Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

T his is Dinah deciding to lose weight. She’s tired of seeing her daughter grow as large as she is even though her daughter swims a two-hour practice every day. Dinah decides she’ll set an example for her daughter. She learns of a new regimen to lose weight that requires human chorionic gonadotropin. She’s not sure what that is, but thinks it has something to do with babies, and every day she pours drops of this stuff on her yogurt and she lifts the spoon to her mouth thinking she’s eating failed pregnancies and intended abortions. The taste isn’t so bad, especially since she mixes maple syrup on top of the yogurt as well. She starts losing weight, but the down side to that is her husband is becoming more attracted to her, and because he is losing his hearing, he talks to her loudly in the night, pleading with Dinah for love, while Jessie, who shares a bedroom wall with them, can probably hear what he’s saying.

Dinah knits in the bleachers, the needles swishing together, as her daughter swims her practice. Dinah has, by accident, knit some of her hair into a pink-and-brown-striped scarf, but she leaves the hair in the scarf anyway, wishing she knew of a person who would want such a personalized gift from her. She can’t think of anyone right now, except her husband of course. Right now she wouldn’t want to give any gift to him. Dinah’s husband blames his going deaf on one day — the day he shot a buck and the rifle report in his ear was much louder than usual, because at the exact same time another hunter shot the same buck. It was never decided who made the kill shot, and Dinah’s husband didn’t take up the other hunter’s offer to split the buck, because he didn’t want to partake in the venison anyway. “I just want the antlers,” he told the other hunter, and so the rack of six points was given to him and it now hangs above his bed and Dinah tells him how the antlers drive her nuts because the board they are mounted on bangs against the wall, making a rattling sound every time her husband rolls over, and making her think the buck has come alive and is ready to trample her with its cloven hooves in her sleep. “I can’t hear the rattling sound,” Dinah’s husband tells her. “I’m going deaf, remember?” Then he walks away, knowing that if she answers him he will not hear her anyway. Dinah’s husband hates going deaf. He tells everyone that at least he won’t have to hear his daughter’s pop music and he won’t have to hear all the loud, obnoxious mothers who cheer for their children from the bleachers during a race, but then he also tells everyone that what’s terrible about going deaf is that not everything is tuned out, you still hear muffled sounds that make you think you’re going insane because you’re always trying to make sense of them, as if they’re everyone’s voices telling you secrets or telling you what to do, but you can’t understand them.

This is Dinah, who has put down her knitting and is now looking through her opera glasses at her daughter swimming, or not swimming, really, she thinks. Her daughter is a cheater, as she can see through the lenses smeared with what must be her own oils, from her hands and her face. Her daughter pulls on the lane line to drag herself through the water when she’s tired. Her daughter is not doing the entire set. Dinah can tell because she’s been counting, she’s even ticked off on a sheet of paper how many two-hundred IMs her daughter has done and she has only done seven and the coach told them to do eight. Dinah thinks she should go down there on deck and tell her daughter to knock it off, to finish the set like the rest of the girls or she’ll never get faster. She’ll threaten to take away her novels if she doesn’t. Dinah then realizes she doesn’t want to go down on deck. She doesn’t want to burst through the double glass doors and have everyone notice her, even though she has lost weight, a lot of weight. She’s still not sure she wants to be seen crouching by the end of the lane and admonishing her daughter while the other swimmers and the coach look at her. She doesn’t want the coach to see her and then later call her into her office and give her a talking-to, because she has been called into the office a few times before, for various actions that the coach said were over the top, not necessarily against the rules the way Annie would go against the rules, but they were not how a swim-team parent was expected to behave. Once Dinah ran through crowds on deck before a race to get to her daughter and scream at her to get up to the blocks because her heat was about to begin, and she pushed her daughter from behind to get her up on the blocks, and she was wrong. It was not her daughter’s heat. She has been called into the coach’s office for calling the director of an away swim meet and entering her daughter into a meet that her daughter’s team, as a whole, was not going to attend, and therefore her daughter wouldn’t have the coaches there representing her. She didn’t know it was against the rules. She just wanted her daughter to attend the meet because Jessie had a good chance of winning some of the events there. She has been called into the coach’s office for sending too many e-mails telling the coaches what events she thinks her daughter should be swimming, which is not against the rules, but, she was informed, was uncalled for and meddlesome. She has been called into the coach’s office after a swim meet at which she organized the concessions stand and then — when she felt there weren’t enough people helping her sell the gooey mac and cheese, the brownies in baggies, and the cold tasteless pasta salads — she sent a mass e-mail to all of the parents telling them that they weren’t pulling their fair share, that the proverbial scales had been tipped, and not in her favor, and that they had better volunteer more and harder next time or there would be no concessions stand. She wrote that it would be a devastating disappointment to their team as well as the other teams who came to the meet. Imagine, she said, arriving at a meet and having nothing to buy for your child. Imagine no Ring Pops, sodas, bagels, or oat granola bars to tide them over throughout the long grueling day. The e-mail was lengthy, at least a page. She did not check it first. She did not think the other parents deserved that much consideration. Let them be assaulted by bad grammar and typos, she thought while emphatically hitting the send key.

Of course, there are a few parents in particular she doesn’t care for. No, that’s wrong. There are a few parents she doesn’t like at all. There’s Annie, whose daughters often lead the practice lanes and are always ahead of her daughter. Annie, who doesn’t entirely play by the rules. Annie, who went off with Paul and hung out in his hotel room while their kids watched TV together in another room. And what was that remark she made to her about her bathing suit being very Marilyn Monroe? On the surface, you’d think Annie was being nice, but Dinah wasn’t fooled. Marilyn Monroe had killed herself. More likely Annie was hinting that the suit made Dinah look pale, and corpselike. She’s probably sleeping with Paul, Dinah thinks to herself. I should tell her husband she’s having an affair. People think it’s not their business to tell other people things like that, but it is. If you see blatant injustice like that staring you in the face, it’s your duty, your obligation to report it. She told her husband, Joseph, that she was going to tell Annie’s husband, Thomas, that his wife was having an affair. Joseph rarely becomes angry, but when she told him she planned to tell Thomas about Annie’s affair, he promised her that if she told him anything, he would tell Thomas not to pay any attention to her. He would tell Thomas, he said, that Dinah had finally come “undone, unhinged, in-fucking-sane.” In that moment, Dinah felt that she could honestly say that she didn’t love Joseph anymore, so she told him so and asked for a divorce in the same breath. She felt that telling the truth to those who least wanted to hear it was what she was probably best at. Even to herself, she was good at telling the truth. When she first got the idea to lose weight, she stood naked in front of the mirror. She made herself look at her reflection for a solid hour. She started with her feet, the flab on her ankles that hung over her ankle bones, that made her look like a doll made of nylon stockings and stuffed with pillow filling. She made her way up to her legs, which were riddled with varicose veins, and then to her waist, where the fat hung over her hips, and then up to her neck, with its three rolls. She held up her fingers to the mirror, and they were so swollen it looked as if her wedding ring would never come off. And it didn’t with just her pulling on it, so then she went to the kitchen sink and squirted dish soap onto it and ran warm water over it, but even then the ring would not twist off. She would need a jeweler’s saw for that task, or better yet she would need to lose weight. So she did. It was when she reached the twenty-five-pound goal after seven weeks that the ring fell off by itself while she was washing her hands in the restroom at the facility. She could hear it clink its way down the spiraling pipe for the first few seconds, and then she could hear nothing but the water running and the distant sound of children playing in the current of the lazy river and the coach on the main pool deck yelling, encouraging her swimmers in practice to “Pick it up, pick it up,” and quicken their pace.