STUDEBAKERS

When I was six, my mother bought my father a giant chocolate-chip cookie for his birthday. She had the bakery pipe To My Studebaker Nut with Love on it in chocolate icing. There is a picture of my brother, my father, and me on the chesterfield, gathered around it, mouths gaping, as though we are about to take huge bites of it.

Before Derek and I start to swim, our family holidays are planned around car meets. My father, an active member of the Ontario Chapter of the Studebaker Drivers Club, packs us into his white 1964 Gran Turismo Hawk, the 1963 Raymond Loewy Avanti, or my favorite, a graceful green 1953 Champion Starliner Coupe, with mothballs rolling back and forth across the parcel shelf, and drives south to the States. I watch as the landscape changes from Canadian to American, watch the brick houses become wooden ones, watch the signage crank up in volume, the sidewalks buckle. I prop my legs on the cooler in the backseat and sniff my knees, or sit cross-legged, lean back, and stare up at the perforated white leather of the car ceiling, until the dots float millimeters from my eyeballs. Our summer weekends are spent walking up and down chrome rows of vintage cars, parked tidily on grassy lawns. Sometimes Derek and I play with American children in red and blue Studebaker Drivers Club T-shirts identical to ours.

I feel deep boredom most of the time, the boredom of being small and herded, the boredom of backseats, and the boredom of chrome car parts, displayed on the grass or in greasy lumps on tables made of sawhorses and doors. I get a strange feeling when I see, in the window of a gleaming Studebaker Lark, a pink card that coyly pleads: Please don’t fondle my parts . . .

My father promises to buy me a 1957 candy-apple-red Corvette if I win an Olympic gold medal. In the corner of our dining room he keeps his collection of Matchbox cars, Studebaker Dinky Toys, and other small trinkets in a six-foot-tall display case. When it’s plugged in, it rotates, shelves illuminated, the cars driving clockwise in a slow loop. The Timex sign that once crowned the top has been replaced by one that reads STUDEBAKER in tidy blue Helvetica. After dinner I like to lie on my side and watch the driverless parade.

•   •   •

In the spring of 2010, James and I live in Berkeley for a few weeks, while he works on a farming project. I buy a ten-session adult swim card for an outdoor public swimming pool near our rented house. Every morning at seven, I pull on my suit and jog over for the seven-thirty lap swim.

This morning it is raining steadily, making the surface of the water pocked and opaque. When I breathe to my right going up the pool, and left back down, I see a black chair at the side. Someone has spray-painted green loop-de-loops on its padded backrest. The pool has a wide concrete deck, surrounded by stubby pines and a chain-link fence woven through with green plastic ribbon. I take my kickboard from the end of the lane and lift my goggles onto my forehead. Two swimmers occupy each of the six lanes. The Berkeley Aquatics masters coach, who keeps inviting me to practice with his team, stands at the shallow end in rubber boots and a long red parka, holding a green-and-yellow-striped umbrella. He competed for the Moroccan national team and plays North African music from a boom box while he watches his swimmers. The steam coming off the water’s surface is thin; it skims down the lane and blows east. As I kick I watch the masters swimmers train. I complete four hundred yards kicking, then switch to four hundred pull.

•   •   •

The pool is twenty-five yards long; an adjustment for me, a Canadian, whose default settings tend to metric. I overhear two women in the showers talking about the weather and have no sense of what forty degrees means. I competed in a few twenty-five-yard pools as a teenager, as Studebaker meets were slowly eclipsed by swim meets. One in Rochester, New York, another at an outdoor pool in Lakewood, Ohio, and the last one in the Robert J. H. Kiphuth Exhibition Pool at Yale. Unpacking after a move, I find a videotape my father made at the swim meet in Rochester, in 1987. The indoor pool is tiled in dark yellow and green, the windows are high and let in a bright but milky light. The camera finds me at one end of the pool. I am thirteen, narrow and tall. I pace behind the blocks before a race, adjusting the straps of my green and blue suit over and over again. As the other swimmers step to the blocks, it appears I am the only girl in the race.

As I swim, my father’s video camera follows my progress up and down the pool. He uses the camera’s timer, and the white digital numbers clock my pace at the bottom of the screen. It is a two-hundred-yard swim. My mother’s voice, nearby, is cheering in a loud, almost panicky cry. I win easily, and rudely hop out of the pool before the other competitors finish. My father’s camera zooms in slowly on my shiny head while I wrap myself in a towel and wipe my face dry. I pull on one of the green T-shirts the team made for the meet. Silkscreened in white, they say: Mississauga-Rochester Invitational 1987, Hasta La Vista Baby!

The tape stops, then starts again with a sweeping shot across the deck to Mrs. Mitchell. She is the mother of Luann and Daniel, who practice with Derek and me. Mrs. Mitchell sits in a plastic chair against the pool wall in her team T-shirt, staring at the water and rubbing her feet together distractedly. She notices the camera and makes a “Ta-da” flourish, grinning. The camera doesn’t move. She looks away, smiling self-consciously. The camera remains on her.

Suddenly we’re outside in the parking lot, beside our green Dodge van. The microphone catches the loud sound of the wind over bits of chipper conversation. The camera finds my mother talking to a small group of other mothers.

“Lorna!” my father calls.

She turns, smiles squinting in the sun, and waves. The other women look and wave too, and then make parting remarks and move away. Following them as they disperse, the camera finds Mrs. Mitchell as she makes her way through the parked cars, and zooms in. She waves and steps behind our green van, gesturing “Cut” with her hands. “It’s not on!” My father laughs, then asks, “When are you going to come over to our place to watch?”

Mrs. Mitchell demurs, head tilted. “When are you going to come over to our place to watch?”

The tape stops. Then starts again as the camera turns to the pool building, where Derek and I have emerged in matching Levi’s jean jackets with matching sleeves rolled up. The camera zooms in, making us blurry, then clear. I walk straight up to it and ask my father through the lens:

“Can we go to Ames? They have Jams.”

I receive no response.

“Come on, can we go to Ames? Please? There are no Ameses in Canada.”

I plead and plead with the lens. The camera turns away and finds my brother, arms crossed, leaning against the van. My whining continues off camera as my father zooms in on Derek (blurry, clear), who is in a bad mood after swimming poorly. Derek asks the camera if we’re going to a restaurant. The tape stops and my screen dissolves into snow.

•   •   •

As I rewind the tape I remember that we didn’t go to a restaurant; the two teams met at somebody’s house for a poolside barbecue. At one point I set aside my paper plate and asked to use the bathroom. I was shown to an outdoor cabana structure, wallpapered in a yellow and brown palm-tree-and-toucan pattern. There was a wooden lacquered sign hanging on the wall beside the sink that read: Don’t piss in our pool; we don’t swim in your toilet.