The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [47]
It’s possible it would be impossible for me to drown.
After I shot through the rough and tumble of the whitewater tunnel I pulled the skirt and made a wet exit not even bothering to hold on to my kayak. I somersaulted twice in the current and banged my knees and shoulder and something else on rocks and saw my own air bubbles furiously leaving my nose. But I popped up anyway, taking in the biggest breath of my life. Coughing. Snot all over. Something warm on my cheekbone. Blood. The cold finally making me shiver.
I saw the entire posse on the shore, some of them yelling and waving or pointing. Then my exasperated instructor paddled up alongside me and grabbed me by my life jacket. “Let’s get you in - you gave us a scare - you gave us a goddamn scare, girl!” His voice controlled anger.
“Let go, Jeff,” I said, “I can swim it. Let go.”
It was true. I cut through the minor current easily. I swam upstream even though most of my strength had left my body.
Big red ended up swimming down my kayak and bringing it back to the exit edge. Magnificently. Hannah didn’t say much. She sat near me and ate an orange. She looked pale. She fed me orange slices. She looked extremely serious and soooooooo not high. I’d lost my high underwater. Jeff acted cranky - both because I nearly lost the kayak and paddle but also because he watched me enter the whitewater and surrender. It must be hard to know one of your students might drown. I wonder how often it happens. If at all. When we put our gear back onto the truck he pulled me aside. Were you trying to kill yourself? Jokingly, laughing the tight pitched nervous laugh of a man old enough to be one of our fathers.
Was I trying to kill myself. Letting go the paddle in deep water. Letting go the handlebars of the bike as a kid. Letting go the steering wheel. These are not questions I know the answers to.
Later at home Hannah put her arm around my waist at her front door. She kissed my cheek lightly as whisper. She tried to be womanish and caring, but it wasn’t what I wanted. My eyes stung. My chest hurt. I wanted to see stars.
She put her hands on my shoulders to gently usher me inside. I stopped and turned my head back to look at her - no, I said, harder. I put my hand on the door. She put her hand on my hand. She pressed my hand against the wood. Harder. Let lips do what hands do. Let hips.
I wanted to be pushed through her door and shoved to the floor knees first, my elbows pinned behind my back, my hurt cheek against the hardwood floor, my ass skyward, my good cheek exposed to whatever was coming next. Her face close to my ear: you could have died.
The truth is I was a woman who thought of dead things. All the time. I couldn’t help it. Dead daughters. Dead fathers. Dead steelhead. I wanted her to somehow knock it out of me body to body, even if it killed me, which it never did.
Maybe this is how the steelhead feels when it’s caught - thrashing itself against water, then land-a lifedeath fight. How some get released and others get eaten and others just float away, too weak to survive. All those body blows and wounds. Or when they swim upstream to spawn then die. Are they killing themselves? Or making life?
Inside her house, Hannah made me a cup of green tea.
But tenderness couldn’t touch me then.
I went swimming in the river alone every night that week. At a spot where hoodlums and teens got drunk and jumped in to shoot the rapids. Nobody cared that I was there. Or that I was older than them. Or alone. In nightwater, I didn’t have to feel what people are supposed to feel. There is a glooming peace there. At the end of the rapids, there is a still.
In water, like in books-you can leave your life.
Writing
AFTER MY MOTHER TRIED TO KILL HERSELF WITH THE sleeping pills, we shared a strange dream-time together. Every day after school and before swim practice I sat with her in the living room while she watched television soaps and drank. She looked exactly like a zombie. But one day, she put down the giant vodka tonic she was drinking. She