Sara Jaffe - Dryland

I said, You mean the stopping?

A few days before the meet, I had come to the end of a length to find Donna standing in the shallow end, arms folded. She’d said, I’m just resting. She’d said, Ask Coach. I hadn’t said anything. I’d turned around and kept going, though I had been planning to take a minute or two to savor the wall.

I sat up straighter. I said, I think it might have something to do with the people in my lane. Coach hmmed. I said, So what about Lane Six?

Coach said, What about it?

I said, You could let me swim in Lane Six, and I could train for the 500 Free.

It was an amazing idea. Coach chewed his lower lip. He tapped a pen against the desk. He said, It’s a bit unusual. What about all your teammates who don’t get their own lane?

I said, No one wants Lane Six.

He said, That’s true. It’s not great for morale. He squinted. I knew it was an act. He’d known how perfect the plan was the moment I mentioned it. He said, Okay. Okay, why not? Let’s try it. Maybe distance is where you’ll hit your stride.

AT THE BEGINNINGof practice, Coach called me over and huddled me up with the top distance swimmers. He asked them to give me some pointers. They all said, Pacing. They said, Long strokes. The gangly pro who’d asked me about my brother at Grapestuff’s party had won the 500 at the Madison meet. He said, Don’t kick. He said, I kick, like, five times when I do the 500. It’s a waste of energy.

Coach said, He’s exaggerating.

The pro looked at me. His eyes were pinkish, from pot or chlorine. He said, Don’t kick. Unless you’re really a kicker. It’s not worth it.

The distance swimmers went off to their lanes and Coach walked me over to Lane Six. I could feel the swimmers in my old lane watching me. I felt as if Coach were my handler, or bodyguard. I felt famous. Coach had me jump in and swim a few laps while he watched.

I pushed off. Nothing but a lane line separated me from the poolful of swimmers, but Lane Six was quiet. I couldn’t feel any difference between my body and the water. I swam a smooth line. I was in my own pool. I was swimming the blue parts on a map of the world. I didn’t try to swim fast, I listened to the water, I didn’t kick, and it was true, Coach was wrong, in Lane Six I could swim 500 yards. I touched the wall and turned and kept swimming. My mind went to Alexis, not to her, but to the feeling of her, the change that had arced the air when she leaned against me and said, Come here. Lane Six put that feeling on my skin.

I pulled up to the wall to find out what Coach had noticed. He said, Okay, looks pretty good.

I waited for him to say something else. I thought he would say something about how well-suited he now saw I was for the 500, or he’d give me the one final key I needed to make the 500 work. I said, Do you think I should be kicking more?

Coach said, It looked pretty good to me, Julie. He blew his whistle and called out the drill to the rest of the team. He said, You’ve got the basic form down. It’s just going to be a matter of getting over that psychological hump. The 500 can feel long.

It was true, I’d blown off his advice before. Now I was ready for it and he wasn’t giving me anything. I said, Do you think I’m holding up my head too high? I said, Sometimes it feels hard to know how high I should be holding it.

Coach said, Sure, that’s normal. He said, I’ll check back with you in a bit. Why don’t you do 200 pull and 200 kick, and we’ll go from there.

Donna and the striver were standing on the other side of the lane line, listening. When Coach walked away, Donna said, Why are you in Lane Six?

I said, I’m in training.

Donna said, For what?

I said, 500 Free.

The striver said, Really?

I said, What.

The striver said, You get tired after four laps.

Donna said, If that.

The striver said, You stopped in the middle of our race.

I said, That wasn’t why I stopped. Lane Six coolly called me. It wanted me to get back to it. It wanted me to do the 200 pull, all arms, easy, and maybe the 200 kick, maybe 100 of it, if I decided to be a kicker.

Donna said, You know what? If you want to swim in that losers’ lane, that’s totally fine with me.

It was pathetic. It was ironic, those losers. They weren’t the ones Coach said had potential, or whatever it was, they weren’t the ones getting tips from the pros. They didn’t know what it was like to be in Alexis’s or anyone’s room, to have anyone push an arm against theirs before taking them there. Coach blew his whistle. Donna said, Saved by the bell, but it could have been me who said it.

THE TABLECLOTH WASuneven beneath the plates and food. I took the cloth’s edge and pulled it toward me. On the bus ride home Erika had asked what I’d been doing swimming in Lane Six and when I told her about the 500 she’d asked me if I thought I could do it, backtracked and said of course I could do it but she was surprised that I wanted to. She’d been as bad as Coach, putting a concerned look on her face and making me explain myself instead of saying she was happy for me.

My dad asked how swimming was going.

I said, It’s fine. I had nothing about swimming to say to my parents. What I wanted to know, I didn’t want to hear about from them. They’d use the wrong words, or they wouldn’t have been paying attention to the right things. They’d have forgotten the things I most wanted to know: how he stroked, when he breathed, if he did or didn’t kick. They wouldn’t know, he wouldn’t have told them, if swimming the 500 felt like swimming forever.

My dad said, Have you had any meets yet?

My mom said, Not that you have to tell us about all your meets.

My dad said, Right. We’d only come if you wanted us to.

It was the middle of the night in Germany. The early early morning. If my brother were still in training, it was around the time he’d be getting up. I shook the salad dressing bottle until the oil and vinegar and the flecks of herbs combined.

I said, I’m thinking about swimming the 500 Free. I said, It’s twenty lengths, in case you forgot. Ten times there and back. I said, A counter sits at the end of the lane with a number chart to help you keep track.

My mom said, I remember that chart.

I said, Do you remember anything else about it?

My mom said she remembered it seemed long. She said it was the event when people got up to use the bathroom. She said she thought my brother had only swum it once or twice, it wasn’t one of his main races. She clearly didn’t know, or care, that he had set the county record.

It had been four years since my parents told me my brother was taking a break from swimming. They hadn’t said if break was the word he’d used or the one they’d chosen. It wasn’t as if they’d be the first ones he’d tell if he started again.

I ate a few more bites and excused myself. I ran up the stairs to my room. I wanted to be in close reach of my phone so I could pick up right away if Alexis called. She would be so happy to hear my news.

ON SATURDAY Iwoke up and went to the window. Ben’s car was parked outside and Ben was in the yard, lifting branches in the drizzle. I hadn’t heard Pledge barking or the bell. I’d been sleeping heavily. I thought I’d been exhausting myself the first weeks of practice, but now that I wasn’t stopping, or was stopping less, I fell into bed flattened out, depleted.

A note on the kitchen table said Ben might be in the yard. I zapped my Lipton and went out in my sweats and rain boots.

Ben said, Just up? Lucky you.

I said, Do you always work when it’s raining?

Ben said, If I want to live here and I want to work, I guess I have to. He had on solid-looking hiking boots and a Gore-Tex raincoat. I didn’t feel that bad for him. He said, How nice of you to bring me coffee.