“I did, I talked to the policeman who was at the scene. He told me that if anyone else had hit that man, he would be dead.” She lowers her eyelids modestly. “So actually, in a way, I saved his life.”
• • •
WE PULL INTO THE ENTRANCE of the park a little after lunchtime. The afternoon is as fresh as a fish. The white quartz light falls everywhere, and the trees billow toward the clouds. The trees of the Midwest have not been sufficiently praised. There is a subtle, continuous movement among their leaves that looks like communication. When they huddle together, they seem to surround a shadowy swimming hole, hung all around with rope swings, a hidden launching point only the locals know about.
This is the Black River, which flowed peacefully through wide valleys for ages until it reached this spot. Here it became trapped by boulders and thrashed in its stone cell like a wedding veil, all pearls and lace and foamy netting. It continued in this furious loop until it began to carve a deconstructed palace out of the pink granite and sparkling blue rhyolite.
The welcome center exhorts us to:
Take a dip in the famous shut-ins surrounded by billion-year-old rocks.
Marvel at the forces of nature responsible for creating this shut-in.
Yes, it takes a great deal of Nature’s energy to produce a single shut-in. I ought to know.
The welcome center posts on prominent signs that people swim in the shut-ins at their own risk, but I don’t pay much attention to these. There are no lifeguards, and only a single park ranger—how dangerous can it be? But I have underestimated the recklessness of the local population. When I see the park laid out below me, I am stunned. It is wall-to-wall rocks. It looks like the gnashing ruins of a giant’s mouth. The stones still carry with them the sound of geological groaning, grinding, cleaving, shifts. “Oh my god, it’s the devil’s obstacle course,” I exclaim.
“It’s not the devil’s obstacle course, it’s a naturally occurring water park,” my mother informs me loftily. “Over millions of years, erosion carved the rocks into natural chutes and water slides for people to enjoy.” A nearby child dashes his small rump against a stone and begins to howl.
“How many people die here every year?” I ask, appalled, but for once in her life my mother hasn’t looked it up.
Landlocked people everywhere have one thing in common: a mad lust for water parks. I still remember the commercial for the St. Louis water park that used to play on television in the summer. This park went by the sad name of The Beach, and the jingle was sung by a man pretending to be Jamaican. “Come to da beach! C-come to da beach!” the jingle coaxed, while the camera flashed on images of a surprised grandpa nearly being carried away by an artificial wave. It was the sort of place where a ride was always being closed down because someone had sustained a grievous injury on a flume. But no one can ever close down Nature, no matter how many patrons it kills.
• • •
BETWEEN THE MASSIVE BOULDERS, the water boils or is still. Missourians lie beached and belly-up everywhere, lounging in the pools with the physical frankness of people drinking beer in hot tubs, their elbows hoisted up on either side of them. The water is a trouty brown in the shallows, but becomes a startling YMCA aqua where it carves itself deeper. This must be the most hazardous place in the world to take six children who cannot swim. “I know I need to teach them,” my sister says as we pick our way down the shuddering wooden steps toward the river, “but do you remember how traumatic it was?”
She and my mother climb over a glittering granite upheaval to a smoother area of the shore. I have noticed that at a certain point women in my family stop going in the water. I guess after we have our first children we become afraid a fish is going to swim up us and we’ll have to carry it to term. I step into the nearest shallows with the two youngest toddlers, holding their chubby, resilient wrists in my hands, and immediately my every sense is locked into the ancient, timeless female effort of Preventing the Next Generation from Dying.
