Suitable Precautions (12 page)

Once Cheryl told me that the D and D had been a story from our own pool. “A woman miscarried in the ladies' locker room at the end of Aquafit,” she said. “The thing looked like a wet kitten. I swear to God, it was covered in fur.”

“You're disgusting.”

“I swear to God,” she said again. “I found her. It was really freaky. The Nazi took a whole month off after, and I still won't go in that shower without wearing flip-flops.”

It might have been true. Since then, I have seen enough bodies in various stages of birth and death to know that almost anything is possible, but back then my medical knowledge came primarily from biology textbooks and reruns of
ER
. I was skeptical, and Cheryl was always making up stories.

I thought that there were only two kinds of people, generally speaking: the kind that got more embarrassed when they put on a bathing suit, and the kind that got less. The confident ones—fitness buffs in neon bathing caps, elderly women with elephantine breasts—came for the lap swim, and they knew their limits. Most of the time it was safe for me to zone out to the sounds of people sluicing down the lanes. Sometimes I got so relaxed I felt like my eyes detached from my brain and floated on the surface of the pool, buoyed along in the wake of perfectly automated flutter kicks. It was like watching incredibly boring trained seals. At least the cocky ones gave me something to watch. Spindly girls in bikinis begged for attention as they shrieked and grabbed each
other by the elbows, sliding around on the wet pool deck in the hopes that a boy might find the nerve to push them in. The worst I expected there was a bloody nose, maybe a chipped tooth. I only had to blow my whistle a few times before one of them inevitably called me a bitch, or something similar, and then the gaggle of them would decide to leave.

It was the shy ones I worried about the most. They were the ones who had heart attacks in locked bathroom stalls, seizures behind shower curtains. Kids who were afraid to tell their parents they had choked back pool water ended up dying later of secondary drowning, their lungs filling with suffocating white froth as they slept. When these people got into trouble, and especially if they thought they were dying, they wanted to be left alone. They hid. They were like animals that way.

It strikes me now that Ronnie Diaz didn't fit into either category. He may have had the guts to try the waterslide, but by all accounts he never called for help, or even splashed around. He simply jumped in and disappeared, sinking to the bottom like a perfectly weighted anchor.

But I didn't think about that at the time. I was bored and hot in the stuffy room, and Ronnie Diaz was just another D and D Report. I remember Len finished diagramming a search pattern on the blackboard—“We'll call this the Diaz Pattern,” he said, and Cheryl made a small horking noise—and then the staff meeting was over. Len exhaled like a deflating balloon as we handed him back our photocopies, or threw them in the garbage.

“We going to your house?” Cheryl said, which was her way of saying that we were.

The parking lot asphalt radiated the heat of the day back at us, sucking at the cheap rubber of my sandals as we
walked to the bus stop. We sat in the bus shelter, ignoring the fact that it was essentially a greenhouse.

“The problem with this job,” Cheryl said, digging through her purse, “is that the human body is disgusting and dangerous. When you dress it in Lycra and put it in water, it only gets worse.” She found a lollipop and unwrapped it with her teeth, spitting the wrapper onto the ground. “What other job issues you a special net for skimming poop? There was a kid the other day who barfed and shat in the pool at the same time. Come
on
.”

The foulings, as Len called them, were secretly my favourite part of the job—if it was bad enough, I got to close out the pool and get paid to sit in the staff room and do nothing, or my homework. I was working on applications for medical school, and I was finding the essays difficult: why did I want to be a doctor, and what did compassionate care mean to me? I spent a lot of time on my laptop, Googling the answers to these personal questions and checking my email.

Cheryl licked her arm and smelled the skin. “What does this smell like to you, Alexa?”

“I'm not smelling your arm.”

“Chlorine,” she said definitively. “Len shocks the hell out of that pool. I've had to buy two bathing suits this year alone. It's a miracle we have any skin left.”

Cheryl and I heard the rattle of the city bus and she tucked the lollipop into her cheek. We grabbed our bags and stood outside the shelter, the whine of the bus engine making us wrinkle our noses in anticipation of the hot soot. The driver saw us, waved, and flicked his sign over to “Not in Service.” The bus kicked up a hot wind as it whooshed past us,
and we went back into the greenhouse without saying anything. We didn't take it personally.

