From the window of the bus back to Pam’s, I see a dark-haired man exit a door and turn a corner. He is wearing Adidas track pants, clean white sneakers, and a battered leather motorcycle jacket zipped snugly up to his chin. I decide I want to swim again, and I want to know where to get clothes like that.
Over fish fingers, Pam and I talk about my taking up swimming again. I decide to defer McGill, train for the next year, and live with my brother in downtown Toronto.
• • •
February 2010. During the last afternoon of a monthlong stay in London, I wander into a café adjoining a bookstore and eyeball the cakes. There are four, but two stand out. A dark cherry polenta cake, dense- and rich-looking, and a lemon olive-oil cake, shiny yellow with amber edges, flecked with spiky rosemary. I order a square of the latter, sit and eat it bite by slow bite, staring off into space, incredulous. When I finish, I interrupt the waitress as she clears my teacup, and stammer: “That cake . . .”
“Oh, I know, right?” She laughs. I ask her where the recipe came from, but she winks and will say only that it is a secret, “North African” in origin. I thank her (for nothing), pay and leave, but not before peering at the cake closely, trying to memorize its nature. Its defining qualities are a large crumb, a puckering tartness, olive-oily moisture, and a crunchy, sweet glaze that seems soaked through. The cake is coarse, and deep yellow in color.
Rising at four-thirty a.m. back in New York, I search online for “Lemon, olive oil cake, Morocco” and “Lemon cake, rosemary, olive oil.” I frankenstein a recipe from five different sources in an attempt to conjure that London afternoon.
My night kitchen is clean, calm, and quiet. Outside, all is dark except for two windows in an apartment building opposite. I grease a cake pan, grate four lemons, and rub the rinds with sugar. The night kitchen is a changed place, its clicks and hums are louder, the pots and pans make a wincing clatter when I pull them out of the cupboard. The tapping of rain and the muffled whooping of police sirens are the only other sounds. I juice lemons and add half the liquid to the sugar, then whisk with three eggs.
After combining the dry ingredients, I add the sugar mixture and the olive oil, then pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and slide it into the oven. Next: the glaze. In a small saucepan I add a sprig of rosemary to the remaining lemon juice, and then sugar, bring this to a boil, add a blurp of agave nectar and, after a finger dip, the juice and grated rind of one more lemon. I let this steep while the cake bakes. As I wait, I make tea and read the previous day’s paper, stopping to stare out the window at the changing light. I feel relief at a lightening sky. When I took up swimming again and joined the University of Toronto team in 1991, the practices were held in a fifty-meter pool with high, street-level windows on the west wall. I breathed to my right going up the lane, my left going down, and I’d watch the sky’s colors mark the advancing time, turning from black to purple, then ultramarine, periwinkle, mauve, and finally, with warm-down, lungs aching, relief flooding, a cold, pale gray.
When the lemon cake is done, I perforate it all over with a fork and pour the glaze over it. I let it cool in the tin for half an hour, before turning it out onto a plate. When I do this, I see I’ve completely burned the bottom, so I slice the charred layer off and leave the cake to cool a little longer. Upon inspection, it seems to have the right color, but sampling it I know I’m off. Close, but off.
• • •
My mother comes to visit me in New York for a week. The quilt I fling across the guest room bed is coming apart, fraying at the edges. She insists on repairing it, so I lug my sewing machine out of the closet and set her up at the dining room table. As she mends the quilt, I ask her if it hurt her feelings when I asked her not to watch to me swim.
“I guess I thought it was a teenage thing,” she says, looking over her glasses at a seam. “I wonder how old was I then?”
I walk to the kitchen to reheat some takeaway coffee and say over my shoulder, “I was around fourteen, so you must have been, what, forty-four?”
“. . . but I might have watched anyway.”
“What do you mean, you might have?” from the kitchen.
“If I wanted to see how you did, I’d watch from where you couldn’t see me.”
“You did?”
“Sneaky, huh?”
I watch the coffee heat and think about this. I smile.