At the bottom of the pools are thousands of pebbles sparkling with velvety druzy—infinitesimal crystals that resemble pollen, or butterfly feathers, or book gilt. I instruct the children to look for lucky ones. That way, I reason, they’ll keep their heads down and move inch by inch, instead of rushing headlong to their doom. The oldest kid, Wolfgang, approaches me in private, adult to adult. His voice has that sandpapery sound that means it’s about to plunge down. He inclines his buzzed blond head toward me and says, “Mom says we shouldn’t have anything to do with luck, because it’s like saying that you don’t need God.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” I hazard. It can get tricky, being the heathen aunt. I am sometimes called upon to tell my nieces and nephews that I go to “mental church,” or to explain why my friends are not named after saints. “I really just mean that they should try to pick a favorite, or one that looks like it means something.” Favorites are all right. Even God had them. And meaning, after all, is a kind of luck—some things just shine with it, and no one knows why.
Meanwhile Jason, who has forgotten to bring water shoes and is uttering chihuahua yips of pain with every step, is ready to embark on the equally timeless male pursuit of Introducing the Next Generation to Danger. He points out the forbidding cliff that rises up over the most spectacular and fathomless swimming hole, and he and Wolfgang set off together to explore the possibility of hurling their bodies off it.
When darkness falls, the welcome center warns us, teens sneak into the park and party in this hole. It is implied that many of them drown this way. It is implied that many of them climb to the highest point and dive their way into eternity—or something worse. The bottoms of my feet thrill as I call up the height, the tensed muscle, the poise to jump. Just as I am about to make that free, wild leap in my imagination, a man flings a baby off the edge of the cliff with visible exhilaration. Presumably there is someone to catch the baby at the bottom, but who knows.
My sister’s sentence continues in my ears. Of course our aquatic education was traumatic. How could it be otherwise? Greg Lockwood was our teacher.
• • •
MY FATHER TAUGHT, in one form or another, all throughout our childhoods—mostly at all-boys high schools. He was renowned for his methods, which included throwing pieces of chalk and keys directly at the heads of his students, so expertly that he only ever hit them by accident. Nowadays this would not be allowed, but back then parents would actually call him up and thank him for being tough on their awful sons, whom they hated.
When it came to our own education, my father declared himself in charge of only two subjects: religion and swimming. He was, on the one hand, an elevated man; he was, on the other hand, a subterranean man. His lectures on religion were endlessly absorbing, and centered largely around a scene where a virgin woke up one morning and found herself pregnant with a piece of fire, and then gave birth to it nine months later surrounded by a bunch of donkeys. This meant you should never have sex before marriage. Christina and I listened, and then looked at each other and shrugged. It was as plausible as anything else.
When it came to teaching us to swim, though, my father dismissed my mother’s suggested strategy: first we would dip our faces in the pool every day for one year. Then we would submerge our bodies in the water every day for two years. Then we would meditate on the beauty of the dolphin every day for three years, and at the end of a decade we might be ready to learn how to swim. “BULLSHIT,” he told her. “My kids only need one kind of swimming lesson. The kind where I throw them into the damn pool.”
The first weekend after school let out, he drove Christina and me to the YMCA and dropped us into the deep end with huge zest. Christina, who lacked buoyancy, sank instantly and silently to the bottom like treasure. I thrashed my powerful midwestern legs and squealed, swallowing half the pool in the process. After a long minute of watching us struggle, he leaped into the water with the grace of a hefty ba
llerino and dragged us to safety, one daughter on each arm. “That’s your first lesson,” he told us, as I struggled to hold back a forceful cascade of aqua puke. Neither of us died, so we passed.
So began the summer of our training. We were forbidden to dog-paddle; we were forbidden to hold our noses. Flotation devices were not allowed. Water wings were a sign that a child needed to be picked off by predators in order to strengthen the herd. Rules about waiting a half hour after lunch to go swimming were to be as strenuously disobeyed as the laws of Bill Clinton. Above all, we were never allowed to “ease into the pool.” He believed that if a child was plopped into the water without ceremony, some bone-deep mammalian reflex would take over and its arms and legs would spontaneously erupt into textbook swimming strokes. If a baby drowned, it was because it wasn’t listening to its body.
