The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [89]
Joy.
A word. An act of imagination. Me, Andy, Miles. In the pool we work on Miles’ water skills. My husband swims and floats and laughs, dives down like a kid, making his nose run from the chlorine. Not caring. He can swim the deep end.
When I am in the Salishan pool with Miles, I play. Usually we play water games Miles has invented, all of which involve him getting to keep his head above the water. This time he tells me he has a very important game. I say, “OK. What is it?”
“I’m going to put my whole head underwater,” he says.
!
I nod and stay quiet, trying not to blow it. I move toward him to hold him so we can dunk down together quickly. Painlessly.
“No,” he says, “you stay over there and do it and I’ll do it over here and we’ll look at each other and try to hold our breath as long as we can.”
!
“OK.” I say.
My heart.
He’s got his goggles on. He’s got a hold of his nose with one hand, and with the other, he’s going to count off.
One.
Two.
Three.
And then he takes the hugest breath in like ever. And puts his head under. All the way. I do too. I can see him through the blue. His beautiful underwater head. For the first time. Holding his own breath. A magic.
When we rush up for air we are both laughing and I’m telling him how proud I am of him and he’s splashing around and Andy comes over and we do a group hug. You know, like people goofing off on vacation.
“Again!” he says.
We do. We do and we do.
In this water with the two of them - the boy, the man. I almost can’t breathe. I didn’t know. It is a family. It is mine.
It’s a small tender thing, the simplicity of loving.
I am learning to live on land.
The Other Side of Drowning
I WONDER. WHO WAS ROOTING FOR ME?
For the first time since I was maybe 14, I’m watching Super-8 films of myself swimming. Racing. My father took them. Many, many of them. They’ve been sitting silent and immobile in a cardboard box since 2003 when my father died - two years after my mother went. I knew about them. They’ve been down in the garage. I just never … drug them up from the depths until now.
I don’t quite know how to explain to you what it is like watching the little woman swim for her life. I mean from where I am now. Look at her go. Is she swimming away from something? Or to something?
On film I watch myself swim, and even though on the surface the plot is about winning races, or losing, there is something you will never see.
What you will not see is how far. How many miles I had to swim to come back to a simple chlorinated pool where I might… just be.
I swim laps three, sometimes four times a week now. At the Clackamas Aquatic Center near my home. It feels… it feels like the closest thing to home I have ever had.
At the pool, the people who swim in the lap lanes next to me are not athletes. Though occasionally one will show up and my game will come alive in my body - I can’t help it. I’ll race them until they leave. We usually don’t speak - just nod at each other when it’s over, as if we’ve shared something intimate.
But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics - mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers - their massive breasts and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds. When I swim by them I watch their legs and bodies underwater, and feel a strange kinship with a maternal lineage. You know you can smile underwater. You can laugh.
Twice in my life I have found myself swimming next to an albino. I felt lucky somehow. Like I’d found the right water.
At the pool near my home there is a woman who is missing a leg. She swims her laps with a prosthetic that has a flipper at the end. Very high-tech. Her workouts, I’ve noticed, are formidable. I love her made-up leg. I like to swim near her.
Sometimes kids and teens take up a lane -no doubt they are on swim teams - I can tell by their spectacular strokes and the kinds of swimsuits and caps and goggles they wear. They are in the sweet. Effortlessly.
Old men people the lap lanes too, most always extra friendly to me. Their skin