Swimmers

 Written by Catie McGuinness

This entry was originally submitted on 4 JAN 2024, and published on Nov 18 2024.

courtesy of unsplash

When it happened, I felt it like I saw it. The buckling, splintering, tiny shards shattering in the white, stacked bone column. The bloody tissues, the red, sinewy infrastructure bloating up like an inflatable life preserver, desperate to keep the calcium structure from turning into chalky dust. It was a turn I had made a thousand times before. One hundred thousand times before. I’m not sure what made this flip any different--maybe the angle of approach was off by a degree, or two; maybe I had slid too far into my thoughts as I pierced down the lane. It’s so quiet under the water and the temptation to retreat into the silence is persistent. Within the silence is a dense peacefulness, a compact feeling of wholeness. I feel the water slip against my skin. It drips down my arms, a cool, embryonic slime. Inside the water I am re-cooking. Inside the water there's only me and nothingness.
 
You have to train your body early on to not let the wet slide too far down the ear canal, or up the nose. Even the head must be held in just the right position during the initial dive so that water does not burst through the goggles and into the eyes. These movements are a part of me now. When I focus I am past a place of concentration. My body falls into the right gear and I am going, going, going, fast. I can feel that I am the fastest.
 
The water works particular muscles in the chest, the neck, the back, the arms, the torso, even the butt and the legs. We chisel and refine ourselves in the water, and then on land with weights. The weight room is a place for bulking, for specific enhancement. I avoid it whenever I can. I am not a girl whose whole identity is the pool. I don’t want others to know that I am a swimmer unless I choose to tell them that I am a swimmer. I don’t like to be deduced, reduced, figured out. I am probably not figure-outable and I don’t want to give a contradictory impression. 
 
Instead, I rely on the silence. I rely on the feeling I find there that insists on winning. This insistence has taken me as far as I’ve wanted it to take me, which is getting into some college that is just beyond the reach of my academic statistics, beyond the reach of my family’s finances. Swimming is the tool. It’s the tool that keeps me in certain circles, keeps my body looking a certain way, feeds the feeling inside that wants to be fast, the fastest. 
 
Upon impact I thought fucking toe mother fucker! In hindsight even the biggest toe is relatively small, but the pain was so violent, so searing, and the ensuing bodily reaction was so reflexive--there was no time in between the impact and the curling up of the spine (knees into the chest, heels into the stomach, hands onto the foot)--that it (the stopping of the lane flow, the interruption on the conveyor belt of other freestylers torpedoing towards me) couldn’t have been prevented. In the first moments of thrashing, as I tore into the air for oxygen, and then plunged back underneath the foaming ruffles at the surface to hold my body as tight and still as possible (as if willing the spasms to stop spasming, as if giving my own body a sort of silent treatment that communicated I will not move until you stop this), I could only hear the sound of the pain. The pain said, I’ve got you right where I want you. It curled around me, wrapped more tightly around the toe, the foot, up the leg, and then finally receded into a slightly more bearable, duller thudding. 
 
The shock kept me from fainting or vomiting. Adrenaline coursed through my stiff body, willing me to stay alert. I took the opportunity to make two strokes--with the arms only, the legs were held statue still--and hoisted myself out of the water and onto the cool, white cement at the lip of the pool.

The beat that emanated from what I then identified as the top center line of the right toe continued. Bumm, bumm, bumm, a slow drumbeat of pain. It vibrated through to the tips of my fingers, like an electrical charge. The pain formed a translucent echo chamber around my body and as sounds from outside of it hit against the shell, I finally became nauseous. A blackness crept into my sight and tiny silver specks formed and pricked around in the darkness.

What the fuck are you doing? I heard him say. Jessica! What the fuck are you doing! You fucked up the whole fucking line, get back in the fucking water!

Don’t swear, I whispered.

What!

Swear, I said.

Coach kept insisting that I get back into the pool and continue on with the drill, but it was like the things he said were passing through me without sticking to anything on the inside, and in the end he must have seen that the time it would have taken to force me back into my lane was too much time in ratio to what was left of practice. He turned to Pamela and told her to drive me to the hospital, and so she did.