Somehow or other, this strategy worked. It had to. The alternative was a grave with the words HERE LIES A CHILD WHO HAD NO INSTINCTS written on the headstone. My mother’s face, as she witnessed these lessons, belonged to one of the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch—the figure being crucified on a harp, perhaps, or the man giving birth rectally to a glass egg. Still, she never interfered, and my sister and I became brilliant swimmers, speeding through the water as if our lives depended on it, as if our own mortality were chasing us.
“WATCH YOUR FORM!” my father shouted from the sidelines, and then buried himself again in a thick Tom Clancy novel about men being nervous on a submarine. He adjusted his sunglasses and smacked his lips with satisfaction. The men were SO nervous.
Despite these beginnings, I soon came to adore the pool, because the pool meant teens. By the time I was seven or eight, I was a devoted student of the teens and their ways. I observed them from every angle, and marveled at the way they had somehow come into possession of beach bodies. Beach bodies had a stillness, a turning, a restless luxuriation—an introduction of every part of the body to the sun. They stretched on their white plastic chairs. They stretched and stretched. Legs and arms, columns of backbones, necks. Even their long tan lineage stretched, back to some previous life as a basking animal. Their hair grew half an inch; their fingernails; the future.
The teenage boys were fed on hot dogs, and turned the color of hot dogs in summer. They glistened like wiener advertisements from a golden age. If you had thrown an ice cube, you would have hit a boy named Brad, which even sounds like a hot dog’s name. All of the girls were named Danielle or Stephanie and qualified as actual bikini babes, with sunglasses and raunchy perms. I, on the other hand, was named after a repressed Irish nun, and I had recently gone to my mother’s salon for the first time and been given a haircut that was called “the nest.” No one else in my class had “the nest,” and subsequent research has failed to prove it even existed. I raised a hand to my neck and touched the fringe of it self-consciously. I would be a teen too someday, I would attain beach bodiness, but for now I waited. I held my breath the way I had been taught, and I watched.
• • •
THE SWIMMING POOL posed three dangers. The first was that you would drown. The second was that your little brother would do a number two in the kiddie pool, which happened so frequently it was hard to believe it wasn’t part of a malicious campaign. The third was that you would be struck by lightning. Moms were very concerned about lightning at this point in history—I don’t know if it was part of the satanic panic or what. The way they talked about it, you’d think whenever it stormed, the sky turned into black leather and Satan started ripping open his shirt, and if the lightning touched you, it was with the devil’s finger on a genital you didn’t know you had. Lightning was sunlight played backwards, and moms hated it. The rule was that whenever the lifeguard heard even a rumor of thunder, we all had to get out of the pool for fifteen minutes so we wouldn’t be electrified. I considered this to be a great pity, as well as a blatant attempt to hamstring my genius.
Dads didn’t care about lightning, because lightning was on the cover of all their favorite albums. Sometimes it was painted on their trucks as well. You could tell that if their kids were killed by lightning, they would be sad, but they would also feel superior about it for the rest of their lives, because it was without question the most hard-ass way for a child to die. “My son Rondy . . .” they would say, their voices trailing, “taken from us by pure electricity in the year Nineteen Hundred and Ninety . . .”
Still, we took pleasure in prolonging that space after the lifeguard blew her whistle. We stayed for as long as we could, the water suddenly blood temperature, the sky a witching green. The best was when the rain came up so fast that it happened while you were under, and then you could feel the dimples all over the water as if it were your own skin.
• • •
IT LOOKED LIKE RAIN on this particular Saturday, as my father made the turn off FeeFee Road and parked the van on the blacktop, which was just beginning to ooze. “Now don’t forget,” he said, handing me my COWABUNGA! towel. “You go off the high dive first, and then you get to swim.”
That long-ago trick of flinging us into the pool had worked so well that my father decided to re-create this triumph every time he took us to the Y. Before we were allowed the freedom to enjoy ourselves, we first had to jump off the twenty-two-foot high dive, whether we wanted to or not. This is the sort of rule only a father would institute. A mother would far prefer to tell you a story about a high school football star who once jumped off a high dive the wrong way and became so paralyzed that ever afterwards he could only move his left pinkie finger in order to signify that he was thirsty. Why had he done it? Because he had had beers. But dads had reckless, cliff-jumping pasts. Dads had drunk beers in their youths and done backflips into lakes and saw those backflips replaying whenever they closed their eyes in the sun.
