Swimming Studies Read online

  • • •

  Hour two. Along the ceiling of the bus the lights switch off one by one. Eyes close and mouths fall open. Elbows and knees flop. There is a sweet and sleepy whiff of recently unlaundered pillowcase. The sounds of the bus are lulling: engine humming evenly, steady breathing, the scraping of textbook pages turned, the tinny smashing of Sony Walkmans, volume cranked.

  • • •

  We pull into the parking lot of a twenty-four-hour restaurant. The overhead lights come on and swimmers stir. Some reach groggily for their bags and wallets, mumbling all at once:

  “You want anythi—”

  “Can I borrow a few dollars?”

  “Where are—”

  “God, what’s that smell?”

  “You smell—”

  “Where’s my—”

  “Grab me a hash brown?”

  A Senior boy makes his way down the aisle, slapping each headrest hard as he goes by, bleary annoyance in his wake. The girls brush their brassy hair back with their hands, pull it into elastics, stuff hands into mittens. Cheeks and lips are rosy with sleep and wear the inward, glum glaze of athletes at rest.

  A few of my teammates leap the bus steps and bounce up and down in the icy air, pull their hands inside their cuffs, and lope toward the restaurant. I remain on the bus and watch them, my head pressed close to the cold window. They hunch against the wind and yank their coats around themselves. I can tell who they are by their bodies and gaits, but their first names are embroidered on the shoulders of their identical parkas: Brad, Karen, Andrew, Stephanie. One swimmer, Duncan, has a big sheepskin coat instead of a parka. It was his father’s, and it’s coming apart at the armpits.

  Leaning back, I look at my reflection, sharp in the dark window, then at the yellow restaurant sign, then back at my reflection. I look like a boy; my hair is dry and puffy, eyes slightly too close together. By my watch we’ve been on the road for two and a half hours. Halfway.

  I climb out of my seat to get my bag from the overhead compartment. In the end pocket are six Oh Henry! chocolate bars. I take one, settle in, and eat it, studying the fabric pattern on the back of the seat in front of me. My eyes are locked in a zombie stare. I think vaguely about the squiggles and specks as I chew.

  • • •

  My mother bought the chocolate bars from Hy & Zel’s pharmacy in the Dixie Value Mall. There are wire bins of them—alongside bins of shampoo, pink razors, and licorice, everything three for ninety-nine cents—at the entrance of the store. I see a different side of my mother at Dixie Value Mall. There’s a laser focus in her browsing, a discerning gaze I never see her use anywhere else. She loves nice clothes and has an eye for fashion. We have pictures of her from the early 1960s, modeling white asymmetrical gowns in the Philippines.

  She buys magazines from time to time, Vogue and Elle, close-ups of beautiful women with glossy fuchsia lips and shiny bangs on the covers. (Her only subscription, though, is to Chatelaine, a Canadian women’s magazine that seems more about salads and what to put on cuts and scrapes.) In the car once, she told me that she used to wish her nose were pointier, whiter, less wide, and that as a girl she went to bed with it pinched in a clothespin. My father always tells me that her nose was one of the things he noticed first about her, that he loves it.

  In stores, when my mother holds a top or a dress to her body and looks in the mirror, she juts her jaw a little and glares half lidded at her reflection. I hate that face, but my own seduction by clothing follows hers—the version of myself that I yearn for squints back at me when I pose before a mirror.

  I have specific ideas about my thirteen-year-old wardrobe, informed by sitcoms, music videos, and illustrations on the covers of young adult paperbacks. I insist on minute details: sweatpants have to be gray, the cotton has to be a certain grade and thickness, shoes have to fit over the instep so that the laces are evenly spaced. Under a red sweater I could wear only a white shirt. White turtlenecks look best under V-necks, and pants should make your bum a triangle. When I follow a trend (plastic bracelets, neon Lycra), I get nervous. Mosquitoes and wasps are attracted to my fluorescent-yellow sweatshirt. I spend an unhappy year in seventh grade trying to look preppy with the wrong ingredients (cheap cotton shirts, the colors too heavy and bright; fake-leather penny loafers; acrylic cable-knit sweaters). Photographs from that time show a boyish girl, sad and stiff.

  My father protests when my mother buys herself new clothes. Doesn’t she understand they just can’t afford it? They can’t afford it. They just cannot afford it. Her silence hangs in the house like the smell of burnt toast.