Back in the dining room I hand her some coffee. “I never use that machine, but I will if you show me how to thread bobbins.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she says, “but you have to thread carefully, because if you don’t it will go all bohol-bohol.”
I ask her about the other swimmers’ parents.
“I remember all of the other parents thought you were very pretty and very fast.”
“Which were you more proud of?”
“Both.”
During my wedding reception, my mother, dressed in a white toga with a garland crowning her head, performed a dance to Elvis’s “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” Her lips moved silently to the lyrics as she swayed around me and James, perched on a coffee table. She gracefully placed leis around our necks. At the conclusion of her dance, as the applause was petering, she bowed and cried out, “See! Leanne’s not the only talented one!” Everyone laughed, but I exchanged a quick glance with James. What? He looked back at me, eyes wide.
• • •
At the end of her visit I wake my mother early to drive her to the train station. She throws back the covers when I whisper to her; her limbs—in the dark, in her underwear—look like my own. Earlier in the week she borrowed a dress of mine to go to the Glamour Women of the Year Awards; she tried on several before deciding on a vintage black and yellow one. I was both reassured and weirded out that they all fit and suited her, even though her body is a different shape, and much shorter than mine.
Downstairs the blue light filters through the windowpanes as I put the kettle on, and make weak, milky tea for her Pirelli thermos. When we step outside, the air has a thin, mauve cast, is cold as lake water.
TRAINING CAMP
Barbados, the last week of December 1991. I am sharing a hotel room with Rachel, Erin, and Shelley. I don’t sleep well the first night; it is hot and I can hear “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from the hotel behind ours. I stare at the curly iron bars of the open bedroom window and think to myself: That is the hotel where normal people stay, normal people just a little older than us. They are listening to Nirvana and staying up late and drinking killer Kool-Aid and eating Doritos.
“A mosquito / My libido.”
I lie on my side and wait for the weak wheeze of the fan to reach me. The hotel has given each room an oscillating upright fan, and I’m the farthest away from it, behind Shelley, who smells like insect repellent and shampoo. The fan pushes fainter notes of chlorine, suntan lotion, and wet concrete around the room.
Training camp takes place between Christmas and the New Year. We get up at 5:45 a.m., and gather on the lawn at 5:50. It’s dark, and the Caribbean insects are loud. As we wait, we stretch out on the cool grass and use our duffel bags as pillows. We’re sleepy, skin still hot from yesterday’s sun, our hoods pulled up against the morning chill. I see the lumpy outlines of my teammates on the lawn.
Their bodies are familiar. Since nothing is concealed in a swimsuit, no size or shape, the thrilling reversal is to see bodies clothed: obscured lines of muscle and limb, how someone tucks or untucks, cuffs ankles or pockets hands. I like the way the boys look dry, wrapped in long sleeves and track pants, hair brushed and parted, like the Morrissey song. From the lawn we can hear the ocean over the road. At 4:50, Byron and Linda cross the damp grass and unlock the doors of the minivans. Everyone piles in, and we jostle against windows and one another while the vans climb the road to the pool. A fresh breeze comes through the windows, and the sound of surf recedes. Nobody talk
s; everyone wants to be immobile for a little longer.
When we arrive at the Barbados Aquatic Centre, the lights are off. The pool is fifty meters long, sitting smack in the middle of a large field. It is surrounded on three sides by loud billboard advertising, eight feet high. Even in the dark, the Barbadian colors are bright. Some of the ads are hand-painted, and the space feels open and makeshift, optimistic. On one side are stands and locker rooms. There is steam coming off the cool water. We slouch onto the deck. I spread my towel on the dew-damp concrete to stretch, holding the lying-down positions longer than necessary. The pool lights come up slowly. I roll off my track pants to apply sunscreen. My suit is still damp, raising goose bumps on my arms and thighs. Many of the other girls wear brightly colored tankinis bought for training camp; Lycra panels of purple, yellow, and orange, florals and wide stripes.
Warm-up is eight hundred meters swim, kick, pull, swim. We are given thirty seconds to get in the pool, by the hand of the pace clock. We either inch in, bouncing toward the deep end, or plunge and swim furiously to get warm. Within twenty seconds, everyone is in and under.
