Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  “It’s tragic,” Katie said, “though they are overpopulated.”

  “She’s getting worse.”

  “Es la verdad. Estoy de acuerdo.”

  “Sí,” I said. “As long as you’re not talking about me.”

  Katie leaned forward to face her sister. “I don’t get why she’s making you study so much. I’m obviously the brain in the family and you’re obviously the little actor. You need to concentrate less on the books and more on your bod.”

  “I swear the next time I leave the house I’m driving all the way to the real Broadway to see Kiss of the Spider Woman. I don’t want to wait until I’m twenty-five, after all the best actors have won awards and moved on. Who’s up for a drive to New York?”

  “It’s my senior year,” I said. “No time for fooling around.”

  Katie slapped her thigh and clapped, more than displaying her appreciation. “Speaking of fooling around,” she finally said, tugging at her leather jacket lapels, “do you think Dad had a lot of girlfriends back in the day? He used to be a lightweight boxer, you know.”

  “It’s not exactly clear if he ever won a fight,” Emily said.

  “I’m going to dig around Grandma’s attic and see. I bet I’ll find a trophy or two.”

  I nodded optimistically, despite having a hard time picturing Mr. Schell hitting anything other than a telephone pole while backing up in his Beemer. Emily started pacing between the front porch and the driveway, stretching stiff-legged from one stepping-stone to the next.

  “Did Katie tell you she’s got an admirer?”

  “Shut up. I do not.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “It’s someone from your Spanish club.”

  “He’s not an admirer. He’s just some kid who only talks to me when my symptoms are out of whack. He’s creepy.”

  “He just wants to help,” Emily said. “That’s his in.”

  “It’s still creepy. Even if he’s the only guy in the school who actually listens when someone else is talking.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked, surprised by my own anxiousness.

  Katie slumped and threw her hands at the sky. “It’s Thomas Staniszewski. He’s nobody. Just some weirdo with a perm and a name no one can pronounce.”

  “A red perm,” Emily said, hopping toward us and raising her eyebrows. “He’s got red hair.”

  “No he doesn’t,” Katie shot back. She grabbed her crutch and pushed herself up. “God. My shows are coming on. See you later, George.”

  “See you at the match.”

  “You seemed to pronounce his name just fine,” Emily said, smirking and hopping to the next stone. Katie paused at the door and leaned back around. “You know, she can be really immature sometimes. It’s kind of sad, especially knowing that she’s my older sister and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You can buzz off,” Emily said, “that is, if you have any interest in me taking you for a driving lesson when Mom and Dad head out to dinner tomorrow night.”

  “You coming, George?”

  “I’ll be too hungry to go driving while I’m thinking about what your parents are ordering for dinner.”

  “Poor George,” she said, shaking her head as she stepped inside. Emily hopped over and sat down again. It would be another month or so before the first snowfall, but it was a dry breezy night, already swirling with the crisp cologne of winter.

  “Any word on Bridges of Madison County?”

  “Not yet. It probably won’t get released until the summer. Anyway, they cut out a lot more footage than they use. The camera only faced my direction a couple of times.”

  “Everything okay?” I asked, watching her heel at the cement, realizing she was more upset than I thought.

  “I just wish things were different. My mom and I used to have a good time together. Let’s face it, Katie got her sense of humor from someone, and it wasn’t my dad. The only time he’s funny is when he thinks he’s being serious. But every time I feel like opening up to her, she says something rude that makes me want to punch her in the nose. And she always strikes when I’m in a good mood.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t notice what she’s doing? I mean, maybe if you two had more conversations about normal things, it wouldn’t come off so badly when she gave you advice.”

  Emily was already shaking her head and kicking at the cement again. “She makes it impossible. The other day I was complaining about this guy in the play who didn’t know anything about Shakespeare. I’m talking like, this guy probably thought Macbeth was the name of a new breakfast sandwich. We pay all this money to study with this bigwig writer, and my partner can’t even remember his lines. So I start complaining, and then my mom turns beet red and calls me a snob. I mean, I know my dad makes a lot of money, but am I really spoiled? Do I act like a rich little snob?”