After a while, Cheryl asked, “You're pre-med, right? What does that even mean, pre-med?”

“It means,” I said, holding my hands out so as to read from an invisible piece of paper, “that Alexandra Turner's work as a lifeguard shows her commitment to saving lives.”

The silence of the bus shelter sounded like a shell pressed to my ear, hollow and roaring at the same time. I dropped my hands into my lap.

“You save lives.” Cheryl sucked on her lollipop. “Well, I'm impressed. Give this girl a medal.”

“I'm still working on the application,” I said. “Forget about it.”

I was relieved to hear the drone of a new bus and I stood up before realizing it was only the welling buzz of cicadas. I sat back down on the bench, hugging my backpack, and I licked my arm. “It does smell like chlorine,” I said. I wanted to change the subject.

Cheryl took the lollipop out of her mouth and tossed it on the ground. She rolled it back and forth under her foot like she was working an old-fashioned sewing machine. “You're never going to get in with that kind of stuff,” she said. “Saving lives? You might as well say you're in it for the money. At least that'd be more original.”

I knew she was right. All the application guides I read said my personal essay should be about something riveting and emotional, or at least violent. Good topics included my own past experience with a doctor—bonus points if I had suffered from a serious or chronic illness—or a relative dying in a long, drawn-out way. The samples on the internet
were full of that kind of stuff: a guy who helped his mother shave her head before chemo; a rape crisis counsellor who convinced a suicidal woman to go to the emergency room. My favourite essay was about an AIDS hospice worker who had been born in what he called “abject Beirut,” losing both his parents in a bus bombing before moving to America to heal people. I was white and from the suburbs; my grandmother paid my college tuition and all my other expenses. I lived twenty minutes away from my mom and dad, and I had never seen a dead body.

“Don't worry,” Cheryl said. “I got you covered.” She looked up and down the street and then tied her hair back with a rubber band. “Check this out. You know that woman in the shower, the one who had the miscarriage?”

I felt the air in my lungs compress a little like I was diving under water, a feeling made more real by the sight of a bus shimmering towards us in the heat. “Let's go,” I said, standing. “He's not going to see us in here.”

“It was the Diving Board Nazi who actually found her,” Cheryl went on. “She called me in and told me to put on a pair of gloves and pick up the baby—she called it a baby. She said to wrap it in a towel and give it to the mother. The thing was a mutant, Alex. It looked like E.T. for God's sake. It was obviously dead, but the Nazi was like, ‘Be careful to support her head.'”

“Jesus. Let's go.” The bus was almost there, and I didn't like where Cheryl was going. I was out of breath in the thick, wet heat. The smell of chlorine—it was not just on my skin, I realized, but in my hair and on my clothes—was making me feel sick.

“Her head,” Cheryl said again, not moving. “That woman was just leaning against the wall, her skin almost the same
colour as the white tile, and there was blood everywhere. The Diving Board Nazi was doing something, I don't know what, between her legs, but this woman didn't take her eyes off me as I bundled her baby. She had these really dark eyes, almost black, or I thought she did. It turned out that they were just all pupil.”

“What is wrong with you?” I shouted as the bus pulled up and opened its doors. I jumped onto the first step. “Cheryl!”

“Relax, Alex.” Cheryl stood up and cocked her hip, giving me the same face she gave Len when he told her that lifeguards were required to wear regulation sweatpants. She jammed her hand into her pocket, calmly searching for a ticket as the bus driver tried to shut the doors on me. “Is this or is this not the kind of shit that gets you in?” she said.

I admitted that it was.

Cheryl pushed past me to pay her fare and then strolled to the back of the empty bus, swinging herself along the fabric loops that dangled from the ceiling, her feet just barely touching the floor like she was floating through space.

“We're writing your essay tonight,” she said.

We took the bus to my apartment. We sat on my bed and I gave Cheryl my laptop, but before we started I told her I had thought about it, and I didn't want to use the baby story after all. I wanted my essay to be about Ronnie Diaz.

“What? Why?” Cheryl squinted at me like I was out of focus, or crazy. “The baby thing is way better.”

