Plastic Bear: We don’t need no dads.
Teddy Bear: How come?
Plastic Bear: ’Cause they do drugs and go to jail. An’ they hurted our mom.
Teddy Bear: Moms do drugs, too.
Plastic Bear: But sometimes moms stop and buy you stuff. And sometimes they take you away from dads. Dads are bad. They go to jail. My dad is in jail. My new dad didn’t go to jail yet.”
Teddy Bear: Is he goin’, do you think?
Plastic Bear: Maybe, yeah, a lot of dads go to jail. My old dad wants to kill my mom, but he’s five hundred miles away. My new dad might, too. I just need a mom, not a dad. They always go to jail.
I creep in and park behind Marvin. Frankie ignores me.
I whisper. “How long has this been going on?” Marvin glances at his iPhone. “Hour or so.”
“You’ve been watching this for an hour?”
“It’s like you can see his world. He calls any guy Sheila brings home ‘Dad,’ and I think she’s brought some bad ones.”
“Only kind she knows.”
“Man,” he whispers, “if you just watch, or join in when he wants you to, you learn some crazy stuff.” He watches a minute longer. “This goes round and round. He wants his mom bad, but she won’t protect him; she loves him when she’s not on drugs and bails when she is.”
Marvin looks up at me. “Why are you crying?”
“It’s mostly about rhythm,” Leah says. “Two kicks per stroke and you have to move forward. Think like a dolphin.”
“Dolphins are supposed to be really smart, right?” I say.
“Even dumb dolphins swim,” she says. “Get the feel of it.”
“I feel better on land.”
She laughs. “If I remember right, this was a choice. What did you do to get yourself in all the fly events? That’s the stroke you learn last, if at all.”
“That’s the stroke that gives you a stroke,” I say, “but there’s less competition. Keeps me in the water.”
Leah gives me a good half hour of detailed instruction: Get the timing, swim till the stroke starts to deteriorate, then stop; if I swim after my stroke falls apart, my body will learn it wrong.
“One thing you already know as an athlete,” she says, “never do anything half-assed when you can do it full-assed.”
Pop and I are at a standoff through the rest of my “swimming season,” such as it is. His silence has amped up his irritation at me for not playing elite basketball; he simply won’t accept that I won’t get with the program and hop on the bus—and the plane—to go up against the top competition in the sport I’m best at.
“I don’t want to burn out,” I tell him.
“Which is why you’ll never reach your potential,” he says. “You kids. All you want is to have fun. Get a little bored with something and you’re ‘burned out,’ off trying something else. The true elite players in any sport know repetition.”
The only repetition I’m sure of is Pop saying the same thing over and over and over, but I keep that to myself. He’ll have me doing push-ups until my arms melt if I challenge his expertise as a motivator.
“Do you know how Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan?” he asks.
“Because his parents named him that?”
“Because he never took his eye off his goal. Everything he played, he played all out. He’d fight and scratch every second of a meaningless one-on-one game, whether he was a point ahead or ten. When Michael got you down, he put his foot square on your neck.” He takes a deep breath. “Annie, what you don’t realize is, now is the time when you get hardwired for athletics. So many talented athletes think they can coast when the years are easy, when they’re twice as talented as their peers. But with every level you move up, dozens more mediocre athletes fall away, and the competition becomes that much tougher. Kids who were fabulous athletes in high school walk into a university with a whole team of kids who were fabulous athletes in high school. The ones with fire in their belly make it. Is that so hard to understand?”
It isn’t. He doesn’t understand that I’m not Michael Jordan, or more specifically, Kelsey Plum. I have fire in my belly, but it’s not burning to make me a top high school recruit for some university. I don’t think that far ahead. On the court during the season, fire is all I’ve got. I never let my teammates or my coach down—if you don’t count Hoopfest losers bracket, but that’s different—and I can’t start to tell you how I hate to embarrass myself. Way too often that fire is anger, I get that; Pop is right about my temper putting my game in jeopardy. Half the time I can’t even put my finger on what I’m mad at. He and I wouldn’t come to these loggerheads if he helped me understand what motivates me instead of deciding what should motivate me.
No matter. School will start in less than a month, which means volleyball and basketball in earnest, at which point all of the above will come into play. Pop gets highly supportive and highly critical, and I get highly motivated and highly manipulative. In book club, Seth said some things can only exist in a state of great tension. He was talking about science, but it’s sure true about Pop and me.
So the end of summer is the end of my “frivolous” athletic endeavors for the year, but I swear I’m coming to enjoy being anonymous in my sport. Leah’s work on my stroke has given me a whole different feel for my body in the water, and even though I’m no Dara Torres—a name I wouldn’t even know to drop if it weren’t for Leah—I am no longer disqualifying myself by walking the last five yards and have actually picked up
