This is the next day at practice. The rain is coming down hard on the facility and it sounds loud, as if the roof were made out of tin sheets and the place were a barn. Practices seem to be better when the weather is bad. Everyone happier to be in a place where it’s warm, not minding being stuck indoors. The starts look better to you. Your girls go off the blocks in streamlines tight enough to fit through holes in doughnuts. They’ve also got spring in their legs that takes them almost to the first flag strung above the pool before they enter the water. Kim’s butterfly kick looks so strong, it looks like she’s getting as much speed from her down kick as she does from her recovery kick. It won’t be long, you think, before she starts breaking pool records again. She must be done with growing, and now her movements are not so awkward. She has grown into herself. The coach, a woman who was a you-don’t-know-how-many-time all-star champion in college, is really pushing them along. You admire the coach. Everyone admires the coach. The girls on the team all want her attention. Sofia tries to get her attention by being sarcastic and making the coach laugh. Alice tries to do it by crying and complaining over sore muscles and slight scratches that always seem to require the coach to fetch her an ice pack or a Band-Aid. Kim tries to get the coach’s attention by swimming the fastest she can. Alex tries to get the coach’s attention by being silly and showing the coach how she can make the muscles of her stomach roll like waves. The coach has days when she doesn’t laugh, though. She can be serious, and those are the days your girls tell you practice was hard or practice was boring. At one meet, the coach raised her voice at Sofia, telling her that she didn’t take it out fast enough in the first fifty, and your daughter came to you and cried. You agreed with the coach. You saw the race. It looked as if Sofia was daydreaming, which she probably was, having just put down a book before she dove into the water. She was probably still thinking about the book’s characters in midair. She was still inside of the book. She was reading a book that took place in Afghanistan, and she was probably flying kites in Kabul during her entry. She was eating fresh fruit and lamb on the steps of a mosque at the turn. She was not thinking about how she should have taken the first fifty out as hard as she could, because if she had been then she could have won the race. The coach talks to you, the parent, about this. “Sofia has to take it out faster,” she says to you. “And I told her so, and I’m sorry if I upset her, but maybe it’s good I upset her. Sometimes I have to be harsh with the swimmers, or maybe there are just some swimmers I know I can be harsh with and Sofia is one of them, because I get the sense that she’s not a head case. She won’t get so upset by criticism that she’ll ruin her stroke entirely. She mustn’t be afraid of expending her energy. She doesn’t realize how strong she really is, how much breath will be left inside of her even after the first fifty,” the coach says. When you talk to Sofia about it, she says, “I know, I know,” and then puts her head back into her book. In her world, strings of kites glued with shards of glass are cutting each other in half against a blue Afghan sky.
This is you in the water. You swim in a lane reserved for swimmers who are not on the swim team. You swim while the swim team swims alongside you. This is you thinking as you’re swimming that it sounds as if the water is whispering to you. Swimming always calms you. You rarely think about Thomas or your brother while you’re swimming. In fact, you started to swim more seriously to forget about your brother after his death. It’s as if the water embraces you, lets you know that here is a place you can be without getting hurt. I will buoy you. I will caress you. I will soothe you and whisper to you, it seems to say. You hear the faint shush of the water going by your ears as you freestyle forward. You wonder what the water, if it could talk, could possibly be telling you about your stroke. Could it be telling you to lift your arms up higher, as if you were reaching over a barrel, the way you have heard swim coaches do when describing the stroke? Could it be telling you to kick harder? After all, your kick is barely a splash, barely a flutter. After you take a swim yourself, just a mile of freestyle, a two-hundred individual medley, and an IM kick, not even a quarter of the workout that the swim team will do, you look at your toes in the shower. They look like toes on a child. They are fat and rounded, and not slender and long, the way Chris’s are. You wiggle them, letting them send up a happy hello to you from where they are on the tiled floor. You wash your hair that is thinning, thinking maybe your brother wasn’t so dumb after all, maybe doing yourself in before you’re really old and useless is the right way to go. A boy who is allowed in the women’s locker room because there is something wrong with the boy and he is in a wheelchair and has a woman who helps wash him, is in the next shower stall. The boy says the word “water” over and over again. “Yes, you like the water,” the woman says. You can hear soap or shampoo going through the boy’s hair in the next shower stall, as if the woman were playing with the boy’s hair, lifting it up into peaks like a troll, or creating a long blade of it through the center, like a foamy Mohawk.
