Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton

After the Canadian national anthem is played and the bagpipe-led officials are paraded onto deck, the consolation, or B, final of the women’s 100m breaststroke is swum. These women had the ninth through sixteenth fastest times from heats. As they climb out of the water, eight more women are introduced. This is the A final, the first through eighth fastest qualifiers. The women are marched along the deck to thumping pop music, in this case “Raise Your Glass” by Pink. They all wear caps and goggles, and some, a second cap over their goggle straps. Their team logo is printed on both sides, and on occasion, the swimmer’s last name. They wear baggy variations on tracksuits, parkas, and team uniforms; towels slung over their shoulders, hoods up, earbuds inserted. Their feet are shod in sneakers, deck sandals, flip-flops, or UGGs, or are bare. Behind the blocks, the women jump up and down, pointing their toes. They stretch their legs over the blocks, compulsively adjust and readjust their caps and goggles, pummel their thighs with fists, fling arms back and across, back and across their bodies, suckle water bottles, adjust their blocks, and pull on the straps of their tight competition suits. They are twitching, readying.

  The woman with the fastest time after preliminary heats occupies lane four. Second-fastest is in lane five, third in lane three. The rest, in descending order, are in lanes six, two, seven, one, and finally, eight. This placement accounts for the inverted-V formation that typically occurs during a race. A swimmer who leads from lane one, two, seven, or eight is often called “outside smoke.”

  The meet official announces each swimmer’s name, beginning with lane one. The referee will indicate, with a few short blasts of a whistle, that the swimmers must remove their shoes and clothing. At this point the swimmers stretch, rotate their arms, waggle their heads, bend to the pool and splash water onto themselves. Some stand still, hands on hips. A long whistle indicates that the swimmers are to approach and step onto the starting blocks. The crowd settles into silence. Over the microphone the starter intones, “Take your mark—” and the swimmers bend and freeze with at least one foot touching the front of the block.

  • • •

  Here is a composite sketch of each tensed figure: In lane one is an eighteen-year-old vegetarian who keeps spiders as pets. Her mother died of cancer when she was twelve. Lane two, age seventeen, suffers from severe allergies and chronic eczema but is wary of using antihistamines and topical steroids because of random drug testing. It is lane three’s nineteenth birthday, but her boyfriend, who goes to university in Alberta, has not remembered. Her little brother’s best friend—who developed a crush on her after she pointed at a houseplant and said, “What is this? Corn?”—wished her a happy birthday as she walked by him on the way to the ladies’ locker room, but she did not hear him. Lane four, age seventeen, knows that a coach from the University of Michigan is in the stands hoping to recruit her, and can’t stop her hands from shaking. Lane five, nineteen, has been yawning. This is alarming because it usually means she will have a bad race. Lane six, also nineteen, chose a Snickers over a PowerBar half an hour before the race, and some caramel is stuck in an upper left molar. She was worrying it with her tongue during the march but has since forgotten it in a tunnel of concentration. She silently repeats Okay, okay, okay to herself. Lane seven’s parents are going through a divorce. Last weekend when her father came to pick up her two little brothers, he brought his new girlfriend, Lorraine. Her mother went batshit when she saw Lorraine get out of the car, and ran out of the house toward her, screaming obscenities and then yanking down Lorraine’s yellow strapless top. Her father kept saying calmly, “Lorr, get back in the car.” Lane seven watched all of this unfold from her bedroom window. She is fifteen. Lane eight visualizes a white blankness; she hears deck noise as if through a cloud of cotton balls, having tried the sequence of meditation exercises her stepfather taught her, just before the race. She is not speaking to her teammate in lane four, since lane four made out with her ex-boyfriend at a party two weekends ago. She is seventeen.

  • • •

  When the swimmers are perfectly still, the starter’s horn makes a loud bleep. In unison, the swimmers launch themselves over the water into something that resembles a tiny midair push-up, followed by a small flex at their hips, and enter the water. Lane five, the yawner, has the best start, hitting the water just ahead of the field. In the mid-1990s, the Fédération Internationale de Natation (or FINA, the international governing body of swimming) established a zero-tolerance false-start rule. If someone in the race starts before the gun, the race proceeds and the disqualification occurs at the finish, announced over the loudspeaker.

