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.
Suitcase
SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SWIMMER. Everything collected in my memory curls like water around events in my life. Or maybe everything that’s ever happened to me I understand better if I picture it in a great, aqua, chlorinated pool. Not even Florida could kill the swimmer in me.
At my senior prom in Florida I armwrestled five boys about to become men. I lost once. After the dance we all got drunk and climbed the fence of the pool in Gainesville, Florida. We went skinny dipping in a 50-meter competition pool - the same pool I spent two hours every morning, two hours every evening in swimming. My body was stronger than it has ever been in my life. I looked like someone’s son. The biceps of a son. The jaw. The shoulders. My hair whiting out gender. Breastless. When it came time for everyone to make out, I did laps.
That summer was long and wet differently for me than it was for other people. The air got thick with more than heat. In June, letters began to arrive in our mailbox. They were scholar - ship offers. For swimming. Exit visas.
In the evenings, I’d go out to the mailbox. My breathing would jackknife in my lungs just before I opened the box, and I’d shuffle through our idiotic mail waiting to feel the weight of something different. Waiting for my leaving.
Five letters came.
The first scholarship letter was cool and weighted in my hands. It was from Brown. The red and black logo of Brown University on the envelope looked royal to me. I ran my fingertips across it. The envelop felt smooth - the paper announcing its difference. I smelled it. I closed my eyes. I held it against my heart. I walked it to the house almost believing in something.
Inside, I put it on the kitchen table. It sat there all through dinner - which we ate in the living room watching TV. Barney Miller. I could feel the blood in my ears.
After dinner, after Taxi, after my father smoked three cigarettes, he finally went into the kitchen. And my mother. And me.
We sat at the kitchen table like I guess families do. My mother and I breathing. He opened the letter more slowly than a retarded person. He read it silently. I watched his eyes. Blue like mine. In my head I swam laps. My mother sat to the side of me like a drunk lump patting her one hand with the other. I tried not to bite my tongue off.
Finally, he spoke. A¾ ride. At a Snob school. A snob school for silver spoon girls and rich assholes. My mother looked out the window into the Florida night. I stared at the paper with the Brown logo on it. And my name. I knew it wasn’t money. We had money. It was what came out of his mouth next, his cigarette smoke making shame swirls around my face. Did I think I was special? Like someone squeezing my neck. In my throat I swallowed language.
The second letter came from Notre