This is weeks later. This is how the summer has been passing, with you thinking about Paul, and taking the girls to swim practice, and sometimes seeing Paul at the facility and talking with him, and Thomas still not touching you, and you thinking about Paul even more. This is the air filled with the scent of the knee-high grown mint. This is your stream, lower now than in the spring, bordered by baneberry and pink lady-slipper, the flowers past bloom but the leaves full. This is your road in front of your house hardly visible through the hanging vines of the Spanish moss tree and the leaves of the tupelo and the old hemlock blocking the view and the sounds of passing cars. These are the storm clouds gathering from the south, sitting over the pond heavy with algae the color of forsythia and thick with tadpoles about to grow legs, turning the surface water dark gray.
This is you at a wedding, taking pictures of the bride, trying not to take a picture when she’s swatting at the mosquitoes feasting on her bare arms. This is you remembering your own wedding with Thomas, when he grabbed you by the arm right before you said the vows, holding up his index finger to everyone seated, letting them know he just wanted a moment. Then he took you back behind the barn on the property where you were married. “What? What?” you said, wanting to know what was going on and seeing your white shoes disappearing into grass that hadn’t been mowed because no one expected anyone from the wedding party to be walking around there next to the old barn boards, a rusted tractor, and the rock foundation. What was wrong? Did he want to stop the wedding? He kissed you there. It was a long kiss, as if he had all the time in the world, and there weren’t one hundred people waiting for the both of you and wondering what had happened. When he was done, he said, “That’s the real kiss I want to give you. It won’t be the same in front of all of those people. Remember this kiss when we’re old and gray,” he said, and then he grabbed your hand again and the two of you ran back up to where the judge was and you stood in front of him. Everyone seated cheered then. You knew you were married at that moment, saying the vows wasn’t even necessary. Now this is you thinking how one of the grooms looks like your brother. He’s got the same eyes that appear half asleep. The groom is probably high, you think, and then of course you start thinking about your brother, and about how he shot himself, about how the blood . . . You can feel yourself slipping into thinking about him. It’s almost as if you’re ducking in through a door with a sign on the front that says “Dead Brother Door.” You are relieved when you realize there’s a way not to think about him. All you have to do is think about Paul instead. This is you looking at the road every few seconds, thinking you’ll see Paul driving by because the wedding is not far from Paul and Chris’s house. This is you missing the chance to take a photo of the groom having his lapel straightened by his mother because you are too busy looking at the road. This is you also missing the chance to take a photo of the bride hugging all three of her bridesmaids at once—they’re huddled together like teammates about to break into a cheer—because you think you actually do see Paul at the wedding, with his ponytail hanging down, and with his back facing you as he’s getting a drink. You know it would be highly coincidental if he were at this wedding, but just maybe he is. You run up to him, and then almost drop your camera when he turns around and is somebody else, somebody with large nostrils and a deeply receding hairline. He doesn’t have the thick hair Paul has, or the fine aquiline nose. This is you later, leaving the wedding in the dark while the father of the bride sets off celebratory fireworks in a field. You consider driving to Paul and Chris’s just to look in the window and see if he’s there, but when you look down at yourself, in the glow of an especially large display of palm and willow fireworks with bursting light that falls in tendrils, you see that your dress is rumpled, your sandaled feet covered in bits of grass wet with dew, and your hair is hanging in strands about your face like drooping antennae. This is you deciding that if you did drive to his house, on the pretense of saying hello to Chris, and he was there by himself, you’d be too embarrassed about the way you look to talk to him. You wouldn’t even get out of the car. You’d drive away and he’d think you were stalking him, which, of course, you probably would be.