  • • •

  One night, my husband, James, comes to bed in a pair of blue oxford boxer shorts, with a T-shirt that I found in a pile of things a coworker was giving away. The shorts have a little polo horse embroidered on one leg. I recognize the horse and its simple threaded colors. It’s the horse from the shirts that teammates and classmates wore in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. Shirts my best friend and her brothers wore, stained, lost.

  “You have no idea how much that little horse thing meant to me,” I tell James, tracing the threads on his cuff, “how many hours and weeks and months I spent thinking about that horse, wanting it, wishing I could have that horse.”

  “Really?”

  I tell James that my parents disapproved of spending more than ten dollars on an item of clothing. How, in 1986, something that cost forty dollars was disgraceful. How I saved and saved my paper-route cash, my dollar-a-day allowance, earned by emptying and loading the dishwasher, vacuuming the stairs. How one Friday night I slept over at my best friend Danielle’s. Her mother dropped us off at Yorkdale Mall on Saturday, and I took an hour choosing a plaid cotton shirt, boys’ size 18. How I still have the shirt, never being able to give it up. How baffled my parents were at my first act of rebellion.

  “Want to see it?”

  I go to the closet and come back with the shirt, droopy on a hanger. It’s a pastel cacophony. Every color in the world seems to be gridded into the thin cotton: a weird, postcolonial mess of madras.

  “This is Polo?” James is suspicious. “This isn’t Ralph Lauren.”

  A small swell of panic. Then I locate the horse. “Look.”

  The pale blue embroidered horse is barely visible against a pale blue, green, and mauve field.

  “You can’t even see it!” James laughs. “It’s so you to have picked out the one shirt where you couldn’t even see it!”

  I stroke the smooth threads of the tiny horse and tell James that when I bought it, I thought it was the nicest one in the cubbyhole of shirts, I thought the colors would go with everything. That though I was dismayed at the imperceptible horse, I bought it anyway and figured I could make do. That I used to take a blue pen and color the horse in darker when I wore it.

  “Look at the colors. Preppy vomit. So not me.”

  I put the shirt on; it still fits.

  James tilts his head. “Well, it doesn’t not suit you. . . .”

  • • •

  My teammates return and push down the aisle, carrying takeaway cups and paper bags, trailing cold parking-lot air. The food perfumes the bus. Mary S. offers me a corner of hash brown. After a head count, the bus sighs and pulls out of the parking lot. I turn around, lay my temple on the armrest, and watch the overhead reading lights come on. I hear the unzipping of parkas and loud drawn-out burping. From my sideways view I see running shoes being slipped off and feet in white athletic socks poking into the aisle, soft and curving like hockey sticks.

  I turn onto my back and look out my window. It frames a stoic northern landscape: the snow glows blue against long, dark whale-like swells of Precambrian Canadian shield. The tall pines, silhouetted against the navy sky, are a deep, living black, treetops rushing up and down like a giant electrocardiogram.

  • •
•

  I wake as the bus pulls into a hotel parking lot and stops. I look out my window: a thin gray morning. The driver pulls on his parka, wraps a scarf twice around his head, and exits. He opens the side of the bus, and begins to stack luggage on the pavement. It’s mostly team duffel bags. Clipped to them are kickboards and foam pull buoys with surnames hand-printed in permanent marker: Fedoruk, Chase, Creelman, Lang. A few pieces look like honeymoon suitcases. Sky-blue plastic, Black Watch tartan, some pale tan with big gold buckles and stickers from Cancún. I watch the driver set down my father’s small black suitcase, with the broken front-pocket zipper.

  • • •

  In our room, Andrea drops her bags on the floor and dramatically falls facedown on a bed in her parka and boots. I unpack, brush my teeth, and put on my pajamas. Mary L. kicks off her shoes and curls under the covers in her parka, then immediately springs back up and unpacks her food. She places a jar of peanut butter, a box of crispy-chewy chocolate chip cookies, a bunch of bananas, and five granola bars on the desk. She twists open a jar of blueberry baby food and eats it with her index finger. I pull the heavy drapes closed and get into bed. We have two hours before heats.

  LAUNDRY

  London, 2010. At eight a.m. I set out from the house, toward the Hampstead Heath Ladies’ Pond. I can see my breath as I wend my way up the overgrown front path; I exhale long and slow to watch it as I cross the road and walk past a couple of magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy. On my right, the Long Pond is dark and green, then, over a hill and around a bend, the Mixed Pond grayish-brown on my left. I can feel the cold air through my sweater. September.

