The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [87]
Still, at my son’s age, I was a racer. You know those little plastic wind-up bathtub things - contraptions with small flippers or limbs attached to internal rubber bands which, when wound, rotate at alarming speeds? Sending a little dolphin or boat or shark shooting across the tub? That’s what seven year old girl racers look like. Heads down. Twenty-five meters. Maybe one breath. Maybe. Whoever we were on land, once freed in water, we grew dangerously alive.
My son’s been in swimming lessons - level A - three times now. At the end of the lessons they always hand me the green card that says mamma of Miles, your son can barely float, he’ll only hold his breath above the water, if he’s in the water without supervision he’ll sink to the bottom like a tire, and they smile, and I smile, and Miles beams, and then we go home and eat OREOS and I give him another one of my trophies.
When I work with him alone in the pool, he clings to me like a little sea monkey until I let him put his full regalia back on.
It’s his head.
He doesn’t want to put his head in. When I ask him why, he answers incredulously, “Because the water will go in my nose and ears and go into my brain. Duh.”
I look at him for a long minute. He doesn’t back down.
“I see,” I said. “ Where’d you get that idea?”
Quite convincingly, he responds. “Harry Potter.”
Harry Potter.
Goddamn that little bespectacled twit.
I instantly know which Harry Potter scene he is talking about. It’s the one from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, where the five students have to compete in the Tri-Wizard’s Cup. One of the trials is an ocean dive to save trapped friends and loved ones who have been suspended underwater by strange little sea witches with pitchforks. Each student must figure out a magical way to breathe underwater, or they’ll die, and all their loved ones trapped underwater will die, water will go up all the noses and flood all their ears and drown all their brains unless they have special underwater gear. Total kid death fest if they don’t find a way to breathe underwater. Neville Longbottom, the buck-toothed nerd kid interested in animals and botany and ichthyology, gives Harry Potter magic Gillyworms. Then he grows temporary gills and webbed hands and feet.
Christ. Why does anyone become a mother?
I look at Miles. I say, “Miles, you know when you see mamma swimming and swimming in the lap lanes?”
“Yes,” he says, looking solemnly at the floor.
“Well, water has never gone into my brain. Not once.”
He looks at me quite seriously. I can see from his eyes he’s puzzling out an answer. He’s a thinker, that one, so I already know he’s coming up with a good one. He would have been all over Hogwarts. “Let’s hear it then,” I say.
“Then you must have had a waterhorse. A waterhorse who put you on its back when you were little and afraid of the water and then the water horse dove down underwater and taught you how to swim because the waterhorse loved you and you loved the waterhorse and there was magic.” He rests his case, hands on hips.
Of course there was magic. Like in “The Waterhorse.”
Goddamn American kid films.
The year I was seven the kid movies were The Aristocats, Pippi in the South Seas, and King of the Grizzlies. Nobody died from having water go into their brains. Wait. The Poseidon Adventure - 1972. That whole Shelley Winters thing. Man. That still gets me. That’s some sad shit. I think I bawled for an hour when they took me to see that. I think we had to leave the theater. And I think my father said “If you’re going to cry like a baby, you can’t go to the movies. Crybabies have to stay home. For christ’s sake.” Pounding the steering wheel. My mother looking out the window with her endless denial. My sister half feeling sorry for me and half glad for another target in the family.
Now that I’m thinking about it, except for swimming, I was a big fat failure at many, many things. Being in public, for one, like at all, but other things too. For instance bike