Ultimate Sports (22 page)

But they didn’t touch. I was watching the whole complete conversation.

It’s one thing to enjoy a vacation, to forget your troubles and have a great time. It’s another thing to go completely off your rocker and want to throw your normal life away. I said that and Patrice answers back, “You think the way we live at home is
normal
? That’s not normal, that’s crazy. It’s a treadmill. We’re like mice in a lab and somebody’s watching how long we’ll endure the stress before we tear our own flesh apart.”

Now, that is not normal thinking.

“The sun’s gotten to you, Patrice. You’re not thinking.”

“Not thinking? I’m thinking more clearly than I have in a long time. This is the real me thinking.”

The conversation went on in that zigzag kind of way, the way it is when everybody wants something so bad, and everybody gets off-balance.

I said to my parents, “But if I go to college now, I’ll just be vague about it. I’ll
sort of
want to be there. If I come back to live on the island, I’ll be completely focused because I’ll be doing what I want to do, not just waiting to do it. Not just sort of vaguely getting ready to do it.”

“And what is that exactly?” Dad asked. “Just run it by us again so we can be sure.”

“I want to dive, and teach—well, tutor—in the one-room school on this end of the island. Those little kids don’t have any school at all now.”

“What are you going to live on?”

“Why couldn’t I be a jellyfish collector? Or a something-else collector? It would be simple. Research labs need specimens; I can easily find someplace that needs something collected. That’s the easy part.”

“Do you really think living on this island is going to be the way it’s been for us for a week? Think again,” said my father. “We’ve had luxury—it’s not like that for the year-rounders. You won’t have maid service.”

“Dad, this is me, your daughter. Have you ever,
ever
seen me expect maid service?”

“Daddy’s right. You’ll be appalled at the difference,” Mom said.

“That’s it. A difference. I want to make a difference,” I said. “Now. I want to do it now—not wait ten years till I’ve logged enough lab hours to drive me batty—”

“Look at it this way, Patrice,” interrupted my father. “If it’s the lab hours you don’t want to put in, try another field, something without lab hours. There are all kinds of great possibilities for you out there in the real world.”

“You think
that
world is real?” I said.

“You think this one is?” he said.

“Doesn’t that depend on what you mean by ’reality’?”

“Reality is what you wake up to every morning,” said my father.

“No. Reality is what you make out of your potential and your ideals. People make their own reality,” I said.

Dad got in his stubborn voice. “Well, I didn’t get to take honors this and honors that in school, and I don’t understand all that. It sounds like some kind of excuse-making to me. It sounds like some kind of philosophy, I don’t know what name they have for it this week.”

My father is completely rational and sane, up to a point. When you hit that point it’s a dead end, and you have to go back and try another route.

When Patrice got over people making their own reality, she asked me, “Didn’t we come here because you wanted to get out of a rut?”

I told her, “Yes. Sure we did. But the whole point is we
get in ruts because in ruts is where we get work done.” I was trying to defend something that ordinarily doesn’t need defending—a way of life. “Remember the scuba rule: Plan your dive and dive your plan.”

“Dad! That’s exactly what I’m talking about. A scuba plan is there because it’s for safety. A life plan is a whole different thing. I think a life plan can get to be a life
rut
just because people are afraid to change.”

“And I think you’re seventeen years old,” I said.

If I’d gone to college instead of the army, I might be a vice president by now. We might have a vacation home on an island like this. It’s my dream to see her with a college degree.

And I know if she delays for a year, then another year, and another one, college might look too hard. She might end up settling for less than she deserves. I’ve seen it happen. Lots of kids have big plans and then they end up settling for a life that eventually disappoints them, just because the other way was too much work.

When I was a kid I didn’t have the choice she has.

I took a walk down the beach.

Only Patrice and I were left on the terrace. We sat looking away from each other. I said toward the sunset, “Life is bland and dull one moment and utterly shocking the next.”

“Are you making a point?” she asked my back.

“No, I’m telling you how I feel.”

“How do you feel?” She sounded tight-lipped.

“Confused.”

“Do you want me to apologize for confusing you?” she asked.

I didn’t answer for a while. No, I didn’t want her apology, I wanted her to be the way she was before. And I can’t expect my daughters to be the way they were before. That was before.

“No. I just want you to be safe.”

She was quiet, not making a move behind me. I could imagine her staring up the beach, watching the waving grasses and the little ripples of the water, wrinkling the inside ends of her eyebrows up just slightly.

“You can’t keep me safe, Mom. Life isn’t safe.”

That turned me around. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.

