Chapter 13
GWEN
Kettle Point at five-forty in the morning on the twenty-first of August looked like a refugee camp for people in rubber.
Four hundred and some swimmers, vans backed onto the grass with their hatches up, the whole place smelling of neoprene and coffee and sunscreen, which does not need to be a smell at five-forty in the morning but is.
A woman near me was doing yoga in the gravel.
A man of about seventy was eating an entire baked potato out of foil.
The water temperature went up on the board at ten of six. Sixty-eight, which is wetsuit legal and warm for that lake, and which meant nothing, because at the start you're going to be cold no matter what the board says.
"Splits," she said.
"Dot."
"I'm asking what you want. Every loop, or nothing."
"Nothing till the third. Then everything."
"That's a good answer." She smacked a pin flat with her thumb. "Don't go with the front on the first turn. They're all thirty and they're all stupid."
Marta was there — she'd driven down at four in the morning with a thermos and a sweatshirt pulled on over her pajamas.
Benita was there on her day off, in a folding chair, because she'd heard about it and said she wanted to see it, which I did not know how to be about.
Wade was down at the water's edge in the same clothes he wears to the yard, hands in his pockets, looking at four hundred people in rubber suits like a man in a foreign airport.
And they'd brought Lita.
He'd said he'd try. I hadn't let myself hold it.
But at six-fifteen his truck came back down the access road.
He got her out with the belt and the walker and moved her forty yards across packed sand, to a recovery chair he'd set up above the tideline with a blanket over her knees.
Eighty-one years old, three and a half months out from a pinned hip, on a beach.
She was wearing lipstick. On a beach. At six in the morning.
I went over. She looked me up and down in the wetsuit.
"You're going in that."
"I am."
"It's the color of a bruise."
"It was on sale."
"Well," she said, and looked out at the water, and then said nothing else at all, which is so unlike her that I stood there an extra second waiting for the rest.
At ten of seven they called us to the line, and that's where the old voice came up out of the floor of me like water in a basement. It didn't sound like Wade. It didn't sound like Charmaine or Lita. It sounded exactly like me — thirty, forty, fifty-three.
A whole Saturday. The entire Saturday, and everyone drove out here, and Lita's on a beach in a chair, and Marta took a day, and all of this is for you, just for you, for four hours, and what if you don't even do well.
Twenty-nine years, and it has never once had to raise its voice.
I didn't answer it with anything magnificent. I looked down the beach at the far buoy and thought, the water doesn't care, and then the horn went and the argument didn't get to finish its sentence.
The first turn was exactly the mess Dot promised, because four hundred bodies converging on one orange buoy isn't a sport, it's a subway platform.
I took a heel in the ribs, and somebody's hand went into my goggle seal and pulled it half off my face.
I stopped, treaded, cleared it, resealed it, lost eight seconds and didn't panic.
I've had a stranger's hand in my goggles before, and eight seconds is eight seconds.
Then the field spread and it was a lake again. The first kilometer I swam too hard, the way everybody does. The second one I found my pace, and my breathing settled into threes, both sides, going where I was pointed.
The middle is the lonely part. Somewhere around the second turn the fast group's gone and the slow group's behind and you're alone in green water with your own breath and the sound of your own arms, for a long time, with nothing to look at.
That's where my mother is. Not a vision.
Eight years ago I came out of five months in a room with her and couldn't be anywhere quiet without hearing it — the machine, the timer, the counting out of the doses, her breathing at the end, which does not sound like breathing.
Everywhere on land had that in it, and then I got into a lake at fifty and it wasn't there.
Four years, and it's still the one room in the world she isn't dying in.
So I swam the middle kilometer with my mother quiet and my arms going over.
The third turn came at about three thousand meters. I lifted my head and sighted and the buoy was exactly where it was supposed to be, which meant I hadn't steered with my lungs, which meant Dot had won an argument she started four years ago.
The last quarter mile is what I'll keep. I've been swimming four years with something on me, and I didn't know it until a seventy-one-year-old woman said so on a tailgate.
At about forty-two hundred meters it let go.