After warm-up I get out to use the bathroom. Walking back to the pool I stop short. The top of the wide staircase, leading to the deck, and the bottom of the bleachers frame a breaking tropical sunrise. I’m serenaded by sky blue and pink, an intense, Tahitian Treat pink. Popsicle, Care Bear, little-girl colors. I’ve never seen sky like this. It’s optical glucose.
As we head into the main sets, the sun appears. By seven-thirty it is clear and the ads surrounding the pool are sharp. I see them when I breathe. Milo, pull, pull, Colgate, pull, pull, Pepsi, Sudsil, pull, pull, Carnation. Between sets some swimmers pat zinc on their noses. Training camp practices are difficult. Our coaches work us harder than at any other time of the year, and it’s understood that the pain will be unrelenting for the duration of the week. When practice ends, nobody bothers to change: we pull on shirts and shorts over our suits and pile back into the minivans, limp with fatigue, but cheerful in anticipation of a few hours of bliss—sleep, food, dozing, beaching—until we have to go back to the pool at four-thirty.
The heat covers us like a blanket. At the hotel we drape our wet towels over the balcony railings to dry. The sun is higher still, and hotter; some of us shower, some sleep, some prepare breakfast. My roommate Rachel makes pancakes and—too hungry to wait—picks one up in her hand, pours syrup straight onto her palm, and eats the whole thing, laughing. By noon, most of us are down at the beach, spread out on towels suntanning, or splashing in the waves. Erin gets her hair braided, the ends beaded in red, green, and yellow. The sun burns her scalp bright red; the cornrows will remain for a month after her return to Toronto. We don’t swim in the sea, we just stand in the waves, being pushed gently around by them. We form little groups in the shallows and talk, shoulders burning. A few of us try backflips, look at stuff through our goggles. Our scale shifts in the open water, we are smaller.
The team is going to a hotel restaurant at a nearby beach for dinner on New Year’s Eve, but I somehow talk my roommates into having a fancy spaghetti dinner on our balcony, then meeting the rest of the group at the hotel for the countdown. Between workouts we get a lift to town and spend the afternoon going from store to store buying ingredients. After evening practice we cook through our fatigue: spaghetti with fresh tomato sauce, two loaves of garlic bread, and fried plantains. We spread our table with a white sheet, dress in our nicest clothes—white jean shorts and a new Lacoste shirt for Shelley, a polka-dot rayon sundress from Le Château for me, a strapless top and jeans for Rachel, an Ocean Pacific minidress for Erin—and light candles. As the other swimmers make their way to the restaurant, they see our flickering ground-level balcony and approach, impressed. We speak in English accents and shoo them away from our table. Danny grabs three pieces of garlic bread, blows out our tea lights, and runs off, stuffing bread into his mouth and whooping hysterically.
Kevin, whom Erin likes, opts to stay in his room and sleep through the night. When I hear this I suddenly like him too. After dinner, Erin asks me to go with her to his room and persuade him to come out, but he insists on staying in; he’s already brushed his teeth. We leave him in bed. Erin is disappointed; she wanted to kiss him at midnight. As we close his door I glance back at his body under the flowered hotel coverlet, his greenish chlorine-bleached head of hair turned toward the wall. Kevin has a small, cruel mouth I like.
• • •
Twelve years later, I find myself feeling smaller in the sea again, when James takes me on a short vacation, our first together. I have no idea how to “vacation,” how to lie on the beach and relax, wade into the waves holding hands, how to dress for dinner, swan around in a fluffy robe, book a massage. On our first day I retreat sulkily to the bedroom with a book of Alice Munro stories, irritated by the expectation that I’ll enjoy things I’ve never enjoyed. It dawns on me that I am now the normal person in the next hotel, listening to Nirvana. When James gets back from a tennis lesson, I’m in a better mood.
Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn’t see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it’s something to enjoy, where the focus is not on to how to win, but how to flourish—in both the literal and the superficial sense. I can understand flourishes, the conceptual, the rare, the inspired, and the fantastic. James introduces me to the idea of bathing.
