by Mishna Wolff
The next week Violet was back in class, looking a little worse for the wear, and avoiding the smokers on the stoop out front. But Marni was still nowhere to be found. And as much as I kept thinking I should call over there and see what was up, after Violet I was scared that it might be something horrible—like she was killed in the passenger side of her mother’s car on a drunken late-night run to Jack in the Box. But no news was forthcoming and by the end of the week, I saw that as a good sign—and cynically reassured myself that if something tragic had happened, they would have called an assembly. But the fact that I was even worried about these people was weird to me. I had spent the last six years being jealous of them.
A few weeks later I had a swim meet. Mom had dropped me off, and I didn’t ask her to stay. Though inhaling chlorine in a damp environment was my idea of a great Saturday, she worked seventy hours a week and I respected her desire to take a nap or eat sitting down once in a while. She provided, she fed, and she went to the trouble of making my life about as free of drama as humanly possible. We had a good thing going as long as I didn’t ask her to stand up to Dad for me.
I walked into the host pool and saw Lilith, who was on another team, sitting against the wall with her teammates. Normally I would walk over and say hi, but seeing my sister over by my teammates was more compelling to me. She was walking around the pool deck in a T-shirt with African colors on it and a silhouette of an Egyptian monarchist couple holding their newborn African prince. And as I walked up to her, she threw her arms around my neck and said, “Sissy!”
She had come with Dad, whom I hadn’t seen since I’d left, and I looked over and noticed him taking a seat in the bleachers with the other parents. He looked lonely and out of place. He took a seat near a girl named Teagan’s parents and started a conversation with them even though I knew he didn’t like them. When he saw me, he got excited and waved as though nothing had happened between us. I waved back. I was happy that I existed to him again, but it also felt weird—like I didn’t want to let down my guard. And for the rest of the morning, as I warmed up, stretched, and prepared for my events, I could feel him watching me and wanting to be included. And I knew he was proud and sad.
When it was time for my last event, he grabbed me on the way to the block like he always did when he came to a meet. He squared off my shoulders to him and looked me in the eye and said, “I want you to come off the block real fast.”
I didn’t know how to handle it, so I just said, “Okay.”
“Then on that second lap, don’t give up,” he said. “That needs to be real fast, too.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“Then the third lap—” But I stopped him. I felt myself loving him as he was standing there, and I needed my bad feelings back or I was going to cry and ask him if I could come home. Instead I let my anger at him well up like nausea. I thought about the van incident and the business with Yvonne and the shirt. And I could feel new resentments growing inside me like muscles, making me strong.
“I know what I’m doing, Dad!” I said. “I don’t need you to tell me how to swim.”
“I’m your father,” he said.
“Yeah!” I said. “Well, I’m the swimmer, and I already have a coach! Go coach Anora!” I saw him getting hurt and then angry, and I was scared for a moment. But he didn’t lash out at me.
He just threw up his arms and said, “A’ight,” and turned and walked away. I walked the other way, inflating my anger, pumping it like lead as I walked past my coach over to my lane and got on the block.
I did poorly—not only that, I was conscious of what I was doing wrong as I was doing it. I was hovering over myself in my lane watching myself late on the start and then taking one stroke too many on the turn, all the time thinking, That’s gonna cost you at the finish. And to add insult to it, when I went to get out of the pool, there was Lilith standing above me. And no matter how much I knew she understood that everyone has a bad race sometimes, no one wants to eat it in front of their friends.
“Hey,” she said.
“I really bit that.” I was embarrassed and hoped she didn’t think that was the best I could do.
“Eh,” she said. “Let’s get some chips.”
I looked across the pool and saw Dad and Anora palling around in the bleachers. And I was glad Lilith was with me because I wanted to look popular.
“So,” I asked awkwardly, still half-looking over at my sister and Dad as we walked over to the concession stand, “how have your events been going?”
“Killer,” Lilith said, “I got a personal best in the hundred fly.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “What’s next for you?”
“That’s it till finals,” she said, tearing open a bag of barbecue Lay’s.
We sat on a bench by the trophies, eating chips, when she casually said, “Oh, so guess what . . .” and I knew whatever she said next would be bad news. Lilith then told me that she had heard through the grapevine that Marni’s parents had put her in the nut house.
“What?” I asked. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“Well, they called it something else, but basically they had her committed.”
“Not a theraputic community?” I asked. “Like where Jenna got sent for stealing her dad’s prescription pad?”
“No, dude. Not rehab. Crazy-hab. Institutionalized, like the song.”
“But Marni’s not crazy. She just has shitty parents.” The princess who lived in the glass house on the sea was not a princess at all.
“I don’t know,” Lilith said.
“Trust me,” I said. “You’d be crazy, too, if you had her parents.” And I suddenly wanted to get away from Lilith and everyone she worried about. I no longer felt like I could navigate the kind of problems my friends had. They seemed much worse than being poor. I looked around the pool deck at all these preppy swimmers and I felt so out of place in all this whiteness.
“Excuse me,” I said to Lilith, “I’ll catch up with you later.”
“Where are you going?” Lilith said.