  Three people are unfolding tables near a van in preparation for a marathon. In a wooded path two joggers pass, smelling of shampoo and laundry, lemony. The path dips and I hear women’s laughter, its pitch distinctive. Voices carry crisp and dense over water, heads held high and tipped back to speak. The effort makes for breathy, cheerful barking. I can’t see the Ladies’ Pond, but I can hear it.

  The pond water temperature, neatly written on a blackboard, is fourteen degrees Celsius. Two women circle the life preservers at the far end. Another swims steadily out toward a lily-padded patch. Two more stroke toward the concrete dock, one in a yellow cap. A few ducks and a pair of swans bob in the corner.

  I know I have to get in without hesitating, one smooth movement from the top of the ladder into the murk. I slip in until my shoulders are submerged—the water stings and my breath balls in my throat, high and shallow. I can see only a few inches of my body before it dissolves into the olive dark.

  I swim, moving every limb exaggeratedly to generate heat, then push facedown to the farthest life preserver, toward the two women. When I get there I raise my head. One woman talks about how her child is adjusting to school. The other makes noises of assent and sympathy. I wonder: Did they come here as friends or befriend each other in the pond? How long have they been swimming in water this cold? Will I ever have a friend who swims in freezing ponds with me? I circle again and my body feels warm, but it is the warmth of a slap: blood rushing the flesh. Looking back toward the dock, I see another woman, wearing a black tank and a white cap, step calmly down the ladder.

  After another turn I get out and wrap myself in the fluffy gray bath towel I grabbed from the bathroom of the house where I’m renting a room. My breath is still tight in my chest. The towel smells lemony too.

  • • •

  The unnaturally sweet laundry smell is a match scraped against deep feelings of longing. I’m obsessed with this smell. A detergent-fragrant scarf bought on eBay arrives in the mail and I debate whether to write the seller and ask what brand she washed it in. I buy unscented soap for my dermatitic skin, can’t quite bring myself to buy dryer sheets, but part of me still wants my life to be suburb-scented.

  When I was little, our family laundry was done with no-name detergent and line-dried until well into November. It didn’t smell like anything to me. Now when I visit my parents’ home and press my face into a towel, I smell my family. My mother’s Filipino homemaking and my father’s citrus-scrub mechanic’s hand cleaner. The smell is mildly tarpaulin, with notes of canvas, bamboo, and limonene. Comforting, but harsh.

  • • •

  Edmonton, Alberta, 1987. I wake in the middle of the night, and by the color of the darkness and the sound of an aquarium I know I’m not at home. I blink, lie very still, and remember: Jen, Stephanie, and I are being billeted in the basement of somebody’s Edmonton home. I am lying on my side on a pullout couch; my two sleeping teammates are in the room, Jen on a couch across from me, Stephanie on a mattress on the floor.

  It is warm in my Miss Piggy sleeping bag—we are all in sleeping bags—and smells like the inside of a van. My mother made a liner, two striped twin bedsheets sewn together, and I’m twisted inside them, beneath Miss Piggy’s giant lashed eyes, her mouth slightly open in a happy Muppety expression. The clock on my new yellow stopwatch, wound around my wrist, reads 4:15 a.m.

  I close my eyes and try to sleep again, but I’m thinking of hotel rooms, the comforting sterile non-smell, the hum of ice machines. I’m thinking of breakfast upstairs in the kitchen of this house in a few hours, of demonstrating table manners, the strange swimmers from the other team whose house this is, their non-swimming siblings, cheerful chatter, and the selection of breakfast cereal. I always wind up eating too much or too little in other people’s houses. I hope the billeting mother will not make eggs.

  Turning over onto my back I can dimly see a few things on the paneled walls: a poster of Corey Hart, another of a baseball team, a framed landscape. I close my eyes. The meet starts tomorrow. We drove straight to the Edmonton pool from the airport, lugging our bags through the locker rooms and onto the deck. It was an easy practice. I used a yellow kickboard that belonged to a swimmer from the University of Calgary team, the Dinos, and I wanted to steal it.

  I decide to do my race. I turn onto my stomach, tuck my head into the sleeping bag and begin. My stopwatch beeps and wakes Stephanie.

  “What the—?”

