Swimming Studies

by Leanne Shapton

  At the entrance to the exhibition I am given a boarding card bearing the name of a real Titanic passenger. The man explains that at the end of the tour I can check to see if I survived or not. I look at my card: Berthe Antonine Mayné, a twenty-four-year-old cabaret singer traveling first-class en route to Montreal. She was the mistress of Quigg Baxter, also twenty-four, a Canadian hockey coach who had dropped out of McGill University. He bought her the ticket and booked her passage under the alias Madame de Villiers.

  The tour starts with the ship’s bronze lookout bell and proceeds through first class to second, third, boiler room, and bridge. Along the way we are presented artifacts recovered from the Titanic’s debris field: a bow tie, a full bottle of Champagne, a new pair of socks, gratin dishes. The exhibition is moving, though overproduced. The sounds of heaving iron ship are piped into the sets; in the boiler room we hear hissing and clanging. But the artifacts at the center of the show manage to find their emotional bull’s-eye, and the unpredictable, normal lives of the passengers and crew emerge. In the final room a plexiglass case encloses a piece of the ship’s iron hull, from C deck. The sign reads: “Touch the Titanic.” A hole of about one and a half inches is cut through the top of the plexi so a visitor can extend a finger down toward the scrap and, indeed, touch the Titanic. I look at the small grubby cloud on the black metal where people have stabbed their fingers. It’s a strange, morbid glory hole, a Blarney stone of tragedy; me, the doubting-Thomas tourist. There is something Egyptian, a telescoping of fate and time and the grave, about the moment, something that makes me hesitate before I touch it. But then I do: I stick my index finger through the hole and touch the Titanic. It is cold.

  • • •

  At Fitness First, I do only sixty laps, eager to get out of the close basement air. In the locker room a woman beside me pulls on a black pencil skirt and black silk shirt. Her black patent peep-toe pumps have little black bows.

  “She cut her head open on the kitchen table,” she explains to another woman. “They might have to restitch her if she opens it up again.”

  I realize she is talking about a toddler.

  “Where did you get that shirt? It’s nice,” her friend asks.

  “This? It’s maternity. I just tuck it in. . . .”

  • • •

  I walk past a line of women blow-drying their hair and watch them while I spin-dry my suit. They are glossy-lipped, clean, and office-ready. I am wearing a ripped vintage dress over my pajama bottoms, feet shoved into men’s paddock boots. I don’t have a brush. I feel sloppy and wonder for a second if they might think I am a resourceful homeless person using the showers. I remember the office job I left a year ago, where I was part of a good team. Much as when I swam, I’d get home exhausted at eight p.m. and stare like a reptile at a plate of food.

  I look in the mirror at my reflection, the red goggle marks around my eyes. I cover my wet hair with a hat, leave.

  • • •

  Our room at the Château Laurier is still not ready, so we head to the bar for some lunch. We are seated next to a player piano that churns out Joplin and Mozart. James points out the damper pedals that move by themselves. “Phantom pianist,” he says. The Château is a little spooky. Its wide arched halls are similar to those in Kubrick’s Overlook. The elevators make wailing noises as they ascend; the beveled leaded windows, turrets, and heavy oak doors telegraph a dramatic sense of what goes unseen, of privacy and transience. I buy a copy of Haunted Ottawa and read that the fifth floor—the one we are staying on—is rumored to be visited by the ghost of Charles Melville Hays, who might sing in a stairwell and brush up against women while they shower. The opening of the Château was scheduled for April 26, 1912, but because of the Titanic disaster was delayed until June 1.

  • • •

  When I get home from Ottawa, I google Berthe and Quigg. She survived the sinking, he did not. Then I do an image search for “pool on the Titanic.” I find a few renderings and images labeled “pool like the one on the Titanic,” some images of the pool on the Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship, and one that claims to be the pool on the Titanic. It’s a black-and-white image of a tanklike room, walls and ceiling of girded iron. A row of what look like changing cubicles can be seen along the left wall. A staircase leads into the pool, down which a blurry figure descends. At the top of the staircase another figure stands and watches. A small clock high on the wall is the only decorative touch. One round life preserver hangs on a rail along the right side of the pool.

