Swimming (4 page)

Christ’s Mass

Leonard’s driving like a maniac, barely missing the cars that line the street. We’re on our way to Christmas mass at Holy Name. Late. Nuns hate late. Late for Christmas equals late for Christ. I hold on to the strap of the door so I don’t crush Roxanne, who’s slumped next to me. If I crush Roxanne, she’ll crush Dot, who’ll crush Bron, then there’ll be trouble; we’d gotten our orders the night before:
Leave her be
. I hang on to the strap of the door as we careen and my mother sighs even though it’s her fault; when we were supposed to be entering the church with other families, she was walking around the house in nothing but a chiffon blouse and black panty hose, her vaginal muff flattened underneath like a mongoose in the middle of a highway, her lips still chalkless. I didn’t care where her skirt was but I wished she’d put it on. It was the same scene every year, snow falling in tufts, ground covered in ice, Mother half-dressed: in skirt but no top, in sturdy bra and jacket but no pants, wandering the house, hair done, face on, my father waiting in his study, stars glinting a million light-years away, other families already settling into the wooden pews, organ humming in the background, human breath mingling with Christmas perfume and incense.

When we arrive, we open the heavy door carefully and lurk, scanning the pews for space. The Schippers are usually later than us, but tonight I spot them sitting in the last pew with side parts so deep they reveal an entire ear. The pews behind the nuns are the only ones still open. Father Tod is mumbling at the pulpit, chalice in both hands. Jesus hasn’t descended yet, is still up there, deciding. We’re going to have to walk up the central aisle. Leonard sets his chin, whispers:
Come on
.

I’ve grown three inches, am now almost as tall as my father, and am having the first real lousy year of my life. My period won’t come no matter what I do. I pray to it, earnestly, say:
I’m ready
. I check my underwear every chance I get. My heart sinks at the soft, perfectly white rectangle of little girl it reveals. The girls at school are bleeding together and everybody’s talking about it. I don’t know I’ve decided to sin until I pull my mother aside in the kitchen and sin:
I got it
. She goes into her bathroom and pulls out a maxi pad she hands to me with a short weep. Bron looks at me pointedly when I tell her; she knows something’s not right, isn’t in the mood to figure out what. When I tell Lilly Cocoplat, she looks at me and says:
Told you it sucks. I can’t believe you were worried
. And I look at her and sin again:
It super sucks. It’s like lousy
. I know it’s just a question of time, carefully tape a maxi pad into my underwear.

I’m wearing one as I slide in next to Dot. It sits between my legs like a torpedo, absorbing the dry warmth of my body. I bow my head, pretending to pray for good universal things. When it’s time for the sign of peace, the nuns turn, chins supported by dress cowls, clasp my hand with their warm hand bones, grant me peace. I’ve known them my entire life.

The granting of the peace always brings out the drama in my mother. This year she has decided that peace shall be welcomed with a thumping nervous breakdown. She’s crying so hard she’s wrestling with herself, and Leonard has to hold on to her so she won’t fall into the nuns. Bron is not pleased; her face is tight and she’s holding her back as hard and as straight as a board. Trouble. I grit my teeth, calculating escape; we’ll sing soon, then the buffet with hot tea, cider, coffee, juice, and two hundred varieties of cake. I find Lilly Cocoplat lodged between her beanpole parents. She puts her middle finger up her nose and coughs twice. I have a hard time controlling myself; wimples rustle; my mother recovers enough to pinch me with nails she’s filed into fangs. Life is delicately balanced.

At the buffet, Leonard is quickly surrounded by nun. Sister Atrocious is talking to him a mile a minute, a piece of half-eaten strudel sitting in her palm. Nestor is nodding vehemently here, then there, chewing on something I can’t identify, but there’s a field of pink crumbs lying on the ledge of her chest. I watch their mouths move, sure that serious information is being exchanged. I send the Cocoplat over to investigate; she comes back with a plate full of apple crumble, a slice of angel food cake, a handful of foil-wrapped chocolate, a glass of something red:
Nothing
.

What’s that pink stuff Nestor’s eating?

I looked for it. There’s none left
.

Bron’s standing at the bay windows, half hidden by the sacred tree, every inch covered in tinfoiled angel. She’s got one hand on the glass as the other waves my mother away.

Leonard and I have finally reached a compromise: I’m swimming on the Holy Name swim team and can practice with the Dolphins on Wednesday afternoons during the school year as long as my grades don’t slide. Lilly jumps up and down when I tell her, but she’s losing interest in the pool. I can tell.

