The Chronology of Water (14 page)

Chang Rae? Sorry I thought those things. Thanks for pissing me off all those years ago. Beautiful random nemesis.

WHEN I FIRST MET HANNAH IN GRADUATE SCHOOL I WAS a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere.

I was using my body as a sexual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I sexualized my entire existence. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn’t have to think or feel anything but MMMMM good.

Hannah was one of those lesbians who looks like a beautiful boy - hazel eyes, that cool short curtain of hair hanging over one eye, broad shoulders, little hips, barely there titties. More like M&M S. Hannah played basketball and softball and soccer when she wasn’t being a Eugene lesbo and English grad student. She used to wait for me by my blue Toyota pickup truck between classes and hijack me and drive me to the coast, where we’d stay up all night getting it on in the back of my truck, drinking Heinekens and waiting for the sun to come up. Then we’d drive back and go to class. Or I would. Hannah thought grad school was kind of lame. She much preferred sex and club dancing.

So when Hannah captured me and my best friend Claire in the hall after our 18th- Century Women Writers seminar by grabbing our wrists and pulling us toward the wall, I already knew it would be something sly. She smiled her sly Hannah smile and whispered, “Wanna go to the coast? I got us a room.”

Claire blinked so blankly her eyes looked like a doll’s, and
I think I coughed academically. But I have to admit it. My crotch went messy pretty much that instant.

Listen, you probably think you wouldn’t, but I’m telling you, if Hannah said get in my truck we’re going to the coast, raising her little trickster eyebrow and putting her hand right underneath your breast and against your first couple of ribs, going, I dare you, you’d go.

Women go the See Vue Inn because of the themed rooms. The Secret Garden Suite (private garden). The Crow’s Nest (nautical). The Salish (Native American). Princess and the Pea (weirdly medieval). Mountain Shores (rustica). Far Out West (cowgirl). The Cottage (you get the “house” to yourself).

We had The Cottage.

The little cottage sported a fireplace, so I said don’t do anything without me and drove off to get firewood. When I got back, the door was open. I went in. The two of them were in bed with the covers pulled up just underneath their tits - Hannah’s M&M S and Claire’s glorious pendulous globes, smiling like Cheshire cats. Cheshire cats who had licked pussy. And in the middle of the bed was a little suitcase that Hannah brought - filled with toys.

I immediately dropped the wood on the floor, shut the door, and stripped, launching myself onto the bed like superwoman.

Whoever was staying in the Princess and the Pea or the Salish or the Far East, they must’ve gotten an earful. Hours of woman on woman on woman whose regular lives didn’t allow for such wild abandon. Sometimes Hannah’s fist up my cunt Claire’s mouth on mine or me sucking her epic tits. Sometimes Hannah on her stomach me up her ass with a strap on Claire behind me giving me a reach around - a skill she intuited. Sometimes Claire on all fours me and Hannah filling every hole licking every mouth rubbing her clit making her scream making her entire corpus shiver her head rock back her woman wail let loose gone primal cum and shit stains and spit and tears. I came in Hannah’s mouth, her face between my legs like some goddess in a new myth. Claire came with Hannah’s fingers in her ass
and pussy, her body convulsing and falling off the bed, me wrapped around her and laughing and hitting my head on the wall. Hannah came jamming a dildo up herself while I buried my face in the clit of her. She pulled my hair. She pushed my head. Claire curled under me licking and gagging but not not not stopping. I don’t know how many times we came … it seemed unending.

We ate each other we ate pickled herring we ate gruyere cheese. We ate the animal out of each other’s bodies we ate steak we ate chocolate two women my chocolate. We drank each other we drank all the beer we drank all the wine we peed outside. We got high on skin and cum and sweat we got high on pot. We came in waves we ran out and into the waves.

I wanted to stay like that forever - outside of any “relationship” I had ever had and inside the wet of an unnamed sexuality. The moon a grand spectator. As full of alive as the ocean outside the door. All the night it was difficult to tell whose body was whose. The woman of it drowned me. It nearly cleaved my mind. And again. Again. Waves.

I don’t know why women can’t make the story do what they want.

I don’t.

