Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

We ate each other we ate pickled herring we ate gruyere cheese. We ate the animal out of each other’s bodies we ate steak we ate chocolate two women my chocolate. We drank each other we drank all the beer we drank all the wine we peed outside. We got high on skin and cum and sweat we got high on pot. We came in waves we ran out and into the waves.

I wanted to stay like that forever — outside of any “relationship” I had ever had and inside the wet of an unnamed sexuality. The moon a grand spectator. As full of alive as the ocean outside the door. All the night it was difficult to tell whose body was whose. The woman of it drowned me. It nearly cleaved my mind. And again. Again. Waves.

I don’t know why women can’t make the story do what they want.

I don’t.

When we got back to our ordinary lives, Claire told me she was in love with me. A sentiment I couldn’t find in myself to return, hard as I tried. I wish I could go back and try. It was real, what she offered. But kindness wasn’t something I even recognized.

WITH HANNAH, IT TOOK ME WEEKS TO FIGURE OUT IF she was attracted to me or just really pissed off — her jokes always seemed a little mean, always left me feeling like a female headed slow-poke. Sometimes she’d charley horse me good ones in the arm or thigh hard enough to leave a lump. It didn’t weird me out. Unlike everything else, I could feel it.

Once she bit my cheek so hard I sat in my classes the next week looking like I’d been mauled by a chimp. When she bit my cheek? I laughed so hard I cried.

I never thought Hannah was hurting me when she’d do things like shove me up against a wall for fun hard enough to ache my shoulderblades. I felt like I had pain in me that needed to come out. More and more I wished for the force of her. She’d drink my vodka from the bottle and we’d go for long walks at night in the graveyard next to the college and fuck on the stones of dead folks. After she’d flip silver dollars in the air and we’d lay on our backs and watch bats dive at them. I’d talk about dead things. She’d let me.

A few months in to our whatever it was she walked up to me and whispered, I signed us up for kayaking.

?

The U of O pool is where I first made Jr. Nationals as a teen. The pool had not changed — a slimy chlorine hell with Disney ducks painted on the walls. We were two of three women in the class. The third, big red, was 6’ 2” with a mane of red hair all the way to her ass. I had a hard time not touching her hair. In our giant fiberglass kayaks we learned kayaky things from our instructor, Jeff. In our cockpits. Things like the life-saving Eskimo roll. Hoping to master an ender. A pry stroke. A put in. A wet exit. Hannah learned fast because she was a tomboy woman, and I learned fast because anything in the water felt like home.

Our last class in the pool our instructor put each of us one at a time on the end of the diving board, kayak noses pointing forward, and then he grabbed the back end and heaved so we went in nose first and hard. The idea being that you’d immediately be upside down underwater and have to practice your Eskimo roll. I loved it. Not the life saving part. I loved being pitched over the edge and being upside down underwater. I asked Jeff to do it again and again. Harder, I’d say, and Jeff would shove me off the board. I’d stay under for as long as I could — sometimes until I heard Hannah or Jeff yelling my name.

At the end of the five weeks our instructor took us all to the McKenzie River for our “final.” Little bit of speed in the alley, little bit of white water for excitement. I decided that day it would be a really good idea to get incredibly high just before I met up with Hannah at the river’s edge.

On the forest trail to the put in I remember Hannah being annoyed with me, because it took me too long to put my life jacket on and too long to secure my paddle into my kayak and too long to pick my kayak up and trudge down the forest trail to the put in as I stopped and turned to look at things and got the kayak tip caught in bushes and wow look at my own magnificent red converse sneakers a step at a time in front of me making a rhythm and cottonwood blowing around like summer snow and look at the intriguing hats in the branches no wait those are BIRDS and stopping and laughing until she came back for me going WHAT ARE YOU DOING, EXACTLY? My kayak in the dirt.

Eye to eye, she saw it. Christ Lidia, you are high. What the fuck? You have to go in the water. To my huhuhuhuhuhuh.

So she slapped me hot and hard right on the cheek.

Time stopped. I’m pretty sure my pupils pinned. I saw stars. I liked it. For a split second I felt alive. I wanted her to do it again. Harder. But I didn’t say anything.

Hannah turned and picked up her kayak and left the trail in the trees, making for the rocks near the river’s edge. We could see the rest of our class up ahead — some on the rocks, some in the water. Still stunned into focus, at the point where the rocks met the water I saw a dead steelhead, half in water, half out. Even dead, she was something. The silver and black and blue sheen of her body, the white of her underbelly. She smelled like ocean. “She” because of her split open belly, and the dried up jelly of sunburned eggs on the rocks. I had a hard time not looking.

LIDIA. Hannah calling.

No one seemed to notice we were a little late, they just dipped in and paddled around like spinning ducks in a big pool of slow water, their shiny bright colored helmets looking like Easter eggs to me. Big red’s hair briefly mesmerized me, as usual, and I reached my hand out to touch it, but Hannah pinched my arm where fat grows and I got clear again. In we went, Hannah ahead of me, me getting a little too interested in the black lines on the ends of my paddle. Huhuhuhuhuhuh. I had my bright blue tard helmet on backwards but no one noticed.

My feet and legs stretching out the front of the kayak seemed easy to forget existed. The slow water curled long left then slow right, around giant boulders that I knew had steelhead in the eddies. The tree leaves hanging over the water quivered. It smelled like river — dirt and fish and wet and algae. I put my instructional paddle across the skirt over my lap and let my hands trail in the cold dark wet. I closed my eyes. I leaned my head back, up toward the sun, the skin on my face hot, my hands in the water cold. I thought I might be touching bliss. A surface I’d not felt in years. Then I heard my name too loudly and looked up to see Hannah looking back at me: LIDIA. PAY ATTENTION. Too late, Hannah. Too late.

When we hit the whitewater, instead of the lane we were supposed to navigate, I went down the one that was out of our league. Look at all the pretty white. Like lace. I smiled. I didn’t make one paddle stroke how I’d been taught. Instead, I lifted my paddle into the air and laughed, and I heard Jeff’s voice going LIDIA and Hannah’s voice going LIDIA but I was laughing, so the power current took me into a spin and I traveled backwards for a bit and then down and sideways and then right over, my shiny blue helmeted head going down and down. I didn’t have to think about taking an enormous gulp of air first. It’s in my DNA.

Upside down underneath the water holding my breath things became oddly calm. You’d think you wouldn’t be able to see shit, but the water is icy and green colored clear up where we were on the McKenzie. And the underwater blur isn’t as pronounced as you might think. But it does make your eyes feel like ice cubes.

The boulders bigger than bodies rose up dark black jade and shimmered with the sun moving through layers of deep water. I could see the bottom of the river. Rocks, sand and plant life moving and moving by. More than one steelhead shaped itself, their dark shadow selves doing that thing where they water — hover in the current moving only their tails. The cold water made my temples pound. My heart beat me up in my chest and eardrums the way it does when you are running out of air. My lungs burned. My hands went numb. I closed my eyes.