Light Lifting (17 page)

She moved forward every week. First the floats and the introductory front swim. She could see them now, understand how everything fit together, the breathing and the basic movements flowing into each other. He made precise adjustments, guided her arms and legs with just the tips of his fingers, moved her head with an open palm on her cheek. The back swim and the kneeling front dive and the stride jump. She went down to the bottom and retrieved three or four rubber rings at a time. At the end of each class, they treaded water for thirty seconds longer. His head bobbed close to hers as he counted off the time and she could see droplets of water hanging in his eyelashes.

He gave her a copy of the Royal Life Saving Society manual. The book was a yellow and blue three-ring binder with the society's logo printed on the cover. An oar crossed with a grappling hook and knotted together with a shamrock of coiled rope. Everything you needed to know was in there: what to do with poison, electrocution, a severed finger in a glass of milk, plucked eyeballs. If you fell into sub-zero water you were supposed to float on your back with your knees curled up to your chest. This kept your dwindling body heat concentrated in the core area. It was called H.E.L.P. – the Heat Escape Lessening Position. A drowning victim would grasp at anything to survive and a rescuer would have to ensure personal safety before trying to aid another. If a victim pulled you down you were supposed to strike hard and move back immediately, kick to the face or stomach or groin if necessary. And if they became hysterical or violent, you had to stand by, just out of reach, and wait until they lost consciousness before moving in to help.

She took everything in. At the end of the session Brad made her a construction paper report card and drew happy faces and stars beside all the skills she had completed. He gave her five coloured badges from the Red Cross Kids program.

“I guess you're in Green now,” he laughed. “And not too far from a shiny Bronze Medallion if you keep it up.”

The ladies were not impressed.

“He's not supposed to do that, you know,” one of them said.

“Those badges are for children. He's not supposed to do that. I'm sure you have to pay extra for badges.”

SHE LEFT THE CLASS after fourteen weeks and never came back for Advanced Beginner II. On the last day, Brad helped her fine-tune the front crawl.

“Keep your head down, face in,” he told her. “When you breathe, you have to turn your head instead of lifting it. Like this. You have to move your head from side to side instead of up and down. Like you're saying a big ‘No' instead of a ‘Yes.'”

She incorporated the breathing into the efficient cycle of her stroke, her head turning just enough to raise the corner of her mouth out of the water. At Christmas, they offered a fifty-percent discount for students who signed up for a full-year membership. She got a card and started coming almost every day to practice her lengths. The accuracy of the place, she liked that most. One length, a trip to the opposite wall, was worth twenty-five metres and the return gave you fifty. The day always ended on a nice round number.

She did her best thinking after ten minutes, when she was warmed-up and hit on a good rhythm. Her senses blurred and she felt cut off and separate and alone. In the water, there was no taste or smell or feeling or sound. Only her vision stayed sharp and sometimes it seemed too clear. Through her no-fog goggles, she studied the black lane marker stretching along the bottom into an elongated capital “I.”

400 meters: 16 lengths. 800 metres, a half mile, needed 32. When she was sure she could cover the whole mile, she asked her parents to come watch. They sat up in the observation deck for the whole forty-five minutes and when Stace climbed out – a little flushed maybe but not breathless – they clapped and waved. Her mother cried and wore an expression that seemed proud and happy, but also scared and confused at the same time.

They came down the stairs and her father gave her an awkward hug, pressing her wet body into the acrylic fuzz of his sweater.

“Whoa,” he said. “Look at you go. Amazing.”

Her mother shook her head. “I just don't know,” she said. “Even as I'm watching you do it, I can't believe it's really you in there.”

SOMETIMES, WHEN SHE PUSHED HARD, sawing back and forth between the walls, she thought about the person she used to be and wondered what had happened to that girl. She felt distant, like she had moved to rural China or to some other country where the climate, the language, the diet, religion, politics, architecture and culture were so completely foreign, so different, it made it hard to believe that your own past, the place you came from, could still exist somewhere else in the world. Where did you store them, your leftover superstitions and the ridiculous rituals that once guaranteed your safety? All the misplaced and abandoned beliefs: what did people do with them now? The woman in the elevator, or the arachnophobes, and the paranoids who felt sure they were being followed? What did they do when they learned the truth? Where did they go? Who did they become, how could they return?

She felt alone and stupid, embarrassed by the force of her flawed convictions. Years of her life had been sacrificed. She was a fool, taken in by a lie, duped. It made her so angry she stopped once – in mid-stroke, halfway down the pool. She shook her head, ripped off her goggles and treaded water for a couple of seconds in the middle of her lane while she took it all in. Preposterous Lifeguards in their tank tops. Brad trying to look so severe as he glared down from his highchair. A thin slippery film of piss-warm water coating the entire deck. Two other swimmers, ugly manatees, bloated and awkward and slow, sloshing between their pontooned guide ropes. The four multi-coloured hands of the timer's clock circling around every fifteen seconds. A burning stench of antibacterial soap and chlorine wafting up from every surface.

It was too much. She said the word
Fuck
and slapped the warm, flat surface with her open hand. Nothing came back. Her fingers passed down through the transparency. She felt ashamed and exposed, like the last kid who refuses to let go of the tooth fairy until some brute in the schoolyard says: “It's your parents, you retard. They put money under your pillow and throw your teeth away.”

ONE TUESDAY NIGHT, early in the summer, she arrived late and could only get in twenty minutes before the session ended. She'd barely started when they blew the long whistle and everybody had to get out. As she headed for the changing rooms, one of the Lifeguards, a girl with a ‘Melanie' name tag, waved in her direction and walked over.