  “You’re not a snob. Jan Lewis is a snob. Even Ashley’s a bit of a snob. Your mom is a total snob, and probably a prude, too.”

  I laughed a queer little laugh, like I was just giving her mom a hard time in order to make her feel better. A second later, when Emily searched my eyes, I swore she found every petty thought in my head. I might as well have punched her in the stomach.

  “So am I, huh? A prude.”

  “You’re Emily Schell,” I said, like that was the best achievement anyone our age could expect, like she was perfect.

  “Emily Schell is a tease.”

  “I don’t care about that. My problem is that you’re my best friend, and you spend more time with me than anyone else, and I’m still jealous. I don’t even know who I’m jealous of. But you’re the only actor I’ve ever known and the only actor I ever want to know.”

  “All right,” she said, ending my little ode with a big wave to her neighbor who was pulling up into the driveway next door. The woman stepped out of the car, shining us a smile as she grabbed her briefcase from the backseat. For some reason this made Emily laugh (“Distract me,” the laugh said). My stomach growled like the long woeful chirp of a paralyzed cat.

  “You’ve got to eat, George. This one-forty business is ridiculous. You should be wrestling at one-fifty-two, at the least.”

  “If I wrestle at one-fifty-two I’ll be the only senior on the junior varsity squad. Colin Franzen wrestles at one-fifty-two, and I’ve never come close to beating him.”

  “You could try. You don’t know until you gain some weight and give it another shot.”

  I knew in that moment that Emily would rather have talked about anything other than the details of our sexless relationship that no one, including ourselves, knew how to interpret. We talked about her workshop for a while and then I drove home, recognizing that while our classmates were fretting over SAT scores and potential careers, my only real ambition in life was to love Emily in the same fierce and noble way I’d loved her from the beginning. I’d nearly told her how I felt.

  Fourteen

  While I’d never considered myself a competitor in any radical sense of the word, by midwinter of my senior year something changed, and I can’t help but think the new intenseness I discovered in myself came as a direct retaliation against my established mode of circuitous and biddable wooing. At this point of the season we were all scrapping dogs wrestling on death metal and invented egos, tapping into any and all sources of energy that might stave off our hunger, distract our better instincts, and prove our warrior-like worth. I was cutting more weight than anyone and any lines of weight-loss methodology I’d previously vowed not to cross were summarily erased. I practiced in a rubber suit, chomped laxatives, binged and purged. The severe effects of such a regimen included mood swings, headaches, dizzy spells, and lapses of short-term memory that might’ve bested Katie at her recidivist worst.

  But by then I’d become a core member of the team who’d impressed Coach Grady enough in the first half of the season that he’d begun to notice every detail of my technique and form. He attempted to fine-tune my skills in such a way that I occasionally felt my human p
otential being scientifically weighed, that I was no longer training for the state tournament but attempting to stretch the boundaries of my life’s possibilities. My guess is that my new attitude also owed a great deal of credit to the surprise visit we received by the Great Dan Gable. In response to our waning team morale, Grady assembled a crew of former St. Pius state champs who began showing up before practice to narrate the episodes of their greatest, life-altering victories. But even Grady was caught speechless when Will Warner and a few of his University of Iowa teammates stepped into the room with Coach Gable, whose hyperintensive workout routines were the bastion of our daily education.