  GOGGLES

  In 1984, when Derek and I first joined a summer swimming program, we became obsessed with goggles. My hero was the Canadian champion Anne Ottenbrite—a blonde breaststroker who wore a pair of wide, round Speedos. I wanted a pair of those goggles. When I finally got them I thought I looked faster.

  At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Ottenbrite won gold in the 200m breaststroke and silver in the 100m wearing the Speedo goggles. But Victor Davis won gold in the 200m breaststroke and silver in the 100m in a pair of squarish Arenas, with black lenses and opaque white sides. Alex Baumann won the 200m and 400m IM in Arenas. By the end of the summer, I switched to a pair of squarish black Arenas that I regularly rinsed out with tap water as the instructions advised.

  By 1988, when I was swimming seriously, minimal Swedish goggles had arrived in southern Ontario. These were molded plastic eyepieces that fit securely into the eye socket, without any rubber or foam lining the rims. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Janet Evans won her 400m and 800m freestyle and 400m IM gold medals in a green pair. There was a coach who sold Swedish goggles poolside at Ontario meets for $12. I bought two, a red pair and a brown pair that came, unassembled, in narrow ziplock bags. Brown for training, red for racing. These goggles marked a step up in my swimming career, from okay to good. It was the beginning of my loyalty to equipment, to rituals and patterns. These goggles are a Masonic handshake. Even now, if I see other swimmers using them, I know they know.

  • • •

  Since I quit competitive swimming in 1992, my exercise routines have been a combination of jogging, kickboxing (briefly), swimming laps at the Y, swimming laps in my backyard, swimming laps with a group of Italian illustrators before heading to a juice bar where they smoke and drink carrot juice, tennis lessons, yoga, an early-morning boot camp, and, after being persuaded by a guard or coach on deck who notices my stroke, tagging along for various masters team swim workouts in different cities. When I do this, it starts out great, but I eventually grow shy of the mid-set banter, get discouraged by my practice times and uncomfortable with my loss of autonomy.

  When I decide to push past these issues and join a New York masters swim team, I take the training back up like an old habit, an outgrown winter coat or friendship. It’s familiar territory, but, as a teammate points out, I need a pull buoy and flippers, and it’s the perfect excuse to look for new goggles.

  Flicking through the selection at Paragon Sports, I see they have a few based on the Swedish design: foamless, socket-fitted molded plastic goggles that you assemble yourself. One version is called the Socket Rocket.

  The night before a morning workout I find it hard to contemplate getting up to swim. My head is full of protest, a persuasive voice tells me not to bother. I have to mentally freeze-dry these impulses so that my body gets up, pulls my suit on, ties my shoelaces, picks up my bag, and calls the elevator. From there—like getting into the chilly Hampstead pond—it is one fluid motion: street, blocks uptown, building, stairwell, pool deck.

  Once I am on deck, my will slumps again and the petulance seeps in. For the first hundred meters the water feels resentfully cold. In the face of the oncoming meters and the interval training, the inner whining becomes a wail. I blur my already blurry vision, and force my body to eat the meters, eat the laps. My body is constantly in motion, while my brain is glued to the clock, willing the minute hand to move, to eat the minute
s. My head and my arms are like a bickering couple, beseeching each other to chill.

  I clearly have not Made a Commitment, defined in a 1987 memo that my coach Greg made, xeroxed from the book The Nuts and Bolts of Psychology for Swimmers by Dr. Keith Bell. I still have it. The spread he copied includes two paragraphs titled “Make a Commitment.”

  A commitment is important. Once you have set a long-term goal, you have decided to make the trip. Without a commitment, however, you are liable to question each step of the way.

  Commit yourself to an intense training program. Don’t allow yourself to be making decisions about whether to attend a given day’s practice or whether to cruise through the upcoming set. It doesn’t make much sense to have to decide whether to take each individual step in a trip you have already decided to make.