“Listen,” the girl whispered, and she looked around to make sure they were alone.

“Listen, the place is yours if you want it. Nobody cares. We're stuck here for another hour of clean-up so you can finish up and stay as long as you like. It doesn't matter to any of us. It's not like you need somebody to watch over you.”

She spoke with a sarcastic slacker tone that assumed mutual understanding. As though these two shared an equal part in a wider conspiracy.

Stace waited for the others to leave and watched as the girl went around with her necklace of keys, locking all the doors from the inside. Then Melanie turned and fanned her hand out across the pool.

“It's all yours,” she said. “Go nuts.”

It is time to go. Stace releases the rope, pushes out into the water as hard as she can. Near the sides, in the shelter of the pilings, the current is almost still, but it picks up quickly as she moves outward and pulls her away in a long diagonal. She can barely breathe, but she calls out his name, forces her face in, swings her arms and kicks. Something vegetal and slimy brushes up against her thigh and lets go. Her stroke is short and tight and she feels heavy, already exhausted. It is hard to stay up and difficult to go on. Every thirty seconds she has to stop and lift her head, get her breathing back and look for bearings. She searches above and below and yells again. His name, the word Brad, sounds pitiful and small.

We are made most specifically by the things we cannot bear to do. She realizes it now, feels it in the powerful movement of this different water. The old discomforts coming home: a familiar tightening in her diaphragm, the intimate constriction of her larynx, sticky weight in her arms and legs, the scurrying in her brain. Fear is our most private possession. Heights and crowded buses, reptiles and strangers, hot and cold, the smell of burning wood, loud noises: they persist. Takeoffs and landings, abandonment, holes in the ground, wide-open spaces, horned insects, the dark, earthquakes, mirrors, clocks, wind, deep water: they stay with us, forever in the world. Even when we overcome, they remain, reminding us of past truths. There can be nothing in their absence, not even the smallest possibility of a significant action.

But there is light. She thinks she sees it. A paleness flashes up about sixty feet away and goes back down. The object bobs in the current and disappears.

“Come out to me,” she hears him repeating in her memory. “It's not that far.”

The light is positioned at the limit of her vision. Beyond that spot, full darkness comes down like a heavy velvet curtain and the shadows make it impossible to be sure of anything. She chases it, moving as fast as she can. The wind blows in circles and a tiny island of floating garbage shoots past. A hinged styrofoam container that once held a Big Mac smiles at her as it surges through the foreground, pushed downstream so quickly it disappears in seconds.

She thinks about the Great Lakes, a project she did in elementary school, all five of them carved out in blue plasticine on a painted piece of plywood. It had been tricky to get the shapes and the scale right, difficult to get Lake Huron to fit correctly around the green mitten of Michigan. Information printed on her notecards: One quarter of all the fresh water in the world flows through here. A chain of liquid coursing in the middle of the continent. It blasts over Niagara Falls, and spills into the St. Lawrence before it finally reaches for the ocean.

The paleness in the water moves downstream and she pursues. It could be anything. His hand held out, always the target, or maybe his overturned back, the fabric in his boxer shorts. The lights on both sides of the river go dim and she is too far out now, too low to see the Renaissance Center, the Holiday Inn, and the Odeon. In the middle of the shipping lane, the water moves with its full force, pulled by gravity, by the lean of the land underneath and by tides thousands of miles away. She is inside of it now.

Jacques Cousteau came to shoot a movie. He was the reason for their grade-school projects. The
Calypso
sailed right down the middle of the Detroit River and the whole school went down to Dieppe Gardens to watch it go by. Stace stood on the concrete bike path, far back from the railings. The boat seemed old and rickety and wasn't as big as she expected. His yellow helicopter, stuck on the back, seemed like a toy.

Everyone cheered and clapped as he passed, but Cousteau never came out on deck to wave back. Her teacher said nobody in the world knew more about life underwater than he did. They played a record and showed a film strip in the darkened classroom. Stace had to sit beside the projector and turn the knob to advance the pictures every time she heard a beep.

Beep: Cousteau, standing on the deck, skinny and old with brown teeth, wearing the same red toque all the time. Beep: Cousteau in his gear, the aqualung respirator in his mouth, ready to roll backwards over the side. She thought he seemed too fragile to be down there with the Swordfish and the Killer Whales, the Manta Rays and the Giant Squid. Beep: Cousteau on the Great Barrier Reef. There were colours she had never seen before, real-life creatures that couldn't be real.

“Everything you can see in this picture is alive,” the teacher said, the shadow of her hand showed on the screen.

“Even the rock is living.”

Beep: Cousteau swimming under an Iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean. He is suspended in a grey void, an astronaut wandering in deep space. His slow voice coming out of the record player. The accent. He says, “From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to the earth. But he has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.”

The teacher made them memorize it.

They gave Cousteau a key to the city of Detroit and thousands stood in Hart Plaza to welcome him. But when he gave his speech, he turned furious and angry. His face contorted with rage and he talked about acid rain and illegal dumping, cancerous tumours and contamination of the food chain. Blind fish with confused sex organs. Mutating species.

“Your river, it is sick,” he said.

“When we try to film, it is only dying we see down there.”

There is a living tension, a line running between what can be achieved and what we cannot do. The light, the paleness inside the water, there is no way for her to catch it. He is beyond reach, moving at a pace she cannot match. A sentence from the lifesaving manual: Before all else, the rescuer's first duty is the preservation of the self. She gives up, surrenders, and turns back to try for the side.