The Holy Name swim team is coached by Holy Name’s new addition, Father Timothy Heaver, tennis coach and Bjorn Borg fanatic. No one would notice if we didn’t exist. Real high school swimmers treat our meets as a light practice, rarely bothering to cheer. Our first meet of the season, Father Tim sits us down and gives us a speech that mixes equal portions of the Holy Trinity and exciting things that happened to Bjorn Borg. Father Tim is a naturally sweaty person who does not fare well in chlorine atmospheres and is virtually impossible to talk to during practice because the tennis players swarm him like gnats. I try to explain some things to him through the privacy of the confessional, for example, how the progressive-overload principle proves that if you progressively overload someone just a little bit past what is bearable every day, they will become stronger.
It’s a proven fact, Father. Coach Stan explained it to the Dolphins when we were six
. But Father Tim thinks one practice a day is fine enough, even though every other swimmer in the world my age is doubling up.

We won’t get any faster
, I whisper, finding his form through the dim gray mesh.

Of course we will
, and
we’ll have fun
. He’s leaning on one elbow, his forehead resting in the middle of his palm.

I blast his profile with my eyes, raise my voice a notch.
Our muscles won’t get any stronger; just ask Coach Stan. Call him up. He’ll tell you; we need two hard practices a day. We will not improve
.

He whispers so softly, I can barely hear him.
Your muscles will get stronger. Why in the world wouldn’t they?

I whisper back, loudly. I don’t care who hears.
Ask Coach Stan, Father Tim. And the speeches … I could give you …

He breaks the Catholic confessional protocol of absolute anonymity and turns to peer at the hulking shadow I must be.
Is this why you’re here?

I cross my arms over my chest and look down.
Yes
.

He’s still peering; I can feel his breath.
There’s nothing else?

My kneecaps are pushing down hard into wood.
No …

Nothing you want to discuss …
He waves one hand dripping with sleeve.

Everything’s okay. Dad said
, I whisper. He looks me straight in the face and blesses me with a sigh.

There are eleven other girls on the swim team, all of them recreational swimmers. Some of the recreational swimmers are tennis players in disguise; they talk about Chris Evert, wear socks with little balls attached that bounce when they walk.

I make him give me my own lane. I plant both feet into tile, make my face go as square as it can, say:
Give me my own lane, Father Tim
.

We lose every meet. Every single one. I swim badly, demoralized. I’m still growing taller and it hurts, a dull ache behind my knees, a strange feeling in my hip. I have existential bouts on the starting block, am prone to the extremities of moodiness. I say:
Boy, these cramps sure do ache
as the tennis players look over in suspicion.

My swim falls apart in the water like paper. Former Dolphin colleagues I have always easily beaten easily beat me. They’re insincerely apologetic, give me a thumbs-up from afar, have high school coaches with mustaches and clipboards, fund-raisers and sleepovers, camping trips and morning workouts. I don’t cheer but they do:
Holy Name is mighty lame
.

Father Tim says:
We did our best and I, for one, am proud
as the tennis players smile in unison and I sulk. Then he blesses us.

This annoys me.
Don’t bless us for
real,
Father Tim. Bless us in your head
.

The only people worse than us in the entire state are the Arc City River Rangers. Arc City is home to deep-dish pizza and girls with celloshaped thighs and fat-encased torsos whose ripples you can count from the other side of the pool. I’m itching for one lonely win, but suffer from a terrible antsiness, diving in too quickly, disqualifying, stuck in the recall rope with my heart bursting to race. Father Tim says:
There’ll always be a next time!
as an Arc City River Ranger flips me the bird, the underbelly of her arm wobbling to and fro. I call Coach Stan when I get home, a rubber ball of despair lodged in my throat. He sighs.
Con-cen-tra-tion. Next time up, belly-breathe like I taught
.

Next Time Up

Leonard’s wearing a pair of mail-order beige slacks with the single neat pleat, a white turtleneck, his dark blue Windbreaker. He’s bending over the small door cut into the immense door of the hangar. I feel detached and intent at the same time. It’s very agreeable. I’m standing behind him, shining the flashlight on the lock, the sky behind us a pre-dawn sapphire blue. He opens the door; I shine the light in.

The first thing you notice about the fabulous Mooney M20K 305 Rocket is her wings, the jaunty splash of orange, the sliver of light blue that runs up the length of her fine nose. We fly often, on a rotational basis. Dr. Bob comes when he’s not on call; sometimes Ahmet Noorani jumps on at the last minute. Mom occasionally braves her motion sickness with Wintermint gum, ginger drops, a bottle of water, and a plastic-lined paper bag, but only for the long cultural weekends when we stay overnight in small lodges, rent cars, go to fairs, fight.

When we got here this morning Shirley R. said:
Hi ya, bat man
when her eyes lit on Leonard. He smiled back, his thin face creasing.
Hello there, Shirley; weather’s looking good today
. She didn’t say hello to me, nodding coolly in my direction with both lips pressed together in a wide coral line. She’d caught the Cocoplat’s rendition of her in the bathroom the last time we flew together; we’d forgotten to check the stall, a mistake we will not make again. I stifled the smile I was going to give her, wanting to say
I’m sorry
but not feeling up to the task. Some people give you one chance and after that you’re dead to them forever.

