Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

“I was an architect? No. No, I don’t think so. Was I?”

Or I’d say, do you remember the time when … and I’d try to choose something happy. Like the time he took my mother and me to Trinidad, where his greatest architectural achievement had happened. Steel drum music. A tortoise we saw lay eggs on the white sand beaches. Or living at Stinson Beach. Fruit trees in our yard. The ocean on the breeze. Or my sister singing in The Singing Angels Choir. Or classical music. Or baseball. To all of these he’d smile, sometimes he’d laugh, shake his head yes, maybe a glimpse of something. Mostly he’d stay quiet and look out the window of the car. Once he looked over at me driving and said, “Marilou?” His sister’s name.

“No Daddy,” I’d say, “I’m Lidia.”

“I know that,” he’d say, and laugh.

Among the meager boxes of things he’d brought with him — old photographs and miscellaneous “papers” and a drawing pad and a very fine assortment of pencils and pens — was my first published book. I found it in his room one day. I picked it up and said, “Huh. What are you doing with this thing?” The cover was worn.

“Oh, I’ve read that book many times.”

“Really. Do you know who wrote it?”

“You,” he said, looking up at me with transparent blue eyes, twinning mine.

“Yeah, daddy. Me. Have you read all the stories?”

“I think so. I can’t remember.”

“That’s OK. It doesn’t matter.”

“There’s one about swimming.”

I looked at him hard. Sometimes — I couldn’t help it — I wondered if the other guy was in there somewhere. Some people will know what I mean. There were moments when he looked more knowing than he should. In those moments I almost … I almost wanted him back. My father was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. My father was an artist. My father loved art, and nature, and the life of the mind. He gave me those things.

He was talking about the story “The Chronology of Water” I’d written. In it, there is a father who abuses his children and then loses his memory. A father whose daughter pulls him out of the sea. A swimmer’s story.

“I like it. It’s a very good story.”

“Thank you,” I said, knowing not to say more.

“Not very flattering of me though.”

I smiled and looked down and crossed my arms over my chest. “Fair enough. You know, I won a prize for that story. I got to go to New York.”

“Isn’t that something,” he said, and whistled, and looked out at the trees.

That’s the only thing we ever said to each other about anything that had happened.

A father. A daughter.

Recollected.

I have an image of him from that time. He appears in a film short Andy made based on the same short story. My father agreed to let us film him for it. In the segment in which he appears, the film is black and white. You cannot tell from looking at him that he has lost his wits or memory. You cannot tell from looking at the square jaw and broad shoulders and intense stare that he abused his wife and daughters. You cannot tell he was an award winning architect, and before that, he had the tender hands of an artist. You cannot tell he is anything but a man who looks intense on film.

I’m in the film too. In the segment in which I appear, the film is black and white. I am walking out into the ocean of the Oregon Coast. In November. I walk in waist high, and then I dive into the oncoming waves, and I swim. How I swim.

My father died less than two years after my mother. His ashes were in a plastic bag about the size of a loaf of wonder bread. The ashes were white. I went to the funeral home to get them, but that’s not all I got. I had asked for his pacemaker and defibrillator. The two mechanical things attached to his heart that had kept him alive after he drowned. How strange they looked, without a body. Eventually Andy helped me smash them on the garage floor with a mallet.

I drove my father’s ashes up to Seattle pretty immediately because I didn’t want them. I didn’t want them in my house, or my garden, or any waterway near me or my son.

My sister and I dumped them in the river next to her husband’s boathouse office under a bridge. That Seattle bridge in Freemont that has the cement troll underneath it at one end. We just parked the car, got the ash, opened the bag and dumped it at the edge of the river, where it mixed with river refuse and bird shit and the oil of passing boats. The white ash got on both our hands, and at one point, my sister sneezed. Without thinking, my sister reached up to rub her nose and mouth. White ash was on her face. Possibly in her mouth. We stared at each other. Then her eyes got big and she said “GET IT OFF!” So I splashed her whole head with crappy river water until she sputtered and laughed.

We laughed so hard walking back to the car we couldn’t breathe.

We laughed so hard our sides ached.

We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins.

MORNING. I’M SITTING IN MY CAR WAITING FOR THEM to unlock the doors of the swimming pool nearest to my home. I can feel the years of training like a DNA river running through me. All those years of 5:30 a.m. Then I see my mother, sitting in a car just like I am, her long gray winter coat with the faux raccoon fur collar, smelling a little like last night’s vodka and dayold Estée Lauder. How she waited for me every morning when I was too young to drive a car. How she sat there quietly, the engine purring alongside her middle-aged misery of a life. What did she think about sitting there in the dark? Who was she besides the mother of a swimmer and the wife of a jerk?

In Port Arthur, Texas, where my mother is from, the trees rise only a little off of the ground. The sky is the main thing, resting heavy and blue and hot on miles and miles of dirt. Heat singing like a fever in you. Making you forget water and that breathable blue past. Making you think the southern song was meant for you, the twang thick like syrup up your spine, cradling you like lemon drops in that hot dry always. The front porch. The cool of tile in the basement. Panties in the freezer. A breeze at night like prayer. And the land is filled with the up and down black steel heads of oil rigs hemming their way across dirt.

Where I was born the trees bear fruit and the ocean hugs the shore, making you believe in things like sea serpents and mermaids and Disneyland. When I was five, California had a smell. Orange trees, their waxen leaves like crowns studded by fruit. Marin County. Stinson beach. Warmth whispered around my skin, I could breath it into me, I was tanned like children get. My hair white against the whole sky. My eyes blue as lapis. In our front yard, orange trees, plum trees, and apple trees. The front of the house keeping its secrets, the hands of a child rubbing bark, or grass, or dirt; child’s games. But the back of the house gave way to ocean and the edge of things — a girl’s thoughts rose and fell as tides, drifted like the smell of orange blossoms through the windows and doors, out, across, beyond vision, beyond daughter. The house is of a man’s hands, and I was not a swimmer yet.

Maybe there’s another reason I went to Texas beside escaping to college. Maybe I was looking for something — something of her. Where in that dirt is she from? Is it from a damp place miles down, a place where dead things have composted? The wet at the back of the neck, a woman’s hand wiping sweat away, her eyes closed? Or is she in the heat itself, the dry whisper of wind pushing everything out and away … a woman’s imagination burning a hole in her skull to get out? Did she nearly die waiting? Wanting? Is she in the sound of a southern drawl out the mouth of a woman, its dips and ahs making words go strange, beautiful?