“It just feels too, I don't know, too personal, or something. Like I'm taking advantage.”

“Personal is good,” Cheryl said. “And you are taking advantage. That's the point. Come on, I'll even leave out the part about the fur.”

I refused. I didn't believe the story, not entirely, but I still couldn't bring myself to trade on a dead baby in a shower stall. It seemed like the kind of thing I might regret, years later. I believed in karma then. I wanted to have children some day.

Cheryl tried to point out the fact that I'd be denying myself the opportunity to save hundreds of babies. “If you tell them you want to be an obstetrician,” she said, “this thing'll write itself.”

In the end she wrote the essay about Ronnie Diaz—“It's your funeral,” she shrugged—changing names and geographies, adding details about my dramatic and ultimately unsuccessful attempts at CPR. We both agreed that tragedy, not heroism, was the better strategy. She called the essay, “Why I Want to Be a Doctor”; she said that a more inventive title wasn't necessary. “You need to blend in just enough,” she advised. “They have to go in expecting crap and come out bawling.”

I promised to mail it in the next day, and to tell Cheryl as soon as I heard anything.

Not long after, though, I got a job as a research assistant in the biology lab. It paid better than the pool, and I thought it looked good on my resume. I quit lifeguarding, and I lost track of Cheryl.

I didn't think of her again until the acceptance letters came. I had aced my school interviews by repeating the Ronnie Diaz story, almost exactly as she had written it. I opened each crisp, thick envelope with a kind of sensual pleasure, leafing through the glossy brochures of smiling but serious people in preppy blazers and polo shirts. One of the pamphlets said that sixty-five percent of doctors meet their future partners at medical school. I was ecstatic. I called my parents
to give them the news, and they asked me to make a reservation at the fanciest restaurant in town. We were celebrating my bright future. They said I should bring a friend, but by then Cheryl didn't work at the pool anymore. I heard from Len that she had quit to audition for an arts school in the city. Acting, he said, or writing. He wasn't sure. “She gave me one day's notice,” he said, “and now I'm scrambling to staff Family Swim.”

I told myself it was probably too late to find her.

 

I MET DARREN during a cardiology rotation. When we married, the tables at our reception were named for parts of the heart: we sat the wedding party at Aorta, our parents at Superior Vena Cava, that kind of thing. The flowers for the tables were arranged in beakers and flasks, and we served gazpacho appetizers in test tubes. We designed a monogram of hummingbirds in a stylized heart, the twigs in their beaks intertwining in a double helix to spell DnA for our initials. We printed it on programs that doubled as fans—it was August, and we had rented a tent for my grandmother's garden. After the ceremony, people toasted us with champagne, and then servers in impossibly crisp white shirts brought around drinks that looked like parrots, bright red with lime wedge tails. My father told them to keep them coming all night. My mother had found an antique bird cage and spray-painted it gold, setting it on the gift table as a moneybox with a sign that read, Help the Lovebirds Feather Their Nest. Darren told her he thought it was unnecessary; didn't we already have everything we had ever wanted? My mother was charmed all over again.

After I cut the cake and tossed the bouquet, I slipped away to the front of the house. I took off my shoes and lay
down on the prickly grass, spreading my arms wide as I looked up into the milky grey sky. The jazz band was playing a slow number, and the music mixed with the pieces of conversation that floated across the lawn like friendly ghosts. I closed my eyes until all I heard was the thrumming of the party, like a pulse, and I thought, happily, This is what it must feel like to be dead. No, not dead, I corrected myself. Unborn. Brand new.

“What's up, Doc?”

I sat up and opened my eyes and there she was. Her hair was cut unfashionably short and pinned behind each ear with drugstore barrettes. With one hand she balanced a tray of parrot cocktails, a thick napkin over her forearm, and with the other she untucked her white shirt, which was too big for her in the body, boxy like it belonged to a man. It made her look thin in an unsettling way; she reminded me of a patient in a hospital gown. She set the tray between us and put the napkin over her shoulder, as though she were getting ready to burp a baby. She picked a lime wedge from one of the glasses, sucking on it a bit before chucking it into the bushes and sitting down beside me, scratching at her back. “They bleach the shit out of these things. It gives me a rash.”