This morning I’m flying alone with Leonard although it’s not my turn. We didn’t even draw straws—he’d said
Be ready by five
so I was ready by five. I laid my clothes out by the side of my bed so I could wake up and slide into them without waking Bron. She didn’t wake. When I looked over at her as I was shutting the door, she was wrapped up, her long arms with the pointy elbows covering her face. She was in a good mood last night, sang “Cat’s in the Cradle” until I got so sad I made her stop. Then she sang “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number,” but I don’t like that song so I crept into Leonard’s office, stole some nun fudge, brought it back. I chewed a bunch; she nibbled some, said:
Don’t you think it sounds like an English butler?

I said:
What?

And she said:
Hodgkin’s disease. Don’t you think Hodgkin’s sounds like an English butler?

And I swallowed my fudge and said:
Yeah, I guess it does
.

When we walk into the lounge, my heart twitters; there are a couple of Mooniacs sitting on the tweed couch, drinking tar from Styrofoam cups, open topographic maps lying between them. The Mooniacs are exactly like the swimming tennis players: they dress alike and have a hidden agenda involving the one subject that interests them:
Old Mooney, the new Mooney, the most powerful pistons in the sky
.

We luck out; today they are busy planning some treasure hunt that crosses the Southern states, stopping somewhere in Florida. They shake Leonard’s hand and nod toward me as I slouch in to the Coke machine, which only takes quarters.

Good. I hate it when we’re delayed, fling myself on the mangy couch with long sighs, staring at the centerfolds of flying magazines Shirley has tacked to the walls. Bron always brings a book, just in case, sitting sideways in the corduroy armchair, her legs dangling over its arms as Roxanne looks out the window gnawing on her nails. Dot goes up front and sits on Shirley’s lap, welcoming fellow voyagers or drawing colorful planes diving into blue space. The odor of keen pilot coffee bites the warm air in the small room as people wander in and out with weekend bags slung over their shoulders and huge leather aviation briefcases containing things that hold zero percent interest for me.

We often make cultural excursions around the state, getting up at dawn to view the big well and meteorite in Greensburg, Monkey Island in Independence. We go to the Wizard of Oz complex in Liberal, feasting on towers of pancakes that come up to our chins. We go to Meade to check out the escape tunnel used by the Dalton Gang in 1929, a disappointing heap of dirt. We attend the annual black squirrel celebration in Wichita, where we buy figurines of squirrels whose frozen faces mirror the complexities of human joy. We examine the world’s largest twine ball in Cawker City and the transparent woman with the illuminated genitalia at the Halstead Center for Health in Liberal. I study her glowing bits, her bright sunny ovaries, her hot pink tunnels of tube. I step in closer, wondering what vital womanly thing I’m missing until Bron grabs my arm and squeezes:
People are staring
. We fly into the fields surrounding local fairs, where we stack up on pots of apple butter the color of mole, pickles, fresh sweet corn we shuck, then freeze. We rent cars from airports sitting in the middle of lonesome fields like shacks and drive up into the Smoky Mountains, picnicking in front of a small lake with frigid green water we hold our breaths to dive into, flying home into a violet Kansas sun as Mother barfs loudly into one of her American Airlines necessity bags that Leonard collects on his commercial flights.

Sometimes we fly just to fly, nowhere, careening in wide, even circles, staring down at the world with hypnotized eyes and not saying one word until we land with a lurch, rubber on cement, sky shifting back into place. These are therapeutic flights that work on the principle that by removing ourselves from earth’s grasp, we cool its sting. It works; little problems waltz across the world until the bigger ones give in and join them.

Dr. Ahmet Noorani, the Pakistani urologist, has the hangar next to ours. He flies a ratty Cessna he’s named Ducky and is building his own plane. He’s here every time we are, standing in the hangar in dirty white coveralls with a wrench in one hand and a bright yellow cigarette burning in the other. When he sees us, he puts down his tools and hugs us one by one, pulling us into his prickly face and kissing both cheeks with tight sound. He and Leonard are linked not only by their love of flight but because they both are the only men in a family of women. Ahmet has three of them, short, golden-haired, slightly fattish daughters who bear no resemblance whatsoever to him. We study each other from across the hangar, don’t mingle, although Ahmet cries:
Talk, talk, girrllllls; what’s the matter with you? They never stop at home …
If Dr. Ahmet gets to Leonard with one of his lilting questions, we’re sure to spend an hour looking at the engine that’s spread across the floor on a sheet of gray tarp. But today the hangar next to ours is dark, all tools packed neatly into a metal box, tarp folded sharply on top. Ducky is tied down, her eyes covered in silver isothermic material.

