She took everything in. At the end of the session Brad made her a construction paper report card and drew happy faces and stars beside all the skills she had completed. He gave her five coloured badges from the Red Cross Kids program.
“I guess you’re in Green now,” he laughed. “And not too far from a shiny Bronze Medallion if you keep it up.”
The ladies were not impressed.
“He’s not supposed to do that, you know,” one of them said.
“Those badges are for children. He’s not supposed to do that. I’m sure you have to pay extra for badges.”
SHE LEFT THE CLASS after fourteen weeks and never came back for Advanced Beginner II. On the last day, Brad helped her fine-tune the front crawl.
“Keep your head down, face in,” he told her. “When you breathe, you have to turn your head instead of lifting it. Like this. You have to move your head from side to side instead of up and down. Like you’re saying a big ‘No’ instead of a ‘Yes.’”
She incorporated the breathing into the efficient cycle of her stroke, her head turning just enough to raise the corner of her mouth out of the water. At Christmas, they offered a fifty-percent discount for students who signed up for a full-year membership. She got a card and started coming almost every day to practice her lengths. The accuracy of the place, she liked that most. One length, a trip to the opposite wall, was worth twenty-five metres and the return gave you fifty. The day always ended on a nice round number.
She did her best thinking after ten minutes, when she was warmed-up and hit on a good rhythm. Her senses blurred and she felt cut off and separate and alone. In the water, there was no taste or smell or feeling or sound. Only her vision stayed sharp and sometimes it seemed too clear. Through her no-fog goggles, she studied the black lane marker stretching along the bottom into an elongated capital “I.”
400 meters: 16 lengths. 800 metres, a half mile, needed 32. When she was sure she could cover the whole mile, she asked her parents to come watch. They sat up in the observation deck for the whole forty-five minutes and when Stace climbed out – a little flushed maybe but not breathless – they clapped and waved. Her mother cried and wore an expression that seemed proud and happy, but also scared and confused at the same time.
They came down the stairs and her father gave her an awkward hug, pressing her wet body into the acrylic fuzz of his sweater.
“Whoa,” he said. “Look at you go. Amazing.”
Her mother shook her head. “I just don’t know,” she said. “Even as I’m watching you do it, I can’t believe it’s really you in there.”
SOMETIMES, WHEN SHE PUSHED HARD, sawing back and forth between the walls, she thought about the person she used to be and wondered what had happened to that girl. She felt distant, like she had moved to rural China or to some other country where the climate, the language, the diet, religion, politics, architecture and culture were so completely foreign, so different, it made it hard to believe that your own past, the place you came from, could still exist somewhere else in the world. Where did you store them, your leftover superstitions and the ridiculous rituals that once guaranteed your safety? All the misplaced and abandoned beliefs: what did people do with them now? The woman in the elevator, or the arachnophobes, and the paranoids who felt sure they were being followed? What did they do when they learned the truth? Where did they go? Who did they become, how could they return?
She felt alone and stupid, embarrassed by the force of her flawed convictions. Years of her life had been sacrificed. She was a fool, taken in by a lie, duped. It made her so angry she stopped once – in mid-stroke, halfway down the pool. She shook her head, ripped off her goggles and treaded water for a couple of seconds in the middle of her lane while she took it all in. Preposterous Lifeguards in their tank tops. Brad trying to look so severe as he glared down from his highchair. A thin slippery film of piss-warm water coating the entire deck. Two other swimmers, ugly manatees, bloated and awkward and slow, sloshing between their pontooned guide ropes. The four multi-coloured hands of the timer’s clock circling around every fifteen seconds. A burning stench of antibacterial soap and chlorine wafting up from every surface.
It was too much. She said the word Fuck and slapped the warm, flat surface with her open hand. Nothing came back. Her fingers passed down through the transparency. She felt ashamed and exposed, like the last kid who refuses to let go of the tooth fairy until some brute in the schoolyard says: “It’s your parents, you retard. They put money under your pillow and throw your teeth away.”
ONE TUESDAY NIGHT, early in the summer, she arrived late and could only get in twenty minutes before the session ended. She’d barely started when they blew the long whistle and everybody had to get out. As she headed for the changing rooms, one of the Lifeguards, a girl with a ‘Melanie’ name tag, waved in her direction and walked over.
“Listen,” the girl whispered, and she looked around to make sure they were alone.
“Listen, the place is yours if you want it. Nobody cares. We’re stuck here for another hour of clean-up so you can finish up and stay as long as you like. It doesn’t matter to any of us. It’s not like you need somebody to watch over you.”
She spoke with a sarcastic slacker tone that assumed mutual understanding. As though these two shared an equal part in a wider conspiracy.
Stace waited for the others to leave and watched as the girl went around with her necklace of keys, locking all the doors from the inside. Then Melanie turned and fanned her hand out across the pool.
“It’s all yours,” she said. “Go nuts.”
