Читать книгу The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch - Страница 13

The Best Friend

WHEN I WAS 15 MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT WE WERE moving from Washington state to Gainesville, Florida because the best swim coach in the nation was there - Randy Reese, the coach of Florida Aquatic Swim Team.

I remember sitting in my room alone thinking what? Why would we leave our home out of the blue for something called F.A.S.T.? Why would we leave the trees and the mountains and the rain and the green of the Northwest for a strip of sand and alligators? We didn’t know anyone in Florida. I’d never been there. The only things that mattered to me were at the pool - the only people I trusted or loved, the only time in my life I felt O.K., the only place I felt like something besides daughter. And why was he telling me we were moving for me? I didn’t ask for that. Why would I?

I loved my swim coach. He was the only man I knew who was kind to me. He’s the man that explained to me why there was blood running down my leg at swim practice and what to do about it when I thought I was dying of cancer. He’s the man that I spent six hours a day six days a week with training to win. He corrected my stroke. He pushed me when I tired. He lifted me up in his arms when I won and put an arm around me and a towel when I lost. When I said, “ What about Ron Koch?” My father, he said, “ No one knows Ron Koch.”

When I asked my mother her face creased with worry. She pat one hand with the other on her thigh and said “ Well, Belle, your daddy’s been promoted. It’s a lot of money.”

When I asked her if she wanted to move to Florida, she said, “ He says you deserve the best. Besides Belle, it’s sunny!”

In reality, my father got promoted to lead architect for the southeastern coast. But that isn’t what he told me. It was, as he put it, the sacrifice they were making for me.

Inside our house always smelled like cigarette. Back in my bed I thought about my best friend Christie. Who I ’d known since I was five. Who I’d been eating lunch with everyday in the locker halls of high school. Who I’d sit by in Art class wishing every class was art class. Whose family I’d vacationed with, wishing they were mine. I cried so hard I chewed on my pillowcase until it ripped.

And so I left the water of one pool and slipped into another. Water, you’d think it would be the same everywhere. But it is not. The tap water in Florida tastes like swampshit. The water that comes out of the shower is weirdly slippery. The water that comes out of the sky is warm, and leaves behind a thick steam that chokes people who are not used to it. The ocean water is the temperature of urine, and the pool water is lukewarm even in December. Like a giant bath gone dull. Hurricanes go to Florida.

I hated it.

Randy Reese barely looked at me. There were Olympians on his team. I’d try to catch them, keep up with them, and sometimes succeed, but no matter how hard I swam or what my times were or my weight or place on the podium, I never felt like I was … his. When I did well, he’d show me my splits on a clipboard. Numbers. I’d stand there dumb and dripping, waiting for a hug. But he was not that kind of man. Before important swim meets? He’d make all the women swimmers weigh themselves. If you didn’t hit your weight? You’d get “licks.” A Styrofoam kickboard whack at the back of your thighs and ass. One lick for every pound of flesh. In this way the pool became a place of shame, and so there was nothing to distinguish it any longer from my home.

Whatever promise I may have carried in my swimmer skin, whatever hope I had in the water began to drown. At home the weight and rage of father took the air out of the rooms. At the pool a man yelled on the side and hit us with kick boards and never smiled.

At the State Swimming Championships my senior year our 200 yard medley relay had the best time in the nation. I stood on the podium with the three other girls and looked out into the stands. My father wasn’t anywhere. My mother smelled like vodka - it seemed I could smell it all the way across the pool. Randy Reese didn’t even look at me. Then Jimmy Carter took all little girl dreams of swimmer glory away from our bodies with a boycott - Randy’s famous pool full of winners included - anyway. There was no word left to belong to. Not athlete, not daughter.

I hated Randy Reese. I hated Jimmy Carter. I hated god. Also my math teacher, Mr. Grosz. I hated my father most of all, a hate that never left but just changed forms. My life had been ruined by men. Now even the water seemed to forsake me.

But I met a boy not like any other in the water.

In the pool with me. For those excruciating three years in Hogtown. A beautiful boy. With a long body and long arms and long legs and long eyelashes and long hair. And dark tanned skin. And dark eyes. And he had a secret in his skin too - not about fathers though.

This boy, my friend, was hands down the most talented artist in high school. That’s an idiotic way to say it - he was more talented than ANY of the people in ANY high school; in fact, he was more talented than ANYONE in Florida who called themselves “artists” by about 500 miles long and 160 miles wide. He painted. He sculpted. He drew. When he did, there was not anything that ever came out of his hands that was not astonishing.

When I’d first moved to the hellhole of Gainesville, he called our house the first week and invited me to float down the Itchitucknee river on an inner tube. What a strange language coming through the phone holes. Itchetucknee? I had no idea on earth what he was talking about but I said yes.

The water of the Itchetucknee is ice-cube cold. And the river is not wide, but it is deep, and it has a current. Whitetail deer, raccoons, wild turkeys, wood ducks, and great blue herons can be seen from the river. And there are … well, snakes. But there is a kind of beauty to it. The aqua blue crystalline Ichetucknee flows six miles through shaded hammocks and wetlands before it joins the Santa Fe River. I floated next to my friend the artist for three hours. He asked me questions about my life. I asked about his. We laughed. We basked in the sun like reptiles. We swam like swimmers do when they’ve been freed from laps. At the end of the float I felt I’d known him for years.

I think it might be true that we spent every single day together except Sundays for nearly three years. Much of the time we’d meet at school and I’d go to English and French and he’d go to the art lab and then we’d leave round about lunch. Or we’d spend the whole day in the art lab together. Or we’d go to his house and eat sandwiches and listen to Pat Benatar between swim practices. Or nap together. His skin had almost no hair and was soft as velvet.

I don’t quite know how to describe how much I loved him. But it was a love I didn’t have a wit’s notion what to do with. I flirted as hard as I could, but he didn’t seem interested in me sexually. Other Hogtown guys seemed to want into my pants on a regular basis, even at 7-Eleven, but him? Never. So I had sex with Hogtown men. And I continued to get all up in it with girl swimmers. But nothing between me and the artist.

And yet he made me the most gorgeous burgundy silk prom dress you can imagine, with a drop down back and tiny crisscrossing straps in the front and near my ass - NO ONE had a cooler dress. It’s possible no one ever has. In any state.

And he made me a fetching short-waisted big-shouldered women’s 1950s blazer from a man’s suit coat that everyone at school drooled over.

And he cut my hair in a bob that turned heads.

And he applied make-up on my face (the only make-up I’d ever worn) and took fashion photos of me.

So the love I had just got deeper and deeper for this man, but there was nowhere to put it. It just built up in me like sperm must in men who aren’t getting any. Sometimes I thought I might faint in his presence, but he’d bake something and it would taste so good. He could make cheesecake, for christ’s sake. All I wanted was to be around him. All the time. His skin smelled like cocoa butter.

Days and days and days and days and days. Perhaps the happiest of my life to that point. Just underneath how much I hated the Florida.

Then one day my drunk-drawled mother told Jimmy Heaney’s mother in the Publix Grocery store aisle that she heard my artist was gay. What I’m saying is that my dumb ass mother outed my artist before he’d outed himself. He’s homosexual. In a southern drawl.

And he stopped.

He stopped calling me. He stopped seeing me. He stopped having me in his life at all.

You know what it felt like to have a beautiful gay man stop loving me?

Like being dead.