Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

This is Dinah, seeing how your daughter Sofia out-touched her daughter Jessie in the one-hundred free, even though Jessie used her streamlines and turns. This is Dinah coming up to you while you’re about to go down the stairs to the foyer saying that she did not see your Sofia using her streamlines and turns, and that she thought all the girls were supposed to be using them now. This is you shrugging, saying, “I suppose she’ll start using them one day, but can you blame her? That’s a long time to hold your breath and swim hard at the same time.” This is Dinah thinking how when she talks to the coach after the meet, she will let the coach know that she noticed Sofia is not using her walls and streamlines. This is Dinah thinking how she hates it when others don’t do what they’re supposed to do, and how Annie and her daughters always seem to be doing what they’re not supposed to do. For example, Annie, because she couldn’t afford all the equipment, never bought her girls the required fins they need for workouts, and instead, before a kick set, lets them dig through the bin on deck filled with ones that were left behind from swimmers years before. Dinah thinks how that’s not right, especially when it says right there in the handbook that the required equipment to purchase is a water bottle, a kickboard, and fins. Then there are the instances, Dinah thinks, when Annie asks the coach for special permission to age her youngest daughter up at a meet so that her youngest daughter can swim in the same session as her oldest daughter, just for convenience’s sake, so that Annie won’t have to be at a swim meet for two five-hour sessions back to back. This is frowned upon, of course, because it means Annie’s youngest is swimming with older swimmers, and usually, therefore, faster swimmers. Dinah doesn’t approve of this at all, since it means the afternoon session goes that much slower because there is a slower swimmer entered. Then there are the required parent meetings that Annie doesn’t go to some of the time. Instead, on those days, Dinah sees Annie swimming in a lane in the pool, while almost all the other parents are packed into a stuffy utility room off the pool, sitting on folding chairs and listening to a lecture by the coaches about volunteering for the team, or listening to a guest lecturer about the importance of feeding your swimmer carbohydrates and avocado the day before a meet, when that’s the last thing Dinah wants to serve her daughter, Jessie, who, like herself, is already carrying too many pounds. Dinah once told the coach afterward that she saw Annie in the pool swimming while the rest of them were in the meeting. The coach sighed. “There’s not much I can do,” she said. Dinah told the coach maybe there was something she could do. “Maybe you could kick her kids off the team,” Dinah said, to which the coach replied, “Dinah, it’s been a long night and I am going home now.”

T his is Mandy, the cleaning lady. She has always been concerned about her teeth. They cross over in the front so that they look like a row of theatergoers in the first seats with all of their legs crossed. Of course it would be a summer show, everyone in shorts with legs exposed. A showing, maybe, of Showboat , or some other summertime show. Maybe West Side Story . This is Mandy sweeping the floor in the locker room, seeing if what she should be sweeping into the dustpan can be swept down into the drain instead, thinking about Natalie Wood, how she drowned in the sea, and what a shame that was.

Some of the swim-team mothers talk to Mandy, and some pass her by, and some just nod slightly when they see her with her mop in her hand, pushing the water that has come off their daughters’ bodies and onto the tiles. Some know all about Mandy and how she and her husband go fishing and how their daughter works at a clothing store selling clothes she would never wear because they are all clothes for outdoor enthusiasts and Mandy says her twenty-year-old daughter’s idea of outdoor enthusiasm is firing up a barbecue and grilling a few sirloins. Some don’t even know that Mandy’s front teeth are all crooked because they have never looked up at Mandy to see her smiling. Some assume that because she’s at the pool her income is the same as that of everyone else who can afford to pay the six-hundred-dollar individual membership for the facility, or can afford to pay over one thousand dollars just to have her child swim on the team for one season. Some confuse Mandy with the other cleaning lady, or even with the cleaning man, who is as round as Mandy and who also wears glasses. Some think Mandy is part of the coaching team and they ask Mandy questions like when is the next meet and what time does it start. Some think Mandy is another swimteam parent and they ask her which one is her child and which squad does she swim on: developmental, juniors, or pre-seniors? Some think Mandy works in the snack bar, and when they see her in the bathroom or in the hall, and there is no one working the snack bar, they wish she would just get back to her job selling snacks because they’d like to buy a bagel or a chocolate milk or an electrolyte vitamin-fortified drink for their swimmer. Some think Mandy works in the weight and exercise room and writes your name down when you enter the sweat-smelling room and adjusts the fans so that they blow on you while you run on the treadmill and programs the two overhead televisions so that one is always airing a talk show and one is always airing sports. Some think Mandy works the front desk and checks your ID card and holds the key to the glass case that sells goggles and water bottles for an exorbitant price. Some think Mandy is just a gym fanatic who comes every day but never looks any thinner, despite all that spinning and sweating.

This is Kim in the warm-down lane still crying over the race she just finished and trying to correct herself, trying to lift her rear higher out of the water thinking that because her sixteen-year-old body’s changing, and her bottom half’s getting heavier, it’s causing her to sink more, but when she lifts her rear higher, her arms go deeper, which causes her chest to dive deeper, which makes her recovery all that much slower because her arms encounter that much more resistance.

This is you timing with Adam. This is Adam telling you how his boys don’t even like to swim on the team but would rather play in the locker room and fill their swim caps up with shower water and throw the water at each other. You know his boys, you have seen how they like going down the slide in the water park next to the competition pool with their eyes closed and their arms crossed in front of themselves like dead people in open caskets, only they’re alive and doing it for maximum speed. Together you and Adam look up at the timing board when the names of the swimmers appear, and you wonder what officials at Ellis Island would have renamed these kids if they had just walked off the boat. Lipshutz would be “Lips,” you think. This is you forgetting to press the plunger and stop your stopwatch when a kid comes swimming into the wall for the touch because you are thinking of last names the kids will never have. This is you writing down a time for the kid anyway, looking at Adam’s time and changing yours a few tenths of a second so that it looks believable, because even though the times of the swimmers are important to the swimmers, this swimmer will not have a competitive time. It will be enough for the swimmer to know that maybe she knocked off a few seconds from her seedtime, but that is all.

This is Adam asking you if you happened to hear the news about that awful strangler out west. This is you saying, yes, how awful. This is Adam saying, “Thank God we live here. I mean, that’s why my wife and I moved out of Boston, to get away from exactly those kinds of horrors.” He says in the rural town where he lives, a town similar to yours and also an hour away from the facility, the school board member is the greengrocer who is also the animal control officer who is also married to the postmistress, who herself is head of the recreation committee and whose brother is the volunteer fireman and the select board member and the general store owner, and that brother’s wife is the town clerk and the PTO head and the notary, and her brother is the librarian of the one-room library that’s open only two afternoons a week and boasts a working fireplace, one computer for browsing, and a perpetually filled barrel of oyster crackers for the taking of patrons who come up the porch and pass through the pleasantly creaking screen door. This is you agreeing, saying, “Yes, we are lucky to be able to raise our children here.”