Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is you the next day thinking you’d like to think that it was the hot summer lightning you just drove through on the way to practice that’s giving you the urge to reach out and help Chris, but odds are it isn’t. It’s not like the lightning struck you or the car. The only things hitting your car were the giant marble-sized balls of hail. The lightning was only close enough to make you and your daughters’ fingers feel tingly at their ends for a while. When you arrive at the practice, your fingers still a bit tingly, and your shoes wet, you realize you should help Chris. Your realization comes in the form of some kind of energy. Maybe it’s a form of “friend energy.” Your mind telling you that what is more important than your obsession with Paul is your new friendship with Chris. After all, she’s in the same boat you are right now — a sinking one with a husband who’s half there — and she can probably understand what you’re going through. You’ve been feeling horribly guilty when you see Chris at the facility. You feel so guilty you haven’t even talked to her the last few practices. You’ve collected your girls in the lobby and run out the door, hoping you wouldn’t even see her in the parking lot. Today you will change. You will get Chris involved in her daughter’s swim life. It will get her mind off her delusion that her husband is cheating on her. Over and over again you have seen mothers and fathers who can rattle off the times of their daughters and sons, and know exactly what they need to break in order to move up the ladder, and enter age groups, zones, sectionals, and even nationals. Those parents, like Dinah, even know the times of other people’s kids. Those parents go to every single meet and outfit their vans with mattresses and in pitch-black predawn carry their sleeping children out to the car bundled in blankets so that they won’t have to lose any sleep and have their fitness compromised when they swim their races. Those parents don’t have time to fight or quarrel or accuse each other. Those parents, maybe those parents are really smart, you think, and then you think for a moment that maybe you should be one of those parents too, but then you dismiss that thought quickly, knowing that you can barely remember your locker combination, or your age, or the birthdates of your children, so how could you possibly remember both your daughters’ times and the times they need to beat? How could you possibly lift your children out of bed and put them in the car while they’re sleeping? You aren’t strong enough, and your oldest girl is already taller than you are. Christ, she’s menstruating already, and you know that Thomas won’t get up in the morning to help carry them, he would laugh at the idea of you being so serious about swimming. “To what end?” he would say. And both of you have agreed that the worst thing you can imagine is having to go to college for swimming, having to maintain a scholarship and good grades and swim every morning when you could be staying up late working with a group of friends in the library, having sex, or going to keg parties. You picture Thomas laughing, throwing his head back while he laughs at you for turning into an über swim mom, which is what every swim mom has the potential to become the longer her children are on the team, and the closer her children are to reaching an age when they could get into college with a swim scholarship.

The place to start is with the swimsuit, of course. That is what Cleo wants, a racing suit. The racing suit means that she is serious. She is hungry to win. On your computer at practice, you show Chris all the racing suits to choose from. Some are low drag and some change flow conditions along the swimmer’s body. Some have fabric splices that allow for greater flexibility, some are neck to knee, some are johns, some are tanks, some are thin straps, some are wide, some are scoop backs, cross backs, V-2 backs, wing backs, super backs, fly backs, spider backs, diamond backs, butterfly backs, extreme backs, and max backs. Some have maximum compression aiding in blood flow and improving stability, some have minimal permeability, some have undergone a technical heating process to produce an ultra-smooth, lightweight surface, some have flatlock stitching, some are hydrophobic, some are coated with Teflon, some… “What?” Chris says. “Teflon?” and then she groans and tells you how a few years ago she threw out all her old Teflon-coated pans because she could see the coating was scraping off each time she used the spatula to turn food in the pan, and she realized the coating was ending up in their mouths. “Now you’re asking me to have my daughter race in Teflon?” Chris asks.

“I know, who would think anything associated with heavy metal pans could make your daughter swim faster, but it does,” you say.

“And what’s this about hydrophobic suits?” Chris asks. “Isn’t hydrophobia associated with rabies?” You tell her you don’t think it’s the same thing. Hydrophobia in this case is what you want. It repels the water, lessening the resistance. In the end, Chris finds a john she likes for Cleo and they order it for overnight shipping. There’s another swim meet in a week, and it is important for Cleo to wear the suit during practice to see how it feels, so there won’t be any surprises when she has to wear it all day.

You wish, for a moment, you were swimming instead of technical suit shopping with Chris. You watched a video at home on how to perfect the fly, and you want to practice bringing your hands up earlier in the recovery. You have always dragged your hands far behind yourself, as if waiting for someone to grab on to them and keep you from completing your stroke. Who? Maybe someone who could convince you that all the swimming you are doing is pointless, that maybe you should be trying to get your daughters to pay more attention to improving their own swimming since they are the ones with potential and not you, or maybe you should be at home instead or out in the world trying to make a difference. A difference to what, you don’t know. You aren’t one to volunteer in your town or work at the food shelf or be a driver for the meals-on-wheels program. You prefer to stay at home when you can. When it is a warm day and the clouds are far away from each other, you go outside and lie on a blanket and feel the sun on your face. You aren’t thinking about making a difference in the world when you’re lying on a blanket under the sun. You are mostly thinking about the kind of bug that is trying to land on your face. Is it a deerfly? A mosquito? A stray hair from your own head mimicking a bug as it blows in the breeze? And what about that bird blocking your sun for a moment? Is it a raven? A crow? And what is the difference?

S ome swimmers don’t shower at all after practice. They dry off and get dressed right away. Later, at home, they shower. Some swimmers spend forever in the shower, wearing their swimsuits the entire time. None of the swimmers stand naked under the shower. You don’t understand how they can spend hours in bathing suits in front of crowds of people at swim meets wearing suits so tight the outlines of their pubic bones and the clefts of their vaginas can be seen, but then in the shower be so modest amongst each other and never reveal themselves. Even the little ones, from an early age, learn how to put their bathing suits on without taking off their shirts first. Your Sofia is one of them. You are convinced no one has ever seen Sofia’s breasts, except Sofia herself. You have never seen them either. In the locker room, after she’s showered still wearing her suit, she lowers the straps of her bathing suit down just to her shoulders and then pulls her shirt over her head. That way she can remove her suit from under the shirt. When she comes out of the locker room her shirtfront is wet from having touched the wet suit, and her posture is poor. She looks as if she is doubling herself over. You’re not sure why she does this. Maybe it’s to hide the fact that her shirtfront is wet and that she has breasts large enough now, they’re noticeable beneath the cotton cloth of the tee shirt she wears. You hope she is not caving in on herself, trying to curl up in two to protect all of the feeling parts of her. This is you hoping she doesn’t end up like your brother someday, someone who never felt good about himself, someone who would try to fold himself in two if someone he loved stopped loving him in return. This is you telling Sofia to keep her back straight, but this is Sofia shooting you a look that could freeze water. This is you thinking what you should have done instead was asked how practice was, or told her how good she looks in that sky-blue-colored tee shirt she is wearing. What if, you think, your father, instead of yelling at your brother to do a chore, had told him how well he played the trumpet, how like the rest of us he enjoyed the sound of the notes that landed so pleasantly on our ears with a ring of authority and a tone of respect at the same time. Would your brother have been different as an adult then? Not that your father ever paid you compliments yourself, but your mother did, and that’s all you needed maybe to face growing up. That’s all any girl ever needed, maybe, a mother telling her how beautiful she was.