When we got back to our ordinary lives, Claire told me she was in love with me. A sentiment I couldn’t find in myself to return, hard as I tried. I wish I could go back and try. It was real, what she offered. But kindness wasn’t something I even recognized.

WITH HANNAH, IT TOOK ME WEEKS TO FIGURE OUT IF she was attracted to me or just really pissed off - her jokes always seemed a little mean, always left me feeling like a female headed slow-poke. Sometimes she’d charley horse me good ones in the arm or thigh hard enough to leave a lump. It didn’t weird me out. Unlike everything else, I could feel it.

Once she bit my cheek so hard I sat in my classes the next week looking like I’d been mauled by a chimp. When she bit my cheek? I laughed so hard I cried.

I never thought Hannah was hurting me when she’d do things like shove me up against a wall for fun hard enough to ache my shoulderblades. I felt like I had pain in me that needed to come out. More and more I wished for the force of her. She’d drink my vodka from the bottle and we’d go for long walks at night in the graveyard next to the college and fuck on the stones of dead folks. After she’d flip silver dollars in the air and we’d lay on our backs and watch bats dive at them. I’d talk about dead things. She’d let me.

A few months in to our whatever it was she walked up to me and whispered, I signed us up for kayaking.

?

The U of O pool is where I first made Jr. Nationals as a teen. The pool had not changed - a slimy chlorine hell with Disney ducks painted on the walls. We were two of three women in the class. The third, big red, was 6’ 2” with a mane of red hair all the
way to her ass. I had a hard time not touching her hair. In our giant fiberglass kayaks we learned kayaky things from our instructor, Jeff. In our cockpits. Things like the life-saving Eskimo roll. Hoping to master an ender. A pry stroke. A put in. A wet exit. Hannah learned fast because she was a tomboy woman, and I learned fast because anything in the water felt like home.

Our last class in the pool our instructor put each of us one at a time on the end of the diving board, kayak noses pointing forward, and then he grabbed the back end and heaved so we went in nose first and hard. The idea being that you’d immediately be upside down underwater and have to practice your Eskimo roll. I loved it. Not the life saving part. I loved being pitched over the edge and being upside down underwater. I asked Jeff to do it again and again. Harder, I’d say, and Jeff would shove me off the board. I’d stay under for as long as I could - sometimes until I heard Hannah or Jeff yelling my name.

At the end of the five weeks our instructor took us all to the McKenzie River for our “final.” Little bit of speed in the alley, little bit of white water for excitement. I decided that day it would be a really good idea to get incredibly high just before I met up with Hannah at the river’s edge.

On the forest trail to the put in I remember Hannah being annoyed with me, because it took me too long to put my life jacket on and too long to secure my paddle into my kayak and too long to pick my kayak up and trudge down the forest trail to the put in as I stopped and turned to look at things and got the kayak tip caught in bushes and wow look at my own magnificent red converse sneakers a step at a time in front of me making a rhythm and cottonwood blowing around like summer snow and look at the intriguing hats in the branches no wait those are BIRDS and stopping and laughing until she came back for me going WHAT ARE YOU DOING, EXACTLY? My kayak in the dirt.

Eye to eye, she saw it. Christ Lidia, you are high. What the fuck? You have to go in the water. To my huhuhuhuhuhuh.

So she slapped me hot and hard right on the cheek.

Time stopped. I’m pretty sure my pupils pinned. I saw stars. I liked it. For a split second I felt alive. I wanted her to do it again. Harder. But I didn’t say anything.

Hannah turned and picked up her kayak and left the trail in the trees, making for the rocks near the river’s edge. We could see the rest of our class up ahead - some on the rocks, some in the water. Still stunned into focus, at the point where the rocks met the water I saw a dead steelhead, half in water, half out. Even dead, she was something. The silver and black and blue sheen of her body, the white of her underbelly. She smelled like ocean. “She” because of her split open belly, and the dried up jelly of sunburned eggs on the rocks. I had a hard time not looking.

LIDIA. Hannah calling.

No one seemed to notice we were a little late, they just dipped in and paddled around like spinning ducks in a big pool of slow water, their shiny bright colored helmets looking like Easter eggs to me. Big red’s hair briefly mesmerized me, as usual, and I reached my hand out to touch it, but Hannah pinched my arm where fat grows and I got clear again. In we went, Hannah ahead of me, me getting a little too interested in the black lines on the ends of my paddle. Huhuhuhuhuhuh. I had my bright blue tard helmet on backwards but no one noticed.

