The Chronology of Water Part 14

I swim laps three, sometimes four times a week now. At the Clackamas Aquatic Center near my home. It feels... it feels like the closest thing to home I have ever had.

At the pool, the people who swim in the lap lanes next to me are not athletes. Though occasionally one will show up and my game will come alive in my body - I can't help it. I'll race them until they leave. We usually don't speak - just nod at each other when it's over, as if we've shared something intimate.

But more often there are regular people in the pool. Beautiful women seniors doing water aerobics - mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers - their ma.s.sive b.r.e.a.s.t.s and guts reminding you how it is that women carry worlds. When I swim by them I watch their legs and bodies underwater, and feel a strange kinship with a maternal lineage. You know you can smile underwater. You can laugh.

Twice in my life I have found myself swimming next to an albino. I felt lucky somehow. Like I'd found the right water.

At the pool near my home there is a woman who is missing a leg. She swims her laps with a prosthetic that has a flipper at the end. Very high-tech. Her workouts, I've noticed, are formidable. I love her made-up leg. I like to swim near her.

Sometimes kids and teens take up a lane -no doubt they are on swim teams - I can tell by their spectacular strokes and the kinds of swimsuits and caps and goggles they wear. They are in the sweet. Effortlessly.

Old men people the lap lanes too, most always extra friendly to me. Their skin hangs off of their backs in pale speckled folds. Their legs seem too thin to carry them - and they nearly all wear some form of white or beige boxer trunks. Sometimes with very thin fabric. But they wrestle the water anyhow, in all shapes and sizes, all forms of swimming. Once I stopped my laps to rest and two of them were staring at me. One said to the other, "Ain't she something?" The other one said, "And how." Then they clapped. It cracked me up. I still see them sometimes. We say h.e.l.lo, or goodbye, or keep up the good work.

Middle-aged women like me show up too - most of them do not have the stroke quality of someone who has competed - but I am filled with wonder at them anyway. They put their bodies in the water to swim the same way that I do. Maybe they are trying to shed pounds. Or maybe stress. Or lives. Or maybe it just feels good - being alone in water - no kids hanging on you, no husband to tend to, no one and nothing to answer to. When the pool is full I've noticed I'm among the first they will ask if they can share a lane. They must be able to tell I'm going to lap them and lap them. But there must be something more important that draws them to my lane. I think - I hope it is that the water is safe.

Gay men are there too, I can tell. Their legs will be hairless or they'll be wearing earrings and, well, the only other men besides athletes who wear Speedos are gay. I sometimes have to fight off strange impulses to crawl over the lane line into their lanes and hug them - to thank them for being the men they are - men who showed me love and compa.s.sion at every important moment of my life - even though we are strangers.

Occasionally a swim coach will show up. I always get the same question. "Did you compete?" I nod and dip back under quickly. It's not a conversation I want to have any longer, and they often ask me about joining Masters Swimming. I don't want to join Masters Swimming. I want just to be in water.

In the voiceless blue. In the weightless wet.

a La Recherche du Temps Perdu SOMETIMES I THINK THINGS OUT IN THE TIME IT TOOK me to win a race. 200-meter b.u.t.terfly: 2:18.04. How long it takes to walk from my car to my office. 100-meter breastroke: 1:11.2. How long it takes to brush my teeth. It's what swimmers do. It's muscle memory.

I remember things badly. When I look back, things are underwater, and when I pick them out and bring them to the surface they float around my idiotic attempts to drag them to land. I wonder what memory is, anyway. What writers are doing when they scratch at it. Usually I think of Proust, who tried to write a sentence about memory and ended up with seven volumes about nostalgia.

In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. It lives in the head, lights up with synaptic firings, and travels the waters of the nervous system.

400-meter individual medley: 4:55.1. How long to nuke a frozen Lean Cuisine.

According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience. They found this truth in rats and lemurs. Little wires sprouting from their heads.

However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It's what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience.

The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can't remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.

When my father drowned in the ocean it took me the time of winning the 100-meter breast stroke. To reach his body. By the time I had dragged him to sh.o.r.e, I'd won the 200-meter b.u.t.terfly. By the time an ambulance came, I'd won the 400-meter individual medley, the length of time it takes brain cells to begin dying. The length of time for his heart to fail. For memory to leave. Hypoxia.