  The race, two lengths of the fifty-meter pool, is considered a sprint. Lane five leads, but at the fifty-meter mark—the split—she is outtouched by lane three. Lane three has a strong turn, with a powerful kick.

  Here is what it sounds like to lane three at the wall: A low thump as her hands hit the touchpad. Brief cheering at an intake of breath, collapsing into bubbles as her head, aligned and steady, dips back and under again at the turn. This is followed immediately by quiet. There is a rippling during the long stroke of her underwater pullout, a tight, thin sigh of effort, a gruff exhalation of air, a grunt at the dolphin kick.

  As her head breaks the surface, the roar of the crowd is, with each breath, loud then quiet, loud then quiet; a chorus of warbled pops and splashings bursts against the sides of her cap.

  The water ahead is smooth and the view is low glassy horizon. Lane four has a grasp of her periphery, but ignores it. Lane five and three are even with her, if not just ahead. Lane four blocks a sinking feeling and starts kicking harder. Between strokes, each swimmer can catch the deep bass of the announcer calling the race over the cheering of the crowd. What they don’t hear is that lane eight is creeping up in the last twenty-five meters, and is now even with lane four.

  The last ten or fifteen meters are the most painful, physically and mentally. Muscles flood with lactic acid. Strokes shorten, weaken, churn, and find no purchase. It’s a terrible, desperate feeling, where the results of training are determined. Not enough cardio and your entire body fails, not enough drills and your stroke slips, not enough strength training and muscles burn like paper curling in flames.

  Lane three touches first, followed by lane four, just barely outtouching lane eight, in third place by two-hundredths of a second. The swimmers turn, heaving, to look at the big scoreboard that displays each lane’s time. When lane eight sees her third-place finish she smashes her palm into the yellow wall. Lane five is fourth, followed by six, seven, two, and one.

  Lane three pulls off her cap and tosses it onto the deck, then dips her head back to feel the cool water on her head. A whistle is blown. The swimmers haul themselves out of the pool, gather their towels and clothes. Some head for the warm-down pool, others to their coaches.

  • • •

  During the medal ceremony, a woman in a tight black cocktail dress and red heels hands each swimmer a cellophane-wrapped rose, places a medal over her wet head, shakes her right hand. Then each medalist turns to the other two. Lane four hesitates before offering her hand to lane eight. Lane eight shakes it, then, stepping off the podium, wipes her palm on her thigh.

  DOUGHNUTS

  I join the Town of Mississauga Aquatic Club (TOMAC) swim team with my brother, Derek. He is fourteen, I am twelve. Within the club, our group—Intermediate Age Group—is for the slowest members; the beginners mixed in with the arguably untalented, regardless of age. We are also the least disciplined, required to attend only five practices a week. Advanced Age Groupers have to make eleven. Advanced Age Group is the next level up, where the serious, the crème de la crème of the fifteen-and-unders, swim. Senior level is next, the fastest swimmers fifteen and over. A handful of swimmers from these two groups usually place well at national meets, ranking in the top twenty-five nationally.

  Our coach, Tom, is the most fun. He is big and rangy, with a thick dark mustache and a hound
-dog face. He drives a red Toyota hatchback with a grubby lamb’s-wool steering-wheel cover. At practice, he shuffles up and down the puddled pool deck yelling encouragement and eyeballing our lopsided strokes. He wears deck sandals with gray wool socks, soggy half an hour in.

  In winter, when the humidity inside the pool building gets too high and the air we’re breathing too hot, Tom opens the double steel doors that lead to the parking lot. A rectangular cloud of steam piles five feet above the water’s surface. The cooler air is thick with chlorine, and when I look at the overhead lights through my goggles, they have lemon-yellow halos. The end of the lane is visible only underwater.

  After Saturday practice, Tom stations himself, a paper cup of vending machine coffee, and a box of forty Timbits, Tim Hortons doughnut holes, on the benches outside the locker rooms. The Timbits are always all one kind, usually sugar-glazed or glazed chocolate. This fascinates me. I accept that having as many different flavors as possible is better—I democratically believe in assorted. But seeing such a concentration of one good flavor of doughnut hole looks more like abundance. Tom may also have known that with assorted there were always orphan duds left rolling in the bottom of the box.

