The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [40]
The Hairy Girls
GIRL SWIMMERS ARE HAIRY.
I don’t know how much you know about these things, but competition swimmers don’t shave their legs unless they are preparing for the big meet, Regionals, State, Senior Nationals, for instance. So when I was a girl who barely had any hairs looking up at the towering corpus of Nancy Hogshead from the puny viewpoint of the pool, their leg hair was downright scary. And they had pube hair sticking out of their suits up at the top of their thighs and going into their business. Boy. Talk about terrifying.
OK that’s a lie. It wasn’t terrifying. It was mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop staring. It made me into a mouth breather.
When Jo Harshbarger showered in the locker rooms, all I saw was her legs as something I longed to pet, and her stuff as a little furry special place, especially since as a girl I was afraid to look at tits or twats or even faces.
That’s a lie too. I stared at tits and coochie as hard as a drunk eyeballing a fifth of vodka.
These hairy women - they were - they were mythic. As a kid, I had no idea what they were in real life - students, girlfriends of something, females who used hand-held hairdryers, people who shopped at the mall with purses and drove cars around - but at the pool and in the locker rooms they were mythic. I think that’s why I remember so many of their names, these larger than life to a kid women - Jo Harshbarger and Evie Kosenkranius and Karen Moe and Shirley Babashoff.
Lynn Collella Bell.
I used to walk around the locker rooms and toddle dreamily out to my mom’s car looking up at the sky with LynnCollellaBellLynnCollelaBellLynnCollellaBell making song loops in my skull. LynnColllelaBell with the broadest shoulders and teeniest hips I’d ever seen. Making me hippoventate.
Is it any wonder that by the time I was 12 I could barely keep from biting one of them? All that flesh and wet. Me standing forever in the hot shower staring and staring and I’m pretty sure drooling … it’s a wonder I didn’t pass out in all the dreamy steam and crack my skull open.
For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I wanted to lunge at one of them and hump them like a little monkey. At home, in bed, alone, I’d get on my stomach and butterfly kick my bed to death. Or maul a pillow grinding my hips and clenching my knees around it. Finally it got so frustrating - this whatever it was I had in me - I had to resort to hair care items like brushes and combs and rubber bands. Snap.
Yeah? Have you ever tried it? Then shut up.
You know, now that I’m thinking of it, it didn’t even occur to me to put something UP IN THERE. I didn’t get my period until I was much older due to my athlete body, and no one, not my mother, not my sister, not any of my friends, not my swim coach bothered to explain the manwoman sex thing to me. I mean of course I figured it out later, what with television and film and so forth, and my slutty friend Kelly Gates who explained it to me while I barfed a little in my own mouth, but for a good long while, and you know, even today if I sit too close to one, I thought I might die from wanting to rub myself raw on a girl.
Look I’m trying to say I didn’t have little girl crushes like you are imagining. And I didn’t have the cliché swimmers are all dykes deal - though lots of swimmer girls regularly spanked twinkies, I was to learn later - no, it was much more serious. I mean I was in pain. Whatever blue balls were, I was pretty sure I had them. Every day at practice, in the showers, with all that girl stuff right in front of my face. All the soaped up torsos and boobs, all the uninhibited washing of you know whats, the bubbles sliding down their asses and legs. If a kid could coronary from want, I’d be a dead woman.
No, I didn’t want to have a slumber party. I didn’t want to go to the mall.
I wanted to use my hair brush and rubberbands and make someone ... whimper.