When Paul, Chris’s husband, shows up after practice to pick Cleo up, you decide you’ll go and talk to him. Maybe there’s a way you can tell just by talking to him if he’s really cheating on Chris. “Hello, Paul,” you say, coming up to him, getting his attention as he’s turned away from you looking out the door. When he turns toward you smiling, you feel as though a light is shining back at you. Even the facility seems brighter, as if up above through the high skylights clouds have made way for sun, but it’s not the sun. The sun is on its way down. “Hi, Annie,” he says, his whole face opening up to you, as if the sole purpose of him standing there and waiting were for you to come by and talk to him. Has he always been this good-looking? you think to yourself. You don’t remember ever standing this close to him before. Usually it’s the mothers who have the kinds of jobs they can leave early to pick up the kids and drive them from school to practice whom you regularly see, not the fathers. You see Kim’s father sometimes waiting at practices, he’s always working on his computer, or you see Keith’s father at practices, always reading a war novel. You see Catherine’s father, a man who watches the entire practice attentively as if it were as exciting as a meet. You’ve seen Jonathan’s father sometimes driving up in his pickup with the lawn care logo on the side and driving off again after Jonathan’s gotten out of the truck with his swim bag, but again, it’s mostly the mothers you see. Maybe it’s because it’s been so long since Thomas, your own husband, has touched you in the night, and because when you tried to touch him last he patted your hand instead, that Paul suddenly seems attractive. But you are no spring chicken, and you would be very surprised if Paul even looked at you twice. You decide he will probably notice your graying hair first and then the wrinkles by your eyes that are so pronounced they look more like the head of a serious garden rake than the proverbial crow’s feet in lines of three, which to you sound almost dainty in comparison. You decide, when he looks at you, still smiling, that you can see why Chris, his beautiful wife, married him, and why any student of his would probably lean over his desk a little too far, revealing a little too much, in order to get his attention, and to get him to smile at her the way he has just smiled at you. You decide your friend Chris should maybe be more worried than you thought. You realize a few things.
You realize it has been a long time since you have met another man who you thought was attractive. You realize how you are probably a good wife, never talking to men other than your husband, never thinking maybe there are men you could flirt with, men who would talk to you about things other than the decline of civilization, and particles in the air you can’t see. You realize your eyeliner may be smudged and that you should run the tip of your finger under your eye so you don’t look as though you’ve been crying. You realize that when you speak, your voice sounds gravelly, as if all these years you’ve been smoking cigarettes instead of exercising almost daily, eating healthy food, and drinking from BPA-free containers. You realize that when he, Paul, smiles back at you it seems as if his eyes are twinkling, and as if they’re sending out points of light you can feel animating your face, making you smile back. You realize you have the urge to toss your hair out from where it lies on your shoulders, to give it fullness. You realize that you hold back that urge to toss your hair out from your shoulders because you realize it would be sending a type of signal you haven’t sent in a long time, a signal that you can be attractive if you want to. You realize that the sun is really down outside the facility, and that the pavement is turning dark, almost as dark as India ink. You realize you are thinking that maybe without the sunlight shining on you, you might not appear to have lines like garden rakes at the corners of your eyes. You realize you are staring at Paul’s lips as he talks. They are sensual. You realize now that you are standing close to him that he is taller than you previously thought, and that you have always been attracted to tall men. You realize you are asking Paul how he is enjoying being the parent of such a good swimmer on the swim team, and you realize he is answering you, and choosing his words carefully, saying he likes it just fine, that he thinks Cleo is the one who is really enjoying it, which is the way it should be. You realize you like the sound of his voice. It’s a deep voice that makes you look at the skin on his chest that you can see between the collars of his shirt, where the top three buttons are open. You look at his chest after hearing his voice, wondering what his voice would sound like if he were talking softly and you were laying your head against him. You realize you are stepping back, telling him you are glad you met him. You’re afraid of how much you’re imagining being closer to this man. You wonder where Thomas is. He came with you to the facility. He does come sometimes to work out or to watch the girls swim, but it’s rare these days, his work being more important. Even though you’ve asked Thomas to come more often to help at the meets, he says he’d rather work on the wood at home or spend extra hours at the lab. Now when you see Thomas coming down the hall from the men’s locker room, after having just showered and changed, you realize that you are relieved. You wish that Thomas, in his infinite wisdom about space and particles, could speed up and get to you faster. You realize Thomas is tall too, and has a deep voice, and eyes that sparkle, and that you are lucky he is all of the things that Paul is, and that you don’t have to toss your hair for Thomas. All that you have to do is go get in the car with Thomas, and go home, and at night, after he has patted your hand, and after images of your brother have paraded in front of you, all you have to do is sleep.