  Do I have a long-term goal? If anything, it’s to figure out what to do with something I do well but no longer have any use for.

  The one thing that I am formally trained at is swimming. I’m aware I rely on this training when I’m working, that I know when to push through and when to rest, that I’ve figured out the equivalent of drills, interval training, and performance when I’m on deadline or trying to realize a project. But I don’t know where to put the old skill, if I can, or even want to, incorporate it into my adult life.

  Watching the even strokes of my masters teammates, I wonder whether they question what they’re doing as much as I do. I’m used to hearing artists and writers question what they do; self-loathing, doubt, and mental blocks are par for the course. Athletes may wince at muscle pain but generally don’t articulate their struggles. We respect them because they suck it up. They just do it.

  • • •

  My masters team holds practices at the Baruch College pool, in the basement of the Athletics and Recreation Complex, on the corner of Twenty-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. In the bluish six a.m. light, the bronze life-scale statue of a smiling Bernard Baruch sitting on a bench in the lobby never fails to startle me.

  Our coach is from Russia. He gives us textured workouts, often involving dolphin dives, fins, partners, and streamlining drills. He demonstrates each drill balletically himself from the deck, sweeping his arms around his body.

  I like his workouts, and as much as my mind questions the point, my body knows exactly what to do, with some advanced level of competence, even grace. When I arrived for my first practice with the team, two other swimmers were stretching against the cinder-block walls and I joined them. The coach then led us jogging through the corridors and empty rooms of the basement. We ran up and down the stairs and did push-ups on pleather benches in an anteroom. While we did ankle stretches, the coach looked at my flexible feet and remarked: “You have been a swimmer all your life.”

  As the weather warms up, my focus weakens. I don’t prioritize practices, barely manage one a week, dreading it in the days before. The usual frustration sets in when I can’t make pace times. I’m embarrassed that the coach thinks I’m better than I actually am, and baffled when I hear another swimmer in the locker room after practice enthuse about what a kickass workout we just swam. The kickass workout only makes me grumpy. Where are my endorphins? I leave, sore, and think: You can’t choose what you are good at, but does that mean you should do it? It occurs to me that I might be happier doing something I’m not good at. I have a bad attitude. I’ve noticed one swimmer who cuts corners and leaves early. I dislike him immediately, the way you dislike someone who reminds you of yourself. I think about quitting. But a team e-mail announces a local meet, and I decide to enter.

  The day before the meet, when I tell James I have to carbo-load, he prepares sausage orecchiette with fresh chard from our garden. After dinner, in bed, I assemble a new pair of pink Swedish goggles I ordered online. On race day, I buy macaroni and cheese from the gourmet shop around the corner, happy to continue my carbohydrate binge. When I was fourteen, I’d cover a plate of my mother’s spaghetti and meatballs with foil the night before a race. I’d then eat it, cold, for breakfast on race day. Tucking into my elbow pasta and Gruyère, at noon, alone in my apartment, I feel silly and have a pang of longing for the world I knew instinctively, the one I started eating spaghetti in. I see the rounded edges of my parents’ kitchen countertop—a small swelling lip dropping to a ninety-degree vertical, ivory laminate chosen from a fan of colors on a beaded chain. The three steps leading down to our side door. The way the light from our basement window fell on a small snowdrift. The pale blue shade of the seat belt in my mother’s station wagon.

  The meet begins at three p.m., with warm-up at two. On my walk to the pool I buy a bottle of blue Gatorade.

  On deck, Ludacris is playing over the loudspeakers, and the volume rises as I get in to warm up. I feel a little tired but good. I loosen up my arms and legs, try a few starts to make sure my goggles stay on, and do two sprints before getting out. The heat sheets are taped to the wall. I’m swimming four events: 50m freestyle, 50m breaststroke, 100m breaststroke, and 100m freestyle. No sign of my coach, or anyone I recognize. I seem to be the only person representing my team, so I sit against a wall between two other teams and watch the rest of warm-up, soothed by the beautiful strokes of some swimmers, the jerky awkwardness of others.

