By the time I arrived in the family, eight years after my sister, the laws of the house were in place. But none of them seemed to work on me. By the time I was four, when I cried, I wailed. Epically. And I cried all the time. I cried when I had to go to bed. I cried in the night. I cried when people I didn’t know looked at me. I cried when people I did know talked to me. I cried when someone tried to take my picture. I cried being dropped off at school. I cried when new food was presented to me. I cried when sad music played. I cried when we put the ornaments on our Christmas trees. When people would open the door to my “trick or treat” at Halloween. I cried every single time I had to go to a public restroom. Or in bathrooms in anyone’s house. Or bathrooms at school. Until I was in seventh grade.
I cried when bees came near me. I cried when I wet my pants - in kindergarten, first, second, third, and sixth grades. When I got any bruise or scratch or cut. I cried when they put me to bed in the dark. When strangers spoke to me. When children were mean, when my hair was tangled or ice cream hurt my head or my underwear was inside-out or I had to wear galoshes. I cried when they threw me in Lake Washington for my first swimming lesson. When I got shots. At the dentist. When I got lost in grocery stores. When I went to movies with my family - in fact, one of the more famous of my crying stories happened when they took me to see Gone With the Wind. When the little girl has the pony accident and Rhett leaves Scarlett my grief was inconsolable. For about a week.
I cried when my father yelled - but I also cried sometimes just when he entered the room.
When my mother or sister were sent to retrieve me, the victories were small. About the size of a child.
It was my voice that left.
In my house the sound of leather on the skin of my sister’s bare bottom stole my very voice out of my throat for years. The great thwack of the sister who goes before you. Taking everything before you are born. The sound of the belt on the skin of her made me bite my own lip. I’d close my eyes and grip my knees and rock in the corner of my room. Sometimes I’d bang my head rhythmically against the wall.
I still cannot bear her silence while being whipped. She must have been eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Before it stopped. Alone in my room I put a pillow over my head. Alone in my room I got my parka out of the closet and buried my skull in it. Alone in my room I drew on the walls - knowing the punishment - pushing the waxen color as hard as I could against the wall. Until it broke. Until I heard it stop. Until I heard my sister going into the bathroom. I would steal inside and hug her knees. My silent mother ghost would make a bubble bath. My sister and I would sit in it together. Voiceless, we would soap each other’s backs and make skin pictures with our fingernails. If the picture was on your back, you had to guess what it was. I drew a flower. I drew a smiley face. I drew a Christmas tree that made my sister cry - but only into her hands. No one could have heard her. Only her shoulders and back moved. The red marks of a child’s fingernails remaining even after the soap washes off.
When my sister left the house I was 10.
I didn’t speak to anyone outside of my immediate family until I was about 13. Not even when called upon at school. I’d look up, my throat the size of a straw, my eyes watering. Nothing. Nothing. Or this: if an adult required me to speak, I’d hold one leg up stork like with one hand, and my other arm I’d put behind my head in an “L” shape, and I’d rock until I lost balance. Instead of talking. Little bird ballet. Little girl making an “L” for Lidia with her arm. Anything but speech. All those years with my sister in front of me I was silent. And after she left. Terror stealing the voice of a girl.
Sometimes I think my voice arrived on paper. I had a journal I hid under my bed. I didn’t know what a journal was. It was just a red notebook that I wrote pictures and true things and lies in. Interchangeably. It made me feel-like someone else. I wrote about my father’s angry loud voice. How I hated it. How I wished I could kill it. I wrote about swimming. How I loved it. About how girls made my skin hot. About boys and how being around them made my head hurt. About radio songs and movies and my best friends Christy and how I was jealous of Katie but also wanted to lick her and how much I loved my swim coach Ron Koch.
I wrote about my mother … the back of her head driving me to and from swim practice. Her limp and leg. Her hair. How gone she was, selling houses, winning awards into the night. I wrote letters to my gone away sister that I never sent.
And I wrote a little girl dream. I wanted to go to the Olympics, like my teammates.
When I was 11 I wrote a poem in my red notebook that went: In the house/alone in my bed/my arms ache. My sister is gone/my mother is gone/my father designs buildings/in the room next to mine/he is smoking. I wait for 5 a.m./I pray to leave the house/I pray to swim.
My voice, she was coming. Something about my father’s house. Something about alone and water.
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