Swimming Studies Read online

  • • •

  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.

  ETOBICOKE

  Derek has a record called “The Song of the Humpback Whale” that came tucked into the back cover of one of his nature books. It’s pressed onto a thin, floppy piece of red plastic, so he puts it on top of another 45 to play. After lunch, Derek and I lie on our stomachs in the living room, listening to the deep keening and moaning of the whales. After a half-hour, we go swimming.

  • • •

  Derek is nine and I am seven. We’re playing a game we call “Shipwreck”: after being shipwrecked in the ocean, we have been swimming for days and are near death. There is an island within sight, but we are tiring fast. We begin the game ten feet from the edge of the Serson pool deck.

  “I see land—don’t give up!”

  Derek, neck lolling in the water:

  “I don’t know if I’m going to make it. . . .”

  As we approach the side of the pool we weaken.

  “I can’t make . . . gluplup . . .”

  “I can’t make it.”

  “Plup glup . . . I can’t, I can’t, I can’t . . .”

  “I feel so cold . . .”

  “No. Don’t give up, we’re almost there!”

  I try to help Derek by pulling his arms. They splash, and flail out of my grasp.

  “Go on without me . . . save yourself. . . .”

  In the deep end, a chubby sunburnt girl dives off the springboard, followed by a tanned teenager in cutoff jeans. Waiting for a turn is an East Indian boy who does tidy backflips. Behind him is a pale man wearing a cross on a thin chain. He folds his arms across his chest and whips his long hair back to get it out of his face; his girlfriend stands behind him, and he talks to her without turning around. He’s working on his cannonball. She has a skinny blond wet ponytail pointing stiffly down. She tugs at the bottom of her one-piece and holds her nose when she jumps. Her friend, who doesn’t get her hair wet, watches from the side of the pool, feet kicking in the water, ankles crossed.

  We are now a foot from the side of the pool. Our arms reach for the painted blue wall and concrete lip and try to grip it, but keep slipping back into the water. This goes on for twenty minutes until we hoist ourselves out and lie on our backs, panting dramatically. A lifeguard looks at us from his chair and then at the other lifeguard directly opposite. The two guards mirror each other, both arms on the armrests, feet flat on the platform. They wear identical dark aviator sunglasses and have whistles strung through their yellow tank tops. Derek finds a wide, shallow puddle of water that has been heating up in the July sun and sits in it. I find a dry expanse of pale deck and pull my knees to my chest, moving over every minute to look back at the butterfly-shaped mark my wet suit bottom has left on the concrete. After ten minutes we jump back into the water and begin Shipwreck anew. The deep twanging boom of the rebounding diving board carries across the park for hours until the pool is cleared at six and the water flattens, plate smooth.

  At night, in bed, when we hear the board booming again, we know: pool hoppers. Bad kids, smokers, heavy metalers, trespassers needing forgiveness. I was afraid of them the way I was afraid of breaking any rules, of anything that smelled like cigarettes. Nineteen years later, about twelve miles east of Serson pool, two friends named Jason and I scale the chain-link fence on a hot June night. Sunnyside–Gus Ryder pool is on the shore of Lake Ontario. Riding a sugar high of birthday cake and white wine, we dive in fully clothed, the Jasons in their shorts, me in a pink party dress.

  • • •

  Visiting my brother and his family in Toronto, I use the washroom and see, draped over the side of the bathtub, a gray towel, the words Etobicoke Swim Club and a moiréd maple leaf emblazoned across it in fading burgundy. I dry my hands and go downstairs.

  “I know what I want for Christmas from you,” I tell Derek.

  “What? It’s February.”

  “My ESC towel. You never even swam for them!”

  “It needs washing.”

  “Fine!” />
  My sister-in law overhears us.

  “I think I delivered Emmett on that towel.”

  By the time I join the Etobicoke Pepsi Swim Club in the fall of 1988, Derek has quit swimming. I swim well at the second 1988 Olympic trials, finishing eleventh and thirteenth in my best events, and my coach suggests I change clubs. It used to be called the Etobicoke Swim Club, or ESC, but after a few swimmers made it to the podium at the Seoul Olympics, it has attracted a corporate sponsor. Mitch, the new head coach, was recruited from the University of Florida. He is an Olympian, has coached Olympians. Mitch looks like Dennis Quaid, wears a dark leather bomber jacket with a sheepskin collar, and drinks can after can of Diet Coke during morning practices.

