Yannick Murphy - This is the Water

T his is the water, lapping the edge of the pool, coming up in small waves as children race through it. This is the swim mom named Dinah wearing the team shirt with a whale logo on it, yelling at her daughter Jessie to swim faster. This is Jessie who cannot hear Dinah because Jessie is in the water. Jessie is singing a song to herself: She is singing, “This old man, he played one. He played knick knack on his thumb.” Dinah is red in the face, standing in the stands. Dinah moves her hand in the air as if to help hurry her daughter along. Behind the starting blocks the water comes up over the edge of the pool and splashes the parents who are timing on deck.

This is the facility. The long shafts of sunlight that come in through the windows and hit the water on sunny days. The showers whose pressure is weak, whose tiles need brush-cleaning in the grout. This is Dinah after her daughter Jessie doesn’t win the race. Dinah is sitting back down on the bleachers in the stands. She is writing down Jessie’s time. She is comparing the time to the last time Jessie swam that event. She is telling herself at least her daughter beat her previous record. This is how much she beat it by: one one-hundredth of a second.

This is the racing suit some of the swimmers wear. It feels like the skin of a shark when rubbed the wrong way. Rubbed the right way it’s smooth and gives you the feeling that you can beat your old times, that you can beat anyone’s times. The suits are supposed to fit tight, as tight as a corset probably. The suits, the girls all say, are terribly uncomfortable. They ride up their crotches. They cut into their legs. They dig into their shoulders. They flatten their chests. They make it difficult to breathe. But they love their suits nonetheless and after a meet they rinse them and hang them up dutifully to dry, unlike their practice suits, which they sometimes let stay in their bags overnight in a wet ball, and the chlorine from the pool eats away at the fabric.

This is the bathroom in the locker room where a girl changes into her suit. In the bathroom grunting can be heard. Many hands are on the girl and the suit trying to help her get into it. If you look under the bathroom door, you can see so many legs. From the stall you can hear the pull of the swimsuit fabric, the sucking sound of skin being pushed and shoved.

This is the mom named Chris who is timing with another parent she doesn’t know from another team. Chris is not wearing the swim team tee shirt with the whale logo. She did not think to put it on when she left the house at five a.m. with her daughter in the car and her daughter’s swim bag stuffed with towels to last throughout the long day of racing, and when the moonlight was flowing over the field, lighting up a deer and a doe nibbling at the edge of the forest. Chris does not cheer for her daughter. She only realizes her daughter is swimming in the race when she looks out across the lanes of the pool and sees someone who looks like her daughter swimming. She still doesn’t cheer when she realizes it is her daughter because she knows her daughter would not hear her over all the other noise. Chris also thinks it’s silly how many parents are so involved in their child’s swimming and cheer so loudly, as if the cheering will make their child go faster, as if it were the Olympics or if winning or losing a swim down the length of the pool and back were a matter of life and death. Chris’s daughter, Cleo, is becoming more interested in swimming every season, even though Chris doesn’t ask her much about it. Cleo keeps a record in her journal of all of her past times and of the times she needs to qualify for certain meets. Cleo has begun sharing her times with her father, Paul, because he seems more interested than her mother in how she’s able to shave off time by tucking tighter in her turns, or keeping her hips up in the backstroke. This is Chris, being splashed by the water when a swimmer dives in and liking the way the water feels through the leg of her blue jeans, making her feel cool when it is so hot in the facility. These are the windows of the pool, covered over in mist so thick it looks purposely sprayed on, as if what were being done behind the glass were not to be seen by anyone on the outside.

This is the outside. A bright New England day that is almost spring, but not quite. Snow still in patches in places surrounded by the pale green grass of last summer — last summer wanting to still be seen, even if its grass looks frizzy at the tips and is mixed with what looks like bits of straw. These are the two highways behind the lawn of the facility, the cars going by quickly, most of the drivers wanting to leave the area whose exits are congested with shopping stores and food chains. They want to get back to the areas where people actually live instead of shop. They want to get back to their homes on rural roads where what wakes them up in the morning is the occasional lowing of the neighboring farm’s cows, or a woodpecker at work on the exterior siding of their cedar-framed house, and where the spring peepers peeping at night in the nearby ponds are the last sounds people hear before sleep. This is what’s in front of the facility: a view of a small mountain gently rounded, a skyline often interrupted by vee formations of high-flying geese, a dirt road that loops around the facility and also branches off and travels to the south for only so long before it peters out and you see a field of scrubby grass surrounded by scraggly pines, unhealthy at their tops, their upper boughs the color of rust.

This is Dinah at the home meet talking to Chris when Chris’s shift as a timer is over and she goes up into the stands. “How did your daughter swim?”

“She looked like she was having fun,” Chris says. What Dinah hears is, “Chris’s daughter did not swim well and she doesn’t want to talk about it.” This is Dinah telling Chris that her daughter, Jessie, lost one-hundredth of a second off her seedtime.

This is Chris needing the bathroom, thinking as she sits on the seat that she needed to sit down as much as she needed to pee. Chris has been feeling tired lately, she thinks, or maybe she’s just been feeling tired for years now. She’s not quite sure. Maybe she’s been tired ever since she was a girl living down south and had a babysitter, a young woman named Beatrice who would stay with Chris in the evenings and make sure she did her homework and tucked her into bed, who was raped. Chris thinks she loved Beatrice as much as she loved her parents, maybe even more. Her parents were too busy running the general store they owned to spend time with Chris in the evenings, but Beatrice would come over with her college texts, and Chris would have her math sheets and her ancient civilizations textbook out, and they’d sit at the kitchen table studying together, with music from the pop radio station playing. Beatrice would lean over Chris, helping with a fraction, smelling of fruity shampoo, and when Chris got the answer right, Beatrice would say, “Atta girl, Chris.” After they studied for a while, Beatrice would announce it was break time, and she’d pull out her collection of nail polish and bend over Chris’s toes and paint them with colors Chris had never even imagined existed, or had imagined existed only as precious metals that one could find deep in the veins of the earth. Gleaming, creamy, flecked metallic bronzes and coppers and golds and silvers in small bottles with price stickers from the drugstore stuck on their plastic tops. After seeing those colors, the realization came to Chris that anything could be replicated, even the insides of the earth.