The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [7]
Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper. I had a journal I hid under my bed. I didn’t know what a journal was. It was just a red notebook that I wrote pictures and true things and lies in. Interchangeably. It made me feel-like someone else. I wrote about my father’s angry loud voice. How I hated it. How I wished I could kill it. I wrote about swimming. How I loved it. About how girls made my skin hot. About boys and how being around them made my head hurt. About radio songs and movies and my best friends Christy and how I was jealous of Katie but also wanted to lick her and how much I loved my swim coach Ron Koch.
I wrote about my mother … the back of her head driving me to and from swim practice. Her limp and leg. Her hair. How gone she was, selling houses, winning awards into the night. I wrote letters to my gone away sister that I never sent.
And I wrote a little girl dream. I wanted to go to the Olympics, like my teammates.
When I was 11 I wrote a poem in my red notebook that went: In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim.
My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water.
The Best Friend
WHEN I WAS 15 MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT WE WERE moving from Washington state to Gainesville, Florida because the best swim coach in the nation was there - Randy Reese, the coach of Florida Aquatic Swim Team.
I remember sitting in my room alone thinking what? Why would we leave our home out of the blue for something called F.A.S.T.? Why would we leave the trees and the mountains and the rain and the green of the Northwest for a strip of sand and alligators? We didn’t know anyone in Florida. I’d never been there. The only things that mattered to me were at the pool - the only people I trusted or loved, the only time in my life I felt O.K., the only place I felt like something besides daughter. And why was he telling me we were moving for me? I didn’t ask for that. Why would I?
I loved my swim coach. He was the only man I knew who was kind to me. He’s the man that explained to me why there was blood running down my leg at swim practice and what to do about it when I thought I was dying of cancer. He’s the man that I spent six hours a day six days a week with training to win. He corrected my stroke. He pushed me when I tired. He lifted me up in his arms when I won and put an arm around me and a towel when I lost. When I said, “ What about Ron Koch?” My father, he said, “ No one knows Ron Koch.”
When I asked my mother her face creased with worry. She pat one hand with the other on her thigh and said “ Well, Belle, your daddy’s been promoted. It’s a lot of money.”
When I asked her if she wanted to move to Florida, she said, “ He says you deserve the best. Besides Belle, it’s sunny!”
In reality, my father got promoted to lead architect for the southeastern coast. But that isn’t what he told me. It was, as he put it, the sacrifice they were making for me.
Inside our house always smelled like cigarette. Back in my bed I thought about my best friend Christie. Who I ’d known since I was five. Who I’d been eating lunch with everyday in the locker halls of high school. Who I’d sit by in Art class wishing every class was art class. Whose family I’d vacationed with, wishing they were mine. I cried so hard I chewed on my pillowcase until it ripped.
And so I left the water of one pool and slipped into another. Water,