The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [9]
I don’t quite know how to describe how much I loved him. But it was a love I didn’t have a wit’s notion what to do with. I flirted as hard as I could, but he didn’t seem interested in me sexually. Other Hogtown guys seemed to want into my pants on a regular basis, even at 7-Eleven, but him? Never. So I had sex with Hogtown men. And I continued to get all up in it with girl swimmers. But nothing between me and the artist.
And yet he made me the most gorgeous burgundy silk prom dress you can imagine, with a drop down back and tiny crisscrossing straps in the front and near my ass - NO ONE had a cooler dress. It’s possible no one ever has. In any state.
And he made me a fetching short-waisted big-shouldered women’s 1950s blazer from a man’s suit coat that everyone at school drooled over.
And he cut my hair in a bob that turned heads.
And he applied make-up on my face (the only make-up I’d ever worn) and took fashion photos of me.
So the love I had just got deeper and deeper for this man, but there was nowhere to put it. It just built up in me like sperm must in men who aren’t getting any. Sometimes I thought I might faint in his presence, but he’d bake something and it would taste so good. He could make cheesecake, for christ’s sake. All I wanted was to be around him. All the time. His skin smelled like cocoa butter.
Days and days and days and days and days. Perhaps the happiest of my life to that point. Just underneath how much I hated the Florida.
Then one day my drunk-drawled mother told Jimmy Heaney’s mother in the Publix Grocery store aisle that she heard my artist was gay. What I’m saying is that my dumb ass mother outed my artist before he’d outed himself. He’s homosexual. In a southern drawl.
And he stopped.
He stopped calling me. He stopped seeing me. He stopped having me in his life at all.
You know what it felt like to have a beautiful gay man stop loving me?
Like being dead.
Suitcase
SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SWIMMER. Everything collected in my memory curls like water around events in my life. Or maybe everything that’s ever happened to me I understand better if I picture it in a great, aqua, chlorinated pool. Not even Florida could kill the swimmer in me.
At my senior prom in Florida I armwrestled five boys about to become men. I lost once. After the dance we all got drunk and climbed the fence of the pool in Gainesville, Florida. We went skinny dipping in a 50-meter competition pool - the same pool I spent two hours every morning, two hours every evening in swimming. My body was stronger than it has ever been in my life. I looked like someone’s son. The biceps of a son. The jaw. The shoulders. My hair whiting out gender. Breastless. When it came time for everyone to make out, I did laps.
That summer was long and wet differently for me than it was for other people. The air got thick with more than heat. In June, letters began to arrive in our mailbox. They were scholar - ship offers. For swimming. Exit visas.
In the evenings, I’d go out to the mailbox. My breathing would jackknife in my lungs just before I opened the box, and I’d shuffle through our idiotic mail waiting to feel the weight of something different. Waiting for my leaving.
Five letters came.
The first scholarship letter was cool and weighted in my hands. It was from Brown. The red and black logo of Brown University on the envelope looked royal to me. I ran my fingertips across it. The envelop felt smooth - the paper announcing its difference. I smelled it. I closed my eyes. I held it against my heart. I walked it to the house almost believing in something.
Inside, I put it on the kitchen table. It sat there all through dinner - which we ate in the living room watching TV.