A look passed between us, a look of wanting. I was yearning for her to come into my arms and be my old familiar firstborn again, whose heartbeat I knew so well. She was aching to be free of that very thing, her mother’s protective embrace. We looked at each other in the quiet, as the sun sank and the terrace turned grayish with night.

The older people get, the fewer chances they’re willing to take. It’s a law of inverse proportion.

I ran to catch up with Daddy going down the beach. He put his hand in my hair. “Sandy with sand in her hair,” he said. I reached his fingers out of my hair and we held
hands walking along the sand. There was a tiny little warm breeze from the water. “You all packed?” he asked. I told him yes and I figured out I could walk 3 steps and kick a piece of dried-out coral, 3 steps and kick a shell, 3 steps and kick a twig or stick, going all down the beach.

“You turned into a champion snorkeler,” he said. I told him I knew it.

We walked and I kicked for a while. Then I told him a thing nobody even mentioned before. “What if a barracuda bites her?”

Daddy looked at me and took a mosquito out of my hair. “Right, Sandy,” he said. “That’s right. What if a barracuda bites her?”

“That’d be too scary. What would happen to her?” I said.

“We won’t let that happen,” said Daddy.

How could we not let that happen if she comes to live here without us?

When Sandy and I came back onto the porch, Susannah was saying, “There’s no guarantee that you’d even be
liked
here, Patrice. Just because of your color. You might be so uncomfortable… so uncomfortable.”

Patrice said, “I don’t expect to go through my life being comfortable. That’s not the point of being alive.”

I have to admit I was proud she said that. But I didn’t say so. “Patrice,” I said, and I lowered my voice. It was nearly dark, and the mosquitoes were biting, but still there might be others near enough to hear our private family conversation. “Patrice, this island has poverty, backwardness,
racism—Did you have any services performed for you by anybody white?”

“No,” she said.

“How do you feel being called ’Miss Patrice’?” In the dark, of course, we are all the same color. If somebody else had stepped onto the porch just then, we wouldn’t have known what color they were till they began to speak.

“I feel terrible. Guilty. But I didn’t ask to be called Miss Patrice—”

“You look like Miss Charming when Sydney calls you that,” said Sandy.

There wasn’t even a moment of silence to mourn the depths this conversation had sunk to.

“Ooohhh!” said my mother. “Oh!” said my father.
“That’s what
you—” said my mother. “Now I see,” said my father.

There was nothing at all cute about Sandy at that moment. She was a small-minded, petty, vicious, gossipy child.

Patrice said, very slowly, into the darkness, “Do you actually believe I’d be moronic enough to let a crush on my diving guide take me thousands of miles from home and cause me to rearrange my life? Not quite, thank you. I’m more mature than that.” Something in me wanted to agree with her.

I have to admit I felt a fatherly protection. I said, “He’s a real nice fellow, Patrice, but…Well, this is all getting too complicated—It’s so… All I know is—Oh, I don’t know anything anymore. Anybody have a solution to this thing?”

Everybody was silent and just a mosquito buzzed in my ear.

And then Patrice said, “I just feel good here. I feel balanced. This place just feels right. How can you argue with that?”

I told her lots of things feel good that aren’t necessarily good
for
you.

She said, “I didn’t say it feels
good
, I said it feels
right
. You’re not listening to me.” I heard what I heard. I was listening to her.

It sounded so familiar, her saying that.
This place feels right
. What am I trying to remember?

We sat in the dark, four loving people who couldn’t speak.

’Trice’s Cool. That’s it. She was…what? Four. She must have been four. She disappeared from nursery school one morning and the teachers were frantic, nearly crazy with fright. The assistant teacher found her in a room down the hall, all by herself, with a stuffed duck and a book. She was reading to the duck. She was having her own school, and she called it ’Trice’s Cool. She let herself be taken back to the room where nursery school was in
session, and she explained to me, later, when she showed me her private schoolroom, “This place feels wight.”

Even then, she wanted her own learning place, not the regular school. Trice’s Cool.

I wanted to make my own choice, to explore the possibilities of being alive. My parents wanted me to be comfortable and safe. Sandy wanted everything to be smooth and familiar; she can’t see beyond her own view of anything. We all love each other. We were all making each other afraid. Next morning we got on the airplane. The island sailed away underneath us.

Molecules in water collide roughly 10
¹⁵
times per second. The path of a single molecule is chaotic, complicated, ragged. On the outside, the water looks serene.

I’m sure that was only Round One. In feet, I’ll bet on it.

Nothing is as simple as it looks. When you go down deep you find things you’d never even thought to wonder about in your whole life.