This is you the next day thinking you’d like to think that it was the hot summer lightning you just drove through on the way to practice that’s giving you the urge to reach out and help Chris, but odds are it isn’t. It’s not like the lightning struck you or the car. The only things hitting your car were the giant marble-sized balls of hail. The lightning was only close enough to make you and your daughters’ fingers feel tingly at their ends for a while. When you arrive at the practice, your fingers still a bit tingly, and your shoes wet, you realize you should help Chris. Your realization comes in the form of some kind of energy. Maybe it’s a form of “friend energy.” Your mind telling you that what is more important than your obsession with Paul is your new friendship with Chris. After all, she’s in the same boat you are right now—a sinking one with a husband who’s half there—and she can probably understand what you’re going through. You’ve been feeling horribly guilty when you see Chris at the facility. You feel so guilty you haven’t even talked to her the last few practices. You’ve collected your girls in the lobby and run out the door, hoping you wouldn’t even see her in the parking lot. Today you will change. You will get Chris involved in her daughter’s swim life. It will get her mind off her delusion that her husband is cheating on her. Over and over again you have seen mothers and fathers who can rattle off the times of their daughters and sons, and know exactly what they need to break in order to move up the ladder, and enter age groups, zones, sectionals, and even nationals. Those parents, like Dinah, even know the times of other people’s kids. Those parents go to every single meet and outfit their vans with mattresses and in pitch-black predawn carry their sleeping children out to the car bundled in blankets so that they won’t have to lose any sleep and have their fitness compromised when they swim their races. Those parents don’t have time to fight or quarrel or accuse each other. Those parents, maybe those parents are really smart, you think, and then you think for a moment that maybe you should be one of those parents too, but then you dismiss that thought quickly, knowing that you can barely remember your locker combination, or your age, or the birthdates of your children, so how could you possibly remember both your daughters’ times and the times they need to beat? How could you possibly lift your children out of bed and put them in the car while they’re sleeping? You aren’t strong enough, and your oldest girl is already taller than you are. Christ, she’s menstruating already, and you know that Thomas won’t get up in the morning to help carry them, he would laugh at the idea of you being so serious about swimming. “To what end?” he would say. And both of you have agreed that the worst thing you can imagine is having to go to college for swimming, having to maintain a scholarship and good grades and swim every morning when you could be staying up late working with a group of friends in the library, having sex, or going to keg parties. You picture Thomas laughing, throwing his head back while he laughs at you for turning into an über swim mom, which is what every swim mom has the potential to become the longer her children are on the team, and the closer her children are to reaching an age when they could get into college with a swim scholarship.
The place to start is with the swimsuit, of course. That is what Cleo wants, a racing suit. The racing suit means that she is serious. She is hungry to win. On your computer at practice, you show Chris all the racing suits to choose from. Some are low drag and some change flow conditions along the swimmer’s body. Some have fabric splices that allow for greater flexibility, some are neck to knee, some are johns, some are tanks, some are thin straps, some are wide, some are scoop backs, cross backs, V-2 backs, wing backs, super backs, fly backs, spider backs, diamond backs, butterfly backs, extreme backs, and max backs. Some have maximum compression aiding in blood flow and improving stability, some have minimal permeability, some have undergone a technical heating process to produce an ultra-smooth, lightweight surface, some have flatlock stitching, some are hydrophobic, some are coated with Teflon, some . . . “What?” Chris says. “Teflon?” and then she groans and tells you how a few years ago she threw out all her old Teflon-coated pans because she could see the coating was scraping off each time she used the spatula to turn food in the pan, and she realized the coating was ending up in their mouths. “Now you’re asking me to have my daughter race in Teflon?” Chris asks.
“I know, who would think anything associated with heavy metal pans could make your daughter swim faster, but it does,” you say.
“And what’s this about hydrophobic suits?” Chris asks. “Isn’t hydrophobia associated with rabies?” You tell her you don’t think it’s the same thing. Hydrophobia in this case is what you want. It repels the water, lessening the resistance. In the end, Chris finds a john she likes for Cleo and they order it for overnight shipping. There’s another swim meet in a week, and it is important for Cleo to wear the suit during practice to see how it feels, so there won’t be any surprises when she has to wear it all day.
You wish, for a moment, you were swimming instead of technical suit shopping with Chris. You watched a video at home on how to perfect the fly, and you want to practice bringing your hands up earlier in the recovery. You have always dragged your hands far behind yourself, as if waiting for someone to grab on to them and keep you from completing your stroke. Who? Maybe someone who could convince you that all the swimming you are doing is pointless, that maybe you should be trying to get your daughters to pay more attention to improving their own swimming since they are the ones with potential and not you, or maybe you should be at home instead or out in the world trying to make a difference. A difference to what, you don’t know. You aren’t one to volunteer in your town or work at the food shelf or be a driver for the meals-on-wheels program. You prefer to stay at home when you can. When it is a warm day and the clouds are far away from each other, you go outside and lie on a blanket and feel the sun on your face. You aren’t thinking about making a difference in the world when you’re lying on a blanket under the sun. You are mostly thinking about the kind of bug that is trying to land on your face. Is it a deerfly? A mosquito? A stray hair from your own head mimicking a bug as it blows in the breeze? And what about that bird blocking your sun for a moment? Is it a raven? A crow? And what is the difference?