CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I suited up in the locker room. My tweed skirt filled the locker, ten pounds of Highland wool. I poked the folds of cloth carefully into place and got the door latched after a struggle. They were really going to have to work on that leak in the showers, the dripping water like a percussion instrument.

I had envisioned all this, played it out in my mind. But now that I was close to committing act one, scene one, my fingertips were cold. Some musicians and stage-fright stricken actors take beta blockers, chemicals that shut down the anxiety centers of the brain.

I had timed my workout for early afternoon, so Miss P would be there with all the swimmers and divers. I couldn’t suppress all the old doubt. It nagged at me, ugly inner voices warning me, as I pushed open the door from the locker room and caught the familiar waft of chlorine and that strange incandescence a swimming pool casts upward into the space that surrounds it.

I caught Miss P in an ideal moment, most of the team sitting at attention on the lower levels of the bleachers while Miss P demonstrated posture, how to stand, how to let you arms hang, full of their own weight and the weight of all your tension. You give your arms a shake, and you lose some of that anxiety, letting it run from your forearms, through your fingers, out into the air.

I kept walking, in no particular hurry, letting them all get a good look.

Miss P called my name, and Denise looked up from examining her toenails. It would be wrong to say I was unafraid. The old feeling was there, but now I had another feeling, a stronger one, to set against it.

Denise had lost a little too much weight, maybe clocking too many hours on the rowing machine with her personal trainer. Miss P believed in cross-training, practicing other sports to stay in shape, but I always wondered if Denise threw herself with too much gusto into everything that came along. Her father had been right to fire the tennis pro, the one with curly hair all over his shoulders.

Denise almost left her place on the bleachers. She nearly called something to me, a smudge of weariness under each eye. The new dives were taking the glow out of her. Her white bathing cap perched on the bleacher beside her, the top of a skull.

As I passed her I mouthed, “It’s all right.” And I meant it. She stared right back with cautious disbelief, maybe because in her family people resolve their disagreements by giving each other the finger and taking near-miss swipes at each other’s heads.

“Bonnie!” It was Miss P at her most commanding tone, a chilling sound, magnified by the hollow reverberation of the arena. “Get over here!”

I climbed the steps of the tower.

I had told my father once about the imaginary line in the platform, where the diver feels her dive should begin. How when the feet touch this place in the cold, sandpapery surface of the platform, the diver feels strangely at home. “Querencia,” Dad called it when I described it. “The place in the bull ring el toro makes his own. Once he finds that place, he’ll kill all comers.”

I reached the top step and found the place in the platform where my dives begin.

I got good altitude, and did a back somersault.

The water is always a surprise the first dive of the day. Warmer than you expect, or—usually—colder. My nostrils burned, and the sterile taste of the water seeped through my lips. I let my breasts and tummy glide along the pool bottom, and then I let my body loft toward the light.

I broke the surface.

It had not been a very good dive. Just one somersault. Not the worst dive ever done, but far from my usual, my knees bent, my body at an angle. The splash had been bad, the water still simmering from the impact.

There were calls of encouragement, and Denise was clapping, but they were extras in my own personal movie, a part of the living wallpaper. They could have been cheering in Gaelic, Miss P, too, although she put her hands on her hips and assumed an aspect of approval: Go ahead, keep going.

As though I paid them any attention.

The second time off the tower I managed two somersaults, and I felt the whisper of air around the platform as my head almost kissed. I entered the water with about as much grace as an office chair.

I pulled myself out of the water, streaming and splashing all the way, and smoothed my hair back away from my eyes, pulling it tight with my hands, so tight my eyes slanted and my eyebrows stretched. I tugged the seat of my suit, and gave my nose a pinch, checking for excess fluid from my sinuses.

My fellow athletes and the few straggling spectators all froze in place, like a photograph. I mountaineered my way up the platform again, and drove every thought, every doubt, from my mind.

But some shadow must have lingered. I completed a back three-and-a-half somersault, with a perfect tuck. My entry was not so good, though, my feet out of position. You dive with your whole body, and your whole heart, and if there’s a little question in your mind, it shows up somewhere, even in your toes.

My fourth dive was textbook, from top step to pool bottom, and I let the momentum carry me along underwater, wanting this private silence, the pressure at my eardrums, the clunk and gurgle of the pool valves. Even when the pool water appears unruffled and without current, it isn’t. The pumps are at work, under the surface, pulling water through the filters.

An injured athlete has an invisible spotlight around her, and the other teammates stand aside, giving that extra space. They mean no harm. But when your recovery has been established, that aura is gone, and you are yourself again. Hands reached for me, pounded my shoulders, and Miss P grinned and shook her head, in her best I-knew-you-could manner. But I didn’t join the team on the bleacher seats. I was on act two of the drama I had in mind. I skimmed across the concrete, into the locker room.

I was quick to shower and pull myself into my clothes, arranging my full costume, someone going grouse shooting on the moors. I could feel Miss P’s puzzlement and annoyance like radar through the wall. My hair looked the way it always does when it’s wet. I was going to have metal snaps attached to my skull so the beret would stay on in a blizzard.

Denise was there at the end of the row of lockers, looking at me with something close to suspicion, her bathing cap dangling off a finger.

“That’s great,” she said, meaning it, but also going out of her way to sound like she meant it, so she didn’t—it sounded forced.

She eyed my lady-of-the-manor garb and gave her swimsuit a tug at the butt, maybe a habit she picked up from me. One trouble with swimsuits: when you talk to someone dressed like a clothes store you feel at a disadvantage.

Denise came toward me with an air of caution, and sat. She toyed with a terry-cloth towel, flicking it and rolling it. Her toenails dilapidated, ragged quarter moons. She hunched on the bench and splashed her toes in a tiny puddle, like maybe I had forgotten she was there.

It’s amazing how little insight some people have, how little sense of what others feel.

I unzipped the backpack and slipped the envelope from its pocket. I smoothed the gentle wrinkles with my fingers. In my fantasy I had kept reconstructing what would happen next. I would slip it under Miss P’s office door. I would leave it on her desk, on top of a pile of fitness equipment catalogs. Or maybe I would hand it to her in person.

A dozen people slamming into a locker room can be deafening. “Way to go,” said one voice after another. “Looking good, Bonnie,” the dumb, earnest things people say to one another.

Lockers open with a bang almost as loud as when they slam shut, the force of voices and laughter resounding in the metal compartments around us.

Charlotte Witt, the full-bodied star of the Sacramento Invitational, stopped me outside Miss P’s office and said she was so happy I was myself again. Charlotte Witt has the classy air of an extremely athletic First Lady, the sort of person who sounds phony saying good morning. Miss P had taken her time entering the fog and noise of the locker room, but I felt her consciousness groping toward mine, puzzled that I had not come back to talk to her, wondering what was on my mind.

The envelope contained my letter to Ms. Petrossian, resigning from the team. The message covered three lines, telling her that it was time for me to put my diving career behind me. I surprised myself—I carried the envelope outside, like someone looking for a mailbox, then zipped it into my pack.

I carried it home, and slipped it into the bottom drawer of my dresser.