Like Patrice in “Brownian Motion,” ’Virginia Euwer Wolff says, she “adores being in the water.” She loved swimming as a teenager, was a lifeguard, and taught swimming before trying scuba diving. “My scuba diving experiences have been some of the high points of my life,” she declares.

Although the teenagers in her three award-winning novels are not involved in sports, they are competitive and determined.
The Mozart Season
, an American Library Association Notable Book and winner of an Anti-Defamation League Award, is the story of one summer in the life of a twelve-year-old violinist preparing to play in a competition. In
Probably Still Nick Swansen
, the main character is a special-education student who must deal with repeated rejections, as well as his guilt over the death of his sister. Besides winning several other awards, that novel was voted one of the 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992 by the American Library Association.

The recent
Make Lemonade
focuses on two young women trying to find a hopeful future—a poor teenage mother and the girl who baby-sits for her two children. That novel has earned Virginia Euwer Wolff, among other honors, the Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, the Oregon Book Award for Young Readers, and the Bank Street Child Study Book Award. In addition, it was selected as
Booklist’s
Top of the list winner for 1993.

A native Oregonian, Virginia Euwer Wolff has lived in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Washington, D.C., and currently lives in Oregon City. Besides writing, swimming, playing the violin, and rooting for the Portland Trail Blazers, Ms. Wolff teaches English at Mount Hood Academy, a high school on the slopes of Mount Hood for skiers who are aiming toward the Olympics. She has a grown son, Tony, who is a professional jazz guitarist; a daughter, Juliet, who is a psychotherapist; and a grandson named Max.

The
sun is high and hot. The sky is that amazing shade of endless blue you rarely see up north. Not a deep blue, but a blue with depth, a blue you could disappear into as if it were a thick, foggy thing. It’s strange then that the air feels almost lifelessly thin. But it’s just the heat.

Around the pool the adults lie motionless on chaises—iguanas soaking up the sun. The kids scream and splash like birds bathing in a puddle. I must be the only person in sight wearing chinos and a long-sleeve white shirt with a brown eyeglass case clipped to the pocket. As I pass a pair of cute girls lying on chaises, brown skin glistening with oil, one turns to the other and whispers something with a smile. They probably think Pm a dork. I mind, but only a little. This is my last day here; I’ll probably never see them again.

Past the pool I pull open a glass door and feel the chill. The temperature drops at least twenty degrees inside this dim room. The door swings closed behind me and my
ears are bombarded with booms, crashes, sirens, and grunts. Welcome to the video arcade.

Andrew is frozen in front of Suicide Pact, standing in a puddle where his baggy orange bathing trunks have dripped. His damp black hair falls into his eyes as his hands flick over the buttons faster than a telegraph operator from the old West. On the screen two steroid-fed cartoon gladiators bash each other into unrecognizably bloody blobs.

I tap his shoulder. “Time, dude.”

“I’m gonna crush this mother.” Andrew hasn’t quite heard.

“Crush him later. Vic’s gonna be here any second.”

“Vic can wait.” Andrew doesn’t budge from the machine. “Watch this.”

One gladiator bludgeons the other. Blood spurts from his head; an eyeball bounces to the ground and rolls away.

“Great, Andrew. Can we go now?”

“Go without me.” Andrew hasn’t taken his eyes from the screen.

I knew this was a possibility. “I don’t have enough money. You know that.”

“Crap!” Andrew shouts. One gladiator raises his bulging arms in triumph while the other, now headless, lies on his back jerking spasmodically. Large red numbers flash on the screen, counting down from ten. Andrew jams his hand into the pocket of his trunks for another quarter to keep the carnage going.

“No way.” I grab his hand.

Andrew squints angrily at me. “What?”

“We’re going fishing, remember?”

The numbers run down to 0. GAME OVER. Andrew rolls his eyes.

“Great, Max, thanks.” He stares at my clothes. “What is this?”

“Sun protection.”

He smirks. “At least I’ll get to work on my tan.”

He has to go get the money from his old man. I suggest he bring sunglasses and a hat as well, but who knows if he’s listening.

At the dock, waiting for Vic. The sun is beginning its afternoon descent. Three pelicans glide overhead like miniature pterodactyls. They come in smooth fifty yards away in the turquoise shallows of the inlet. Today is my last shot at a bone.

That’s why Andrew’s coming. I’ve already been out twice with Vic this vacation, but the winds and tides were wrong. So now I’ve begged and borrowed for one last shot. I’ve barely got half of Vic’s fee. Andrew’s-the other half. I know him from previous trips to this resort. Our families come back every year at Easter. He’s okay. Not someone I’d be friends with at home, but good for hacking around with one week out of the year.

