Orson Card: Waterbaby

The hardest thing for writers to do is take ourselves out of our own culture and put ourselves into another. Li-fi writers don't have to do that—in fact, they consider it their job, in part, to document their own culture in their fiction. But we sci-fi writers, by definition, move into alien worlds and alternate realities.

At best we only partly succeed. Anyone who has read even the best sci-fi of the fifties, sixties, or seventies can easily see how, without realizing it, in the midst of inventive and strange fiction, the cultural biases of the writer's own time still reveal themselves.

Well, if I thought getting into an alien culture was hard, it was child's play compared to shifting into an existing, contemporary culture that I'm not part of! For the past couple of years, I've been preparing myself to write a novel set in a contemporary middle class African-American community. Now, I know what happens whenever non-Mormons try to write about Mormon culture – they never, never get it right. And in writing stories within the African-American community, my biggest hurdle was to get rid of the images and stereotypes of African-Americans that contemporary American culture bombards us with.

Let's face it. I've watched too much TV, which gives us either Cliff Huxtable or a gang-banger, pimp, or drug lord. What our culture keeps stressing, these days, is how different European-Americans are from

African-Americans. But in my reading and conversations, what I've gradually learned is that the "American" part of those hyphenates is at least as strong as the "European" and "African" parts. And the unmentioned "human" part is far stronger than either.

So ... here is the first story to emerge from these years of work. The family in this story is African-American. But the story is not purporting to be "about" their Africanness, or even their Americanness. The story is about them as human beings, struggling to deal with the impossible, ready to pay the price of a miracle.

--Orson Scott Card

http://www.hatrack.com

http://www.frescopix.com

First off you got to know about Tamika, how it was with her and water. First time she got into a pool, she was only two, we had those tube things around her arms to hold her up and me and Sondra, we were both there in the water, she was our baby and no way she was going to be out of our sight for a second, so we were both there kind of holding her up and making sure those air things really kept her from sinking. So Sondra was kind of holding her on one side and me on the other and Tamika just laughed and shrieked and we could feel how she was kicking and wiggling her arms and it sort of came to me how maybe by holding onto her I was holding her back, and so I let go, figuring Sondra had her on the other side anyway, so she'd be safe. Only later on Sondra tells me she had the same thought at the same moment and she let go and right away, Tamika starts moving forward through the water, kicking her legs, pulling with her arms, smiling and keeping her head above water and there was no mistake about it, she was swimming. By the end of that day we had those tubes off her arms and never looked back. She was born for the water, she was born to swim.

It's been like that ever since. We just couldn't keep her away from swimming pools. We called her our waterbaby, she'd catch sight of a pool and one way or another, in five seconds she'd be in the water. We took to dressing her all summer in a swimsuit instead of underwear cause if we didn't, she'd go in fully dressed or stark naked, but she was going in, right now. Anybody with a pool, they were Tamika's best friends whether Sondra and me liked them or not. At three years old she'd head on out the front door to go over to a house with a pool. We had to put locks high up on the door to keep her in. Sometimes it was scary, she loved the water so much, but we were proud, too, because that girl could swim, your honor. You had to see her. She'd go underwater quick as a fish, move like a blur, pop up so far from where she went under you'd be sure there had to be a second kid, nobody could move that fast. When she dove off the board — she was never afraid of heights as long as there was water under her — she was like a bird, but even so, when she slipped into the water it's like there wasn't even a splash, the water opened up to take her in. I can hardly think of her except soaking wet, drops glistening on her brown skin like jewels in the sunlight, smiling all the time, she was so beautiful, she was so happy.

Tamika said it all the time. "Oh, Daddy, oh Mama, I wish I didn't ever have to come out of the water. I wish I was a fish and I could live in the water." And Sondra would always say, "You're no fish, Tamika, you're just our own little waterbaby, we found you in a rain puddle and fished you out and took you home and dried you off and your Daddy wanted to name you Tunafish but I said, No, she's Tamika." Said that all the time when Tamika was three and four. By the time Tamika was six, she'd say, "Oh, Mama, not that again," but she still loved to hear it.

Sondra and me, our dream was to make enough money to get a house with a pool so she didn't always have to go somewhere else to swim. But you know how it is, that wasn't going to happen. We used to joke that the closest thing to a swimming pool we'd ever have was the waterbed me and Sondra slept on. My parents thought we were crazy when we bought that bed. "Black people don't sleep on waterbeds," my daddy told me. "Black people have more sense with their dollars." I wish to Jesus I'd listened to my daddy.

It was a hot summer night, you know how it gets here in LA late in August, you got the ceiling fan going full blast and no covers on top of you but you still got sweat dripping all along your body like rain and your pajamas are soaked and you toss and turn all night and you're half the time dreaming and half the time thinking about work and problems and worries and you can't even tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And so that's why I thought it was a dream at first. I was there on the waterbed only something was moving under me. The bed was rocking a little and I thought that meant Sondra had gotten up or just lain back down or something, only it kept rocking and I could hear her breathing and she was asleep, and then I felt something bump into me. From below.

Like a fish in the water, a big fish, it bumped me hard. I was awake right away, only I wasn't sure I was awake, you know? How you're thinking that you're dreaming that you're awake, only maybe you are awake, only you know that it's still part of the dream? I felt something start pummeling me from below. Like fists punching straight up at me, pounding on my back from inside the waterbed. Hard enough to almost hurt. Little fists. And I got this picture in my mind of a mermaid trapped inside the waterbed, pounding on me to get me to get off and that's when I woke up, or anyway that's when I rolled over and got off the bed, and I was thinking, This dream's too much for me. I got up and went to the bathroom and took a piss and got a drink and I was kind of shaking from the dream, it was so real, and then I thought, I gotta look in on the kids, and I knew it was dumb but whenever I felt afraid from a dream or a noise in the night, even if I knew it was nothing, I still had to look at the kids and make sure they were all right.

The boys were fine, the four-year-old, the two-year-old, breathing steady and soft in their beds. And from the door of Tamika's room she looked fine, too, in a jumble of covers, only then I thought, how can she stand to have so much blanket on her in this heat? So I went over to see if she was maybe sweating too much and I ought to pull off the covers and she wasn't there. Just her pillow and the covers all wadded up where she must have kicked them in the night and a damp area on the sheets where she'd been sweating and dreaming just like the rest of us.