That morning before any of the girls in the crew arrived, I looked for you in the boathouse. You were in the fog over the cove, the wax smell of the boathouse after the bay doors swung wide, Kaschper eights and fours stacked, the light off their honey hulls. You were everywhere and not there.
If I could have talked with you, I would have told you about the cornfields of the Garden State before the long bridge into Delaware, how blond they were in the sun. I would have told you about the mud, how sludgy it smelled, all churned up and dry after John Deere tractors towed big, spiral blades. The flat pastures after the Delaware Memorial Bridge stretched a long ways, so different than the rolling hills in our college town. A week ago I had driven down a flat black driveway through maple trees, through lawns cut close, to a place I had never been before, a job I had never done. This year, 1983, you and I had talked about the U.S. and the Soviets aiming straight for each other full speed with warheads fully loaded. And we knew there was nothing we could do. And even though I told you about this job when I got it, my first teaching job, there was already so much more to tell. At the end of this driveway in Surrey, Delaware, the main building of the boarding school, St. Timothy’s, was stone block this way and stone block that way. The campus was stone buildings, slate walkways, and lawns sloping down to a lake. A lake shallow and wrong. After one week, this job felt like hurtling headlong at something hurtling toward me.
Sixty years ago the Du Ponts built this lake. The Du Ponts built this school for farm boys to learn Chaucer, to learn rowing, to learn ways of tending corn. I was hired to tend both the boys and girls whose families now owned those farms. I would have told you I didn’t know how to tend.
When 1983 began, we were both twenty-three years old, and if you had been in the smell of the wax on the rowing shells, in the still air this morning, I could have let loneliness be its own thing.
But you weren’t there, and I kept walking to the end of the dock.
Two years ago, you and I sat back-to-back at the end of a dock like this one, jutting out into a different lake, Lake Onota in Massachusetts, where our college crew practiced. At sunset the lake turned from turquoise to jade to black. It was so still that night that the air and water were the same: same color, same temperature, same texture. Your long, strong back lining up with mine, our shoulders wider than hips. Rowers make unusual girls. Usual girls have hips wider than shoulders. That day we had raced and won. That night we talked well into dark. The only difference between the night air and the water was stars.
“Did you see it?” I said.
“There,” you said. You pointed where the shooting star had been.
It was no stretch to imagine the wish you had. The tall and blond Mark, the type of dancer people circled on a dance floor, his Michael Jackson moonwalk a perfect blend of grace and mechanical motion. Your first date you ran to my room to tell me. For months we talked about whether or not you should sleep with him until one day you stopped talking about it, one day either you did or you realized how the possibility killed me.
Around us that night on the lake in Massachusetts, there were tiny ripples against the dock, a bird’s call, cars in the distance. It was May, unusually warm for New England, muggy.
“I thought I was going to die today,” you said.
“Around 200 meters?”
That’s the usual place when we go into oxygen debt, like there’s a plastic bag over nose and mouth, and our lungs almost burst, and everything in us wants out.
“When we took the power-ten on Smith,” you said. “I didn’t think I’d keep going.”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Good thing,” you said. Leaning into me, you thanked me with your back.
“Hey,” you said. You got up, and I could barely see your skin against the dark water, the dark night. “Try this.”
Getting up and walking beside you, I knelt the way you were kneeling. The length of my thigh, the same length as your thigh, kneeling.
I couldn’t see a thing, not the edge of water, not the edge of night.
Then, I felt your wet hand on my skin. If I didn’t breathe, maybe your hand would stay on my arm. “Tell me when your hand hits the water.”
Your fingers, all grip and sure, the calluses on your palms scratchy. And you pulled my arm down to where the water was, but I couldn’t see the water. My skin couldn’t feel it, either. The temperature and texture of the air completely matched the water. My skin in air, my skin in water. No difference. It was the ripple on my forearm that meant water. I said nothing so we would stay like that. Your hand on my arm. But soon something changed, and you let go.
This morning I couldn’t tell. This morning on a lake with fog on warm water, a lake built by Du Ponts for rowing, for farm boys to learn rowing, I watched my wrist submerge, and only my eyes could tell what was air, what was water. My skin couldn’t feel the difference.
“Checking the temp?” someone said behind me. There was a curl to her words.
A student faced me at the other end of the dock, a tall girl, black curls falling over her face.
“Bath water,” I said. The dock rose and fell with each step I took toward this girl. Her eyes moved from my top to my middle to my feet to my middle to my top. I wanted to cross my arms. Her legs spread, lycra shorts, maroon and gray tank top, her skin was tight on muscles and freckled and white.
Before I reached her, I said, “You’re Carla?”
“In the flesh,” she said. Her steps toward me, like a mannequin, her hands a different pace than her elbows, her forearms at odd angles to her shoulders. The previous coach, who left for a rival school, warned me that this girl was both impulse and force, the type of rower who could win a race with her drive or lose a race with her recklessness.
“I’ve heard about you,” I said.
“Who me?” She turned toward the water, her curls covering her eyes. She turned her back, her shoulders wider than her hips.
She was not you, not even close to being you. But there was a jab in my chest, the place that cracked when I heard the news about you.
Other girls walked down the dirt paths from the dorms to the cove where we were. A breeze came up and sent the fog over bare legs.