Annie: It better get better.
Me: But you can’t just wait for that.
Annie: I know, I know. I gotta make it.
Emily Palmer, M.A.
ChapterFive
The uncool thing about swimming is I suck so bad the workouts are at least as torturous as I feared when Coach Rick said he’d be cranking up the yards. It’s possible Janine, kind, patient girl that she is, doesn’t like the way I twitch my bikini butt at her boyfriend, because she’s decided I should be a butterflyer and has taken me on as a project; “helping” me with my stroke when my arms are so heavy I can’t get them out of the water to hoist up some sign language. Leah warned me about messing with her.
“Your arms aren’t clearing the surface after the first two strokes,” she says. “You look like a sinking windmill. Work on shoulder flexibility.” Quiet, calm voice. Instructional. Instructions my body is not built to follow. “You’ll get it,” she says, and pats my wet head. “Never give up.”
Go help someone who can swim. I canvass beyond the chain-link fence for Nancy.
“We work out every day at noon,” I told Nancy after I signed up. “Just come down once a week. Bring Sheila; she’ll love how I suck. I’ll buy you lunch.”
It doesn’t make sense that I care so much, but my heart goes back to those days when I was five and it was just the three of us in a hollowed-out single-wide, days when I would have done anything to make her, or Sheila, proud, make them want me.
“I’ll be there every day, baby,” she said four weeks ago when I made the change between my best sport and my worst. She’s showed up once so far, waited outside the pool area long enough to say, “You’re not very good at that. Them other kids’re swimmin’ right on past you.”
I should have known that if Nancy had only made a small fraction of my b-ball games, she sure wasn’t going to make practices.
“Well, I enjoyed it. Keep it up. I’m meetin’ Walter.” That was our visit. My brain is wired backward. The minute she does show I’m ready for a fight, but when she doesn’t I get this . . . emptiness. It’s like those chicks who cut on themselves; no obvious upside, but every one of them says there’s relief when the blade or the piece of glass slices through.
Today as I’m walking out of the dressing room I overhear Janine talking to Coach Rick: “I think Annie should swim fly in the relay, too.” That’s a mean girl.
“Serious?” Rick says. “She looks kind of desperate in the water.”
“I know,” Janine says. “But she’ll do it.”
So now I’m the butterflyer in the fifty and the relay, which will teach me great humility.
Our first meet is scheduled for late afternoon Wednesday at our pool, where we’ll swim against the suck teams from the other city pools. A-team meets have ticket prices and concessions and portable bleachers where swimmers’ parents sit on padded benches under a canvas overhang that shades them from the hot summer sun. Wipe that out of your head. Three wooden benches stand on the grass outside the pool, occupied mostly with homeless guys who heard the starting gun and came over to see if someone got whacked, or who saw the backstroke flags being strung and thought the carnival was in town.
The meet is scored as five separate dual meets—each team swims separately against each of the others—so I can actually finish dead last and still get points against teams who don’t have anyone dumb enough to swim fly, or flyers with my same crappy stroke but less tenacity. This is my first formal competition, and though I have no identity tied up in being a swimmer, the anticipation of competition and the fear of looking like someone has thrown a cat into the pool, has my stomach dancing.
The longest race for the younger kids is just twenty-five yards, and even I could navigate that, but my age group goes fifty—up and back—and I might as well be swimming the English Channel with an anvil tied around my neck. I thought I had it down, but adrenaline has leaked into my brain and washed out all Janine has taught me; the starting gun fires and three strokes into the race I’m cursing Janine like she’s the Antichrist. Three-quarters through the first lap I meet the first swimmer on her way back. Coming back I look like the person hired to pretend she’s drowning on the final day of Red Cross senior lifesaving class, and five feet from the finish my feet drag on the pool bottom. That would get me disqualified in the Special Olympics, and it does so here; basically I find a way to not earn points while still finishing dead last.
Janine stands beside the judge as he writes out my disqualification slip. “Don’t sweat it,” she says. “You’ve still got the relay.”
“You’re not really proficient, are you?” Marvin greets me as I exit the locker room.
“What are you doing here?”
“You know, scouting the town for comedy. Any Boots on the ground?”
“If anybody showed, they were so embarrassed they left before they had to talk to me.”
Marvin giggles.
“What?”
“Just picturing things that might embarrass your family.”
We walk toward the bike rack; I could have come in the car but Spokane is getting better and better with bike lanes. One thing about living here: people like to be in shape.
“Go out for AAU track.” he says. “At least there’s air.”
“I’m too fast,” I tell him. “I’d be on the traveling team the first week.”
“Sign up for something you suck at. Shot put, maybe.”
It’s a thought, but probably a bad idea to put into my hands a weapon I could drop on Nancy’s foot.
“You know,” he says, “you could make yourself sick doing what you’re doing.”
“Don’t start.”
“Just sayin’.”
“Stop sayin’.”
I peel off at the entrance to the parking lot of our branch library. “Come on in,” I tell him.