It is time to go. Stace releases the rope, pushes out into the water as hard as she can. Near the sides, in the shelter of the pilings, the current is almost still, but it picks up quickly as she moves outward and pulls her away in a long diagonal. She can barely breathe, but she calls out his name, forces her face in, swings her arms and kicks. Something vegetal and slimy brushes up against her thigh and lets go. Her stroke is short and tight and she feels heavy, already exhausted. It is hard to stay up and difficult to go on. Every thirty seconds she has to stop and lift her head, get her breathing back and look for bearings. She searches above and below and yells again. His name, the word Brad, sounds pitiful and small.
We are made most specifically by the things we cannot bear to do. She realizes it now, feels it in the powerful movement of this different water. The old discomforts coming home: a familiar tightening in her diaphragm, the intimate constriction of her larynx, sticky weight in her arms and legs, the scurrying in her brain. Fear is our most private possession. Heights and crowded buses, reptiles and strangers, hot and cold, the smell of burning wood, loud noises: they persist. Takeoffs and landings, abandonment, holes in the ground, wide-open spaces, horned insects, the dark, earthquakes, mirrors, clocks, wind, deep water: they stay with us, forever in the world. Even when we overcome, they remain, reminding us of past truths. There can be nothing in their absence, not even the smallest possibility of a significant action.
But there is light. She thinks she sees it. A paleness flashes up about sixty feet away and goes back down. The object bobs in the current and disappears.
“Come out to me,” she hears him repeating in her memory. “It’s not that far.”
The light is positioned at the limit of her vision. Beyond that spot, full darkness comes down like a heavy velvet curtain and the shadows make it impossible to be sure of anything. She chases it, moving as fast as she can. The wind blows in circles and a tiny island of floating garbage shoots past. A hinged styrofoam container that once held a Big Mac smiles at her as it surges through the foreground, pushed downstream so quickly it disappears in seconds.
She thinks about the Great Lakes, a project she did in elementary school, all five of them carved out in blue plasticine on a painted piece of plywood. It had been tricky to get the shapes and the scale right, difficult to get Lake Huron to fit correctly around the green mitten of Michigan. Information printed on her notecards
: One quarter of all the fresh water in the world flows through here. A chain of liquid coursing in the middle of the continent. It blasts over Niagara Falls, and spills into the St. Lawrence before it finally reaches for the ocean.
The paleness in the water moves downstream and she pursues. It could be anything. His hand held out, always the target, or maybe his overturned back, the fabric in his boxer shorts. The lights on both sides of the river go dim and she is too far out now, too low to see the Renaissance Center, the Holiday Inn, and the Odeon. In the middle of the shipping lane, the water moves with its full force, pulled by gravity, by the lean of the land underneath and by tides thousands of miles away. She is inside of it now.
Jacques Cousteau came to shoot a movie. He was the reason for their grade-school projects. The Calypso sailed right down the middle of the Detroit River and the whole school went down to Dieppe Gardens to watch it go by. Stace stood on the concrete bike path, far back from the railings. The boat seemed old and rickety and wasn’t as big as she expected. His yellow helicopter, stuck on the back, seemed like a toy.
Everyone cheered and clapped as he passed, but Cousteau never came out on deck to wave back. Her teacher said nobody in the world knew more about life underwater than he did. They played a record and showed a film strip in the darkened classroom. Stace had to sit beside the projector and turn the knob to advance the pictures every time she heard a beep.
Beep: Cousteau, standing on the deck, skinny and old with brown teeth, wearing the same red toque all the time. Beep: Cousteau in his gear, the aqualung respirator in his mouth, ready to roll backwards over the side. She thought he seemed too fragile to be down there with the Swordfish and the Killer Whales, the Manta Rays and the Giant Squid. Beep: Cousteau on the Great Barrier Reef. There were colours she had never seen before, real-life creatures that couldn’t be real.
“Everything you can see in this picture is alive,” the teacher said, the shadow of her hand showed on the screen.
“Even the rock is living.”
Beep: Cousteau swimming under an Iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean. He is suspended in a grey void, an astronaut wandering in deep space. His slow voice coming out of the record player. The accent. He says, “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to the earth. But he has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.”
The teacher made them memorize it.
They gave Cousteau a key to the city of Detroit and thousands stood in Hart Plaza to welcome him. But when he gave his speech, he turned furious and angry. His face contorted with rage and he talked about acid rain and illegal dumping, cancerous tumours and contamination of the food chain. Blind fish with confused sex organs. Mutating species.
“Your river, it is sick,” he said.
“When we try to film, it is only dying we see down there.”
There is a living tension, a line running between what can be achieved and what we cannot do. The light, the paleness inside the water, there is no way for her to catch it. He is beyond reach, moving at a pace she cannot match. A sentence from the lifesaving manual: Before all else, the rescuer’s first duty is the preservation of the self. She gives up, surrenders, and turns back to try for the side.
In the middle of the river, the first hint of its approach is more than enough. She feels the throbbing of the engine coming through the water and hears the sound, a massive grinding, like a creature gnawing at the earth’s crust. It is not visible yet, still out there and indistinct, but it is coming and she knows there will be no way around.