But I was already walking away and just said, “Sister.”
When I found Anora, she was sitting on the bleachers quietly watching our teammate Janie, a blond, eighty-pound fourteen-year-old dance around with her Walkman to an NWA song. She bobbed her neck and moved in a little circle as she sang. I don’t think she realized just how loud she was, because she had her headphones on:
“’Cause she’s gotta bunch of kids nappy heads and all dirty . . .” She pumped her hands to the beat, indicating that she was a gangster. She was completely lost in the music and her Walkman as she closed her eyes and sang,
“And she’s getting pimped by a mhhmph whose thirty . . .”
My sister and I both knew the song well enough to know that mhhmph was the N-word.
The next line of the song Janie forgot, and sort of mumbled but came back in to say way too loud, “But I heard that she sucks a good dick!”
I watched her bounce around the pool deck a bit more, singing about how big her dick was and then I turned to my sister and said, “What the fuck is the matter with white people?”
My sister didn’t even look at me but just shook her head and said, “I-do-not-know.”
Fourteen
THE LAKE
SUMMERTIME. We had two swim club workouts a day, which meant Anora and I lived in the water together. In the one year since she had started swimming, Anora was such a presence on the team that I seemed like her shadow. The upper-middle-class decorum that surrounded us in and around the pool had little to no effect on her. She wore her Polo puffer and cornrows, she didn’t deal with people she didn’t feel like dealing with, she tuned out their grunge music like she was allergic to it, and she swam like a motherfucker. And as a result people worked to please her, and those that didn’t, couldn’t stand her. Either way, she didn’t care. In fact, the only person she seemed interested in impressing was me. Why, I had no idea. I was faster, but she was well on her way to br
eaking all of my team records. And now that we didn’t share a room, we had nothing in common.
Summer also meant it was time for CAST to do their annual swim across Lake Washington. This was a 2.7-mile swim, which wasn’t that much for us in the pool, but adding cold, waves, and boat traffic made it a palpable challenge. Anora seemed pissed off by the very idea of swimming across the lake for fun.
“Why?” she asked when Dan announced the swim. We had finished practice and he was standing on the bulkhead like Caesar.
“Did you ask why?” he asked, amazed at Anora. He often found things she said amazing. “Are you really a swimmer? You’re asking me why we should swim across Lake Washington as a team?”
“Sounds awesome!” I said to Ari and Janie, who were in my lane. I had been geeking out on the idea of a lake swim since Dan had mentioned it, and I already saw myself winning it.
“It’s not a race, Mishna,” Dan said, reading my mind.
“What do you mean it’s not a race?” Ari said.
“There’s a boat alongside so you can’t break ahead of the rest of the team.”
“What about the last leg?” I asked.
“You can do whatever you want with the last leg.”
“Kiss your butt good-bye,” Ari said, looking at me.
“I’m not doing it,” Anora said.
“It’s not optional,” Dan shot back. “There’s no I in team.”
“I’m sorry,” Anora said. “I just don’t understand why I would do that. Especially on a weekend.”
“Just to finish a swim across the lake,” I said sarcastically. We didn’t do anything just to do it. There was always winning involved.
And Anora announced to everyone, loudly, “I’m only doing it because Mishi is doing it!”
That weekend I had a dinner with Dad. It had been six months since I had lived with him, and over the previous month I had started agreeing to a couple dinners during which Dad took me someplace that was convenient for him, but not particularly wonderful for me, and always left me stranded for hours longer than I wanted to be and not wanting to have dinner with him ever again. On this particular night he announced as we got onto the on-ramp of the interstate that he was taking me to the Sarge’s house in Tacoma, a military suburb of Seattle. The Sarge was Yvonne’s father, who was a veteran and not particularly fond of white people or my father. He lived in a split-level ranch house, and it always seemed surprisingly big for him, considering I never saw him anywhere other than the kitchen and a leather La-Z-Boy in the den. It was like the rest of the house was haunted by the ghost-of-marriage-past, and he was able to keep the spirits at bay by staying in rooms with TVs.
Yvonne adored her father and doted over him, constantly cleaning and organizing things for him. When she wasn’t doing that, she was telling him what he needed to be doing for this or that little health problem he had.
But that night when we walked into the front door of Sarge’s house, Yvonne was not parenting her dad at all. The second we walked in the house, I could sense there was something off.
“Goddamnit, Yvonne! Just give me the shirt!” we heard Sarge spit from the kitchen. We made our way into the kitchen to see Yvonne pleading with her father while standing over a pile of his clothes.
“Sarge,” Yvonne said desperately, “this is how I always fold your shirts.” It always seemed odd when she didn’t call him Dad.
“Yvonne, why you such a problem? I never taught you how to fold a shirt! Or you stupid?” Sarge asked as he freshened the yellow tumbler of rum and Coke he had been walking around with. Anora, Andre, and Yvette watched silently.
“I’m doing it right,” Yvonne said again.
“You ain’t doing anything right,” he said. “You come over here like you’re helping, but you ain’t helping! I got a way of doing things!”
