The first week of crew practice was the week before the rest of the students arrived and before classes started. The first week of crew practice was also the first faculty gathering at St. Timothy’s. The lawn party was beige: khaki pants, cotton button-downs, ducks embroidered on belts with D-ring buckles. It was late August, and the lake was too hot. The smell in the breeze was cottonwood. It stuck to the back of my throat.
I looked for you. It wasn’t the first time I looked for you in the wrong place. If I had found you at the party, I might have told you about the ways that scotch singes on the way down, like you think love might, but all it is is desire. You see, I needed you to be there for that evening and for the rest of the story.
There’s a crack I carry around, and the only thing that fills it is you.
The dining hall was behind me, the one with the mural inside, all the white boys turned the same direction. Andrew Wyeth painted it. He used the same face for every boy. There wasn’t one face with brown or green eyes, just blue, and in every face, there was boredom in the corners of the eyes.
Outside the dining hall, the first table with a white tablecloth was the bar set up. An older African American man waited for me to say what I wanted to drink. “No, thank you,” I said, and kept walking as the lawn sloped down to the lake, the muddy lake. Teachers talked in little circles. Women in skirts, men in pants. Men with short hair, women with long. New teacher, dyke in khaki pants. The seventeen-page St. Timothy’s dress code meant I left my jeans and flannel shirts tucked behind the new L.L.Bean and J.Crew clothes, the brands specifically named in the dress code. In my apartment attached to the dorm, in my bedroom with a dresser issued by St. Timothy’s, the soft clothes I like to wear were tucked in the drawers, and the stiff clothes I have to wear to be a teacher stuck to me like plastic wrap.
Some old teacher walked up so close I could smell his clothes. His checked shirt, stretched over his belly, was orange peels in garbage cans. He said, “Don’t you drink?”
“Excuse me?”
“You will,” he said and nodded. His chin moved farther into more chins. He turned and walked away.
My button-down shirt felt unbuttoned, a breeze in my breasts.
As soon as the smelly teacher walked away, Dorothy White, the headmaster’s wife, turned from the little circle around her and gathered a small flock of older teachers, dragged them up the lawn.
“Taylor Alta, English, Geography,” she said a few feet away from me, “I want you to meet Tom Francosi, Mathematics, Stuart Applebaum, Economics, and Reverend Bill Moose.” Trailing behind her in a line, each man wore khakis, button-down shirt, tie or collar.
Tom Francosi said, “Nice to meet you.” His handshake was a short up and down.
Stuart Applebaum said, “Glad you’re on board.” His handshake matched mine, and his blue eyes softened as we shook hands.
“My, my,” Reverend Moose said. “What do we have here?” He bent back to take a big breath. “A rower, by the looks of her.” The steps up the hill winded him. Reverend Moose was slow curves, an arc from neck to knees, a profile like Alfred Hitchcock’s. The softness around his eyes, in his belly, made the faculty party spread out on this lawn much easier. I could breathe.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I’ve rowed.” They knew I was on the 1980 national team, the one that didn’t go to Moscow.
“Taylor, it occurs to me,” Mrs. White said, her head shorter than my shoulder, “that girl, the rowing coach who drowned in that accident on the Schuylkill last week, did you know her?”
She knew I did. She was drum roll and clashing cymbals. Her blue eyes were denim, old-people blue, the people who say things too loud. Tom Francosi’s eyes were blackboards. Stuart Applebaum’s were glass. I couldn’t look at Reverend Moose.
“Yes,” I said. “My friend.”
Stuart said, “Did they find the body?” He leaned his question toward me.
My button-down shirt was cellophane. The crack in my chest was dark and deep. The crack came with the phone call last Wednesday night from our teammate. I didn’t know how she got my number since I had been here only two days. But that’s not what I asked. I asked her twice if she was kidding, but she wasn’t. I fell on the floor in my apartment when she told me you drowned. The carpet smelled like mildew.
Mrs. White said it out loud, in front of people. She said you drowned.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said.
Uphill was quick. I swung wide the door to the dining hall. The slam of the door, the dark of the dining room, and the stares from white boys in the mural were sucked into my chest instead of breath. Both my palms hit the girls’ bathroom door, hit the stall door, stopped only by the tile wall. My knees went to the floor, and my hips slumped between the toilet and the wall. I couldn’t crawl under the toilet tank. In one breath I brought cold toilet, ceramic bowl, and tile down into my lungs. The cold was quiet and good.
The quiet turned to a soft sucking sound. The bathroom door pushed the stale air inside.
“Taylor?” a man said from the bathroom door. My cheek resting on the stall wall, cold and damp.
“Taylor, it’s Alex Jeffers. I know the guy who tried to save your friend,” he said. The door to the girls’ bathroom closed behind him. “He’s fine. He made it. I’m sorry about your friend.”
“Thanks,” I said. I sat back on my heels. I was church-kneeling inside a bathroom stall. When you went to coach the novice crew that day, you had the crazy autumn current and a waterfall meters away and your youngest high school girls being swept toward a waterfall. That’s what you had when your motor conked out. Alex’s friend had tried to reach you in the river, tried to keep you from going over the falls, but his motor conked out, too. He and his boat went over the falls. The river didn’t keep him, just you. You were caught in the turbine of the falls. And they didn’t find your body.
“Mrs. White is a pain in the butt,” he said. “I was coming over to see how you’re doing. I heard what she said.” He stood outside the stall. “I’m sorry.”
My hand on the toilet seat, I pushed off the floor and stood up. I turned around, and there was Alex’s blond cropped hair above the stall door. No eyes, but hair. I opened the door to his pink polo shirt, collar up, his arms crossed over his chest. His forearms were layers of muscle laid one on top of the other. He opened his arms to me.