The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [45]
I don’t know why women can’t make the story do what they want.
I don’t.
When we got back to our ordinary lives, Claire told me she was in love with me. A sentiment I couldn’t find in myself to return, hard as I tried. I wish I could go back and try. It was real, what she offered. But kindness wasn’t something I even recognized.
A Body in a Kayak
WITH HANNAH, IT TOOK ME WEEKS TO FIGURE OUT IF she was attracted to me or just really pissed off - her jokes always seemed a little mean, always left me feeling like a female headed slow-poke. Sometimes she’d charley horse me good ones in the arm or thigh hard enough to leave a lump. It didn’t weird me out. Unlike everything else, I could feel it.
Once she bit my cheek so hard I sat in my classes the next week looking like I’d been mauled by a chimp. When she bit my cheek? I laughed so hard I cried.
I never thought Hannah was hurting me when she’d do things like shove me up against a wall for fun hard enough to ache my shoulderblades. I felt like I had pain in me that needed to come out. More and more I wished for the force of her. She’d drink my vodka from the bottle and we’d go for long walks at night in the graveyard next to the college and fuck on the stones of dead folks. After she’d flip silver dollars in the air and we’d lay on our backs and watch bats dive at them. I’d talk about dead things. She’d let me.
A few months in to our whatever it was she walked up to me and whispered, I signed us up for kayaking.
?
The U of O pool is where I first made Jr. Nationals as a teen. The pool had not changed - a slimy chlorine hell with Disney ducks painted on the walls. We were two of three women in the class. The third, big red, was 6’ 2” with a mane of red hair all the way to her ass. I had a hard time not touching her hair. In our giant fiberglass kayaks we learned kayaky things from our instructor, Jeff. In our cockpits. Things like the life-saving Eskimo roll. Hoping to master an ender. A pry stroke. A put in. A wet exit. Hannah learned fast because she was a tomboy woman, and I learned fast because anything in the water felt like home.
Our last class in the pool our instructor put each of us one at a time on the end of the diving board, kayak noses pointing forward, and then he grabbed the back end and heaved so we went in nose first and hard. The idea being that you’d immediately be upside down underwater and have to practice your Eskimo roll. I loved it. Not the life saving part. I loved being pitched over the edge and being upside down underwater. I asked Jeff to do it again and again. Harder, I’d say, and Jeff would shove me off the board. I’d stay under for as long as I could - sometimes until I heard Hannah or Jeff yelling my name.
At the end of the five weeks our instructor took us all to the McKenzie River for our “final.” Little bit of speed in the alley, little bit of white water for excitement. I decided that day it would be a really good idea to get incredibly high just before I met up with Hannah at the river’s edge.
On the forest trail to the put in I remember Hannah being annoyed with me, because it took me too long to put my life jacket on and too long to secure my paddle into my kayak and too long to pick my kayak up and trudge down the forest trail to the put in as I stopped and turned to look at things and got the kayak tip caught in bushes and wow look at my own magnificent red converse sneakers a step at a time in front of me making a rhythm and cottonwood blowing around like summer snow and look at the intriguing hats in the branches no wait those are BIRDS and stopping and laughing until she came back for me going WHAT ARE YOU DOING, EXACTLY? My kayak in the dirt.
Eye to eye, she saw it. Christ Lidia, you are high. What the fuck? You have to go in the water. To my huhuhuhuhuhuh.
So she slapped me hot and hard right on the cheek.
Time stopped. I’m pretty sure my pupils pinned. I saw stars. I liked it. For a split second I felt alive.