Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

Y ou swim in a lane next to your daughters’ lane, where they are practicing reverse dolphin kicks on their backs. Waves from their undulations buoy you from side to side as you swim a slow free, your kick barely fluttering, your turnover rate high since you’re not pulling hard enough when you extend your arm below the surface of the water. You think it’s a good thing you’re not in the ocean, as the movements from the kids on the team would probably buoy you far away from the shore and out into the open sea where you’d… drown? Be lost forever? Swallowed? Saved by Japanese fishermen? You picture yourself lying on the deck of a trawler beside dolphins whose eyes are clouded over and whose skin is dull gray. Maybe the fishermen would give you salty broth made from soy and you would say arigato , and they would nod their heads up and down and smile, pleased you acknowledged them in their own tongue. Would you have the heart, then, to denounce them for the treatment of the dolphins?

This is you in the water swimming slowly, thinking of being saved by Japanese fishermen. Your stroke weak, your hair gray, coming out from under your cap in wisps, your hips on your backstroke sunk low. If you’d only tilt your head back more in the water, those hips of yours would rise up. Ah, there, you tilt your head back now. Good job, Annie, you think you hear the water say. You are not thinking of your brother now, how his wife, after he shot himself, found bits of his blood and skull on the dial for the volume control of the stereo system, and how she threw out all of his toothpaste and there were so many tubes. He must have stocked up one day, a day before he knew, of course, that he would choose to end his days. You are not thinking of Paul or the killer. This is you now laughing in the water, watching Alex being silly in the water as she swims beside you, coming up from underneath the lane line and crossing her eyes and blowing up her cheeks with air when she sees you. This is Alex being told by the coach to get back over into her lane and finish her set. Alex gives you one last funny look before she goes. This is you hearing the water again. You were wrong, you realize. It is not saying, Good job, Annie. It is saying, Do the job, Annie. Do the job, and you don’t know what it means.

We the parents agree not to interfere with the coaching of the swimmers and agree to let the coaches coach. We have to sign forms to that effect every year. We the swim parents, we think we are good swim parents. We the swim-team parents drive our children sometimes almost an hour just to get to practice, and we the swim-team parents hang out for two hours at practice while our children swim, then we drive almost an hour back. We the swim-team parents wake up at five a.m. some mornings to drive our children two hours away to a meet where they may only swim a few races, their actual time swimming in the water not totaling more than three minutes and thirty seconds. We the swim-team parents work at the swim meets, to help the team, for no pay. We the swim-team parents make sure our children are rested the night before, and that they have eaten pasta, because every good swim-team parent knows that pasta will carry them through the next day so they can drive home the finish and motor into the wall. We the swim-team parents buy our children the swimmer’s backpacks for exorbitant prices because they have mesh pockets to keep the wet swimsuits in for the car ride home, and we the swim-team parents buy the swimmer’s parkas with the swimmer’s name embroidered above the breast that the swimmers wear during swim meets to keep themselves warm in between races. We buy them the skintight racing suits that take two adults to get one child into. We the swim-team parents, some of us tell our children we saw how hard they tried when they raced but didn’t win or shave off time. Some of us tell our children to swim faster, to build up an oxygen debt. We want to see them panting for breath after a race, so tired they can’t pull themselves out of the water. Some of us, the swim-team parents, tell our children nothing and just let them sit on our laps after they’ve raced, even though they are too old for sitting on our laps and they are taller than we are, and we place a hand on their backs as they sit on us and the two of us just look at the people around us and the pool below, in constant motion with the movement of swimmers’ bodies. Some of us work at timing, holding stopwatches in our hands, or at admissions collecting fees for programs and heat sheets, or at the concession selling the ziplock baggies of brownies and paper plates of the gooey mac and cheese, or at the timing console making sure the touchpads are reset for the next race, or as officials faulting swimmers for single-hand touches or for wiggling before a dive off the blocks. Some of us don’t tell our children good job at the meet. We save our praise for later. We tell them in long car rides home when they’re tired and hungry and don’t want to hear it, and just want to read their books (all swim-team children are good readers in the car and rarely get carsick because they are so used to the long rides). We tell them how amazingly they swam and how proud we are and how we think all the hard work they’ve done all those evenings at practices in the pool have paid off, and we the swim-team parents can’t believe how much better we feel now that we’re out of that pool and that facility, and we the swim-team parents think that even the stale air of the car — we can smell where the wet dog has sat on the upholstery, and where there are bits of stale chips under the seats, and where there might even be a blackened, shriveled banana peel — is a much better smell than the smell of the hot, chlorinated pool deck we’ve been standing on for so long.

Your house, you think, is just a bigger version of your car. Inside there are also stale bits of food and the smell of the wet dog, and there are clothes scattered here and there, and wet towels no one bothered to hang up, and plastic containers that once held snacks for swim meets, such as fresh diced fruit (a swim-team parent doesn’t bring chips for their children to eat at a meet — each chip, a Frito, for example, acting like a small anchor inside the child’s belly). Some of the swim-team parents buy their children only organic milk, and some of the swim-team parents would like to buy only organic milk for their children, but like you, they have more than one child, and a husband like Thomas who drinks so much milk that buying organic milk would cost too much, and then where would the money come for the vacation you and your family took close to the equator, where Thomas held your arm as you walked on the beach and you saw the panther bounding toward the edge of the forest, and the ocelot crossing the road, and the puffer fish in two feet of water so blue it was the color of someone’s eyes you once dated, but never trusted, because with those eyes you couldn’t tell if he was sincere or not. What was his name again? you think. And then you don’t try to remember, it doesn’t matter. He has another life somewhere with some wife whose purse contents he knows forward and back, or doesn’t. Maybe he couldn’t recognize her purse even if it were stuck up under his nose and he were inhaling the leather smell, and would swear it wasn’t hers even when the contents revealed photos of him on their honeymoon.

T his is the water, still remembering the way Kim felt moving through it, how her body broke the surface with both her arms being brought forward over the water and pulling back at the same time displaced the water, how it’s not just the molecules and atoms of past forms that compose it, but the memory of how bodies once moved through it. The other girls, although they can’t name the sensation, can feel the water remembering, and it gives the girls a better sense of how the butterfly is to be swum. The simultaneous up and down movement of the legs and feet. Each turn at the wall on the breast. Each finish double-handed at the wall. This is the coach nodding her head while watching her team swim, noticing how they are better than they were before at the fly, how at least this is something to be grateful for since there has been such a pallor cast over the team since the shocking news of their star flyer’s death.