  Watching a good swimmer is the visual equivalent of patting a dog’s smooth head—something naturally, wondrously sweet and perfect. You can never tell if swimmers are good or not by looking at them on land. I watch one woman, tall and graceful, perfectly proportioned in her tank, get in and demonstrate a gruesomely mincing, hesitant freestyle. A short, chubby man, wearing no cap or goggles, dives in and executes a delicately churned butterfly down the pool.

  It’s funny that here—amid all this exposed adult flesh—I am my least self-conscious. Maybe my goggles and cap confer a sort of Maskenfreiheit. Without fashion, without slimming blacks and elongating verticals, there is less information to parse and judge, more to accept. Here my mind is the plus one. I don’t wish I had a book or magazine to pass the hours. I watch the races, I sit silently, the most relaxed I’ve been in a long time.

  The Bearcats, the team hosting the meet, occupy a single set of bleachers. The rest of the teams are grouped along the opposite wall. Keeping an eye out for my coach, I watch women with big wet circles on the seat of their track pants, men pale and hairy, coaches holding heat sheets, busy officials in shorts. One competitor’s mother and girlfriend sit patiently at the end of my bench. I glance at the clock and think of this scene in cross section, happening four stories below street level, a pool full of busy adults, kicking and gliding and splashing on a Saturday afternoon. Overhearing bits of conversation I realize many of the swimmers also do triathlons. I can’t even imagine. During the national anthem, a few swimmers place wet hands over wet breasts. I think of the traffic lights above us, the cashiers at the Duane Reade where I bought my Gatorade, who were short of change. I head for the women’s locker room. It’s empty, with a large shallow puddle in front of the sinks. It feels different from how it does during practice, like an elementary school lit at night, full of fizzy anticipation.

  My first race, 50m free, is relatively painless; I win my heat, and then the event in my age group. Still no coach. I wait for my second swim, watching the heats, shifting on my wet bottom, itchy as the Lycra dries. (My brother called sufferers of this common swim-meet affliction the IBC: Itchy Bum Club.) I am irked in my second event, the 50m breast, by a woman in the lane next to mine, who finishes almost a second faster. She is wearing a technical suit I thought was prohibited. I look up her name and age on the heat sheets: she’s ten years younger than I am. I vow to beat her in the 100m. There is a break at five o’clock, and I use the telephone in the lifeguard office to call James, who is in a car on the way to the airport. There are two pizzas reserved for the officials on the desk in front of me. I am getting hungry. Back in my corner the man sitting next to me opens a bag of pe
anut M&M’s.

  The 100m breaststroke is next, and staring at the swimmers in a state of strange hypnotism, I nearly miss my heat. The start, four lengths, and finish unspool like the poems I memorized in high school and remember slightly off: Magee, sunward I climb / towards the tumbling mirth; Housman, Rose-lipt maidens sleeping / in fields where roses fade. I know the pattern and the color, but I don’t know the right words. I win my heat, beating the woman as planned. My time, which places me first in the country in my age group, is shockingly slow to me. I shall wear my trousers rolled.

  One more race and I can go home. As I wait and watch the heats before mine, I remember how much I loved to race. My last event is the 100m free. The four lengths feel good, and so does the familiar push into the bank of pain and fatigue during the last two laps. I finish and glance at the board: 1:11:00. As I’m detangling my hair in the locker room, I realize that is the time I was obsessed with all those years ago for the 100m breaststroke, my microwave time. When I look up the results the next day, I realize I must have read someone else’s time; mine is recorded as 1:10:51. The time places me third in the country in my age group. The rankings mean a lot and very little, like I did it in spite of myself. My body gets it more than my mind will ever appreciate. I give it that.

  Body: “Awesome, right?”

  Mind: “. . .”

  Body: “I’m hungry.”

  • • •

  I believed, for a while, in the aphrodisiacal qualities of my swimming. Sometimes, doing laps somewhere, I’d think: If only he could see me swim, he’d fall in love. It’s like my karaokelomania: the belief that I wield a seductive wand and appear totally awesome when I’m up there singing Radiohead. Sometimes I have swimalomania.