UPDATE OF THINGS MY WIFE THINKS MY LEVELS CAN DO SO FAR: Beg, talk, appreciate food, join a swim team.
WHAT I TELL MY WIFE: All right, I’ll join if you’ll join. I do anything now. I am so happy that the only thing I have to worry about now is my levels that it makes me appreciate having my levels. I am so happy to just look at Sam in our home again. I am happy to see him on the couch, his huge feet on the arm, dirtying the cloth. I am happy to hear him stomping upstairs across the floorboards and whipping towels at his sisters after he has showered. I am happy to hear him screaming for no reason, bounding down the stairs, reaching the bottom and wildly petting Nelly, shaking her head back and forth, and calling her a good girl. I think how it doesn’t matter who shot my son. My son is back. If the hunter were to knock on my door now, I don’t think I’d want to meet him. If the spacecraft were to suddenly blare out his name into the night sky, I wouldn’t want to know what it was. I wouldn’t want to be reminded of when Sam wasn’t.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER A FEW WEEKS: Most nights we crawl into bed, after having swum on our teams, smelling faintly of chlorine with a good kind of tiredness spreading out from our bones. I have tried to think like a dolphin. After all, this is what I have learned is the best thing to do in order to improve my fly. Think like a dolphin. These are happy, fast thoughts. These are undulations celebrating flight underwater. My wife and I have lain in bed in the dark before sleep talking in whispers about stroke and turn. Our arms, glowing silver in moonlight, have moved through the room, bent as we are on perfecting entry and recovery. We demonstrate for one another our aquatic techniques. Backstroking we remind ourselves to roll, keep our heads back and straight, our kick from the hip. Freestyling, our fingertips skate across the surface of the water right before we plunge them in for the pull. Breaststroking, we are moving our hands out in front of us, held in the shape of us at our prayers, our heels nearly touching our rears for the kick. Butterflying, we are trying to move like a dolphin, but it is difficult to do in bed, the weight of us heavy on the sheet coarse with grit the dog brought in on her feathering when she slept on our bed while we were out for the day.
And it is not just the night when we are in bed thinking about swimming, but it is at the breakfast table when we make Sarah or Mia or Sam (yes, Sam!) stand up from their French toast and we take them by their wrists and show them how in the recovery of the fly, their arms don’t go straight back underwater, but out toward their sides, pushing away the water for maximum speed. We take their small thumbs, and we tell them to keep those thumbs down when entering the water. They don’t listen. They grumble. They don’t want to be corrected. They say they’ll be late for school, and even your wife doesn’t care if they’ll be late for school, the whole family’s standing now, arms straight up in the air, practicing the dolphin rhythm, pushing their hips in and then out, moving the smell of the sweet maple syrup through the air, over toward where the dogs are, making them bark, making them want what we have on our plates.
WHAT JANET EVANS SAYS: When doing the backstroke flip turn, flip over onto your belly and then take the allowed one hand stroke before flipping at the wall. It will help you flip faster and increase your speed.
WHAT MISTY HYMAN SAYS (THIS IS REALLY HER NAME, EVEN THOUGH IT SOUNDS LIKE A NAME YOU WOULD FIND AT THE BOOB FEST): Think like a dolphin.
NUMBER OF SIT-UPS JANET EVANS DID EVERY DAY WHILE IN TRAINING: 1,000. Core strength is everything in swimming the fly, the kick not so much from the hip but from the whole body. Your body is a whip.
WHAT THE CHILDREN SAY: Enough, enough, enough of swimming!
WHAT WE SAY: Never enough!
WHAT GISELA LIKES TO DO: Go swimming.
WHAT THE COACH IS: A Seventh-Day Adventist.
WHAT I HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT: What it means to be a Seventh-Day Adventist.
WHAT I HAVE FIGURED OUT: The coach is a really good coach. The children have their swim team practice with him first. Then the wife and the team and I have our practice.
WHO HOLDS MY PAGER WHILE I’M SWIMMING IN CASE THERE IS AN ANIMAL EMERGENCY: Mia, who keeps the pager clipped to the waist of her pants, but she is so small and thin, the pager weighs her pants down and she has to keep lifting them up. When there is an emergency and the pager beeps, she comes to the end of my lane and throws a kickboard on my head to get my attention.
WHAT I DO WHILE SAM IS SWIMMING: Just watch him sometimes, the water sliding off his smooth back, the catch of his stroke underwater, speeding him along, the breaths he takes from both sides, his body working beautifully.
WHAT I FEEL AFTER I’VE SWUM: That my levels are low. I will live.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Victoria told me about the place in Costa Rica where they let you stay in cabins for free so long as you help with the turtles.
WHAT I SAY: What turtles? (Victoria is a woman at the pool who is always telling my wife things.)
WHAT SHE SAYS: The turtles that have come to the shore to lay their eggs in the sand. The eggs need moving before the tide comes and steals the eggs away. Let’s go, Jen says. Let’s stay in the cabins and stay up all night and help the eggs.
WHAT I SAY: That’s a vacation?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Victoria said you can freeze chicken eggs. I never knew this before. You can crack them into ice cube trays to store them in the freezer. People don’t know these kinds of things, she said.
CALL: It’s the voice of the man who calls and hangs up. This time I am ready. After he says hello, I start talking. I tell him the schools I went to. I tell him the places I’ve lived. I tell him the name of my first stuffed animal. Now tell me, I say, just who are you that you keep calling my house and why do you want to know so much about me? The voice lets out the breath again, the breath that sounds like a seashell, and then the caller hangs up.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I think I’ll work at the kids’ school.
WHAT THE COP SAYS WHO TAKES HER FINGERPRINTS SO SHE CAN WORK AT THE SCHOOL: You have almost no swirls on the pads of your fingers. I once knew a potter with the same problem. Working with the clay at the wheel had worn her pattern away. Are you a potter? the cop asks Jen.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Why, no. I type a lot, though, she said. I have maybe worn off the pads of my fingers with all of my stories.
WHAT I SAY: Sounds like you could commit a murder and get away with it.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Who did you have in mind?
WHAT I SAY: Why that doctor, of course. The one who wears pins, the one more gung-ho about my levels than our parallel universe.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Oh, I thought you’d say that hunter. Sam’s hunter, she says.
WHAT I SAY: No, not him. I am done with him.
WHAT THE WIFE WONDERS: When you take your ice cube tray full of frozen eggs out of the freezer, do you have to defrost the eggs first before you cook them, or do you just throw them onto the pan and they skate around on the surface before the heat of the flame starts to melt them?
CALL: No call. The phone hasn’t rung for two days. You see, I tell Jen. Nobody can afford to treat their animals anymore.
WHAT THE PHONE SAYS: Hah-hah-hah.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Your fly looks so fast!
WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO: Lift my head up above the water only high enough to get a breath in that pocket of air. My chin is really still in the water.
WHAT I AM THINKING: I am a dolphin.
WHAT THE DOCTOR DOES: Calls my house and talks to Jen.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: It’s been weeks, shouldn’t you go back to the doctor?
WHAT I DO: Shrug.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: All they want to do is test your levels again.
WHAT I AM: A dolphin. My feet are my tail. My body is in the shape of a sine curve.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Maybe your levels are lower. Don’t you want to know that?
