This is the Water (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

T
his is you at home at night after the meet hanging up towels, wet and smelling like chlorine, and this is you with Sofia and Alex, looking at the swim videos you took of them earlier in the day, your girls stopping the frames now and then to see exactly where they started to slow down or when they reached out to touch the wall. They joke and make remarks like, “I wasn't going to let the girl in the lane next to me win. I thought, This is my race, all mine!” they say. This is you later, looking at yourself in the mirror and hoping to see Chris in the reflection instead. Chris who has the breasts she can wear with no bra, and the rear all the swim-team dads stare at when they should be watching the race they're timing. You know you will never be like Chris. You look out the window at the moonlight on the trees and on the rock wall. It makes the rocks glow. It makes the trees appear as though their leaves are made of silver.

You think about you. How if you were to describe yourself to someone, you would empty out your purse on the table. You would not have to say anything. Your ChapStick that's never used will talk for you. Your receipts from another country close to the equator that for some reason you've left in there for almost a year will talk for you. Your picture of your friend from years ago will talk for you. The hairbrush with hair from not only your head, but also Sofia and Alex's heads, will talk for you. Then you sit on your unmade bed, the bed you never make except before you're ready to go to bed, and you wonder who that someone would be who would want to know about you in the first place. You cannot think of anyone who would want to get to know you that well ever again. You wonder if your husband, Thomas, knows what you have in your purse. If he even has any clue. When he comes into your room to brush his teeth in the bathroom you say, “Do you have any idea what's in my purse?” Thomas brushes his teeth for too long, you have always thought. He's going to abrade his gums and someday they will peel away from his teeth like a pink strip of stretched-out bubble gum that's already been chewed. He is brushing his teeth too long now, and of course not answering you because he is brushing his teeth. When he is finally finished he rinses his mouth and then takes a long time dabbing at it with a towel that is still wet and smells like chlorine from when the girls used it after their races during the swim meet. If I were Chris, the swim-team mom with the breasts and the rear, you think, I bet he would not wait so long to answer me. He would have talked through his brushing and his toothpaste foam to say in a mumble, “Yes, dear,” or “No, dear.” Apparently, though, Thomas never heard the question about your purse. “I've got a great idea how to make money,” Thomas says. “Do you want to hear it?” he asks. Thomas does not ever wait for you to answer his questions, and starts telling you his ideas anyway.

This great idea is not so great, you think. He wants to develop a water gun that horse owners can use on dogs so that dogs don't endanger them when they're on horseback on the rural roads where you live. You think, why not just a regular water gun, the kind your daughter Alex has that blasts hose-sized streams of water more than fifty feet? You don't tell Thomas, though, that his great idea is not so great. Instead you turn away from him in bed, facing the window where you can see the moon on the birch tree making its bark appear frozen white.

This is Thomas in bed lying next to you, patting your arm once before you fall asleep. Thomas has dispensed with the kissing. You think this happened two years ago when the work he does in his research lab started becoming more difficult, coincidentally around the same time your brother shot himself. There is too much worry for Thomas now, what with managing the other researchers and creating the antibodies that he sells. You think that where his lab is located adds to his stress. It's near the local commuter airport, and wouldn't the constant screech of tires hitting the tarmac and the smell of airplane fuel in the air run him down? This is you facing the wall, wondering if the kissing would make a difference. In the morning, would you love him any better because he kissed you on the lips? Would you love him any worse? This is you wishing hours later when he wakes up and makes his way to the toilet in the thick, cloudy darkness of night that he hadn't woken you up. This is the house whistling, the wind coming in through windows not all the way closed. This is you wondering if there is such a thing as wife energy, and if you had it whether maybe you would love Thomas more. Maybe Thomas would be kissing you at night instead of patting you on the arm. If you had wife energy, he would be complimented more often. You would tell him how smart he is. You would tell him you like the way his hair looks when it grows long. You would tell him he did a fine job with the mower, that the fields look like golf courses. You would tell him he is funny instead of listening to funny things he says and not laughing out loud, just laughing inside, because the outside laughter takes energy, and you have used the energy up already. You have used it when listening to your teenage daughter call you names. You have used up your energy trying not to get angry, trying not to care, so that she would eventually stop. You have used up the energy reaching behind you while driving and grabbing a book from your daughters that they were fighting over. You have used it up closing a window. Yes, just a window, you thought to yourself while doing it. The window was heavy and hard to pull down. You had to put your back into that window. What was the use of all that swimming you did at the facility while your daughters were practicing if you could not even close a window?

Outside the house the bats are catching moths and slamming into the windowpanes. There are many moths now that the weather is warmer. You saw one the last time you shot a wedding. You photographed a luna moth fluttering by the bride's face just as she said, “I do.” It was a photo you liked, the luna moth covering the bride's mouth with its lime-green body. But the bride did not like the photo and said it was a shame you hadn't taken one without the moth, as if you were the one who had called upon the moth to come fluttering by at that moment, as if you were the one who was trying to cover up the evidence of the words “I do” being spoken. You keep the photo anyway, in a drawer along with other photos you liked that the brides did not because they were not photos about their wedding day. Some are close-ups of flowers, a gardenia with a ladybug walking on its petals. Some are of the distorted, elephantine reflection of someone's legs in the steel gray side of a guest's car.