  The Etobicoke Olympium swimming pool feels cathedral. The hulky proportions of a fifty-meter indoor pool inspire hushed humility, the concrete diving tower like an altar (with occasional plummeting cruciforms). Mitch plays Rod Stewart over the synchronized swimmers’ underwater sound system, drowning out whatever music we have in our own heads (Nuala, Erasure; Claude, U2; Marcel, R.E.M.; me, the Cure).

  The transition from my smaller team to Etobicoke Pepsi is steep. Stricter rules, longer, more difficult practices, and tougher, more serious swimmers. I practiced in the faster lanes with my old team, but here I’m in the slowest. I dread swimming in lane eight, where a dark window of mirrored glass stretches along the pool wall, seven feet below the surface. It’s like swimming past the mouth of a cave. I worry that someone’s there, watching, and feel a jolt of panic if I catch any sort of reflection in the window. Being one of the slower practice swimmers is crushing, and the cross-training—miles of running through the suburbs and along the service roads surrounding the pool, endless steps up the side of a man-made hill—is lonely. Not a great runner, I can’t keep up, and I jog desperately, miserably, a half-hour or more behind everyone else, tears welling, sides cramping. I look down as I run, watching the jerky progress of patchy-crabgrass curbs while the indifferent gray noise of normal life whizzes above along the sweeping Etobicoke overpasses.

  Despite my misery, I get dramatically faster in the first few months. The graduation to higher national rankings, the intensity of Mitch’s coaching, and inclusion on an elite team give me a feeling of security, pride, and purpose, a feeling slightly deflated by having to borrow, for big meets, a sample set of the expensive team uniform. It is too big, so I roll the track bottoms and jacket sleeves up. I’m careful with the sample: I fold it neatly, take it off to eat, knowing I have to return it when we get home.

  • • •

  The Olympium pool is bisected by a white bulkhead during the twenty-five-meter short-course season, but for long- course training we roll it slowly across the pool to the deep end at the top of morning practice. Three or four boys bend over each end, a mini Iwo Jima tableau in dry double-layered trunks, making sure the motion is even and the bulkhead doesn’t jam diagonally across the width. One girl per lane sits atop, guiding the loosened lane ropes over the bulkhead as it moves slowly along. The ropes are retightened with a heavy winch, which will often slip into the water and sink to the bottom. I’m grateful for this prep, a reprieve before the sentence of practice.

  The interior of the Olympium hums in the mornings, the aural scale amplified by the density of the chlorinated air over the water’s surface. Mid-practice we do lungbusters, fifty meters underwater. We push off at one end and glide, then kick soundlessly through the blue. At the far end we release the air in our lungs, and our bubbles rush up in a muffled crash. As our heads break the surface, the pool echoes with our breathing. The whole process is overseen by the silent sweep of the pace clock swallowing time, rest, and seconds of air before we inhale and slip under again.

  • • •

  On the phone one night I ask my brother if he was bothered when I swam faster than he did.

  “You were as fast as me when I quit and you swam at Etobicoke Pepsi after, so it was natural you’d be faster. It didn’t bother me, it made sense, you were better at it, way more into it.” He pauses. “I was proud of you. I practiced a couple of times with your group, but the guys were dicks. The stoners I swam with were cooler. They listened to the best music.”

  We talk for a bit about Rhys and Christian, two brothers in Intermediate Age Group who had stratospherically better taste than we did in clothes and music.

  “It was easy for me to quit,” Derek reasons. “My last race was the hundred free at a provincial meet. I swam a best time but my shoulders hurt so much I couldn’t lift myself out of the pool.” He laughs. “I think I disqualified our relay team at that meet too.”

  • • •

  The weight room is in the basement of the Etobicoke Olympium athletic complex. It’s a small room, with cinder-block walls painted a glossy pale yellow. From the pocked panels of the dropped ceiling, fluorescent light bears down bluish-white and cold. The door suctions shut over gray industrial carpet. The women’s team does weight training three nights a week in addition to resistance tubing and running, and we record our progress in messy columns of numbers and capitalized titles—LATS, DIPS, DELTS, CURLS, SQUATS, PRESS—our photocopied chart pages growing smudgy and dog-eared over the course of a month. The room has a specific smell: of steel weights, grease, dried sweat, old carpet, and vinyl padded benches. It is a salty, ferrous odor, strongest during hamstring pulls, when my face is mashed into the sparkly blue bench.