The rest of his life, of what he did to us, there was nothing left. Of who or what his daughter were or became, nothing. Of my mother, their courtship - he did have images. In a loop. Like film. Of his greatest architectural achievement, a shopping plaza in Trinidad, and the steel drum music and warm wet air and white sand and dark skinned women he'd found comforted his rage and disappointment, nothing.

My father lost his memory in the arms of his daughter the swimmer.

My mother was his caretaker in Florida until she got cancer and died. So in 2001 there he was, all alone in a house he barely recognized, facing the prospect of the State taking ownership of him and depositing him in a nursing home for the rest of his life.

Have you ever visited nursing homes in Gainesville, Florida? I have. Let me put it this way. Walking in the door of one brings a disgust to your throat like someone grabbed it. They smell like urine and dead skin and Lysol. The creatures tooling around in wheelchairs or "walking" down halls look befuddled. Like hunched over zombies. In the dining room women whose hair and lipstick are not on straight and men who've wet themselves shove pureed gruel in their mouths. But what makes them particularly hideous in a Floridian sense is the heat. The humidity. The air conditioning that doesn't work quite right. The mold on the walls here and there. c.o.c.kroaches. Sometimes the old meat sacks sagging toward death in their beds are restrained.

Whoever I am, I am not a woman who could leave someone to rot in a place like that. Even him.

The grief I carried about my mother's death lodged in me like a baseball I'd swallowed whole. Inside my treehouse sanctuary with Andy and Miles, every night I would dream about her. Every morning I would wake up feeling vaguely like I had been crying. But something else wedged itself between me and my new life. A word. Father.

The man I'd pulled from the sea and breathed life into.

The man without memory.

And so I saved his life a second time, or Andy did, in act of unmitigated compa.s.sion and heroism. He flew to Florida to get my father. Then they rode a plane all the way to Oregon together. Briefly they were detained at the airport security arch because my father would not let go of the faux metal box containing my mother's ashes. He sat in his wheelchair and gripped them and shook his head no. Finally they let an old man through with what was left of his wife.

When Andy brought my father back to me I felt cleaved between two Lidias. A daughter, a tormented and damaged girl. And a woman, a mother, a writer whose life had just been born.

Andy and I found an a.s.sisted living facility about 20 minutes away from our sanctuary in the Bull Run Wilderness. The rooms were more like apartments than dungeons. His apartment had a giant window through which you could see fir trees and maple and alder - the Northwest. It was something I could give him that didn't hurt.

My father lived a quiet life there for two years until he died. In the morning he would watch T.V. In the afternoon too. Sometimes he would just stare out the window at trees and smile. This man who took the place of the father I'd known before was sweet and docile and kind. Even his eyes were kind. Sometimes, I'd let him see Miles. I never saw the happiness that spread across his face like it did when he was with Miles. I mean in my life with him. Though I rarely let him hold my son, when he did, he looked like a miracle had happened. A boy.

A few times Andy and I brought him out to our house in the trees. He marveled at the architecture - muscle memory, I guess. He spoke of the way the light cascaded down the hand crafted wood stairs quite eloquently. The forest took his breath away. He said, "I love it here so much. I wish I could die here." I think he meant to say "live" here, but I let it go. It was not something I could give him anyway.

I'd ask him about things when I'd drive him to do errands or to lunch - I'd say, "Daddy, do you remember being an architect?"

"I was an architect? No. No, I don't think so. Was I?"

Or I'd say, do you remember the time when ... and I'd try to choose something happy. Like the time he took my mother and me to Trinidad, where his greatest architectural achievement had happened. Steel drum music. A tortoise we saw lay eggs on the white sand beaches. Or living at Stinson Beach. Fruit trees in our yard. The ocean on the breeze. Or my sister singing in The Singing Angels Choir. Or cla.s.sical music. Or baseball. To all of these he'd smile, sometimes he'd laugh, shake his head yes, maybe a glimpse of something. Mostly he'd stay quiet and look out the window of the car. Once he looked over at me driving and said, "Marilou?" His sister's name.

"No Daddy," I'd say, "I'm Lidia."

"I know that," he'd say, and laugh.

Among the meager boxes of things he'd brought with him - old photographs and miscellaneous "papers" and a drawing pad and a very fine a.s.sortment of pencils and pens - was my first published book. I found it in his room one day. I picked it up and said, "Huh. What are you doing with this thing?" The cover was worn.

