Sara Jaffe - Dryland

My brother on the podium, smiling, eyes to the crowd, didn’t look gay or not gay. I wanted a shot of his coach. I wanted to remember what he looked like. Was he cute, or hot? I wanted to know if, the first time, a guy came on to my brother or the other way around. Was it Ben? Was it an older guy? How would he define fooling around? Did having fooled around with Alexis make me gay and, if so, did it make her gay, even though she’d had boyfriends in high school? Maybe I should have fooled around with a guy first. Or I needed to try it with a guy in order to decide. The Berlin I imagined had narrow streets and alleys and bridges. Twice my brother had sent us postcards with a piece of the Berlin Wall inside a plastic bubble. Was he right there when the wall came down? Was it such a crazy party? Did he get drunk, and were there gay guys there? Was there AIDS in Germany? It wasn’t that late, or early, where he was but, I didn’t have his number. I knew where to find it, in the Rolodex by the phone downstairs, but I didn’t want to wake anyone up.

BEFORE WINTER BREAKthe school went crazy with candygrams. Every morning a group of girls, cheerleaders, got on the intercom and sang a song about candygrams to the tune of Jingle Bells. Candygrams were a dollar. They were a construction paper candy cane or snowman attached to a real candy cane and they could be signed or anonymous. The candygrams song lodged and crackled in my head all day. Last year Erika had sent me a candygram and also a boy from math class who I’d never spoken to who wished me a Reeeeeally Happy Holiday and drew a ballpoint Christmas tree and a menorah and a question mark. At lunch I started humming and Erika said, Thanks a lot.

I said, Are you going to send PT a candygram?

Erika said, No way. Does he seem like someone who’d be into candygrams? Erika had been acting slightly pissed since the night of the movies, when I’d gone home instead of going over to striped shirt’s house. They’d all smoked pot, and Erika had gotten so stoned that she hadn’t said anything for the whole night except for one conversation with PT about swimming. He’d told her he found swimming kind of spiritual. Erika had said she almost didn’t want to tell me about their conversation because talking about it might make it less real.

I said, You don’t have to send me one either. Alexis would have a desk overflowing with candygrams, from people who were and weren’t her real friends. I wasn’t going to send her one. I wasn’t sending one to anybody. Still I knew, when the cheerleader dressed as an elf came into my homeroom and dropped a snowman on blue construction paper on my desk, with a candy cane tied on through a hole punch, that my candygram was from Alexis. It said, Happy holidays, Julie! and had a picture of a heart, and a comma, and Alexis. It wasn’t what it said. It didn’t say anything. But at some point she’d taken a marker and written my name, and paid someone a dollar, and passed someone the paper with my name on it. I crunched on my candy cane at lunch and Erika said, Who sent you one?

I said, Remember that kid from last year?

AT THE LASTpractice before break Coach crouched on the pool deck and told me not to apply force to my stroke until my elbow was above my wrist. He said applying force sooner meant that I was pushing the water down instead of behind me. That made sense. It was the kind of advice I was looking for. It was the kind of advice I could imagine my brother’s coach having crouched on the deck and given him. It was impossible to imagine how the story went from there — if after giving advice the coach leaned in and whispered to my brother to stay after practice, or if he didn’t need to whisper, if there was nothing unusual about him asking my brother to stay after, and it was what happened when he stayed that changed things. Or it could have happened out of the pool, during one of the times my brother’s coach drove him home, which was normal, practice went long. I pushed off and my arm reached and my fingertips touched the water and went under. Then my hand, my wrist and forearm, and it was hard to tell when my elbow was exactly over my wrist. The coach putting his hand on my brother’s knee in the car. The coach running his hand over my brother’s shoulder and telling him he had a nice body, and was it something my brother had been waiting for, with or without knowing it? Was his hand already unzipping his coach’s fly? I didn’t want to think about it. It wasn’t something I should think about. I reached my left arm and kept track of the position of my elbow. When my forearm was perpendicular to the pool floor I pulled back. The pull felt more forceful. It shot me forward. I hoped Coach was watching.

I finished my entire cooldown, which kept me in the pool for a few minutes after the whistle. When I came to the wall there was nobody else left in the pool. No one was on the pool deck. I didn’t know where Coach could be. I put my hands on the lip of the wall and pushed myself up. I hung there a second, my lower half underwater. My arms had gotten stronger. My arms looked strong, holding me up, half in and half out of the empty pool.

I grabbed my towel from my locker and ditched my cap and goggles. No one was in the shower room. I faced the wall and let the water soak me before peeling out of my suit. I opened my eyes to pump the soap dispenser. Alexis said, Hey Julie. She had come in and started the shower two down from mine. She was already naked. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t glimpsed her naked before. Everyone saw everyone. She said, I was sure I’d be the last one in here. I was running around trying to find Melanie a tampon. Good friend, right?

Nobody talked in the shower. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t look at her, whether I wanted to or not.

Alexis said, What have you got planned for break? She spoke as if we were just having a normal conversation somewhere. I faced the wall.

I said, Probably going to Seattle for a couple days. It was a stupid way to say it — we always spent four days over break in Seattle at my aunt and uncle’s. I said, How about you? I was already rinsed. I was going to skip conditioner, and turn off the water and beeline for my towel as soon as I didn’t feel her looking at me.

She said, I’m going to Hawaii, believe it or not. The smell of Agree bloomed up in the shower room. The smell took me over. I felt crazy. I turned and looked at Alexis. Her eyes were closed and she was rubbing conditioner into her hair. It felt crazy that my hand had touched her body, that my palm had felt, through the softest sweater, what it felt like to feel her nipples get hard. Alexis opened her eyes. She looked at me looking at her. All I could do was turn off the water, hope the soap was off me, and trip out to my towel to get covered.

ON CHRISTMAS EVEwe drove up to Seattle to stay for a few days with my relatives. We did the same Seattle tourist things we always did, the Space Needle and Pike Place Market and a cold, wet walk along the lake. The trip was boring in a way I didn’t mind. My cousin brought his girlfriend, now his fiancée, to meet us for Chinese food on Christmas. I had once visited him in his apartment in Seattle, which was something like Ben’s, though my cousin’s apartment had newer things and fewer of them. He did something with computers. It was hard to believe that he, Ben, and my brother were the same age. On the drive home I sat sleepy in the backseat, watching the highway. It was usually one of my favorite parts of the trip, the highway and the scenery and the open, lazy vacation feeling. Erika was going to spend the rest of break back and forth between all the parts of her family, and Ben was in Arizona visiting his parents, and Alexis, believe it or not, was in Hawaii, which, though a US state, was very far away. It wasn’t that I wished school would start back up. If I wanted to keep up with my training I could figure out a way to go to one of the city pools, or the JCC if we were still members. We were coming up on the space-age hump of the Tacoma Dome. My dad said it first, and my mom and I joined in: Tacoma Dome, Tacoma Dome, feeling the words round and dome-like in our mouths.