  One night, we are listening to a mixed tape as we go through the circuit. When “In the Air Tonight” begins, somebody switches off the light. Everyone stops, the squeaking and clanking gently cease. Nobody speaks. We sit quietly in the dark, listening to the song. All I can see are the tiny red lights glowing on the tape deck and the motionless shapes of the other girls in the room.

  This was around the time Miriam’s father died. One afternoon she didn’t come to practice. Mitch sat us all down on the deck afterward and told us that her father had been killed in an accident. She didn’t attend any practices for a week. When she came back her face looked tired and her skin was pale. Sometimes she started crying in the water, holding on to the side of the pool. Her friends didn’t leave her by herself. I was still new, not close to anyone on the team, but Miriam was kind to me. We swam the same event and I was slightly faster, which now left me with an uneasy feeling.

  Miriam is in the weight room that night. I see her nearby, hugging her knees to her chest. Nothing is said once the song ends, but the mood is low. Somebody turns the lights back on, and we quickly finish up, shower, change, and leave. I wonder if that song meant something to Miriam. My mother picks me up.

  “Tired?”

  “Yeah.” I keep my eyes closed on the drive home.

  • • •

  There is a covered plate on the kitchen counter. Beneath the foil are a pork chop, green beans, and some mashed potato. Next to the plate is a small saucer of gravy, covered in Saran wrap.

  I drop my bag in the hall and hang my parka on the banister. A single place is set at the dining room table. As my mother heats up the gravy, I pour myself a glass of milk and sit down. In the dark living room, my father is listening to CBC Radio. He’s stretched out on his back, six-foot-one along the length of the brown chesterfield, and his arm is slung across his eyes. He turns the lights out and the volume up loud when he listens to the radio. He does this with movies on TV too, turns off every light in the house and turns the volume way up. My mother brings the gravy to the table and I let it cool a little while I stare into space, listening to the familiar radio-host voices—Barbara Budd and Mary Lou Finlay—from my chair, sipping my milk.

  My mother’s noises come from the kitchen. The fridge opens and closes and opens and closes. I hear the dishwasher start. I chew my chop and scoop my potatoes. I wonder if Derek is in his room, and I picture him: he’ll be either at his desk doing homework or sitting on his bed, his shoulders against the wall and
his feet straight out in front of him. He reads like this, or with the book propped up on his chest, using the bottom half of his glasses. He has been reading science fiction and fantasy lately, lots of Isaac Asimov and Larry Niven. I like the cover and title of his paperback copy of A Wrinkle in Time. I finish my dinner, wash my plate, and go upstairs to find my duffel bag at the foot of my bed. The wet towels and suits have been hung up in the bathroom. I walk into Derek’s room, where I find him pretty much as imagined, on his bed, propped up against the wall, reading science fiction.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  He doesn’t look up.

  “What is the name of that Phil Collins song, the one that goes: ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord’?”

  “How should I know?” He’s still not looking up. Then he sighs. “I really dislike Phil Collins.”

  I pick at a sticker on his chest of drawers.

  “Mnh.”

  Derek ignores me. I stick my tongue out at his drawers, then go back to my room. There is French homework in my school bag that I consider doing but know I can cram in during the disorganized five minutes before class starts. I change into a purple Snoopy nightshirt and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

  DEREK

  After my nephews are tucked into bed and while Derek is working, my sister-in-law, Kristin, and I eat some brownies we made, and wash them down with red wine. I had gone to a party the night before, and as I tell Kristin about it I remember that I stopped in at a swim meet.

  • • •

  I’m wearing a dress, heels. The brightly lit U of T pool is on my way, and I look in through the ground-level windows. A swim meet. Finals. I go inside. Shaggy’s version of “Angel of the Morning” echoes across the vaulted space. The first few swimmers dive in to warm up, breaking the plate surface with a churning flutter kick. More swimmers, wearing extra suits for drag, stand at one end as their coaches give warm-up sets. Families in the gallery sip coffees and Cokes, flip through programs. The air is warm and heavy, steaming the dark windows. I find a seat and take off my coat.