  Given the theme of my resolve during this period, I’d like to take a moment to describe the presumed source of Coach Gable’s determination, which could be traced to the Memorial Day weekend of his sophomore year, when he and his parents were away fishing and his sister was raped and murdered in their family home. After that day Gable never lost a high school match. He finished with a record of 64-0, then a collegiate record of 118-1, his only loss coming his senior year against Larry Owings in the final showdown of the NCAA tournament. (Afterward he cried so vehemently that I swore the camera operators and even their cameras and microphones were crying with him. Perhaps Dan Gable is a more complete man for having experienced such a moment of fallibility and public grief, but on each viewing of that match I feel my heart collapsing like I imagine a star dying, and I weep.) The legend went that every time Gable took the mat, he imagined his competitor as his sister’s murderer.

  Despite the fact that Will Warner and his teammates did most of the talking that day, I can hardly report a word of what they said. I only remember staring at Dan Gable and peering through the windows of his amber lenses in an attempt to absorb a small amount of the wisdom I detected in the pale tension of his cold brown eyes. He sat in a folding chair outside our huddle, leaning forward on the balls of his feet—his hands clamped, chin protruding, one shoulder slightly raised—practically in a standard starting position if he’d only lifted a few inches off his chair. There was no need for him to open his mouth. His presence in the room was enough, besides the fact that his wrestlers were regurgitating his own words anyway. “You make it tough on yourself,” Will kept saying, “but even tougher on your opponent. You win the match by winning every second of the match, and the only way to do that is to attack.” At some point I found myself reliving my first night in Des Moines, a memory easily triggered by the story of Gable’s sister, whose murderer, like Nicholas Parsons, was also an obsessed neighbor. I had the feeling that while Coach Gable was sitting before us grinding his hands, he was actually reliving his senior bout with Larry Owings, still set on the perfection he’d sought all those years when he’d only had to look in the mirror to meet his most ferocious competitor.

  While I never exchanged a word with Dan Gable, after that afternoon’s visit I began training with a previously unknown severity. I quit complaining about the conditions of wrestling under Coach Grady, feeling the sudden need to purge myself of whatever weakness had prevented me from the romance that had always remained one painful step away. I decided I wanted to win, to push myself to the physical extreme and see what I was really made of. My new regimen allowed almost zero time for Emily or anyone else—I hardly owned an idle minute anyway—a sacrifice I justified by the possibility that something good might come of letting her miss me for a while. In the end, it wasn’t the state trophy I was after, but the success that I associated with that trophy: winning Emily.

  For the rest of the season I stepped onto the mat with the intention of looking through my opponents, to recognize their limitations as though recognizing my own, then set about exposing them. I started eating more, figuring out how to pack the most energy into the least amount of calories, and working off every bit of excess that I’d previously resorted to spitting, puking, and shitting away. I knew that in a couple of months it would all be over. I’d return to a regular diet and be able to look back in admiration of what I’d accomplished at eighteen years of age, after which time every man begins experiencing a gradual physical decline. Instead of attempting to impress my teammates by showing off on the bench press and squats, I worked the ropes and chin-up bar, developing my wrists and ankles, my forearms and grip, beginning and ending my days with a hundred push-ups, sit-ups, whatever challenges I could invent and find the strength to overcome.

  Smitty did his best to keep up with me (though there was no denying which one of us cast the more beastly reflection in the weight-room mirror). He finished the season strong, despite getting pinned twice in Dubuque at the last tournament of the year, which meant he didn’t qualify for state and disappointed his father and uncles, who were all die-hard supporters. While I had major difficulties making my final weigh-ins, I placed first in Dubuque and won twelve of my last fourteen dual matches. These wins were accomplished by every amount of aggression I could muster, many of them ending with pins in the first period. I qualified for state and spent the night before the tournament running stairs and jumping rope, then taking a warm bath filled with Epsom salt my mom bought to help release the lactic acid in my muscles. With a remaining two pounds to cut—an ordinary and somewhat manageable condition—I spent the early hours the next morning riding a stationary bike in the wrestling room. Minutes before our bus was set to leave for the Civic Center downtown, I weighed myself one last time. I was still six ounces over. I said nothing to Coach Grady. We were greeted by big banners, TV trucks, and as many teenage girls in heavy makeup as stooped old men with thick glasses and official programs.

