Kathleen Winter - Annabel

“What,” Treadway said when he came in from his shed and saw the celestial, symmetrical living room floor, “in the name of God?”

“It’s homework, Treadway,” Jacinta said. “Science.”

“Math, Mommy. It’s math, not science.”

“If that’s math” — Treadway picked his bread bag off the floor; it was nine now, and all that was left in the bag was a heel-end — “those teachers at that school need to have their heads examined.”

The World Aquatic Championships came on television and Wayne watched them with Jacinta. He saw synchronized swimming for the first time. The Russian team turned into a lily. The lily turned inside out and became a decahedron. The hats of the Russian swimmers had starbursts of sequins at the crown, and they were turquoise. The suits were of Arabian paisley. Wayne was transfixed.

“Mom. They’re making patterns. With their own bodies.”

“I had a friend who did that,” Jacinta said. “In St. John’s. Nothing like that though. Eleanor Furneaux.”

Wayne looked at his hands, his legs, and wished he had more than two of them. He couldn’t get over the Russian team. It was glorious. Much more glorious than the English or the U.S. or the Canadian teams. The Russian team had a symmetry that went beyond what Wayne had imagined possible. He dreamed about it that night, and the next day he asked his mother what they had been swimming in.

“What kind of place was it?” He wanted to go there.

“What do you mean?”

“The water. It was the same colour as their hats. What kind of water was that?”

“It was a swimming pool. Is that what you mean?” There was no swimming pool anywhere near Croydon Harbour.

“Where did they get a pool like that?”

“Pools like that are all over the world, Wayne.”

Highlights from the championships were televised over two weekends. Wayne watched the semi-finals and the finals. He noticed the details of the suits, the choices of music. Every departure from perfection on the part of the swimmers, he pointed out, even if he was alone in the room with the television.

When Treadway came in and sat down with his tea and sandwich, Wayne asked him, “Where is their music coming from?” He had been wondering about that for some time. There was no band anywhere visible at the side of the pool. Yet the routines included trumpets, pianos, drums, and all kinds of musical instruments, and even voices.

“What do you want to watch that for?”

“Dad. Where are they getting the music?” The music was loud and it surrounded the swimmers like the water did, and it echoed.

“Well, they just have it for the performance.”

“But where is it?”

“Somewhere in the wings. Wayne, hockey is what you want to watch.”

“How do they know where to put their arms next? How do they know how to do everything exactly the same, Dad?”

“They count,” Jacinta stood in the doorway. “It’s all choreographed.”

“That explains everything,” Treadway said with his mouth full.

“What’s choreographed?” Wayne asked. “I like graphs.” He was doing graphs in school. He coloured his in with stripes and tiny dots and different shades of pencil. His teacher had written on his report card that it would be good if he could finish his work more quickly.

“They practise for months,” Jacinta said. “Years. Choreographed means someone thinks of all the moves and writes them down and the swimmers practise those moves over and over again. And when they’re underwater, they count.”

“Oh! So if water gets in their ears or they can’t hear the music, it doesn’t matter?”

“Right. They count and they all come up at the same moment, and everything is identical, and everything matches up perfectly.”

“Well, their time would be better spent,” Treadway said, “if they went to secretarial school and learned how to do shorthand.”

“It’s a pattern the whole time, isn’t it, Mommy?”

“It is. It’s an intricate pattern.”

“Who decides it? Who choreographs?”

“They have different choreographers. I’m not sure. But for her solo routine when we were fourteen, Eleanor Furneaux had to choreograph her own piece.”

“Solo?” Treadway said. “I thought the whole point was to make a fool of yourself with eight or ten other people all doing exactly the same thing. You can’t be synchronized if you’re by yourself. Imagine synchronizing your watch to the right time if it was the only watch in the world.” He got up and put his cup and saucer in the sink and went to the bathroom. He did not close the bathroom door and they heard him pee, then hawk and spit into the toilet.

At night in bed Treadway lay on his back beside his wife. He did not try to begin lovemaking but left that to her. It was one of the things Jacinta loved about her husband, especially now that her hormone levels had changed. She had taken Eliza Goudie’s advice and sent to Eaton’s for three satin slips with lace boleros. She had bought herself three good brassieres, and wore one each night because it lifted her breasts as if to make a present of them. Eliza had told her to say, out loud, alone, through the day, “I am incredibly sexy.” It wasn’t hormones alone, Eliza said, that dampened a woman’s sex drive. It was not the balding of her husband or the thickening of his belly. It was the woman’s abandonment of her own body. “If you aren’t going to take Valium,” Eliza had told her, “at least buy yourself some beautiful undergarments and negligées and talk yourself into being the most desirable woman your husband has ever known.”

“Skaters have men,” Treadway said.

“Skaters?”

“Olympic skaters. There are men.”

“Figure skaters?”

“Even if they are like — what’s his name?”

“Toller Cranston.”

“Yeah. And they’re not all like him. There are normal figure skaters.”

“But Toller Cranston is the best.”

“That’s a matter of personal opinion. Did he win the gold medal? What I’m saying is, even if Wayne picked skating to go crazy over. But no. He picks the one sport anywhere, in the entire world, that you have to be a girl to perform. There are no boys in synchronized swimming, right?”

“I hadn’t thought of it.”

“Just cast your mind.”

“I’m not sure.”

In his own bed Wayne looked at the broken ceiling tile, which he knew had only 209 holes in it instead of the 224 in all the others, a fact he had discerned the time he had croup when he was seven and had to stay in bed nine days. He lay picturing the swimsuit of Elizaveta Kirilovna, the soloist for the Russian team. It was the first time he had wished he lived somewhere other than Croydon Harbour. All over the world, his mother had told him, there were swimming pools. Even in St. John’s.

“Mom?” he asked Jacinta in the morning. He was trying out the difference between Mom and Mommy. His mother was scrubbing hardened soap out of her English porcelain soap dish. “Where is your friend Eleanor Furneaux now?”

“I think she’s in Brampton, Ontario.”

“What is she doing?”

“I think she married a man who makes tires.”

“But what is she doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she still synchronized swimming?”

Jacinta dried the ridges. Her soap dish was one of the few things she had left of her mother’s. “She’ll be in her forties now, Wayne. Like me.”

Wayne cut around his yolk. If you did the right thing with the tip of your knife you could eat the white and leave the yolk a perfect circle. “But does she go synchronized swimming sometimes?”

“She might still be interested in it. She might help coach or something.”

“Do you have to be young to synchronized swim?”