“It's great that the bats are back,” Thomas said a few days ago, and then you took your wool coat off its hook by the door and stored it on a shelf in a glass case, afraid the moths would find it. Even the glass case took your energy. You had to lift up on the handle while shutting it or it wouldn't close all the way, and while you were closing it, Thomas was talking to you, or rather he was reading to you from his magazine. He wanted you to know how smart it was that he tutored the girls all year round because according to his magazine, schools were dumbing down textbooks, and dumbing down tests, and dumbing down courses in public schools. These were things you somehow already knew about. It wasn't an article that was shedding any new light on what you already had learned as a parent of two children in the school system. “Stop already,” you said to him, “I know all this,” but Thomas did not listen and he kept reading, loudly, his deep voice seeming to resonate through your own chest because he was standing so close to you, wanting you to listen, and he was so loud that you could feel his voice inside yourself, behind your rib cage, like the rumble of a nasty chest cough.

And you wonder if, like Dinah's husband, he too is losing his hearing from his hunting rifle going off by his ear so many times. But really he didn't shoot that often. You know this because years ago, before you had children, the two of you would hunt together on your property. He would sit high on a ridge overlooking the slender stream in your valley, and you, lower down, would face the opposite way, toward acres and acres of woods thick with nettles and scrub pines and tangles of blackberry bushes. You would sit very still and the few times you saw a buck, you would not shoot. You did not want it to die. You did not want to have to drag it home after chasing it in the woods, after following drops of blood and the sound of it stumbling. You did not want to have to eat its lean meat. You would let the deer pass by, and a few hours later after you learned to feel the quiet, and you became part of the quiet yourself, then your husband would rise from where he sat and come down toward you, and the sounds of his hard-heeled boots crunching on the leaves and his stiff canvass coat bending back and breaking branches were so loud compared to the quiet you were just a part of that it seemed as if there were an entire herd of your husband crashing through the woods. “Did you see anything?” he would ask, trying to whisper, but even his whisper was loud. Cradling your rifles as you walked back to your house, and then emptying out the bullets on the front lawn before you entered, you would shake your head. “No, not unless you count a few squirrels and a few noisy birds,” you would say. Slowly, over the years, you stopped going hunting with him, and so he would tell your girls, “Just wait until you are old enough. I will take you hunting. You can take your mother's rifle.” But he himself was less fond of killing the deer than he was of just sitting quietly on the ridge, and so he would come home with just the smell of the leaves on him, bringing in the cold air when he opened the door.

CHAPTER FIVE

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his is a qualifier meet weeks later when the weather is warmer. Driving two hours south to the away meet, you pass trees on the sides of the highway that look faintly green, the buds on the ends of their branches brand-new. You think how in a week's time there will be leaves on the trees up by where you live too. No longer will people driving in cars on your road be able to turn their heads and look up at your house as it sits high on a hill, the copper roof like the buds on these trees, just starting to turn faint green with age. Once again, the trees will grow leaves and the bushes and the blond, tall grass will grow, and no one will be able to see you and your family walking through the rooms of your house: Thomas on the phone with the lab that he runs arguing with a staff member because for months now, almost a year, batches of bacteria he's been growing to target a gene are failing and he can't figure out if it's due to a virus, contaminated water, or a temperature problem, and it's driving Thomas crazy. You at the sink staring at your face in the mirror thinking if you were a bride you had to photograph, then you would have a hard time finding the right light to photograph yourself in—you would have to pull far back with the lens in order to capture the slightest hint of youth, of beauty, of any camera-worthiness at all. Those people in the cars below your hill on your road on a sunny summer's day with the leaves and the blossoms in full riot would not be able to see your girls bent over homework, or standing tall, practicing, holding small chins over the warmly colored wood of old violins.

This is the dead pool at the away meet, a huge affair built years ago and named after a man who has been dead for years in a town that looks like it's dead, located on a college campus that looks like it's dead, where the people shuffling into the store at the gas station to buy weak coffee look like they're near dead. The dead pool, the moment you enter it, is so hot you feel your blood evaporating and your tongue thickening, and you're already wanting a drink of water. The course is long, twice as long as the swimmers are used to. This is the national anthem. Who can hear it being played over a sound system so old?

You eat grapes. The grapes have already become warm because the facility is so warm. You talk to the other parents. “Aren't we lucky,” you tell each other. “We don't have to time today. The home team has enough timers.” But you don't feel lucky. You like to time. You like to be down on deck doing something. The children, the young ones, need to be asked their names. They need to be in the right order. You cannot have someone diving off the blocks who is not in the right order on the heat sheet. The swimmers are nervous and they are bored standing on line at the same time. They play with their goggles. They put them on and take them off so many times. On line, the girls give each other back massages or they spell letters with their fingers on each other's backs and make each other guess what word they are spelling. They play a game called ninja, which you don't understand even though your daughters have explained it to you. The girls all jump together and then end up with their hands in different poses as if they were karate-chopping the air. It reminds you of the game of statues you played as a girl, only these statues always end up in a fighting stance.

 

S
ince 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 CO
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, 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.