The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [86]
The next week, driving to work in my car, I got an earache and my skull felt like a lightning bolt fracture had cracked it open.
My father’s voice filled the ball of my head, curled around the lobes and through the canals of gray matter. It closed my eyes and clenched my teeth.
I began to not only hear my father again, but as clearly as you see the face of your husband, your wife, in front of you, I saw my father’s face at the moment of his drowning. On his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, seizuring.
I nearly wrecked the car twice, unable to see the road or anything else, my ears gone crazy, the deep baritone of his voice making my brain ache.
How to Hold Your Breath
KID STORIES.
What sad little bobbers we all were.
Here’s a pathetic little image: me at age two in a hooded baby blue parka and little red stretch pants jumping off a 25ʹ dock into Lake Washington, yelling “WIM.”
They say, and keep in mind the story comes from my now dead crackpot parents, they say I’d jump in any water I saw. Pools. Rivers. Lakes. The Shojita’s carp-filled garden pond. That I was simply drawn to water, and I’d run and leap with one of those silly toddler glee smiles smeared across my face, and then I’d sink like a stone.
Somebody, usually my eyerolling sister, would have to jump in after me every time, and pull me sputtering to safety.
So when I was three my mother signed me up for swim lessons. But it was my father who put me in the car, drove me to Lake Washington, took off my little clothes and threw me in.
In November.
I was by far the youngest kid there.
I can’t tell you I remember any of this, but I sure the hell can conjure up an image of my own skin bluing in the icy waters. And I feel pretty certain I have muscle memory in my mouth of my teeth nearly shattering from kid cold chatter. If I learned to swim that year I did it in a frozen zombie state, under the heavy weight of father, who, every time I came running out crying stuck his hand and arm out of the station wagon window like an angry god and pointed back to the water.
If there is more to that story it drifts away when I go near it - it’s too far back, or too deep.
When I first began writing this story my son Miles was seven. So that means I’m seven too sometimes. I mean my seven year old me swims back during the course of an ordinary day all the time, whether or not I’m ready. Miles absolutely loves swimming pools. The thing is, Miles can’t exactly … swim. When Miles gets in the pool, there is no other way to say this, he’s a spaz. And he’s wearing more weenie water gear than a special needs deep sea diver. Don your protective gear: goggles, life vest. Then he wades in and has the time of his life, prepared for any aqua danger, looking like a water nerd. When he’s in the water he laughs and laughs. He shows me all the things he can do in the water, things that amount to splashy little circles or pushing his way across the pool like a water bug, and says, “Lidia, look, I’m doing swimming.” He throws his little arms around and kicks his unsynchopated legs and holds his head in this sort of strange crane upwards, his mouth in a little smirk nowhere near the water, his goggle-bugged eyes looking my way. It drowns my heart.
When I was seven I won 13 trophies with little faux gold girls leaning over for the dive on top. If my seven year old me saw his seven year old in the same pool? With all the gear? Well first of all my little posse of athletes wouldn’t have gone anywhere near him. Gyawd they would have gone. What’s wrong with that kid? Is he special ed? But the me inside the me would have adored him. I bet my current salary I would have been the one wishing I could swim over and try out his cool gear.
When I’m with him now, if any of the kids playing around in the pool near us who look like they were born fucking seals even GLANCE at him I shoot them a death look so sharp it slicks their hair back, reddens their smug little faces and … well. Let’s just say something a lot worse than water going into your