Sara Jaffe - Dryland

We were settled in the living room with a movie just started and the phone rang. I went to the kitchen to answer it.

My brother said, Holy cow. Is that Julie? He said, I’m calling for Christmas. For a happy Hanukkah!

In the background I heard music and voices yelling, or talking loudly. I said, What time is it there?

My brother said, What? He said, What’s been going on with you? What are you, starting high school?

He’d called last at the end of the summer. I said, I’m a sophomore.

He said, Of course. That’s great. I remember those times.

The phone was cordless. I went as far away from the living room as I could before the connection got staticky, about halfway up the stairs. There were so many things I had to ask him. I said, What do you remember? I heard what sounded like glass breaking, or a bottle clinking another bottle. I said, Where are you?

My brother said, Oh, just out at a friend’s house. A little holiday party.

It was three days after Christmas, and the middle of the night in Germany.

I said, What friend?

My brother coughed, or laughed. It was a dry, mean sound. He said, Let’s see, whose place is it. Karl’s? Or Jan’s?

The names sounded like made-up German names. For all any of us knew he could be in New York, or London, or on the other side of town. He could be in San Diego, one hand on his coach’s dick. Ben could have been keeping any number of secrets from me. I sat down on the stairs. I said, When do you think you might come for a visit?

He said, Oh wow. It’s pretty expensive to fly back to the States.

I said, I bet Mom and Dad would pay for it.

He said, Oh I get it. Did they put you up to asking?

I said, What? The conversation was swarming away from me. I knew the call was expensive. Any minute I’d lose him. I said, I know you have to go, but I just wanted to ask. I said, in a rush, I’m swimming, and I’m doing the 500 Free, and I was wondering if you could give me any special tips or tricks or anything.

There were a lot of voices in the background. They were speaking German, or English, it was impossible to tell. My brother said, Let’s see. Pacing? He said, Honestly, I fucking hated that race. It was boring as hell. What did you do to get stuck with it?

From where I was sitting, halfway up the staircase, in the dark, I could see out the windows along the top of the front door. Rain in the streetlights. The yard, the careful landscaping becoming a swamp. This wasn’t my brother’s dime — it was Jan’s, or Karl’s. I could sit there silent as long as I wanted to.

My brother said, Probably a good idea to put the folks on now.

I stood up. I said, Okay. I said, I’m not serious about swimming, and went downstairs to tell my parents that my brother was on the phone.

I STILL DIDN’Tlove the Loveless side of the tape Ben had made me, though some of the songs were okay. The fifth song in had a ferris-wheel feel to it and the guy’s and girl’s voices singing together in an upbeat way but separated by layers of fuzz, close and distant at the same time. The R.E.M. songs on the other side were less polished than the R.E.M. songs I knew. They sounded held together by Scotch tape. They were prickly, and they dug a warm groove into the room. When Country Feedback came on I usually had to stop whatever I was doing, which wasn’t much — teaching myself origami from a book my aunt had given me, sorting clothes for the Goodwill — and lie down on the carpet. I could have spent an hour lying there listening to him sing It’s crazy what you could’ve had. That line was the feeling of wanting, or of wanting things that were slipping away. It wasn’t as if I had lost anything. I understood after a day or two that my brother wasn’t going to call me back — that he couldn’t, really, without making my parents wonder why he was calling again. Or that he’d have to wait long enough that it wouldn’t seem strange that he was calling again. The song made me want to have lost something so that I could want it back. Sometimes, lying there, my back molding its impression in the fibers of the wall-to-wall, I thought about Alexis. I let myself picture her in the shower with her eyes closed, knowing or not knowing that I was watching her, and I let the feeling of wanting flood me.

I also did stretches for swimming. On my pool-blue carpet I touched my toes and crossed one leg over the other and touched my toes again, and I pulled my quads and circled my arms and put one arm across my body, pulling at the elbow with the opposite arm. I put on my competition suit and lay on my bed with my front half hanging off it and worked on my stroke, keeping my elbow above my wrist, making sure my head was high but not too high. I took my mom’s Jack LaLanne weights and curled them until I saw hard curves forming on my arms. I looked in the mirror to see if the hairs I could make out below the suit-line would be visible to anyone else, and I got dressed and took a walk to the grocery store for a bottle of Nair. I spread on the pink cream. I stood still in the bathroom while it burned through the hairs like a pesticide.

ALEXIS OFFERED MEmacadamia nuts. Melanie offered me a Mexican lollipop. Erika told me that she had made a New Year’s resolution to ask PT out. I got stuck behind her in the bus line while she stopped to ask him how his break was. He had, I overheard, just become an uncle. Erika couldn’t get over it. She thought it made him seem so sensitive. I thought it made him seem old. I didn’t think it seemed like a great idea for her to ask him out, if she didn’t know that he was going to say yes, or if he might say yes without meaning it.

We got to the Y and got suited and Lane Six shimmered me a hello. It had missed me. I was in a lagoon in Hawaii. The water was clear and the air smelled like heady pink flowers and Alexis swam a few feet ahead. I went arm over arm and my lane opened up to me. It welcomed the weights I’d lifted and the stretches I’d done and the hairlessness of my legs from ankle to thigh. When I finished my warm-up Coach was crouched at the pool edge, waiting for me. I didn’t want to stop and talk to him. I wanted to keep swimming.

Coach said, Listen, Julie. I thought about it some more over break, and I’ve decided it’s not quite fair for you to have this lane all to yourself.

A twig snapped in my chest. I said, You told me I could swim here.

He said, I told you we could try it out. He didn’t smile or shrug his shoulders. He was looking out at the end of the lane, away from me. He said, And I’ve done some more thinking, and I talked to some other folks about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not going to work out.

I said, Who did you talk to?

Coach said, I had some conversations with some other coaches.

I hated the idea of Coach standing around talking about me with other coaches at what, a Christmas party? A bar? I said, No one else wants to swim in Lane Six.

Coach said, Unfortunately, Julie, that’s not what it comes down to.

I said, Okay then, I’ll quit. I knew, I had some idea, that I sounded like a brat, a bad baby making threats to get her way. But it had worked before, and I didn’t care — I wouldn’t go back to Lane Five, with the swimmers who passed me and hated me. I couldn’t stand the idea of going back there. I made a New Year’s resolution. I said, What if you just let me stay here and keep training until the next meet?

Other swimmers were starting to mass at the walls. It was time for Coach to stand up and call out the next drill. He looked at me without looking at me. He looked at me and thought poor him, it was so hard to be a swim coach. The next meet was in a week. He said, We can do that.

I said, How good of a time would I have to get? but Coach was already standing up and blowing his whistle and walking away from me.