Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

T his is you at home at night after the meet hanging up towels, wet and smelling like chlorine, and this is you with Sofia and Alex, looking at the swim videos you took of them earlier in the day, your girls stopping the frames now and then to see exactly where they started to slow down or when they reached out to touch the wall. They joke and make remarks like, “I wasn’t going to let the girl in the lane next to me win. I thought, This is my race, all mine!” they say. This is you later, looking at yourself in the mirror and hoping to see Chris in the reflection instead. Chris who has the breasts she can wear with no bra, and the rear all the swim-team dads stare at when they should be watching the race they’re timing. You know you will never be like Chris. You look out the window at the moonlight on the trees and on the rock wall. It makes the rocks glow. It makes the trees appear as though their leaves are made of silver.

You think about you. How if you were to describe yourself to someone, you would empty out your purse on the table. You would not have to say anything. Your ChapStick that’s never used will talk for you. Your receipts from another country close to the equator that for some reason you’ve left in there for almost a year will talk for you. Your picture of your friend from years ago will talk for you. The hairbrush with hair from not only your head, but also Sofia and Alex’s heads, will talk for you. Then you sit on your unmade bed, the bed you never make except before you’re ready to go to bed, and you wonder who that someone would be who would want to know about you in the first place. You cannot think of anyone who would want to get to know you that well ever again. You wonder if your husband, Thomas, knows what you have in your purse. If he even has any clue. When he comes into your room to brush his teeth in the bathroom you say, “Do you have any idea what’s in my purse?” Thomas brushes his teeth for too long, you have always thought. He’s going to abrade his gums and someday they will peel away from his teeth like a pink strip of stretched-out bubble gum that’s already been chewed. He is brushing his teeth too long now, and of course not answering you because he is brushing his teeth. When he is finally finished he rinses his mouth and then takes a long time dabbing at it with a towel that is still wet and smells like chlorine from when the girls used it after their races during the swim meet. If I were Chris, the swim-team mom with the breasts and the rear, you think, I bet he would not wait so long to answer me. He would have talked through his brushing and his toothpaste foam to say in a mumble, “Yes, dear,” or “No, dear.” Apparently, though, Thomas never heard the question about your purse. “I’ve got a great idea how to make money,” Thomas says. “Do you want to hear it?” he asks. Thomas does not ever wait for you to answer his questions, and starts telling you his ideas anyway.

This great idea is not so great, you think. He wants to develop a water gun that horse owners can use on dogs so that dogs don’t endanger them when they’re on horseback on the rural roads where you live. You think, why not just a regular water gun, the kind your daughter Alex has that blasts hose-sized streams of water more than fifty feet? You don’t tell Thomas, though, that his great idea is not so great. Instead you turn away from him in bed, facing the window where you can see the moon on the birch tree making its bark appear frozen white.

This is Thomas in bed lying next to you, patting your arm once before you fall asleep. Thomas has dispensed with the kissing. You think this happened two years ago when the work he does in his research lab started becoming more difficult, coincidentally around the same time your brother shot himself. There is too much worry for Thomas now, what with managing the other researchers and creating the antibodies that he sells. You think that where his lab is located adds to his stress. It’s near the local commuter airport, and wouldn’t the constant screech of tires hitting the tarmac and the smell of airplane fuel in the air run him down? This is you facing the wall, wondering if the kissing would make a difference. In the morning, would you love him any better because he kissed you on the lips? Would you love him any worse? This is you wishing hours later when he wakes up and makes his way to the toilet in the thick, cloudy darkness of night that he hadn’t woken you up. This is the house whistling, the wind coming in through windows not all the way closed. This is you wondering if there is such a thing as wife energy, and if you had it whether maybe you would love Thomas more. Maybe Thomas would be kissing you at night instead of patting you on the arm. If you had wife energy, he would be complimented more often. You would tell him how smart he is. You would tell him you like the way his hair looks when it grows long. You would tell him he did a fine job with the mower, that the fields look like golf courses. You would tell him he is funny instead of listening to funny things he says and not laughing out loud, just laughing inside, because the outside laughter takes energy, and you have used the energy up already. You have used it when listening to your teenage daughter call you names. You have used up your energy trying not to get angry, trying not to care, so that she would eventually stop. You have used up the energy reaching behind you while driving and grabbing a book from your daughters that they were fighting over. You have used it up closing a window. Yes, just a window, you thought to yourself while doing it. The window was heavy and hard to pull down. You had to put your back into that window. What was the use of all that swimming you did at the facility while your daughters were practicing if you could not even close a window?

Outside the house the bats are catching moths and slamming into the windowpanes. There are many moths now that the weather is warmer. You saw one the last time you shot a wedding. You photographed a luna moth fluttering by the bride’s face just as she said, “I do.” It was a photo you liked, the luna moth covering the bride’s mouth with its lime-green body. But the bride did not like the photo and said it was a shame you hadn’t taken one without the moth, as if you were the one who had called upon the moth to come fluttering by at that moment, as if you were the one who was trying to cover up the evidence of the words “I do” being spoken. You keep the photo anyway, in a drawer along with other photos you liked that the brides did not because they were not photos about their wedding day. Some are close-ups of flowers, a gardenia with a ladybug walking on its petals. Some are of the distorted, elephantine reflection of someone’s legs in the steel gray side of a guest’s car.

“It’s great that the bats are back,” Thomas said a few days ago, and then you took your wool coat off its hook by the door and stored it on a shelf in a glass case, afraid the moths would find it. Even the glass case took your energy. You had to lift up on the handle while shutting it or it wouldn’t close all the way, and while you were closing it, Thomas was talking to you, or rather he was reading to you from his magazine. He wanted you to know how smart it was that he tutored the girls all year round because according to his magazine, schools were dumbing down textbooks, and dumbing down tests, and dumbing down courses in public schools. These were things you somehow already knew about. It wasn’t an article that was shedding any new light on what you already had learned as a parent of two children in the school system. “Stop already,” you said to him, “I know all this,” but Thomas did not listen and he kept reading, loudly, his deep voice seeming to resonate through your own chest because he was standing so close to you, wanting you to listen, and he was so loud that you could feel his voice inside yourself, behind your rib cage, like the rumble of a nasty chest cough.