“Dad,” Yvonne pleaded, “this is how I fold. This is how Mom folded. We all folded your shirts this way.”
“Don’t you patronize me!” he said. “I’m your father! Tell me, what have you done with your life that I should listen to you?” He trailed off. “Messed-up little girl done messed up your life.”
“Dad, don’t be that way,” Yvonne said, sounding fragile. “I’m doing really good with John.”
Then Sarge repeated himself, “Mess up your life!” Dad looked worried. “And another thing . . . You just never had no kind of standards for yourself!”
“That’s enough, Sarge,” Dad said. “You been drinking, and you’ve upset Yvonne.”
“Oh, let her be upset! She always upset about something.”
Dad just stood looking really big and way too close to Sarge, and said in a low voice, “Either you put an end to this . . . or I will.” Dad’s authority surprised me. He had always been eager to please Sarge, but there was no eagerness in his voice and no threat either—just the facts.
Sarge got quiet as he decided whether to chill or fight Dad. After an electric thirty seconds, Sarge’s angry disposition relaxed and he laughed, “Shoot . . . You all ganged up on me tonight!” And smiling, he grabbed a box from under the kitchen counter.
“Cigar?” he asked Dad.
Dad accepted the cigar, and at the same time he took Sarge’s bottle of rum and put it out of reach on a high shelf. And Yvonne took a deep breath and went back to folding.
Sarge looked over at me. “Hey, girl. You back around?”
“Yes, Sarge. Sort of.”
“Oh. Your dad been so sad without you around. You know he talks about you all the time.” I looked at Sarge, surprised. “You don’t believe me? Always ‘Mishna won city championships for swimming.’ ‘Mishna got straight A’s.’ What else, John?”
“Mishna plays the hell out of that violin,” my dad said.
“I’m not that good,” I said, but I was relishing the compliments, even secondhand.
“Come on,” Sarge said to me deviously. “You can help me cook.”
“Is that dinner?” I asked, pointing to the pot on the stove.
“No, your dinner is on the grill outside. That there’s for me. Come take a look.” He watched as I bent over the pot and gave it a stir. I saw the familiar sight of broth and entrails and knew immediately that he had brought me over there to try to gross out the white girl, but I was more grossed out by the smell of cigars and rum on him.
“You know what that is?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, brushing it off. “They’re chitlins.”
“What did you say?” The humor dissolved instantly and the angry guy was back.
I cowered a little. “Chit-lins?” I said nervously.
“Little girl,” the Sarge explained, “those are a food that have been with black people for generations, and you’re giving it some slave pronunciation.” He looked at me sternly. “They’re called chit-ter-lings.”
“Yeah,” I said, knowing he was inferring racism. “But everybody calls them chitlins.”
“Everybody who?” the Sarge asked.
I kept silent.
“Chitterlings,” Sarge snapped. “You don’t believe me, we can look it up in a dictionary.”
“Sarge!” my father warned him.
“Chit-ter-lings,” I said slowly.
But my sister was fearless, and sitting at the table, she cried out clear as a bell, “More like shit-lings!”
I looked over at Yvonne, who was giggling to herself a little over her father’s wash. And it was good to see her smile.
When it was time to take me back to Mom’s house, Anora came with me and Dad. She was super excited that it was the three of us in the van and kept bouncing in her seat, saying we should go somewhere else before I go back to Mom’s.
“Like where?” Dad said, open to the idea.
“Dancing!” my sister screamed, not getting that in the book of things that I would never do, dancing with my little sister was number two. It came right after going dancing.
“I’m going to bed,” I said, really busting my sister’s bubble so that she folde
d her arms and pouted.
“Hey,” Dad interrupted, “your sister told me you all’s team is swimming across the lake.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s gonna be pretty cool, I guess.”
“Well,” Dad said. “I want to swim with you all.” I couldn’t imagine what was making him want to do something so crazy.
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea, Dad.”
“Why?” he asked.
I could think of a million reasons why my thirty-nine-year-old dad shouldn’t get into the water with a dozen twelve to eighteen-year-old swimmers. In fact, the first ten reasons started with the word herniated, and then you could just fill in the blank.
“Well,” I said. “We swim a lot-lot. And we are pretty efficient at it. Plus, our endurance . . .”
“Why don’t you worry about your own self?”
Now Dad was just pissing me off. It was so completely ridiculous to think that an old guy who didn’t work out that regularly could get into the water with twenty athletes at their peak and not expect to hold us up. I was gonna be the one stuck waiting with him while Ari and Janie swam to glory.
I urged him to be reasonable, explaining that none of the other parents were going to try to swim with us.
“That’s ’cause they aren’t in the kind of shape I am,” Dad said.
“But you’re not a swimmer!” I said. “I’m a swimmer! I do this five hours a day! Every day!”
“That’s fine,” Dad said. “I won’t try to swim with you.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, knowing that I was going to lose this one, and my best bet was to start negotiating. “But if you get too far behind—” Dad looked hurt and incredulous that it would ever happen. “—will you get in the boat so that we don’t have to wait for you?” He looked at me like I was being mean, and not totally realistic.
