching my daughter swim in the water. It seems absurd to me, suddenly, this whole practice: her doing, us watching. We have been doing this, for one reason or another, for many years now.

I am proud of her, yes; but, I realize, for something quite other than this: I am proud of her for hanging on in the face of Angelita, and staying afloat in the Sargasso Sea, and coming back to live among us.

There was something, she said last night, after dinner, something important she had to tell me. She held me by the shoulders. Looked into my eyes. I saw dark things in hers; and warm things, like tenderness; and a light. I recognized the light, before I clearly knew it; it was something I grew up seeing, in the sunlight glinting off metal and oceans and fields, reflected in the eyes of Tia Corazón—and, once, long ago, before I was a man with money and too many thing, reflected in my own. It is clear, bright, almost frightening. A touch of the Powers. Of madness, and of love.

If you live as if you will die tomorrow, you may keep this light. But if you live as if there will always be plenty of time on your side—time to develop the heart, the spirit, true kindness and compassion for the creatures of the world, time to begin doing the right and just things—then time is what you will lose, in the end; and, in losing it, you also lose the light. It will wither from your hands; it will fade from your eyes. You will chase other things instead, chase them forever.

My daughter is rearing up out of the water now, lifting a fist triumphantly. I see the scars across her shoulders. Buzzers sound. Electronic boards on each side of the natatorium display cumulative team points, there are human voices and the laughter of young women, and yelling, cheering. My son is standing, hoarsely ranting his sister’s name, his own name—and mine:

Delgado!

Del-GA-do!

I look at the dark brown backs of my hands.

Mr. Delgado, said that friend of hers, the Jewish girl, at dinner last night—I took them to a fine place, after having to convince Jack, who was for some reason sulking, to dress respectably and come along—Mr. Delgado, I want to tell you something, you have two beautiful, beautiful children. Four, I said proudly, nodding. And Babe laughed then, not in mockery or self-deprecation, but in delight.

Later was when she said it: Dad, look, I have something important to tell you. Inside I could feel the heaviness and the weariness in my chest. I loved her more than ever. And, at the same time, I could not bear another burden—I knew that what she wanted to say was no burden to her, but would be to me. What I did instead of listening was a cowardly thing. I took her hands from my shoulders and held them in my own, and said, I love you, what you want to tell me doesn’t matter, please don’t. Which was a lie, and a plea; but also, for me, the truth. So that she went away silenced, and relieved, and disappointed.

My daughter’s team has won.

Del-GA-DO! yells my son. He jumps down tiers of bleachers, running for her, on the pool deck now, surrounded by a group of women.

They are taking apart the lane dividers. Unhooking them. Floating them sloppily, one by one, until they mesh like clumsy colorful snakes in the center of the light blue contained pool of water—that, under no circumstances, could remind me of the sea, or of Angelita, except for the presence of my daughter.

They are lifting someone up on their shoulders. Multiple hands. Multiple screams and yells, release, laughter. An older, handsome woman. White. Solid. Obviously, that coach. I connect the voice from the phone to her—yes, it fits. They are passing her, hands to hands. Throwing her, fully dressed, into the water.

After You Win

(
CHICK
)

Boz and I travel together like old friends, trustingly, knowing each other’s rhythms. There’s the upper-class freneticism of Cambridge near Harvard, matrix of subway stops, bookstores, expensive alumni gift shops, privilege with something still to prove, and the shifting crowds of wealthy young souls who think they’re slumming it in worn, torn fatigues from army surplus stores, indestructible black thick-soled British punk shoes, shaven heads or ponytails, earrings shaped like razors.

We stare coolly out at this, Boz and I, through the windows of my Honda. My turquois blue Honda hatchback with two doors and five speeds—a purchase I agonized over, was later childishly proud of, and which became, in fact, the source of an argument with Bren.

I can’t believe you’re buying a foreign car, Chick! American industry’s going down the tubes, you know—don’t you think you ought to be a little more patriotic?

To which I’d replied: American industry’s going down the tubes because of poor quality and incompetent management and greed and waste and cruelty and shortsightedness and lies, Bren—not because of foreign products. This is the best car for my money. Therefore, I will buy it. She’d shrugged, mildly disgusted. Gone out and spent thousands more on a Buick. Power steering, plush interior, four doors, heating vents front seat and back, terrible mileage. But warmth and comfort were the big things on her mind that winter, anyway—the car was all for Kay, who had given her the go-ahead to purchase Anything But A German Car.

I press on the air-conditioning. Boz whines with a kind of contentment, his wet nose blotches the dashboard and then my shoulder, and he settles down like one compact muscular circle on the seat beside me. Eventually, traffic thins; the river looms, separating privilege from the other side of the tracks; and we do cross over. Past taller buildings, along poorer, rutted streets. Overspilling garbage cans, water hydrants spewing unhalted while kids dance naked through the spray. Brick and concrete crumbling in this sunny Northeastern spring. Soon long-distance trucks rumble alongside, slowing for highway ramps. I follow one, turn, shift rapidly through all the gears onto a whizzing bright interstate and head north. Away from—or into—the thick of things.

*

She’s sitting out on a lawn chair, shorts and sunglasses on. One arm thrown casually behind her head. A knee up, moving gently in rhythm—to some internal song, I think. But pulling into the driveway I wonder, for a moment, if it’s really Bren. The last thing I expected to see was that woman relaxing, un-driven, in the bright daylight of a hot late spring. Coppertone 15 smearing her lips white. She hears the crunch of gravel and sits up to look.

Boz whines a little in anticipation, or anxiety. Lack of foreknowledge. And I do too, I suppose—only silently. Wondering how this will be. Trying not to wonder.

She approaches barefoot. She’s put on a little weight and looks fitter, healthy. She smears sunblock from her mouth with one faintly tanned arm.

“Hey.”

When she leans into the window I see that her face is still tired but not tense. The sunglasses slide down her nose. She smiles gently, and I kiss her. There are tiny streaks of gray in her hair, above the ears. Bren opens the door and Boz clambers over me whimpering, flies against her chest knocking her flat, licks her chin in recognition and confusion. I stretch out, sit next to them on freshly mowed grass that oozes pollen, promises hay fever. After a while Boz pants back and forth between us, as if questioning where his allegiance ought to lie. Then he gives up and goes sniffing around newly green bushes, pees on tree trunks. The sun’s at a peak; I lie fully out on the ground to soak it in. A ladybug crawls up my elbow.

“Okay trip?”

I nod.

“Hungry?”

For many things, I tell her. “But how are you? How are you feeling?”

“Like David Copperfield.” She laughs. Meets my eyes slyly, a little wizened fun sparking her own, teasing. “Ah. You didn’t know I read that stuff—right? Kay forced me to. You know, nineteenth century, et cetera.”

I read that one too long ago to remember, and say so.

No matter, she says, it’s one of those books you really don’t have to remember, in the end you just live it.

“Come on, Chick. There’s lunch around here somewhere.”

Boz! she calls, Boz! He ignores her, snorting through pine needles. Finally I make clucking sounds and his ears snap to alert, he gives his ugly pink dog grin and trots comfortably over.