I’m one of his fastest swimmers. I think that helped, too. I imagine that running through his brain, mixed with the emotional dysregulation--the anger; the extreme, narcissistic annoyance--was a single thought: she’s good, I’ll give it to her this time. Because swimmers like me don’t come around as often as you might think. I have that special blend; I am the special sauce. Technique, and conformation, and a head for winning. My insistence on winning is almost compulsive. An itch that demands to be scratched. Coach pushes and pushes and pushes, and I let him, because when I race for him I win the race.

The hospital was white and bright and desensitizing and sterile and awful, and the air smelled like the inside of a sealed Ziplock bag that has been wiped down, previous to sealing, with a Clorox wipe. I held my nose the entire time I was there and had to breathe heavily, slowly through my mouth to keep from screaming. Everything was light in the same way that something hiding in the night is dark, and I found myself wishing that I had brought a pair of sunglasses. Pamela hoisted me through the lobby, pulled up a chair for me to rest my foot on, and waited next to me in the emergency room until my mother finally showed up and thanked her for taking such good care of me.

It was broken, of course, and they put it into a boot. It seemed excessive, even to me, but it did give the impression of legitimacy. I thought it might shut Coach up. I thought it might also piss him off. I couldn’t decide which was more likely.

Here’s Coach: An Olympic prospect who ended up with the short end of the stick. Too many micro tears in the cartilage that surrounds the shoulder socket to go all the way. He had the drive, he wanted it more than just about anyone. Maybe he wanted it too much. Maybe he pushed too hard. Maybe he had a body that couldn't take him to the place he wanted to go. In any case, it’s pretty clear to me, and to anyone else who is paying any attention, that he’s not over it. In fact, he’s pissed. And the only outlet for his very specific pissed-off-ness is the team.

All the yelling has transformed him into a sort of ageless entity. We don’t even think of him as human. When I stop to think of him as human, when I stop to consider his physicality, his feelings, him at the grocery store buying produce and meat to bring home to cook, him preparing a salad, I cringe. It feels unnatural. At a party with the rest of the team we crack jokes about Coach that are at his expense. We talk about him as if he is a system, as if he is a god that we can barely stand.

With the boot on it’s me in the weight room, there’s no escaping it. I’m mainly on my own in the white basement with the black plastic mat underfoot and the lights blazing down onto my strong shoulders. He knows I want to keep moving towards the target; he knows that I came to him perfectly ready and willing to be molded and he knows that he has molded me perfectly. At first I have music playing, top fifty hits, but then I turn off the radio and try to replicate the silence of the water. As I pull the weights up I blow out through my nostrils, hard, and imagine that I am hearing bubbles instead of air.

At the end of the first hour I’m surprised to meet his eyes in the mirror. When he sees I have seen him he corrects my form, your weight needs to be off the boot, you need to work on your core stability. I respond to him through the mirror and the glass creates a distorted perception that has me seeing Coach clearly for the first time. I see how young he is and I become awkward and feel my cheeks get hot. I feel exposed, though I have more clothes on than on any given day at the pool.

On Friday I have an in-class essay right before lunch and think of him the entire time I am writing. Then at lunch, sitting with a bunch of girls not on the team, I think of him, though they are talking about some tv show, and then some guys and one girl they want to hook up with, and never anything about swimming. That night I drive over to my teammate Mackenzie’s house and we share a bottle of cold white wine and eat pizza on a big couch that has dark flowers all over it in her parents’ basement and I think of him then, too. When I start to feel hazy in my head I think of the way his arm was draped against the wall and his right bicep was straining and his hip was cocked. He had looked like a swimmer, I thought.

On Sunday we have a team lunch outside at the back of the campus behind the pool on some green plastic picnic tables amongst piles of falling red and yellow leaves and I keep catching Coach’s eyes. I wonder if this is how it’s going to be now between us, if seeing each other in the mirror has permanently shifted something, and then I wonder what it was that shifted. He keeps looking at me like I’m an impaled gazelle and he’s the lion. Doesn’t he know that it’s the female lions who are the hunters? I feel annoyed, but I also notice that I don’t want him to stop.

Some weeks go by and I am finally back in the water. My shoulders and my core are stronger now, and I am a more efficient swimmer. When I stroke with my arms my torso is as still as an iron post and my body cuts through the pool like a bullet. In between drills I can feel his gaze resting on me. I have come to expect it, to crave it. When I feel his eyes on me I fill up with something that spreads through my chest and down my arms, through my fingers, through my gut, to my groin, and I go even faster when the next drill starts up again. Now I feel like I need his eyes on me because now I know what his eyes on me make me do--they make me go faster.