A raw terror sears through and demands an equivalent ferocity. She thrashes against the current, driven now by primordial instinct, the need to escape and a raw demand coming from a place she does not know. Her feet and hands pummel the surface. She snarls for breath, moving faster, harder than ever before. She is getting away, maybe, but there is no way to be sure. Every limit is unknown before it is reached. Very soon the prow, two hundred feet high, will emerge from the fog and it will part this water like the gargantuan head of an axe cleaving through. They are the native creatures of this place and the river is their natural habitat. Only the largest pass at night to avoid the complications of smaller boats. The propeller will be the size of a two-story house and the twin off-loading cranes will fold back like the wings of a resting insect. It will be a Leviathan, three football fields long, rusting red hide stuffed with 5,000 tons of salt. The river boils in its wake, a froth even the ocean cannot match. She tries not to hear it, tries to keep it out of her head, but the mechanical roar will not be commanded. It rises out of the dark, advances over the water and swallows everything in its path.
The Loop
The trick to riding a bike in the snow is to stand up on the pedals and push down hard on the front wheel. You need to lean into it and get all your momentum going forward so you can plough through that six or eight inches of slush that piles up on the side of the road. It’s not a skill you can master. No matter how many times you go through and no matter how hard you think about it, it never gets any easier. That skinny little wheel still can’t get a better grip on the ice-covered street. I used to think riding in the snow was the worst part of the Musgrave job, but in the end I had different reasons for quitting.
When you fall, you want to try and go down on the right hand side. As soon as you feel your tire slipping and the whole back end of the Supercycle moving away on its own, that’s when you need to grab the bars tight and swing everything way over to the right, towards the hard line of parked cars. It has to be to the right because if you go down on the left you end up splayed out in the middle of the road, right at the peak of drive-home traffic, and all you can do then is hope those nervous Southern Ontario drivers – the ones who never buy winter tires – still remember how to pump their brakes in just the right way and swerve around you, carving a smooth S curve in the snow just a couple inches from your head.
The one time I went down like that, on the left, the delivery bag ripped open when I hit the ground and everything spilled out onto the street. I got tangled up in the frame and the shoulder strap got wrapped around my elbow and the snow-choked chain came off the big ring and the small ring at the same time. All the little white prescription bags and the brown bottles and the vials with their Musgrave Pharmacy stickers tumbled out. All the other stuff went too: the candy, the tampons, the eight-pack of toilet paper, the denture cream, the jars of medicated ointment and the magazines wrapped in plastic or discreet brown paper. I looked like a soggy hospital piñata that had been walloped into submission. The wet snow kept coming down in fat, lazy flakes and horns were squawking all around me. A steady stream of road-ragers chugged by, each one taking his turn to yell at me about how I better stay on the sidewalk or get the hell out of the way. There was a moment just after I hit the ground, when my head was still down there close to the asphalt and I saw one of those pill vials with the childproof cap rolling away from me, across the yellow line in the middle of the road. I was down right at eye-level and I saw it close-up as this black steel-belted radial came rolling down on it. The plastic tube made a quiet splintery sound and for a half-second I thought I saw a couple of blue and yellow capsules springing up maybe six inches off the ground before they were crushed into the blacktop.
When I finally got myself put together again and made it back to the store, Marlene, one of the nice older ladies who worked at the front counter selling film and batteries and stamps, took me into the tight bathroom on the other side of the dispensary. I remember the way she screwed the cap off a new bottle of rubbing alcohol and how she defiantly ripped open a package of the most expensive antiseptic-treated bandages we sold.
“The bastard,” she muttered to me, as if we were suddenly the same age and we both had been in our jobs too long.
“There’s no place he wouldn’t send you. Nowhere is too far. Just the thought of it. On a day like today. You’re lucky you’re still alive.”
She kind of cooed over me and tried to be
as gentle as she could.
“It’s going to hurt, Allan,” she said. “But what can you do?”
She pressed the alcohol swabs into the scraped red lines on my left shoulder and my left elbow. And there was a weird moment when I had to undo the top button of my jeans and pull down my zipper just a bit so I could reach the bad spot where my left hip had come down the hardest. Marlene turned away and closed her eyes. Then she reached back and held out the dripping gauze.
“That one you can do yourself.”
We both laughed.
When we came out, Musgrave was waiting. He was wearing a lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket flap and holding one of those special metal spatulas they use for counting pills and sliding them across the tray. He pointed the sharp end of the spatula at me, right at the bridge of my nose, and he asked me if I was sure, absolutely sure, that nothing had been left behind.
“Those medications are controlled substances, you know,” Musgrave said. “And from the minute they leave this dispensary, you are the one responsible for making sure they get where they’re supposed to go.”
He stared down at me through his bifocals and kind of swayed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Depending on how I looked up into his glasses from the other side, I could make his eyes change shape just by moving my head up or down.
Light Lifting Page 12