A small white skiff comes around the bend and slows. There’s Vic under the faded red baseball cap and Polaroids, wearing a white polo shirt and khaki shorts, nose coated white with zinc oxide.

“Hey, Max.” He smiles slightly as he throws a rope around a dock cleat. “Ready?”

“Soon as my friend gets here.” I look back across the pool. No sign of Andrew, of course. I’m starting to regret this.

Vic busies himself with the boat, stirring the shrimp in the live well while I strain my eyes for a glimpse of Andrew through the chaises and white umbrella tables.

“Maybe I better go look.” The words are hardly out of
my mouth when Andrew comes strolling toward the dock, taking his time, in black T-shirt, orange trunks, and untied high-top sneakers.

He stops, looks down, and frowns. “That’s a
fishing
boat?”

Vic looks up. I can’t read his expression behind the Polaroids, but I know what he’s thinking: that’s a
fisherman?

Cool engine,” Andrew says, nodding at the big black Merc. “This thing must fly.”

“Get in and you’ll see.”

Andrew and I climb down and sit in the two white swivel chairs in the bow. Vic stands behind the console. With a roar, the skiff guns out of the inlet, the acceleration pushing us back in our seats.

Caught by surprise, Andrew grabs for the gunwale. Then he grins. “Boss!”

The wind rushes into our faces as the boat roars down the buoy-lined channel. I swivel my seat back to Vic and shout, “How’s it look?”

Vic gazes out at the water for a long time. “Hard to say,” he shouts back. “Tide’s a bit strange. Could use a little more breeze. Not the best conditions.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” Andrew yells, hair whipping in his eyes.

“Vic’s just foaming the runway.”

“Huh?”

“He always says it’s not great. That way he looks like a hero when you get fish.”

“What’s that got to do with foaming runways?” Andrew asks.

“Think about it.”

Out of the channel, Vic hooks a right and the skiff tilts
hard, leaving a long, curving white wake in the blue-green water.

“Whoa!” Andrew shouts, and grabs the gunwale again. “Where’s the fire?”

“He wants to get to the fish.”

“So let’s fish,” Andrew says.

“Not here.”

“Then where?”

“He knows.”

I suspect Andrew must feel the way I did the first time, when we raced for nearly half an hour to a small mangrove island that looked exactly like every other mangrove island we’d passed along the way. But since then I’d learned that few fish are more mysterious and unpredictable than bones, and few people are better at unraveling the mystery than Vic.

“What do we catch them with?” Andrew yells over the roar.

I point at the thin spinning rods stowed along the gunwales.

Andrew makes a face. “Must be pretty wimpy fish. We pole-vaulting?” He points at the straight aluminum push pole that rests along the gunwale of the skiff.

“You’ll see.”

The run today is short. Vic throttles down and kills the Merc. The small skiff rises over the backwash, then settles down. An electric whine follows as the big engine tilts forward, angling the prop out of the water. Meanwhile, we’re gliding softly over the glassy surface. Suddenly it’s become very, very quiet.

Vic baits the hooks with live, kicking shrimp. His eyes slowly scan the water for two hundred yards in every direction. Andrew leans over the gunwale and looks down.

“Wait a minute, I can see the bottom,” he says. “How deep is this?”

“About a foot,” Vic replies, staring straight off the bow. He already sees something, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t see what it is.

“A foot?” Andrew asks. “What are we gonna catch, minnows?”

“Shhh…” Vic picks up the push pole and climbs to the carpeted platform over the Merc. He plants the pole in the water and begins to push the skiff forward.

“See it?” he whispers.

Seventy yards ahead to the left a dorsal fin cuts through the flat water. The fin is the size of a playing card and nearly transparent. The sight sends a thrill up my spine. I hold my breath. I’ve waited a year for this.

“See what?” Andrew asks, a little too loud.

“Shhh. Seventy yards at eleven o’clock, coming across the bow.”

“He’s moving,” I whisper.

“Something’s bothering him.” Vic leans into the pole and pushes the skiff ahead. “Maybe he’ll turn this way. Get ready.”

I stay seated, every muscle tense and my eyes straining to keep the fin in view as I grip the butt of the rod and pray Vic can bring me into range for a cast.

Then, just like that, it’s gone. Nothing there but a slight ripple. Vic eases up on the pole.

“What happened?” Andrew asks.

“Something spooked him.”