At breakfast alone the next morning when Thomas has left for work and the girls are upstairs, you are bent over. Hunched, you are folding in on yourself while you eat your raisin bran, thinking about how you aren’t supposed to think about the death of your brother since there’s no forgiving him and no getting mad at him, there’s just no more him. You don’t have the energy to lift your head up. It’s not the weight of the world pressing down you feel so much. It’s more like the weight of the world is sucking you down from below, pulling you into its fiery reaches, its melting core. The raisin bran tastes like cigar ash, and you think you’ve swallowed a bug.
This is you calling Chris, feeling bad that she’s upset about Paul, and asking if she’ll be driving to the next swim meet, and wanting her to come, telling her how nice the facility is, how even the hotel is nice. You know because you’ve been there before, for meets in the previous years. This is Chris saying, “No, I’m letting Paul take Cleo. At least he’ll be with Cleo, so seeing the woman he’s having an affair with won’t be an option.”
This is you coming home that evening after picking up the girls from practice and after a meeting with a potential client in a café to discuss her wedding-day photo shoot. You tell Thomas, while the girls go upstairs, and he’s reading at the kitchen table because there he can bask in the last light of the day, how this client wants all of her photos done in black-and-white, even if it’s a bright sunny day and even though her wedding sounds riotous with color—tangerine-colored bridesmaids dresses and tiger lily centerpieces on all of the tables and ring bearers in fuchsia. “Isn’t black-and-white cheaper? She sounds practical to me,” Thomas says, and then he tells you about the article he’s reading, about people who are hypersensitive. The slightest touch hurts them. The slightest noise deafens them, and they can’t help it. It’s in their genes. You wonder, while Thomas reads to you from the article, if he’s ever noticed the picture of your own wedding day framed on the wall in your bedroom, in direct view from where you lie on the bed, where it can be seen first thing when you both open your eyes, and last thing before you turn off the light. In the picture your bridesmaids are in red, holding bright red bouquets of roses, everything contrasting nicely against the white lace of your dress and Thomas’s black tux. In the picture your lips are the same red as the bridesmaids’ dresses and your cheeks are flushed red from all the excitement of the day. You think how much of the color would be lost if the photo were in black-and-white. The red of the bridesmaids’ dresses just looking dark, and the white of your dress looking colder, not as warm as it does beside the red dresses. In black-and-white Thomas’s tux would just be dark like the red dresses, nothing setting him apart from the bridesmaids at all, as if Thomas matched them, as if he had been more connected to them than he was to you on that day. This is you noticing how when the sun has gone down completely, Thomas still works at the kitchen table. In the growing dark, his outline becomes more solid, his light-brown hair now almost black, a different man altogether than the one you married. These are the girls coming into the room, Alex whistling and Sofia turning on lights, changing the mood very quickly. Thomas’s hair now light brown again, his eyes flecked with sparkling green. Pans get banged around in the shelves because Sofia is starving as usual and wants to bake herself cookies. Alex turns the radio on loud. The dog comes to walk between everybody, brushing you with the end of her tail, reminding all of you that soon she’s to be fed. This is Thomas telling you the girls should stay home and study instead of going off to the swim meet, and this is Sofia banging a tray on the countertop, saying no. This is Alex saying forget it, saying she wants to go to the meet. She’s at the top of her age group and doing well in breast, beating out almost everyone else in the fifty and hundred. This is you thinking, as Sofia preheats the oven, how it will warm up the house, and how soon, in a few weeks when summer’s fully arrived, it will be almost too warm outside to want to bake cookies inside and the dessert of choice, as it does every summer, will turn to ice cream and smoothies. This is Thomas later, telling the girls to grab their jackets and come out and see the stars. They take out a sleeping bag and lay it on the front lawn, and from the open window upstairs you see how with one girl up under each of his arms Thomas points out how stars don’t really twinkle, it’s our atmosphere deflecting their light that makes them appear as though they are changing in color and intensity. He tells the girls that almost every star we see is really two stars, and that from so far away they look like one. Sofia says, “Does that mean when I wish upon a star I’m really wishing on two and that my wish has double the chance of coming true?”
“Yes, I suppose that could be right. I hope it’s true for you, at least,” Thomas says, and then you see how when he says it he brings your girls closer to him, hugging them tighter under each arm.