Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Now the dancing hippos are talking about food, which they always do after their aerobics class. They trade recipes back and forth that do sound good. Swedish meatballs and Brie cheese baked in puff pastry. This is not the talk of the swim-team parents. We, the swim-team parents, talk of roasted edamame beans for quick protein. We compare organic chocolate milk brands that come in convenient containers. We cook fava beans. We make quinoa pilaf. We flavor with sea salt. We bake with flax. We fry in cast iron. We create salads with fiddleheads found on our land or in our neighbor’s fields. We berry-pick at local farms. We meet the steer we’ll consume throughout the year. We raise our own hens. We raise our own turkey. We make our own ice cream. We know the horrors of the levels of the saturated fats in the nearby chain’s doughnuts. We extol the local Japanese sushi joint. We do not talk of the bag of peanut M&M’s we buy to get us through the long day of working at a swim meet. We will not talk of the Diet Coke we drink, perfectly timed to be drunk after our coffee and before the lunch hour, but never in front of our children, lest they see how we drink soda, and we never let them drink it themselves unless it’s soda water flavored with natural juice high in some kind of element or vitamin they wouldn’t normally get in their daily diet and packaged in a can whose design wipes out any image of an industrial facility spewing smoke, spinning the dials of the electric meter, and hiring immigrants at low wages. Instead the can design screams healthy, whole, natural, good for you, flowers, fruit orchards, and sunshine. As if the cans themselves were just plucked from trees.

You wish the dancing hippos would talk more of food. You’d like to ask them the perfect recipe for a piecrust. You have been trying to perfect your own. One recipe you know calls for vodka instead of water (vodka doesn’t evaporate during baking). One recipe asks for lard, not butter. One recipe asks specifically for vegetable shortening to ensure flakiness. One recipe says keep the butter cold with ice before you use it. One recipe asks for baking soda. One recipe asks for ground almond bits. Which recipe do you choose? you want to know, but don’t know how to interrupt. Do you just barge in on the conversation, smiling, asking if they could share their favorite piecrust technique? Do you not interrupt, because you feel guilty that when you saw them in the pool, in the end lane, smelling up the water with their hair spray, you wished them, and their ludicrous weight belts for jogging and their foam noodles wedged between their legs for floating, out of the pool and back where they came from.

Now the dancing hippos are singing. It is from a musical. It is from My Fair Lady. “With a Little Bit of Luck” is the song. It is from when Eliza Doolittle’s father danced through the streets, weaving in and out of bars, singing that all he needed was a little bit of bloomin’ luck. You dress so quickly to get away from them that you don’t even bother to brush your hair in front of the mirror. You brush it while running out of the locker room door. You are fighting a knot in your hair so snarled it seems to have claws and be fighting back, when you see Paul waiting in the foyer. The minute you see him you want to do an about-face and go back into the locker room and finish brushing your unruly hair. You want to apply eyeliner and lipstick to spruce yourself up. You’d even use a coral-color lipstick like the dancing hippos use, anything to avoid having him see you the way you look now. Your graying hair bushy around your temples and your eyes with rings around them from the impressions your goggles left on them. You don’t turn around, though, and he waves to you and smiles and walks toward you. You can’t help but smile back. Maybe your hair doesn’t look that bad after all. He puts his hand on your arm when you get close enough. “Hey,” you say. You begin to blush. You can feel your face turning hot, even though your hair’s still wet from your shower and the rest of you feels refreshed. “What are you doing here? I thought Chris dropped Cleo off today.”

“She did. She left early, though, and asked me to swing by and pick Cleo up after work. It’s on my way.” Just then, the troopers walk out of the facility, their radios crackling against their hips and their shoes squeaking loudly on the polished floor.

“Did you hear about the girl on the team?” you ask Paul while watching the troopers as they leave. The old trooper, the one with the nose that makes him look like a prizefighter, gives one last look at the people working at the front desk before he leaves the facility, as if wanting to memorize their faces.

“I did,” Paul says. “It’s incredible. The same rest stop, and everything.”

“Do you think it’s the same man?” you ask.

“I don’t know what to think. The car’s got to be different, though. That was a long time ago.”

“What do you mean, the car’s got to be different? Did you see a car that night?”

“Yes, didn’t I tell you? It was a red Corvair. It would be a classic by now. It was probably a classic then.”

“But you said you didn’t have any information to give the police. You said you wouldn’t be able to help them in any way,” you say, suddenly feeling very tired, almost sick from feeling so tired, and thinking maybe it has been a while since you have eaten, but the last thing you want now is to eat. The facility smells like onion bagels being toasted at the snack stand, but toasted too long, almost burning. You wish you could go outside, but you have to wait for your daughters to come out of the locker room.

“Paul, a car? Really? You saw a car all those years ago?” you say, almost with a pleading tone in your voice, wanting him to tell you the truth, to clear things up. You are confused. If only you were back on vacation at the equator, on that long stretch of beach where at night the stars were so bright that when you breathed in they seemed to clear everything up for you. The coach of the team then comes out of the pool area. She has a duffel bag over her shoulder and a light jacket on. She is obviously done for the night and going home. She doesn’t say good night or anything to Paul or you as she walks out. She walks with her head down and her lips pursed.

Paul speaks quietly. “I think we should talk about this some other time. Not here.”

You are waiting for him to suggest another time and place. What if he asks you what you are doing later on? Sleeping, I’ll be sleeping, you think, and for a flash of a moment you think of your bed with the flowered cotton sheets that look like wild flowers and vines and you wish you were in it right at that moment, on the verge of the sweetness of sleep. You are not in the least bit free later on. You have to go home and make your family dinner. You have to do dishes and put clothes in the dryer and a new load in the washer. You have to choose photos to send your client from your last photo shoot. You see the hours spanning in front of you. You have to read about what’s going to happen to Anna Karenina. Of course you know the ending, everyone knows the tragic ending, but maybe somewhere along the way, in all of that text, you’ll find there’s a way she could have avoided her death — a place where she could have changed herself. You sometimes feel that reading books is the only way you can think, as if the reading occupied one part of your brain and this allowed the other part to go free and become more active. You need that time to read in order to think. That’s all there is to it. Paul never suggests when and where another time would be. “All right, some other time,” you say. And then your eye begins to twitch. It sometimes does this when you are tired, or when your goggles have pressed on the side of your eyelid for too long. You turn away so Paul won’t see it and think you are spastic or have neural problems. Luckily, Cleo comes out of the locker room. She is showered and dressed, her swim bag slung over her shoulder. Paul smiles at you. “Have a good night, then,” he says, and touches your arm before he looks at Cleo and asks her if she is ready to leave.