"Oh, I've read that book many times."

"Really. Do you know who wrote it?"

"You," he said, looking up at me with transparent blue eyes, twinning mine.

"Yeah, daddy. Me. Have you read all the stories?"

"I think so. I can't remember."

"That's OK. It doesn't matter."

"There's one about swimming."

I looked at him hard. Sometimes - I couldn't help it - I wondered if the other guy was in there somewhere. Some people will know what I mean. There were moments when he looked more knowing than he should. In those moments I almost ... I almost wanted him back. My father was one of the most intelligent men I have ever met. My father was an artist. My father loved art, and nature, and the life of the mind. He gave me those things.

He was talking about the story "The Chronology of Water" I'd written. In it, there is a father who abuses his children and then loses his memory. A father whose daughter pulls him out of the sea. A swimmer's story.

"I like it. It's a very good story."

"Thank you," I said, knowing not to say more.

"Not very flattering of me though."

I smiled and looked down and crossed my arms over my chest. "Fair enough. You know, I won a prize for that story. I got to go to New York."

"Isn't that something," he said, and whistled, and looked out at the trees.

That's the only thing we ever said to each other about anything that had happened.

A father. A daughter.

Recollected.

I have an image of him from that time. He appears in a film short Andy made based on the same short story. My father agreed to let us film him for it. In the segment in which he appears, the film is black and white. You cannot tell from looking at him that he has lost his wits or memory. You cannot tell from looking at the square jaw and broad shoulders and intense stare that he abused his wife and daughters. You cannot tell he was an award winning architect, and before that, he had the tender hands of an artist. You cannot tell he is anything but a man who looks intense on film.

I'm in the film too. In the segment in which I appear, the film is black and white. I am walking out into the ocean of the Oregon Coast. In November. I walk in waist high, and then I dive into the oncoming waves, and I swim. How I swim.

My father died less than two years after my mother. His ashes were in a plastic bag about the size of a loaf of wonder bread. The ashes were white. I went to the funeral home to get them, but that's not all I got. I had asked for his pacemaker and defibrillator. The two mechanical things attached to his heart that had kept him alive after he drowned. How strange they looked, without a body. Eventually Andy helped me smash them on the garage floor with a mallet.

I drove my father's ashes up to Seattle pretty immediately because I didn't want them. I didn't want them in my house, or my garden, or any waterway near me or my son.

My sister and I dumped them in the river next to her husband's boathouse office under a bridge. That Seattle bridge in Freemont that has the cement troll underneath it at one end. We just parked the car, got the ash, opened the bag and dumped it at the edge of the river, where it mixed with river refuse and bird s.h.i.t and the oil of pa.s.sing boats. The white ash got on both our hands, and at one point, my sister sneezed. Without thinking, my sister reached up to rub her nose and mouth. White ash was on her face. Possibly in her mouth. We stared at each other. Then her eyes got big and she said "GET IT OFF!" So I splashed her whole head with c.r.a.ppy river water until she sputtered and laughed.

We laughed so hard walking back to the car we couldn't breathe.

We laughed so hard our sides ached.

We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins.

A Small Ocean MORNING. I'M SITTING IN MY CAR WAITING FOR THEM to unlock the doors of the swimming pool nearest to my home. I can feel the years of training like a DNA river running through me. All those years of 5:30 a.m. Then I see my mother, sitting in a car just like I am, her long gray winter coat with the faux racc.o.o.n fur collar, smelling a little like last night's vodka and dayold Estee Lauder. How she waited for me every morning when I was too young to drive a car. How she sat there quietly, the engine purring alongside her middle-aged misery of a life. What did she think about sitting there in the dark? Who was she besides the mother of a swimmer and the wife of a jerk?

In Port Arthur, Texas, where my mother is from, the trees rise only a little off of the ground. The sky is the main thing, resting heavy and blue and hot on miles and miles of dirt. Heat singing like a fever in you. Making you forget water and that breathable blue past. Making you think the southern song was meant for you, the tw.a.n.g thick like syrup up your spine, cradling you like lemon drops in that hot dry always. The front porch. The cool of tile in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Panties in the freezer. A breeze at night like prayer. And the land is filled with the up and down black steel heads of oil rigs hemming their way across dirt.