My feet and legs stretching out the front of the kayak seemed easy to forget existed. The slow water curled long left then slow right, around giant boulders that I knew had steelhead in the eddies. The tree leaves hanging over the water quivered. It smelled like river - dirt and fish and wet and algae. I put my instructional paddle across the skirt over my lap and let my hands trail in the cold dark wet. I closed my eyes. I leaned my head back, up toward the sun, the skin on my face hot, my hands in the water cold. I thought I might be touching bliss. A surface I’d not felt in years. Then I heard my name too loudly and looked up to see Hannah looking back at me: LIDIA. PAY ATTENTION. Too late, Hannah. Too late.

When we hit the whitewater, instead of the lane we were
supposed to navigate, I went down the one that was out of our league. Look at all the pretty white. Like lace. I smiled. I didn’t make one paddle stroke how I’d been taught. Instead, I lifted my paddle into the air and laughed, and I heard Jeff’s voice going LIDIA and Hannah’s voice going LIDIA but I was laughing, so the power current took me into a spin and I traveled backwards for a bit and then down and sideways and then right over, my shiny blue helmeted head going down and down. I didn’t have to think about taking an enormous gulp of air first. It’s in my DNA.

Upside down underneath the water holding my breath things became oddly calm. You’d think you wouldn’t be able to see shit, but the water is icy and green colored clear up where we were on the McKenzie. And the underwater blur isn’t as pronounced as you might think. But it does make your eyes feel like ice cubes.

The boulders bigger than bodies rose up dark black jade and shimmered with the sun moving through layers of deep water. I could see the bottom of the river. Rocks, sand and plant life moving and moving by. More than one steelhead shaped itself, their dark shadow selves doing that thing where they water - hover in the current moving only their tails. The cold water made my temples pound. My heart beat me up in my chest and eardrums the way it does when you are running out of air. My lungs burned. My hands went numb. I closed my eyes.

Something-I think a rock - scraped my paddle. Oh. Yeah. My paddle.

I didn’t think get yourself upright, dumbass. My arms simply lifted to position until I could see the lines of my instructional paddle - exactly as they should be. I definitely had the right grip to flip myself upright - I definitely had the right angle with my arms - up until I slowly and simply … let the paddle go.

Upside down I saw the sun and sky at the surface make silver blue electricity. The rushing water and strength of current pulled my arms, rocked my head. The upsidedowness of blood in my skull made my head ache. I closed my eyes. Still smiling.
The cold wet of my life. My body in deep water. Weightless. Airless. Daughterless void.

It’s possible it would be impossible for me to drown.

After I shot through the rough and tumble of the whitewater tunnel I pulled the skirt and made a wet exit not even bothering to hold on to my kayak. I somersaulted twice in the current and banged my knees and shoulder and something else on rocks and saw my own air bubbles furiously leaving my nose. But I popped up anyway, taking in the biggest breath of my life. Coughing. Snot all over. Something warm on my cheekbone. Blood. The cold finally making me shiver.

I saw the entire posse on the shore, some of them yelling and waving or pointing. Then my exasperated instructor paddled up alongside me and grabbed me by my life jacket. “Let’s get you in - you gave us a scare - you gave us a goddamn scare, girl!” His voice controlled anger.

“Let go, Jeff,” I said, “I can swim it. Let go.”

It was true. I cut through the minor current easily. I swam upstream even though most of my strength had left my body.

Big red ended up swimming down my kayak and bringing it back to the exit edge. Magnificently. Hannah didn’t say much. She sat near me and ate an orange. She looked pale. She fed me orange slices. She looked extremely serious and soooooooo not high. I’d lost my high underwater. Jeff acted cranky - both because I nearly lost the kayak and paddle but also because he watched me enter the whitewater and surrender. It must be hard to know one of your students might drown. I wonder how often it happens. If at all. When we put our gear back onto the truck he pulled me aside. Were you trying to kill yourself? Jokingly, laughing the tight pitched nervous laugh of a man old enough to be one of our fathers.