Andrew looks suspiciously at me. “This is a joke, right? Fishing in a foot of water for fish you can’t see? My old man’s gonna be thrilled he paid for this.”

There’s no point in trying to explain. I scan the broad,
flat, blue surface. Here and there a plant or a piece of coral sticks out of the water. About a hundred yards away a large white egret stands motionless, waiting for unsuspecting prey to cross its path. The sun beats down, and I wonder how Andrew’s taking it. It’s so quiet it doesn’t seem possible that we’re still on the planet.

I catch a glimpse of a fin moving thirty yards to the left and my arm shoots out, pointing.

“Shark,” Vic says quietly.

“Where?” Andrew gasps. “Let’s get it!”

“Shhh.” Vic begins poling to the right, away from the shark. Fifty yards away two sets of fins move slowly through the water. “Get ready.”

Once again I grip the rod. Vic poles the skiff swiftly and silently toward the fish. Suddenly I’m in range. It seems like a miracle they haven’t spooked and run.

“About eight feet to the right,” Vic whispers.

I rise slowly in the boat and cast.
Plop!
The shrimp hits the water and sinks. Almost at that exact moment, both fish veer to the left, away from the bait.

“Bring it in,” Vic whispers. “They know something’s up.”

He starts to pole after them. I reel in and sit frozen in my seat, watching the tails swish gently back and forth twenty yards ahead.

“How come they don’t just disappear like the last one?” Andrew asks.

“They’re not sure.”

Suddenly the fish turn sharply left, almost coming back toward the boat. “Ten feet ahead of them,” Vic whispers with a new urgency.

I rise carefully and deliver the bait. The fish don’t turn away. They’re right over it! A tail fin pops out of the water
as one of the bones pokes his nose down at the shrimp.

“He’s got it,” Vic whispers.

line is whipping off my open bail. One… two… three… I crank the reel, setting the hook.

Eeeeeiiinnnnn!
the reel’s drag begins to scream. Line peels away. I lift the rod and it arcs like a crescent moon. The fish is running like an express train! This is what I’ve been—

Plip!
The line suddenly goes slack. The rod straightens. It’s over. I flop back into my chair in disappointment, consoled only by the fact that I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my fault.

“What happened?” Andrew asked.

“Needlefish; coral,” Vic says, offering the two most likely explanations.

“Needlefish?”

“They look like little barracudas. They see the line cutting through the water and think it’s something to eat.”

“Bummer.”

Vic starts poling again. I notice that Andrew, for the first time, is hunched over, peering out at the vast plateau of glassy water. Some green mangrove islands dot the distance, and here and there a white egret stands in the shallows, waiting.

“There!” Andrew points. Two fins rhythmically break the surface, disappear, break the surface again.

“Ray,” Vic replies without looking. He’s already seen it.

“Stingray? Cool.”

Vic poles, we wait. The sun’s lower; some cottony clouds have appeared out of nowhere. High above, a tiny glimmering silver jet leaves a silent vapor trail across the blue.

Down here, there is no sign, or sound, of civilization anywhere.

“This is like a safari,” Andrew whispers.

“Ten o’clock,” Vic whispers.

A lone fin moseys along fifty yards away. Andrew glances at me quizzically.

“Your turn,” I whisper.

Andrew starts to rise.

“Sit!” Vic poles the skiff closer.

The bone and the skiff are on a collision course. Suddenly the fish turns right.

“Ten feet in front of him,” Vic whispers.

Andrew casts. His bait lands twenty feet behind the bone.

“Crap!” He starts to reel it back in.

“Leave it.”

The bone decides to turn right again. Vic poles the skiff hard, dragging Andrew’s shrimp across the bottom. It doesn’t seem possible… but then the bone does what we least expect—it turns one more time.

Suddenly it’s right over the bait. Its tail fin rises.

“He’s taking it.”

Line starts whipping off Andrew’s rod.

“Reel!”

Instead of reeling, Andrew jerks the rod sideways, trying to set the hook.

“Get the tip up!”

Eeeeeiiiinnnnn!
the reel screams. The rod bends like a horseshoe. Vic reaches over and pushes the rod tip up as Andrew starts to reel crazily.

“Jeez, what is this?” he gasps.

“A bonefish,” Vic replies, chagrined. He doesn’t think Andrew deserves this. “Stop reeling!”

“But he’ll take all the line!”

“Maybe.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“Keep your rod tip up and your line tight.”

A hundred yards from the boat, leaving a visible wake, the bone shows no intention of slowing its desperate run for freedom.

“I can’t believe this thing!” Andrew cries as the reel continues to scream. “Can’t you stop it?”