  As we wait for our parents, we take one or two Timbits and joke around with Tom. The three older boys who drive to practice ignore the doughnuts and brush past us, kicking the bars of the doors open, heading out to their cars in the snowy parking lot.

  • • •

  Within the year, after steady improvement and placing well at meets, I move up to Advanced Age Group to train with coach Greg, which means Derek and I attend separate practices. Once a week, driving home after morning practice, my mother takes me to Country Style and lets me choose a doughnut. I take my time deciding before always choosing the same: a five-cents-more Bavarian cream. My mother orders a coffee and sighs. She sighs a lot. The women behind the counter recognize my mother but rebuff her friendliness. She makes a joke about the cold. She mentions what a nice shade of nail polish a girl is wearing, and says thank you in a funny voice, Tank you veddy much, when handed her coffee.

  English is not my mother’s first language; she is Filipino, and speaks in secretary-pleasant Canadian English, her voice low. She has clear pronunciation except for subtleties in spelling, which mislead her. Those come out wrong. Thigh food. Eyetalian. She works Tuesdays and Thursdays as a bookkeeper for a company that manufactures tents, tarpaulins, and outdoor pool covers.

  I climb into the backseat with the Bavarian cream, lie on my stomach, and pull the middle seat belt diagonally around myself. We back out of the space. I eat slowly, inspecting the doughnut after every bite.

  Some mothers sit in the bleachers during morning workout and watch us plow up and down the pool. Freddy’s mother would cheer for him during practices. Mine mixes it up: If it’s warm out, she reclines the car seat and naps in the parking lot. Or she’ll drive back home for more sleep, setting the alarm for six-fifty. Sometimes she’ll kill time drinking coffee in the doughnut shop with other mothers, occasionally a father.

  I don’t like it when my mother watches me practice, and at a certain point I tell my parents I prefer if they don’t watch me race. This has something to do with being looked at, seen—I’m self-conscious about my body—and with staking my own territory. They respect this and back off a bit; my mother drops me off and picks me up at practice, drops me off and picks me up at heats and finals.

  My father stands in the living room picture window as we back out of the driveway in the car on our way to finals. He raises his hand in a “V for Victory” sign and grins. I watch him until he disappears past the maple tree. As I rest my feet on the dash, I wonder what he’ll do next. Maybe he’ll watch the car until it is out of sight behind the maple tree, then go back to his studio and the snowbrush he is designing.

  My father works in a glassed-in room at the back of our house, on a large, pale green, Borco-covered drafting table. The surface is stacked with onionskin paper, straightedges, and T-squares that remind me of crucifixes. We are not allowed to touch the color-coded carousel of markers that stands in one corner of the table. Derek asks my father why they stink. “Benzene,” he replies.

  • • •

  One night, I may have been seven, I watched him work at his table, hooking my fingers, eye level, into the pencil tray. Laid out in a circle of lamplight were heavy red paper, our black-handled kitchen scissors, and four sharp blue-and-black Staedtler drafting pencils. He began drawing letters on the red paper.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s for your mom.”

  The scissors made a low sound, sure and careful. He was cutting out words. He made a final snip and held up his work like a string of paper dolls.

  HAPPY ANNIVERSARY HON

  It was the first time I’d seen the word “Hon.” It had been just a soft, blurry burr in our house; I had no idea that it was spelled H-O-N, or that it stood for “Honey.” The sound of it between my parents gave a sense of calm. Here, though, in tomato-red paper, was a Gothic “HON” for my mother. My father pasted it into a cream-colored card and handed it to me to inspect. I flipped it open and closed a few times.

  “It’s good.”

  “Thanks.”

  He smiled, I handed it back.