At our meets I win like I always do, except now when I race I feel something that I hadn’t felt before: I feel his eyes watching me. Now when he screams at me because my turns aren’t as tight as they should be and I need to focus because he can’t afford for me to get hurt again and we’re this close to the NOVA Invitational, I feel a warmth spreading and I lean into it. He yells louder then because I’m sure that he can feel that something is happening that he hadn’t counted on, and the rest of the team gets as quiet as a graveyard, and he says don’t fuck around, Jessica, and I say I’m not. I notice how young his face looks, how wrinkle free his skin is, that he doesn’t seem to have any gray hairs yet, and I think to myself that the power he holds over all of us must be very delicate, and fragile. It’s something that we have only agreed to. I wonder what would happen if we stopped agreeing.

Nobody on the team goes away for the holidays, it’s too close to the end of the season, so we hold all sorts of festive get-togethers to make up for it. Is swimming real, or have we given up a part of our real lives to something made up? It’s strange if we think about it for too long, so we don’t. Instead we focus on where we’re headed, which we tell ourselves is somewhere important.

Snow coats the ground outside and light reflects off of it and through the windows into the pool house. Pamela and the underclassmen have strung up little lights all along the white concrete walls and turned off all of the big, white overhead lights. Everything is dim, and blue, and glowy. Shadows from the water make patterns on some of my teammates' faces and the light shifts shakily on Coach’s light chinos. I watch it bounce between the folds of fabric for a moment before turning away. We eat baked things and drink soda and talk about winning. I’m standing next to Dan, another senior on the team who swims the best fifty free, and he keeps brushing against my arm whenever he laughs or shifts his weight from one side to the other. I can’t decide if it means something, or not. Coach is talking, and then laughing with a group of sophomores at the other end of the lane and I try to imagine him being amused by anything, but can’t.

Afterwards all the seniors go over to Dan’s house, which is in a neighborhood full of long lawns and pleasant brick homes just east of where I live. His parents are away with relatives for the weekend and so he throws a small party.

The big difference between Dan’s neighborhood and my neighborhood is that the houses in Dan’s neighborhood are expensive and inhabited by people who lead expensive lives, and the houses in my neighborhood are less expensive and inhabited by people who lead less expensive lives. The lawns are also less long where I live. When people talk about Dan’s neighborhood it’s like they’re winking and there is a certain tone in their voice that communicates something that I don’t know how to name exactly, but everyone understands what it means.

At the party I get really drunk playing spin the bottle on an old oriental rug in the living room and end up making out with Dan in an empty white bathtub in a bathroom off of one of the bedrooms upstairs. The first time he kisses me he presses his mouth so hard against mine that our teeth clash and the vibrations fizz up through my nose and around my skull. Then he slows down and his hands feel nice running up my thigh, searching under my shirt, grasping at my bra. Afterwards we sit on the foot of the bed in the room off the bathroom and Dan tells me that he’s always watching me at practice, and he wants to know why I don’t ever look back. I tell him I never noticed, that I’m always so focused, I guess. The room is very clean and everything is put in its right place. The curtains are made from the same fabric as the pillows on the chair underneath them and there are a few books stacked in a neat pile on one of the tables by the bed. I ask Dan if he’s read any of them and he says he hasn’t. I bounce gently on the mattress, as if testing it out, and ask who sleeps on it. Dan says that nobody ever does.

When he watches me in the pool I don’t feel him until I stop moving. When I am swimming, when the water is over my head, when I am pushing through it, hard, I can only feel me. But when I stop at the end of the lane to receive instructions for the next drill I am aware of him. Even when he is looking at other swimmers in another part of the pool I feel him feeling me and I am very sure that I’m not making it up. If I give any indication that my focus is elsewhere, if I show him that I’m not listening, our punishment is more and more drills that he demands to be faster. Sometimes, after I’ve been under the water for a long time swimming his drills, moving like a bullet down the lane and back up it, down the lane and back up it again, I can feel him get angry. I think he’s acting like an anxious house pet who is unsure when its owner is getting home and I have to concentrate to contain the smile that wants to spread across my lips. He is barking and barking, but we both know that I am the one with the car and the keys.

