“What happens if you just try to float, or even lightly tread water?” she asked him on the third swimming lesson.
“I’ll show you,” he said as he stopped his vigorous stroking and kicking. He became horizontal in the water for a moment, languidly moving his arms, and as if his feet were extra dense, he began to sink feet first, straight down. Rocky watched him slowly sink to the bottom of the twelve-foot depth, landing lightly on his toes. She expected him to spring back up, push off with his knees bent. But instead, he sank even more and sat cross-legged on the bottom of the pool and placed his palms on his legs.
Rocky waited a moment, treading water above him, and then waved at him to come up. Another moment passed. Then she jack knifed straight down to him, her head coming even with his, her feet kicking about her. She looked at him sternly and gave him a thumbs-up sign for him to get going. His cheeks were puffed up and he stared directly into her eyes and slowly began releasing the air out of his lungs.
Rocky’s body went into the automatic training that had been ingrained into her brain and into every cell since she had first been trained as a lifeguard in high school. Here was a victim, and everything else about him was irrelevant. She gave a huge kick that brought her body down until her feet touched the slick bottom of the pool and she wrapped one arm around his neck and torso, and at the same time that she kicked off, she heaved him up and got her hip under him. She had never pulled anyone off the bottom except in practice and never anyone filled with granite. She aimed up and diagonally for the side of the pool. As they broke the surface, her fury gave an extra bolt of strength and she nearly threw him on the edge.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she spit out.
Bob had swallowed a bit of water and coughed it out of his lungs. The lifeguard on duty came over and said, “Do you need help over here, Rocky?”
“I was just giving lessons to an idiot who decided to sit on the bottom of the pool and exhale.” She waved off the lifeguard. She glared at Bob, checked to see that he was pulling himself up on the ladder, then strong-armed herself on the side of the pool. “Don’t ever pull that stunt again,” she said.
“Look, I wanted to see what it would be like to be saved, to be really saved by an incredibly beautiful woman.” He reached for her hand. “I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”
As soon as he touched her she felt the jolt of energy going through her all over again. He smiled his big-toothed smile. “But if you had to, would you do it again, would you save me again?”
His penance was to be the official victim for the water-safety class. After they made love for the first time, he whispered to her, “I’m in love with a woman who won’t let me drown. What an incredible extra.”
She was ten years out of graduate school, and swimming took less and less time in her life. But she had still used it as a meditative cleansing, swimming laps, feeling her body blur with the watery sounds. Lunch hour offered her just enough time to swim thirty laps, shower, and dry her hair. Had she stopped when Bob died? She had to think back. Yes, there was the world before Bob died and the world after. It occurred to her that her swimsuit and towel waited for her back in a locker in a Massachusetts university along with shower gel, deodorant, and skin lotion.
She was going back to another archery lesson in seven days. She would pull back the damn child’s bow and move up five pounds. She set up a practice target in back of Tess’s house. She had already decided that Lloyd shouldn’t see her in the act of archery. She didn’t know what kind of post-traumatic stress disorder dogs could muster up, but it seemed cruel to expose him to a reminder of his nearly fatal encounter. And she was going to have to build her body back up again.
She spent the next day in Portland searching for an athletic club, signed up at the YMCA and got a trainer to work with her for an hour. The trainer was young and eager. He admonished her to go for a full-body, free-weights regime, and not just upper bodywork as she had requested.
“It doesn’t matter if you used to be fit, you’re starting from scratch,” he said as he wrote down the number of the free weight that Rocky pushed over her head. Rocky stopped, and the two plastic coated, six-pound weights paused overhead like heavy birds. She slowly lowered them.
“You’re right, I’m starting from scratch, aren’t I?” She knew that this happened sometimes, that strangers could speak as sages, pulling truths from the air so deep that it seemed like they were momentarily inhabited by wisdom completely beyond them. Sometimes people get the offer of free advice from the gods, spoken by innocents, and there is always the choice of whether to listen or not, whether to act or not.
“That’s what I’ll do, then. Start from the beginning.”
Chapter 11
The track coach was surprisingly easy to fool. He was old, maybe as old as fifty. Melissa knew he was from pre-anorexia times; he just didn’t get it and acted impressed about her well-defined calf and thigh muscles. He even held her up as an example in September when they started training for cross-country.
“Look at Melissa,” he intoned to the team. “She doesn’t have to huff and puff carrying around an extra ten pounds. Remember, picture yourself with a five-pound bag of sugar strapped to each shoulder. That’s what extra weight does to you. Good job, Melissa. I can see you kept training this summer.”
She figured at least four of the other girls went home that day and said they were too full to eat dinner. She could tell by the angry, frightened look in their eyes when the coach spoke. “Let them try,” she thought, “they still won’t catch me. I’m way ahead of them.”
