The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [8]
I hated it.
Randy Reese barely looked at me. There were Olympians on his team. I’d try to catch them, keep up with them, and sometimes succeed, but no matter how hard I swam or what my times were or my weight or place on the podium, I never felt like I was … his. When I did well, he’d show me my splits on a clipboard. Numbers. I’d stand there dumb and dripping, waiting for a hug. But he was not that kind of man. Before important swim meets? He’d make all the women swimmers weigh themselves. If you didn’t hit your weight? You’d get “licks.” A Styrofoam kickboard whack at the back of your thighs and ass. One lick for every pound of flesh. In this way the pool became a place of shame, and so there was nothing to distinguish it any longer from my home.
Whatever promise I may have carried in my swimmer skin, whatever hope I had in the water began to drown. At home the weight and rage of father took the air out of the rooms. At the pool a man yelled on the side and hit us with kick boards and never smiled.
At the State Swimming Championships my senior year our 200 yard medley relay had the best time in the nation. I stood on the podium with the three other girls and looked out into the stands. My father wasn’t anywhere. My mother smelled like vodka - it seemed I could smell it all the way across the pool. Randy Reese didn’t even look at me. Then Jimmy Carter took all little girl dreams of swimmer glory away from our bodies with a boycott - Randy’s famous pool full of winners included - anyway. There was no word left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.
I hated Randy Reese. I hated Jimmy Carter. I hated god. Also my math teacher, Mr. Grosz. I hated my father most of all, a hate that never left but just changed forms. My life had been ruined by men. Now even the water seemed to forsake me.
But I met a boy not like any other in the water.
In the pool with me. For those excruciating three years in Hogtown. A beautiful boy. With a long body and long arms and long legs and long eyelashes and long hair. And dark tanned skin. And dark eyes. And he had a secret in his skin too - not about fathers though.
This boy, my friend, was hands down the most talented artist in high school. That’s an idiotic way to say it - he was more talented than ANY of the people in ANY high school; in fact, he was more talented than ANYONE in Florida who called themselves “artists” by about 500 miles long and 160 miles wide. He painted. He sculpted. He drew. When he did, there was not anything that ever came out of his hands that was not astonishing.
When I’d first moved to the hellhole of Gainesville, he called our house the first week and invited me to float down the Itchitucknee river on an inner tube. What a strange language coming through the phone holes. Itchetucknee? I had no idea on earth what he was talking about but I said yes.
The water of the Itchetucknee is ice-cube cold. And the river is not wide, but it is deep, and it has a current. Whitetail deer, raccoons, wild turkeys, wood ducks, and great blue herons can be seen from the river. And there are … well, snakes. But there is a kind of beauty to it. The aqua blue crystalline Ichetucknee flows six miles through shaded hammocks and wetlands before it joins the Santa Fe River. I floated next to my friend the artist for three hours. He asked me questions about my life. I asked about his. We laughed. We basked in the sun like reptiles. We swam like swimmers do when they’ve been freed from laps. At the end of the float I felt I’d known him for years.
I think it might be true that we spent every single day together except Sundays for nearly three years. Much