At the end of an entire hours long practice of him yelling and carrying on and demanding things from the team on the other side of the pool he approaches and tells me to stop favoring my one foot, the one that is still healing. He tells me there’s no point in swimming if I’m going to hold back from my full potential. I ask him what my full potential is and he pauses and is quiet and stares at me. I feel his eyes zoom through me like one of those small, flexible telescopes doctors use while searching for tumors in the colon and I squirm. Be serious, Jessica, he says, and I tell him that I am.

At home I sit on the window seat in front of the light wooden table where I have dinner most nights and eat a snack of cut up apples with raw almond butter from the health foods store in the center of town. It’s very wet and so I dip the apple slices into it, rather than scoop. I don’t even need a knife, or a spoon. I watch the almond butter as it drips back into the jar in long, thin, viscous globs.

I have a lot of homework that night and a test the next day, so I stay up later than I should and am tired at practice. Coach tells me I’m swimming too slow one too many times and I don’t know if it’s the lack of sleep or what, but when he yells at me about it one more time I get out of the pool before practice is even close to being over and pull my goggles and swim cap off and shower and drive myself home before anyone else has even entered the locker room. When I pull into my driveway I get a text from Coach that says don’t do that again, and I write back I won’t. Later on he texts me again saying that I need to spend an extra forty-five minutes in the weight room after, or before the next practice and I don’t respond.

The last championship meet of the season is on Saturday. The entire team eats together at lunch every day the week before because we need to stay focused, we need to stay committed. It’s in another state and we’ll have to take a bus to get there. All the seniors get their own room at the hotel and I’m looking forward to being alone. I’m never alone.

On Tuesday Dan asks us if we think Coach has a girlfriend. I’m only mildly interested in the answer, so I don't look up from my food. Most of the people at our table agree that there’s no way he has one, but Dan says he bets he’s a freak in bed and probably needs someone to release all of his pent-up emotion into most nights. I tell him that’s fucked and the other girls at the table agree. Dan tells us to lighten up and that he’s probably right and that’s probably why we’re so pissed off about it. We all thought he might combust the other day when you leapt out of the pool like that, Jess. He didn’t even say a fucking word, it was wild. You could see the blood jumping in his neck. A man can’t walk around with that type of energy inside of him all of the time. It needs to go somewhere.

I sit alone on the dark bus. ”What About Bob” and then something with superheroes in it plays overhead, but I listen to music instead of listening to the movies. Rap and then something atmospheric--the type of music that makes a person feel like they’re walking through gauze. Two and some hours of tunes and then I turn the volume off but keep the headphones in so that people think I’m still listening to something and leave me alone. I’m staring out the window at nothing and then Dan comes and sits next to me and I turn to him without taking my headphones out. Hey, he says, and I say hey back. You nervous? He asks. I tell him not really, I’ve been doing pretty well all season, besides that thing with my toe, and I’m already in my top choice college. Still, he says. Yeah, I guess. It’s the last one, I say. I know, wild, Dan says. I’ve been kind of sad about it. I say really? And he nods, and then I wonder if I’m sad, too. I don’t think I am. I think I want to get the fuck out of High School and on with my life. Dan stays in the seat next to me and starts watching the rest of the superhero movie. He’s laughing and I put the atmospheric music back on. I can see the back of Coach’s head. He’s wearing a bright red baseball cap and it’s tilted down like he’s reading, or sleeping.

The team has dinner together in the hotel restaurant and Dan sits next to me then, too. My big black puffy jacket is smooshed down around me on the bench and he’s pressing into it. On the one hand it feels nice to have someone follow me around so loyally, and on the other hand I wonder if all of the following me around is going to lead Dan to think that I owe him something, and that makes me slightly uncomfortable. I order pasta and eat it slowly so that I’m chewing for most of the meal and have an excuse not to talk to him much.

After we’re done eating we head back to our rooms. Dan is staying two floors below me and I am relieved. My room is small and quiet and looks out over the parking lot. I watch someone smoking a cigarette out by their car for a while and then take a long hot shower and shave my whole body and put lotion on and get into bed. My breathing is low, and slow. I take in a big breath, as big as I can fit into my lungs, and then release it loudly.

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