  • • •

  In the middle of practice, mind numb with the endless counting of lengths, arms and legs bored with strain, sick of Greg’s voice, frustrated by my slow times and the punishing pace, I imagine what my mother might be doing:

  She pulls into the Country Style at the corner of the Queensway and Dixie Road to buy a coffee. She orders it to go, but takes a seat, still in her coat, at one of the tables by the dark window. She sits silently, tired, taking small sips. Sometimes her lips move, as she talks a little to herself. Sometimes she shakes her head and raises her eyebrows. At five forty-five she leaves, still holding her cup. She pushes past the two sets of doors, walks to the station wagon, and gets in. She fixes the cup of coffee in the dashboard cup holder, pulls the seat belt across her lap, and turns on the headlights. Inside the doughnut shop the women behind the counter glance up at her inching out of her space, then go back to doing other things.

  My thoughts are interrupted by a floater: Pale. Opaque. A perfectly detailed chunk of phlegm, suspended a foot below the surface. It looms in my path like something from Jaws 3-D. Seeing it makes me gag, and I wave at it, trying to push it into another lane.

  • • •

  I remember the moment I knew I was not going to go to the Olympics: I am fourteen, it is five-thirty a.m., a quarter of the way into practice. I’m swimming sloppily, staring hard at the stripe on the bottom of the pool. Though we’re still warming up, I’m exhausted. My arms hurt, legs hurt, lungs hurt, and I think, grimly: What for? I’m fed up with the steady pain, the mechanical cycle of breathe-pull-pull-breathe-pull-pull, and the dull gray noise of churning water. Then it comes to me, gently, in a quiet flash: I am not going to go to the Olympics. I will not be going. Not me. I fight off the thought, crumpling it in my head as negative and defeatist. I finish practice, sluggishly shower, change, and wait at the community center entrance for my mother to pick me up. When I get in the car—sullen, damp, and oblivious to her fatigue—I complain that she is late. We drive in silence. As we approach Country Style, she turns into the drive and parks. My wet hair is frozen to the window where I’ve leaned on it.

  • • •

  I still have, from that following spring of 1988, a navy blue T-shirt that reads, in fading white letters, TOMAC ’88 Olympic Trials Team. The 1988 Canadian Olympic swimming trials were split over two meets: one in May in Montreal, and the other in August in Etobicoke, where swimmers had a second chance to fill the team spots that hadn’t been filled in May. The blue T-shirt could have been from either. Trying to recall the meets, I draw a blank. I remember being in Montreal, but it’s all dark vig
nettes: waiting in the Piscine Olympique lobby near some vending machines; the big bright ladies’ locker rooms, orange and yellow, rows of bathing suits hung drying from locker padlocks; a gleaming room of column showers. I’d turned fifteen by the August trials, yet all that remain are my times in Swim Magazine and a three-minute videotape of one of my two consolation finals. I was third in that race, eleventh overall.

  It’s as though these two meets have—like what I had for lunch two days ago—been totally forgotten. Like something I said that impressed someone but don’t remember saying. I nod, right, sure, wondering if they’re mistaken. Wonder how it’s possible that I can remember a booger more vividly than any details from my first Olympic trials.

  SWEATSHIRTS

  Departure is from the Square One shopping mall parking lot, early Friday morning. My mother pulls up alongside the bright bus that churns plumes of exhaust into the frozen air. After checking that I have my money belt (tightly Velcroed between my track pants and underwear) and slipping me an extra twenty-dollar bill, she kisses me good-bye. I shove my suitcase into the gaping side of the bus, shoulder my team duffel, wave, and board. I get two seats to myself. After a roll call, the bus cloverleafs onto the highway and I make a bed of my parka and pillow. For the first hour, the bus cabin is filled with loud giggling, girly mewling, and ass-slapping playfights. Long limbs spill over the arms and backs of seats as our bodies try to get comfortable. Sweatshirts are loud with fading varsity logos: Russell Athletics! Champion! Roots Sports! Speedo! Arena Pro! “TOMAC” is stamped in navy blue and kelly green on bags, T-shirts, and sweatshirts. I’m wearing my Christmas present, a thick Beaver Canoe sweatshirt, stiff from the wash. I feel safe in it, that I look like something recognizable.

  I am thirteen years old and sweatshirts are my metric, sweatshirts mean everything. They stand for who and how I want to be. I believe in their prep school palette of inclusion blue, privileged pink, the felted lettering, crests, membership, belonging. I am small but slouch around in L or XL.