Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

“Cleo just told me she wants one of those suits,” Chris says. “Like the ones Alex and Sofia have.” With a lift of her chin she points to your girls, who are on deck.

“Oh, those,” you say. “They are the biggest marketing scam. The least expensive of them costs a couple of hundred dollars, but do they really make the girls swim faster? They’re so tight the girls sometimes say they can hardly breathe, but without them the girls don’t think they can win the race, and if they don’t think they can win it, then sometimes they don’t,” you say. Chris nods. You feel as if you’ve hurt Chris’s feelings somehow. “I mean, that’s great that Cleo’s that into swimming that she wants one. Now you too can experience the joy of having to help pull, tug, squeeze, and jam your daughter’s rear into a suit in time for her first event when her body’s still wet from having swum warm-ups.” Swimmers can’t wear the suit during warm-ups and then also for their events that day, because that’s too long to keep on a suit that sadistically tight and uncomfortable. “Welcome to the torture club,” you say. Chris laughs. Her teeth are very white, in perfect rows. It is not a full-hearted laugh. It is a polite laugh. You’ve heard Chris make it before. She does it when she’s not really listening, when she’s worried, for example, about where Cleo is, if she has taken too long in the locker rooms and hasn’t yet come out. But what did I expect? you think to yourself. That wasn’t very funny what I just said. You pull out grapes and offer some to Chris. “They’re already warm,” you say. “It’s so hot in here I think they’re turning into wine.” Chris nods, but she does not look hot at all. She is not sweating at the temples the way you are. Chris takes one grape, and then doesn’t take any more. “Where’s Paul today?” you ask.

“He couldn’t make it,” Chris says. “He’s got papers to correct.” You nod. Chris doesn’t ask you where Thomas is, even though you are ready to tell her that he’s cutting wood and splitting wood and stacking wood, and that really, for all you know, he could be eating the wood, because on any given day that he comes home from the lab, if he’s not mowing the lawn, then he’s doing the wood, because in the winter, all you heat with is the wood because wood heat feels warmer and saves money. This was Thomas’s idea, not yours, as most things to do with the house and the family usually are, except the swim team, of course, and joining the facility, which were your ideas. Concerning the wood, you would have been happy with walking over to a dial and turning up the heat. You could have done without hauling in wood at six in the morning in the dark while trying not to slip over ice-encrusted snow. You could have done without always having splinters and small bits of wood embedded in the weave of your sweater fronts from holding the logs to your chest on your way to the woodstove. Who knew that your wrists would hurt from picking up the wood at one end and tossing it on a pile to be stacked after it was split, that it would make them inflamed, and that swellings the size of robin’s eggs would appear on the inside of them? You could have done without never having the chance to read the entire paper because its pages were needed to start the fire every—

“What’s the matter?” you ask Chris, because you have just noticed that Chris has a tear sliding down her cheek. Instinctively, you look toward the water, to see if it’s Chris’s daughter, to see if Chris’s daughter, Cleo, has lost her race and that’s why Chris is crying, because you remember from past meets how you have seen tears in parents’ eyes. You have seen tears in the eyes of Dinah, for example, who cried with joy a few years ago when her daughter made it to age groups, a more competitive division, in the fifty breast. You thought then that for Dinah Jessie’s success was more about her than her daughter. You’ve seen plenty of girls cry too, and even boys, when they’ve lost races. You have seen parents cry when their children who have lost a race cry. You have seen parents cry because the coaches have yelled at them, telling them they have not honored the swim-parent’s code, that they have overstepped their boundaries and taken the sacred job of coaching into their own hands. The parents, apparently, were guilty of telling little Mary that she has to bring her arms up out of the water faster in fly. They told her in the car ride home that her rhythm was off, they told her that her legs were spread wide on the entry, they told her before a race to not forget the two-hand touch, they told her to keep her hands in prayer position for the pull out, and they told her to, for crying out loud, breathe on both sides in the free. But it is not Cleo that Chris is crying about, you realize. Cleo is just sitting on deck on her towel reading a book. She’s not even swimming the event that’s taking place. Chris can’t answer you yet. Now more tears are sliding down her cheeks, and the tip of her nose is turning red. You don’t have a tissue in your purse to offer her. Unused ChapStick, yes, but not one tissue. You try not to ask Chris any more questions. She will tell you if she wants to. You think how you have been friends for a while but never cried in front of each other before. You realize this has suddenly changed your friendship, turned it up a notch. You are now closer whether you want to be or not. You wonder if someday you’ll cry in front of her too and she will look at you with those blue eyes and put her thin, long-fingered hand on your arm and tell you it’s going to be all right. You look at the timing board. The five-hundred frees are over and now it’s the relays. Your daughters are walking with their relay teams to the blocks. Your older daughter, Sofia, walks half the distance with her book in her hand, still reading. When she realizes she can’t dive into the water with the book she runs back to her towel and leaves it there. Chris wipes her face with her hands, making her face appear shiny, and even prettier, you think, and then you think how when you cry, the skin around your eyes puffs up, and your whole nose turns beet red like a seasoned alcoholic, and the skin on your face and your neck gets red blotches in irregular shapes resembling the outlines of the fifty states. Once you stopped your crying completely because you happened to look at your reflection and saw the perfect outline of Texas, and could not believe it was there on the side of your neck. You thought maybe it was some kind of a sign, that you should go to Texas and start life anew, but then you realized you had no desire to go to Texas, and that life anywhere else, except maybe Florida, would be better.

“Darn,” Chris says. “I didn’t want to do this.”

“Do what?” you say.

“Cry,” Chris says. “It’s just that there are so many people I can’t tell, and it’s so hard not telling anyone.” You eat another grape, wishing this time that they really had turned to wine. You could use a drink. For a second you think about inventing a wine product in the shape of a grape, where the outside of the grape is made of something edible, and the middle is filled with wine. You could keep them chilled. You could take them with you and pop them into your mouth at sporting events. You could use them as ice cubes in seltzer to have as spritzers.

You are confused. You aren’t sure if you want Chris to tell you exactly why she is crying. You get the feeling, the once-in-a-lifetime feeling, you think, because you’ve never had this feeling before, that what is going to come next out of Chris’s mouth here at the dead pool is going to change the world as you know it forever. You watch your girls lining up for their relay heats. Your youngest, Alex, your ten-year-old, has her elastic goggle straps set way too long. You can see that they will drag in the water and hit your girl’s arm as she swims, probably keeping her from swimming her best time. You are disappointed in yourself for not remembering to cut them earlier, when you were at home. Do you have something in your purse to cut them with now? No, of course not. Along with the ChapStick you’ve never used, you have click-button pens whose points are stuck in the on position so that the inside lining of your purse is riddled with what looks like a secret code of dashes and dots of black and blue ink. You have nothing that could cut. “Have you got scissors?” you say to Chris, or maybe you think you say it to Chris, but you can’t be sure, because Chris doesn’t answer you, and instead she says, “I think Paul is cheating on me.”