If she could have felt guilty, she would have done so about the depth of the deception with her mother, who was not easily fooled. Her mother asked, just the other day, “Is this going to be a problem? Is food going to be the enemy?” Melissa had put on her most shocked and exasperated look and rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen the after-school specials and heard the lectures in health class. You just don’t know what it’s like to take running to the limit. All the runners look like this.” For added emphasis, Melissa put a hunk of cheese, an apple, and a PBJ sandwich in her book bag. On the ferry ride to the mainland school, she threw tiny bits of the sandwich to the seagulls that followed alongside, looking at Melissa with conspiratorial glances. She could hardly wait to throw the cheese into the trash barrel at school. She ate half the apple in history class and half at lunch, so that it appeared to everyone that she was constantly eating.
Chris was in her last class, Chemistry. She had known her since freshman year. Chris was gone for the last month of the freshman year. Everyone knew it was a suicide attempt. Then last year Chris was all GSA; Gay Straight Alliance Club. Melissa said to her, “Of course that doesn’t matter to me. Everybody’s the same to me.” But she worried that if she hung out with Chris, people would think she was gay, too. She just wanted to make sure that people knew she wasn’t gay.
Chris had talked the principal into announcing the GSA meetings over the morning radio station. It was like Chris had decided to become the most out lesbian on earth. Chris had changed in other ways, too. Melissa noticed that she had gained weight. Actually, she could tell exactly how much she had gained with perfect accuracy. Eight pounds. She knew what eight pounds looked like; hips, maybe as big as a size ten. Melissa knew she would never let that happen. Looking at Chris, she planned the 400 crunches she would do silently in her room that night with the lights out, with a towel folded in half beneath her so that she wouldn’t bruise her vertebrae into a line of vertical dots.
But here was the first big lie. The mere deceptions didn’t count. They were like playacting. But not telling her mother that she was going to the athletic club to work out was a lie. She had told her mother she was visiting a friend after school on Tuesday and Thursday, just for a while, walking around the Food Court in downtown Portland, a safe enough place. She knew her mother, and she knew that if she said she was working out any more that the careful balance she had constructed would collapse and ques
tions would be asked in a more desperate way. Her mother was no fool and Melissa had the tiniest hint of regret about playing her for one.
She had her routine; go right to the Y after school on the days she didn’t have cross-country practice, reserve forty-five minutes on the elliptical, and thirty minutes on the Stair-Master. That’s all. Well, maybe a little run on the treadmill to shake it all out before working on the weights. Thirty minutes on the treadmill if there was no one else waiting. The time of day was right; no neighbors from the island came here, she had already checked for their names. Her mother’s teacher friends all rushed home to take care of their kids, so they weren’t even a possibility.
She walked into the women’s locker room. She had asked for her favorite locker, 266, which was unfortunately taken. She hated it when someone else had it; so she asked for the one that was next to it, number 267. She dropped her bag on the wood-plank seat between two rows of lockers and headed for the toilets. She wanted an empty bladder, to feel as light as possible. She heard one of the showers shut off and the shower curtain shoosh open.
When Melissa came out of the stall and headed back to the lockers, she stopped short. Seated on the bench was a woman with her back to Melissa, a towel hung loosely around her. What she saw was the perfect asymmetry of a moment, one shoulder blade poking out, the other in, as the woman twisted, paused in her moment of dressing. Her shoulders were wide and the muscles that ran down her back produced long gullies on either side of her spine. A blinding flush started in the recesses of Melissa’s hard, flat abdomen and spread out like a kerosene-fed fire across her breasts, straight up the highway of her neck and pooled in her cheeks. Something had skipped her brain entirely and she felt, for the first time in her young life, a full out blast of lust.
The woman turned her head to the right, so that Melissa could see the profile. Melissa felt another competing rush, this time of loathing and fear. It was Rocky.
Why is she everywhere that’s mine, why does she have to follow me around? Melissa ducked back around the corner, back to the stalls where she stayed with her pounding heart until she heard locker 266 slam shut.
Would anyone be able to tell what she was thinking, that she had been overwhelmed, caught in midair, breathless? The image of what she had to do came immediately and unbidden. No matter what, she was not eating anything tonight when she got home. She would simply tell her mother that she was sick. That would eliminate any dinnertime petitions to eat, or have soup, or please have something.
The thought of food, even not having food, had started the surge of her digestive juices, and she felt the cleansing burn of hunger, which she hoped would last all night and like the self-cleaning oven that worked by extreme temperatures would, with surgical exactness, cleanse her of such terrifying emotions.
She wanted something really awful to happen to Rocky. Maybe she would get bit by a rabid animal, lightning would strike her, or maybe her propane stove would blow up. No, not that. Melissa didn’t want anything bad to happen to Lloyd. She had moments of relief when she was with the dog.
She felt her world begin to split open with Rocky’s dead-aim stare, the way she looked through Melissa’s sweatpants and jacket and hooded sweatshirt. Everything was fine until Rocky got here.