The diving board was a terror. It bellied, gulped, and shuddered. The sound of it was wrenched straight off a pirate ship, and one after another they walked the plank in front of you. This is where kids sometimes lost their minds, and where I first saw the word “rictus” applied to human faces. One boy got all the way up to the edge and then sank straight down on his butt as if all life force had been removed from him, suddenly realizing this jump was a rehearsal for his own death. He hid his freckled face in his hands and refused to budge until a lifeguard came up to carry him off. Most likely he never recovered, and became an emo with a paperback Nietzsche in his back pocket later on. The high dive was a test, and when it came to the crucial moment, many of us failed.
This afternoon was like any other; this jump was like any other. I set my footprints on the hot concrete one by one, as permanent as if the concrete were wet. I stepped on the bottom rung, which hurt my insteps because I was tenderfooted. I held my lucky pebble in my hand, my portable piece of meaning, the coherent shape of a kidney bean and beige. I squeezed it and surveyed the landscape. The pool was surrounded on all sides by a diamond-patterned fence that was always sending up a ringing kennel sound where someone had shaken it. I could see my father, wearing a submarine hat with the logo of the USS Flying Fish embroidered in yellow across the front. He was damply thumbing through his Tom Clancy novel and wearing a pair of shorts that appeared to be trying to enter his lower intestine. Every time he shifted position on the chair his shorts got one inch closer to his pancreas.
Most people who went off the high dive were in love. The teen boys, especially, stared moodily out at some indistinct point in the crowd and then cannonballed down as if to obliterate themselves. The ones who were the most in love were the ones who yelled things like “HEY, KEVIN, YOU GAYWAD!” across the pool. They closed their eyes and thought of some untouchable classmate and plunged right into the center of the earth, which was molten. I was not in love; I had no business going off the high dive.
“Brad, you butthole,” a boy above me shrieked, with a look of inexpressible longing.
At last I stood at the top. It was a little stage and a little spotlight. Time
slowed down, and stretched, and exposed every part of itself to the sun. The high dive meant leaping off the edge of a moment and trusting the next one would catch you. The plunge down, like all plunges down, was a short segment of infinity. Your heart flew up out of the top of your head and the red silk of it caught and billowed out and you hung from it for a second in the middle of the sky.
There was a sea sound in the leaves, a rolling and a breaking, a surf. The sun and my brain were directly overhead; both beat down. My shadow walked alongside me down the board, straight and black and doomed.
“DO THE RIGHT THING!” my dad called up to me, sensing my hesitation. “DO THE RIGHT THING!” was a phrase he hurled like a thunderbolt whenever someone wasn’t doing what he wanted or wasn’t doing it fast enough, and I was trained to respond to it instantly. I heard him and obeyed.
There is a trick to entering the water gracefully. In that split second, I forgot what it was. I forgot the cardinal rule of the high dive, which was to enter the water with as little splash as possible. I splashed into the water spectacularly, and the water splashed spectacularly into me.
A sharp pain, a shock in the loins, a sudden feeling of worldliness. I bobbed up to the surface, treaded water for a minute, acknowledged the pulse between my legs, and looked around me in a panic. “Oh god, it’s my herman,” I thought, forgetting the correct word in the heat of the moment. I had heard about girls who busted their hermans riding horses, but since I had never mounted a horse, I thought I was safe. I had heard about girls who busted them doing gymnastics, but since I was incapable of standing on one foot without falling over, I had assumed I would remain intact forever. The pulse said otherwise. A slight scarf of blood in the water confirmed my suspicion. I had lost my virginity to the swimming pool.
Priestdaddy Page 14