I say the same thing I always say when I see Ducky.
Hi, Ducky
.

Leonard looks up.
Don’t mock. Ducky’s a fine little plane
.

Planes are easier to move than go-carts. Leonard steers, door open, one beige desert boot poised on the outside step, his mind busy, humming with pre-flight happiness. I forget how strong I am, push too hard.

It’s not made of lead … gentle, gentle now
.

Our breath blows puffs of vapor into the air as we walk through the crunch of frozen green-smelling hay layered thinly on the ground. It’s so still you can hear the rabbits scatter in fear. Leonard takes his time checking, double-checking. He puts his glasses on and flips switches up and down as I watch the sun tip the horizon with an arc of white light.

We taxi down the runway, Leonard murmuring stuff to control, control murmuring stuff back. He turns to me as if just remembering my presence, smiles, gives me a thumbs-up:
z55 Oscar Papa Romeo, check
. The revving of engine echoes in plexus, speed pulling me back into my seat, until we are released from gravity, our internal organs floating slightly as we lift into air. I’m not comfortable sitting copilot because I don’t ever want to die. I don’t like the idea of dying alone with Leonard either. If we’re going to die, we should do it as a family or else it’s not fair. I don’t mention this to Leonard because according to him we are much safer 24,000 feet in the air than driving our station wagon five miles down Thirty-fourth Street to Holy Name’s annual Easter cake-walk. I know it’s true, but it doesn’t feel like it when the Rocket points her nose straight up in the air, breaking the pull of gravity as the earth falls away and I am pressed into my seatbones by forces I cannot see. It makes my stomach churn.

One of the nicer things about flying alone with Leonard is I get my own set of headphones, which keeps me connected to everything happening between control and the other planes hidden somewhere in the sky. I love to hear them, the pilots passing through Kansas, their swift observations, efficient requests for factual information, the rare jokester cutting through electricity, his voice vibrating off my inner ear, lulling me into a funk so deep and delicious I float in a semiconscious state as I dip my half-open eyes into cloud, into green wavy hill, watching the tin soldiers living out sweet meaningless lives below.

We cut through a colony of dense gray elephant clouds that Leonard says were designed for maximum gloom. The sky opens to a clear dazzling blue and there she is, the sun, patiently watching with one benevolent eye, and we are the lucky ones and life is a marvel.

Leonard’s voice breaks through the static.
This is good, isn’t it?

I break back.
Yeah
.

He’s quiet, speaking only to point out a strange natural formation in the midst of stalks of corn—broken gold hands reaching up from a blanket of white; the Missouri frozen to a standstill with a locked-in barge, gray and lonely, caught like a fat fly in a web of ice.

I keep myself busy calculating the space between land and sky. I plant my eyes on the ground and concentrate hard on the fall. Sometimes I have us catapult into the air before impact, landing on our backs, blackened, bruised, with smoking frizzy hair and oil-slicked faces; stunned but alive. We smile at each other in amazement, teeth a deep cartoon white. But mostly my mind is drawn to the crushing, our zest pierced by harder lifeless things, lives escaping our bodies in a mad hiss of steam, our noisy insides as blank as screens after someone has pulled the plug. Our simultaneous death moves me to delicious tears that I hide in the arm of my sweater as Leonard sweeps us forward through the sky, as confident of the machine that holds us in her metal belly as he is of anything in the world.

He clears his throat.
I need you to do something for me
.

This is new. I clear my throat.
Okay
.

When he doesn’t say anything, I turn to look at him. We’re flying steady over generous spoonfuls of white mousse. He feels me looking, doesn’t turn, white clouds crossing his dark glasses like ghosts. He speaks quietly:
I need you to make things as easy as you can for Bron and your mother
.

I adopt his tone, whisper:
Okay
.

He’s done, switches off the headphones; someone flying in from Kansas City is requesting permission to land.

Landing is tricky. Rushing sensations, bursts of adrenaline, sudden shudders, heaving sky, the descent toward gloom. Wheels touch concrete and out we step, gingerly, as though walking with new feet. I don’t know exactly what flying does for Leonard but it always changes his face. We find Ahmet Noorani lounging in a lawn chair, his hairy ankles sticking out of the brightly colored socks he favors,
How to Build Your Own Plane
sitting open on his lap. He jumps up when he sees us, pulling me into his prickly chin and kissing me tightly on both cheeks.

I turn my back on them, walk out the door. The sky’s full of planes zipping carefully amongst each other in a scary ballet. I watch them for a while, then start to run. I don’t know where I’m going, but I know Leonard will probably find me. I run past trees, out into the open fields that lead to Glenwood. It doesn’t feel bad, but I know that it is.