  First thing, the state qualifiers crowded into the locker room for weigh-in, where I wasn’t the only one straining on the toilet for ten minutes. Starting with the lightweights, we all stripped naked and squatted cross-legged on the metal scale. When they called my name I sat down and closed my eyes and prayed for a miracle. I heard the scale tip. The judge asked me to get off and try again, but in the following ten minutes nothing changed; I was still five ounces over. “Sorry, son,” he said, shaking his head as he scratched my name from his list.

  Coach Grady didn’t bother asking what I’d eaten the week before, or explain how I’d robbed myself of the chance to make the grade for all-time. He stepped right past me, mumbling a gruff and bitter “Excuse me” before he started coaching Colin Franzen, like I’d graduated fifteen years before and was no longer of any use. (I wasn’t the only wrestler that year to lose to the scale; the other guy, a middle-weight senior from Adel, bawled hysterically, then cut his forehead open banging it against a locker.) It was still a few hours before the first match. The other state qualifiers started loading up on orange juice and power bars. After drinking a few glasses of water I called my dad from a pay phone in the gym.

  “If you don’t feel like coming,” I said, “you don’t have to. I didn’t make weight.”

  My dad let go a loud breath. The receiver filled with static, then the sound of a fist pounded on the countertop, rattling plates. “How much over?” he asked.

  “Five ounces.”

  “Will they give you more time?”

  “No. Everyone has to make weight before nine. It’s already past.”

  A security guard unlocked the gym doors. The crowd piled in, each of them carrying enough blankets and drinks and snacks to last a week. I couldn’t figure out why I hadn’t shoved a finger down my throat behind some bush.

  “Five ounces, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, George. You want me to tell your mom?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “What did Grady have to say?”

  “Nothing.”

  I could hear the porch door squeal open as my dad stepped out back to smoke. “Never liked him,” he said. “But doesn’t matter much I guess. Shit, you were overweight on day one. Dropping loads so big we could hardly keep the diapers on you.” There was another deep breath. “Well, I’m sorry, son. I would’ve liked to seen you get another chance at that kid
from Sioux Falls.”

  I didn’t answer. The porch door squealed open again. My dad must’ve covered the mouthpiece. I could hear him whispering (which is to say shouting under his breath), but couldn’t make out the words. “Wait a minute, here’s your brother.”

  “You didn’t make it!” he screamed, personally offended, like I’d been sabotaged and he was determined to find out who was responsible.

  “No. I’m five ounces over.”

  “You should’ve been wrestling one-fifty-two in the first place. Grady should’ve put Smitty at one-forty-five and Franzen at one-sixty. Franzen would’ve made state no matter what. He would’ve made state at one-seventy!”

  “There is no one-seventy. It’s one-seventy-one.”

  “It’s a miracle you made it through the season without passing out and cracking your fucking head open!”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “You’re really done?”

  “Yeah. I’ll see you soon. I’m coming home to eat.”

  By the time Smitty drove me back, my mom had already reheated a casserole dish filled with sausage lasagna she’d stored in our neighbor’s refrigerator so I wouldn’t have to think about it overnight. The recipe was usually enough for the whole family with a few pieces to spare. Smitty and I ate the entire casserole in fifteen minutes, then washed it down with a liter of cola. For the moment it was all I needed to pad the disappointment. I was already four pounds heavier by the time I showered and changed into jeans and we headed back to the arena. On the way Smitty told me all about the fast food he’d been wolfing down over the previous week, which somehow led into a story about his Air Force recruiter hassling him about how it was obvious that he didn’t spend enough time in the gym and how Iowa wrestling wasn’t what it used to be and how unfortunate it was to see so many young men raised in relative peace taking their freedoms for granted. In a surprising bout of pessimism Smitty suggested that the ill-fated conclusions of our wrestling careers was just one indication that we’d never look back on our high school years the way we wanted.