Now Rocky had invaded her secret place. If she could figure out when Rocky was going to come to the club, she could avoid her. But Melissa had a schedule that was perfect. Everything had been perfect, even the way that she showered, grabbed a Diet Coke and an apple on the way out, carried the apple while she was exiting and took two big bites, one while she opened the door from the women’s locker room, chew and swallow, and one bite while she passed the front desk. When she got outside, she could spit the second bite out. Save the rest of the apple for the ferry ride home. Make sure to bring both the Diet Coke bottle and the apple core home, drop them both noticeably on the counter in a way that her mother couldn’t miss. The Diet Coke made the charade believable; her mother never would have believed a non-diet drink.
She was going to make sure that she went to her father’s house this weekend. She needed to become invisible and there was no better place to do that. When she was at her father’s house on the mainland, every other weekend for sure and every weekend if she wanted, he simply didn’t notice. She didn’t have to work as hard with him to keep up the pretense of eating.
Her father had his own body-fat ratio measured and asked her if she wanted to also. “Runners don’t need to carry extra fat around,” he said. Of course he meant his body, not hers, or so he said, but Melissa had already swallowed it like a fish swallowing a hook.
Her father ran every Saturday with his buddy from law school, Alex. She declined their offers to run with them. They were in their forties and she couldn’t understand why they wore such tiny running shorts. She was embarrassed for them and embarrassed to be with them. They looked so old and sinewy.
While her father and Alex ran on Saturday mornings, she prepared her lunch. She woke up thinking about food, went to sleep thinking about food and this worried her. Was she losing her grip, her control? She didn’t want to think of food, but since she still did, she planned to whip it into obedience. One rice cake and cucumber for lunch. The cucumber was peeled, then cut in half the long way, then in half the other way, then she held all the long spears together and chopped those into chunks. She filled a cereal bowl with the cucumbers and threw in one-half cup of nonfat yogurt. By 11:30, her father and Alex were generally in the home stretch. By the time he came in the door, she was seated at the table with the bowl in front of her, a rice cake in hand.
“Eating again, honey? I don’t know where you put it.”
Chapter 12
Rocky expected to see improvement; this was the third lesson. She had worked out a deal with Tess to use the old clunker car that Tess kept on the mainland. Often, if people could find a spot in Portland to leave another car they did, rather than paying for the more expensive car ferry. Rocky knew she was ready to move up to a heavier bow and part of her was eager to hear Hill say, “Good pull and release. This is the day to move up to a twenty-five-pound bow.”
She had practiced for two hours each day behind Tess’s house. She stood with her left side facing the target, set the arrow, pulled out and up, right arm pulled back, elbow up, right thumb even with her jaw, sighted the target, took a breath, steadied the body, released the breath, then in the empty space between breaths, released the arrow. When she had first started, the arrows had flown wildly over, under, and to the side of a target, which was the size of a garbage can lid. The first time that the arrow actually hit the target, she was amazed at the thrill she felt.
Tess, who knew nothing about archery but a lot about Qi Gong, said it was the repetition, through repetition comes freedom.
“Repetition gives the body a chance to expand and be creative. Look anywhere in nature, in concentric rings in sunflowers. Look down from an airplane the next time you fly and look at cornfields in the Midwest in all their wonderfully repeated rows. That lets us see the exception in the change. Your body is getting the hang of this Rocky, even if your brain can’t believe it,” said Tess.
She was anxious for Hill to see the improvement. She had eaten breakfast and lunch and the last time she checked, her energy was right where it was supposed to be, dropped down low in her body. She parked Tess’s car on the street in front of his house. She walked to the backyard after not finding him in his shop garage. He was already pulling back on his sixty-five-pound bow as if it were no harder than the rubber band that secured the Sunday paper. Thwack! He hit as close to the center as an arrow could get.
There was no question of startling him, she knew that. He was a hunter and he listened to sounds like any wild animal. Rocky pictured him noting the sound of her car door closing, the knock on the shop door, and the way she had let the gate slap shut when she came into the backyard. For the first time, she noted that Hill moved his body in a way that was graceful. She had always liked
that in a man, whether he was a dancer or a roofer; some men moved with grace and Rocky had an appreciative eye. His shoulders swiveled in perfect opposition to his hips. She had forgotten that she appreciated anything.
She greeted him with sudden shyness, and tried to pull back hard into a sisterly approach with him, as if he was Caleb, and she was commenting on one of his sculptures. Hill tipped his head slightly as if he was scanning her for important information. After the general greetings, she unzipped her bow from the canvas bag. She took her stance, and began to slow her breathing. She prepared to pull back.
“Are you married?” asked Hill from his perch on the picnic table.
She crumbled minutely in her core, let her arms drop, and she paused to figure out her answer. She was baffled. Why did people have to ask this? Wasn’t she enough as she was? But as soon as he asked, she was thrown into a whirlwind of decisions. Was she married? Surely she felt the same attachment as someone who was married; every single night she missed her husband’s body next to hers. She had not divorced, she had neither asked for or been asked by another to divorce. But no, of course this was different. Finally, she said, “Not anymore, I’m not married anymore.”
He picked up his bow again and walked toward Rocky. “Tough answer. Simple question,” he said. “I’ve thrown you off. Sorry. Let me take a couple of shots while you recuperate.”
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