My hips came up. My catch got long. The whole stroke got cheaper all at once, the way it does when you fix somebody's kick in ten minutes and they think you're a magician.
I went past two women in blue caps who'd been ahead of me for a kilometer, and I went past them easy, and I wasn't even trying.
I swam the last four hundred meters faster than I swam any of the first four thousand, and I wasn't tired, and I was fifty-four years old, and it was the best swimming of my life.
Then my feet found the bottom and I stood up and the world came back with all its sound at once.
They put a wooden token in my hand at the arch. Mid-pack in my age group, nowhere near the podium. Nobody took a picture of me with a medal. Somebody read my number out loud and wrote something on a clipboard, and that was the entire ceremony of the greatest morning of my adult life.
Wade was in the water. Not at the edge — in it.
He'd walked in to his knees in his work pants, boots and all, which anybody who's ever owned a pair of boots knows is a thing you do not do, and he stood there soaked to the thigh with both arms up like a man flagging down a plane.
Marta was screaming; she'd lost her voice by the second turn and was still screaming with what she had left, which was mostly air.
Dot had the stopwatch in her fist. "One fifty-one, forty," she said, before hello. "Your last split was your fastest by fifty-one seconds. Fifty-one, Gwen. On a five K."
"I know."
"You don't know. I've been doing this since Eisenhower." She had my arm hard enough to leave marks. "I've seen four people do that in my life."
Benita had brought a second towel, because she'd known I'd need a second towel, which is a whole biography in one sentence.
And then I came up the sand dripping with the token in my hand and my cap still on, and my mother-in-law was sitting in her recovery chair with the blanket over her knees, looking straight at me.
Lita has never in twenty-nine years said a soft thing to me without a hook in it.
"I never once asked what you did at dawn," she said.
The wind came off the lake.
"All those calls." Her hands were folded on the blanket. "Six in the morning. Every one of them. I never once asked what I was interrupting."
I stood there in a wetsuit with lake water running off my elbows. Two seconds. Maybe three.
Then her chin came up and the machinery came back on, right on schedule, the way a furnace kicks.
"You'll catch cold. That towel's inadequate. Where did you get a towel like that."
"It's Benita's."
"Well. She should have brought a bigger one."
Benita, four feet away, didn't look up from her chair. "I brought two, Mrs. — I brought two."
"Two small ones," Lita said.
We got her back to the truck. Marta ate three of the terrible granola bars. Wade squelched around the parking lot for an hour with his boots full of lake and never once mentioned it, and when I finally said something he looked down at his own feet like he was surprised to find them there.
That night the house was very quiet. Marta had driven back. The lake was still in my ears — it does that for hours after, the whole sound of it, like holding a shell to your head — and my shoulders had gone past sore into that hot heavy thing that isn't unpleasant. I was in bed by nine.
Wade came up at half past and got in and lay there, and then he put his hand on my shoulder.
And I braced. My whole body did it in an instant, before any part of me had a vote, a hardening straight down the back from shoulder to hip.
Not of him. In twenty-nine years that man has never once given me a reason for that.
A hand on my shoulder at night, and then Sunday at his mother's, and then could you just, and then you're so good at this.
That's the order it comes in. My body knows the order the way it knows how to breathe on both sides, and it does not care what I've decided.
He felt it. His hand didn't come off and it didn't push, and it didn't do the thing where a man makes a joke to get out of a moment. He just waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Long enough that I could hear the house.
He didn't say what's wrong. He didn't say I'm not asking for anything, which would have been asking for something. He didn't apologize, which would have made me manage him.
He said my name. Once, quietly. "Gwen."
That's all he asked for, and it wasn't a question.
And I lay there in the dark and my back let go. Not because I told it to — if I'd told it to it would have stayed hard another year. It let go the way a cramp lets go, all by itself, from the bottom, an inch at a time.
That's how I knew.
"Your boots are ruined," I said.
"They were ruined in June."
"Those are new boots."
"They were new in June."
The bib was on the dresser. Number 311, four pinholes in the corners, still slightly damp, put there by somebody — not me, I hadn't touched it — with the number facing out.
We were both awake a long while and neither of us said anything else, and down in my ears the lake kept going.