Джумпа Лахири - Whereabouts [calibre]

Here’s the elderly woman who walks with a limp, leaning on a cane. The space is like an amphitheater and it’s hard for her to make it from the locker room to the edge of the pool. She uses the ladder to get in and always swims with her face above water. Next to her is the guy with the shaved head who dives deep and does laps for over an hour, never stopping. His potent somersaults send him down nearly half a length before he comes up again for air. It’s an enormous pool and the eight lanes are almost always occupied. Eight different lives share that water at a time, never intersecting.

I swim for about forty minutes, maybe fifty, before I get tired. I’m not a strong swimmer, I can’t do a flip turn, I never learned how. The idea of being on my back underwater scares me a little. I typically do the crawl, with a weak but decent stroke.

In the pool I lose myself. My thoughts merge and flow. Everything—my body, my heart, the universe—seems tolerable when I’m protected by water and nothing touches me. All I think about is the effort. Below my body there’s a restless play of dark and light projected onto the bottom of the pool, that drifts away like smoke. I’m surrounded by an element that restores me, one in which my mother wouldn’t know how to survive.

She was the one who brought me to the pool when I was little. She’d wait for me, she’d watch me from above, seated on the bleachers, always slightly nervous as I learned to float and breathe and kick. Water can cover me without drowning me. My mother and I are different that way. Perhaps a few drops enter my nose or ears, but my body resists. And yet, every time I swim, I feel cleansed as if from within.

It’s just that in the locker room, when the other women chat among themselves, I’m prey to terrible stories, brutal information shared as they take their showers, take off their swimsuits, shave their legs and armpits and groins in awkward, contorted poses.

That’s how one day a young mother, responding to a woman who remarked, “I haven’t seen you here lately,” talked about her son’s cancer, a little boy, just eighteen months old. He’s already had two operations. She recounted trips to the best hospitals, the hellish treatment, the precarious recovery.

A few days later two women discussed the adult son of a third woman they both knew. He’d had an accident while on vacation with his family; he’d slipped in such a way that now he was paralyzed, and risked never walking again.

“God, what a nightmare,” one of the women said before turning on the hair dryer and grooming herself.

Today a woman in her eighties who swims four days a week shares a memory that surprises us: she admits that she’s afraid of the sea, because of a huge wave that once knocked her down and twisted her up when she was a girl.

“I was about to drown,” she says, still stunned. “When I was tossed onto the shore, water was pouring out of my nose, my mouth, my ears. My arms were scraped from top to bottom.”

She’d been swimming with an aunt who, seeing her frightened, had held her hand, but that human anchor had only caused more harm. She’d have been better off nearly drowning on her own.

It’s hard to imagine her body when it was young. Over the years it’s lost its shape, she’s hunched over, covered with moles. She gets dressed, combs her hair, and puts on a few gold rings, including her wedding band.

In this humid, rusty place where women congregate, naked and wet, where they show each other the scars beside their breasts and on their bellies, the bruises on their thighs, the imperfections on their backs, they all talk about misfortune. They complain about husbands, children, aging parents. They confess things without feeling guilty.

As I take in these losses, these tragedies, it occurs to me that the water in the pool isn’t so clear after all. It reeks of grief, of heartache. It’s contaminated. And after I get out I’m saturated by a vague sense of dread. All that suffering doesn’t leak out like the water that travels into my ear now and then. It burrows into my soul, it wedges itself into every nook of my body.

The old woman closes her purse and politely says goodbye, but before leaving, as I’m drying my limbs, she says,

“I’ve got a bunch of dresses in my closet that would look good on you. They’re adorable but I can’t wear them anymore. Would you like them, so they don’t go to waste?” She adds, without skipping a beat, “It’s been decades since I’ve had a waist.”

On the Street

I spot them on the street, in the middle of a crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to change: the couple who live around the corner, my friend and the kind man I cross paths with now and again on the bridge. I quicken my pace to catch up to them, I think of saying hello, but then I realize that they’re having an argument. It’s a wide avenue, there’s confusion right and left. You can hardly hear a thing but they manage to make themselves heard. They talk at the same time, their sentences overlapping so that it’s impossible to know what they’re fighting about. Then I hear her voice: “Don’t touch me, you disgust me.”

I start to follow them. I don’t go into the store I was heading to, it’s not urgent. We cross the broad street together. He’s handsome, lanky. She’s got long hair, a bit tousled, and wears a flame-colored, egg-shaped coat.

They pay no attention to passersby, they’re not ashamed of fighting in public. It’s as if they’re in the middle of nowhere, on a deserted beach, or inside a home. They’re having a bad, bitter fight. It rises above the mayhem that surrounds them; they act as if they’re the only people who inhabit the entire city.

She’s furious, and in the beginning he tries to appease her. But then he, too, loses his temper, and he’s as irritated and spiteful as she is. It feels unseemly, a quarrel so intimate in front of everyone. Their biting words pierce the air as if physically puncturing it, seeping into the blue of the sky, blackening it. And it upsets me to notice that his face has turned mean.

At the intersection she says, “See those two?”

She points to an elderly couple. They hold hands and walk with measured steps, in silence.

“I wanted us to get where they’ve gotten.”

My friends aren’t so young anymore, either, even though they’re now behaving like children. After crossing the busy avenue, we turn onto a quieter street. I’m still walking a few paces behind them. And as I do I begin to understand what they’re arguing about.

They’d gone to their daughter’s school to listen to a concert and then they’d stopped to have a coffee. After that she wanted to take a taxi home, whereas he wanted to walk. He’d offered to call her a taxi and then return on foot. And this suggestion had offended her to the point where she’d exploded.

Now she’s saying that he’d never have suggested such a thing when they were first dating, when he was deeply in love with her.

“It’s a bad sign,” she says.

He replies drily, “You’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’re always going your own way these days. I don’t see how we can resolve this.”

After making this statement, she starts to cry. But he keeps walking slightly ahead of her. At the next intersection he stops and she catches up to him.

“Why were you so opposed to walking and enjoying this sunny day?”

“I’m wearing a new pair of shoes that I haven’t broken in yet.”

“Well, you could have told me that.”

“You could have asked.”

At that point I stop following them, having already heard too much.

At the Beautician

In general I avoid spa treatments. I’m not too keen on the idea of lying in a little room wearing a blindfold with mud spread over my body. I wear my hair long, there’s only a bit of gray, so all I need is a good cut one afternoon at the hairdresser’s, once a season. I wax my legs at home while I watch something trashy on TV. My one indulgence, twice a month, always on a Sunday, is getting my nails done, and this forces me, at least for an hour, to not do anything at all. No phone calls to make, no text messages to send, no newspapers to read or glossy magazines to leaf through.