  Before every race I’d rub my hands on the top of the block to make them raw and more sensitive in the water. I’d know the push, the ripping sound of entry, the silence, the gauging of depth, and the repetitive, urging noises when my head broke the surface of the water. I could always recognize my coach’s voice in the crowd. (The images, the intense anticipation and strain I’d conjure in bed, would be replaced, a decade later, with the men I’d imagine sleeping with.)

  As I touch and turn for the last length, hackneyed expressions like pour it on, flat out, mad dash, closing in spool in my head. Suddenly the yellow Omega touchpad. I click down hard on my stopwatch: the blue digits read 1:12:07.

  The sound of the aquarium.

  “Fucking enough with the beeping and panting already. It’s like four in the morning.”

  Stephanie, from the mattress on the floor.

  • • •

  I stand for a few chilly minutes and watch the pond. Two women get out, another gets in. I gather my things. In the shedlike locker room I watch what the other women do, and imitate them. They strip down and rinse the pond water from their suits and bodies. Standing under a lukewarm shower I eavesdrop. One woman swears by her partial wetsuit, another swims through to December. Something about a school, about a woman they all know, about someone else’s handbag. We face the walls as we change, our skin white and red. As I head back across the heath I wave to the guards, the damp towel wrapped double around my neck and over my nose so I can walk along breathing in its smell, now mixed with a greenish whiff of duckweed.

  FOURTEEN ODORS

  1. Clarkson High School parking lot, 4:52 a.m.: Wet brick, notes of rubber, gasoline, and cigarettes.

  2. Teammate’s hair: Finesse conditioner circa 1987, released when hair is pulled out, damp, from a tight ponytail.

  3. Moth
er’s breath: Coffee, warm skin, seat belt, wet acrylic mitten, resignation, Nivea Creme undertone.

  4. Duffel bag pocket: Tangy nylon, porcini. Hint of oats and semisweet chocolate chip.

  5. Wrist beneath watch strap: Vaseline Intensive Care, iodine, and banana.

  6. Parka hem: Apple core, halogen, polyester shearling, dried ketchup.

  7. Sit-ups partner: Tide, milk, terrier, and grape Hubba Bubba.

  8. Wet team towel: Heavy notes of chlorine, light notes of garlic, lakeside dock, and brown bread.

  9. Ladies’ locker room toilet stall: Bleach, baby powder, mild urine, and faint ammonia.

  10. Coach: Fresh laundry, windbreaker nylon, Mennen Speed Stick, Magic Marker, and bologna.

  11. Pillow: Chlorine, mildew, faint clove and starchy mucus scent.

  12. Male teammate: Blue cheese, Polo cologne, suntan lotion, fenugreek.

  13. Fingernail: Chlorine, barbecue potato chip, wool mitten.

  14. Silver medal: Petroleum, nylon, mineral water, and strawberry.

  CROWN ASSETS

  I can’t find a swimsuit in Toronto the day before my wedding reception. All the stores stock in mid-February are skirted, boob-padded backless styles in tropical patterns. At Lululemon, I find a two-piece outfit designed for Bikram yoga.

  “It’s designed to get wet,” the salesclerk explains, “but it hasn’t been tested in chlorine, so it might lose its color.”

  It’s black. I take it.

  The hotel swimming pool is fifteen meters long. On one side is an unlit fireplace, on the other a blue-tiled shower and a few chairs and tables spread with Canadian fashion magazines.

  The water is bath temperature. I swim a few laps, then decide to do a hundred. This is my default workout, one hundred reps of whatever. One hundred is actually not much, but it sounds nice, like “an hour,” even though swimming a hundred laps of this short a pool does not take an hour, it takes about twenty minutes. At each end I count a number to myself. If I lose count, I round down to the last number remembered. As I swim, my mind wanders. I talk to myself. What I can see through my goggles is boring and foggy, the same view lap by lap. Mundane, unrelated memories flash up vividly and randomly, a slide show of shuffling thoughts. They flash up and fade, like the thoughts that float peripherally before sleep, either inconsequential or gathering momentum into anxiety before eventually dissolving. Each thought lasts a quarter-lap or half-lap, a couple of laps tops. My responses to these thoughts are burbled into the water at my lips, improvements on history—things I wish I’d said or been able to say: “No, I’d rather not watch your bag.” “Oui, en taille trente-six, s’il vous plaît.” “Your spouse is not invited.”