SIZE
I am the first one in Stockholm’s Centralbadet this Monday morning, followed by James, then by an old man wearing big yellow goggles, who does a steady breaststroke around the perimeter of the pool. Watching him, I switch to breaststroke myself and match his speed. It feels comfortable. It feels relaxing. As the three of us swim counterclockwise, I channel my old age, my flabby form, my unself-conscious senior. I think of the two older women I passed in the locker room, whose modest black tanks encased humps and bones and bumpy flesh. The cruel phrase a friend once used to describe a woman’s backside: “a bagful of doorknobs.” I watch my hands trace their double ellipse in front of me, my mother’s wrists, my grandmother’s knuckles.
1. Speedo black nylon, used as a doubling suit for training, 1988–1992.
We’d wear two, sometimes three suits to train in, the extra layers and weight providing drag. The suits were made of nylon, more durable and less flexible than Lycra. Some men’s suits were built with mesh pockets that caught the water and billowed out in small cups at the hips. Before practice, we would keep our drag suits resting down around our hips. At a meet we’d roll them down wet after warm-up, as ballerinas roll legwarmers up over their knees and then down around their ankles. A black nylon suit would fade to a grayish-brown over time; a blue nylon suit to pinkish-gray.
The Centralbadet, built in 1909, is a gleaming wood-and-tile Art Nouveau pool. Its corners are round, and the surface of the water is almost two feet lower than the deck; I feel cupped, as if swimming in the hull of a ship. Behind curtains surrounding the pool sit wooden tubs, tanning beds, and darkened treatment rooms. One floor down, James and I find a large room of smaller pools, with a trough of hot water, and one of cold; a steep staircase that immerses the bather in waist-deep cold water; a deep hot tub shelved twice; and beyond that a large whirlpool with built-in recliners. The two older women join us in the hot tub, holding tightly to the handrails.
2. Speedo multicolored “paper suit,” used for competition, 1992.
Called “paper suits” because their extremely fine-woven, crisp, paper-thin Lycra-nylon blend made a rustling tissue-paper sound when dry. We would order competition suits a few sizes too small, and wear them, beneath our clothes, pulled down around our waist or under our armpits before races. We were advised to splash water onto the fabric to ensure that the suit adhered to the skin and to prevent air pockets during the dive. The cut of the suits left most of the back exposed.
My Advanced Age Group coach Greg asked us one morning: What is the first thing we do, w
hen we wake up for practice?
“Stretch,” I said.
He shook his head no.
“Go pee?” someone else asked.
“Yes.” Greg nodded. “And what I need you to do after you use the toilet is to weigh yourself, and write it down.”
3. Speedo multicolored “paper suit,” used for competition, Canadian Olympic swimming trials, 1992.
After the finals at an out-of-town meet, the team would drive to a restaurant for dinner. In the bus on the way to the restaurant these were my thoughts:
Not nervous anymore.
Going to eat in a restaurant.
Can order whatever I want.
Tired and do not have to talk.
Hair wet clothes warm.
Will not have to clean up.
4. Vintage Aldrick & Aldrick red cotton suit, used for recreational swimming, 1998–present.
Purchased from Black Market Vintage Clothing, Toronto. Worn in rivers and lakes on a cross-Canada road trip; in Bobolink Pond, Ancram, New York; down waterslides at Camelbeach Waterpark, Pennsylvania; and in the Lake of Bays, Muskoka, Ontario. Also featured on the cover of Saturday Night magazine and in the Süddeutsche Zeitung magazine.
Dinners with the team look like this: Swimmers wear parkas or heavy coats, which, if they bother to take them off, are pushed inside out over the backs of their chairs. Hair is in various stages of damp. Boys’ combed back, or sticking messily up. Girls’ held in elastic bands, pulled into stubby ponytails. Prolonged exposure to chlorine makes hair stiff and dry, bleaching blond into stripes and green hues, brown into copper. The swimmers wear hooded sweatshirts, jeans or track pants, and have the red imprint of goggles around their eyes.
Swimming Studies Page 7