Where I was born the trees bear fruit and the ocean hugs the sh.o.r.e, making you believe in things like sea serpents and mermaids and Disneyland. When I was five, California had a smell. Orange trees, their waxen leaves like crowns studded by fruit. Marin County. Stinson beach. Warmth whispered around my skin, I could breath it into me, I was tanned like children get. My hair white against the whole sky. My eyes blue as lapis. In our front yard, orange trees, plum trees, and apple trees. The front of the house keeping its secrets, the hands of a child rubbing bark, or gra.s.s, or dirt; child's games. But the back of the house gave way to ocean and the edge of things - a girl's thoughts rose and fell as tides, drifted like the smell of orange blossoms through the windows and doors, out, across, beyond vision, beyond daughter. The house is of a man's hands, and I was not a swimmer yet.

Maybe there's another reason I went to Texas beside escaping to college. Maybe I was looking for something - something of her. Where in that dirt is she from? Is it from a damp place miles down, a place where dead things have composted? The wet at the back of the neck, a woman's hand wiping sweat away, her eyes closed? Or is she in the heat itself, the dry whisper of wind pushing everything out and away ... a woman's imagination burning a hole in her skull to get out? Did she nearly die waiting? Wanting? Is she in the sound of a southern drawl out the mouth of a woman, its dips and ahs making words go strange, beautiful?

My mother was an alcoholic manic depressant borderline suicide case with a limp. All of that.

In 2001 my mother went to the doctor because she was having trouble breathing. I was in my ninth month of pregnancy in San Diego. She'd been taking care of my memoryless father for over 15 years by then. I know what kind of toll that caretaking takes. It must have drained every drop of her. My mother didn't visit doctors much, having spent her childhood years in body casts and hospitals. So there were no chances for early warning. Cancer had already invaded her lungs, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

She called me in San Diego the day before I went into labor to tell me she was dying. Miraculously, Andy answered the phone, and hung up, and lied. He said, "Your mother says she loves you." He waited for our son to be born. Then he waited a little longer. He told my sister and me in our living room in San Diego a week after Miles was born. The three of us cried in my little seahouse, Miles asleep in my arms.

It took six months. The rest of her life. One of the more difficult parts of her hospitalization was her intense withdrawal from alcohol. You will hate my saying this, but it will be true nonetheless. If I hadn't had Miles, I would have moved back into her house of pain. And I would have brought her a bottle to ease her suffering, her journey. Every day if that's what it took. But my Miles - there was a deathmother, and there was his life.

That is all.

When she died I was not with her. I tried to help her during her illness but she had so cl.u.s.terf.u.c.ked her life up by then there was almost nothing I could do. Andy and I flew to Florida to see her. To comfort her. To show her Miles. She looked so happy to see the little baby boy with the lifeforce larger than thunderstorm. She said, "Belle, take him - I don't remember how to hold a baby right." She said, "A boyah! We've never had one a those!" Clapping her hands together and crying. But she had almost no life left in her.

Once when I was alone with her in her hospital room, I asked her a question. She looked so small and still. Her face was shrunken and wrinkled, and her body so pale and slight. She almost looked like a girl, except for the lines a sad cartography across her face. I asked her, "What's the best thing that's ever happened in your life?"

It was the question Kesey had asked me. It's what I could think to ask.

She said, "Oh. Well, Belle. That's easy. My children."

Though I couldn't imagine how, I believed her.

They called me from a Florida Hospice all the way in Oregon when her skin became ashen and her eyelids began to flutter. They put the phone to her ear. She could not speak, as she had starved herself and hadn't the energy by then. They said when she heard my voice on the other end her eyes became very wide, and then her breathing became very loud and urgent. Then the nurse took the phone back and told me she was gone, and that she looked peaceful, and that she believed my mother had heard me.

You probably want to know what I said to this woman. She was not a good mother. She did not save us from my father, and she taught us things that we have spent our entire lives trying to unlearn. But sometimes all I can remember is the way she rode with me to have my third abortion, the way she sat in the little room where they vacuum your insides out and call it a procedure, the little life disappearing into a gla.s.s container - and more specifically, I remember her face as we sat in the parking lot of Denny's because I didn't want to go home, or anywhere else, yet. She didn't say anything. She simply parked the car in the back near the big metal refuse bin. She petted my hand. She cried a little. She smelled like day old vodka and Estee Lauder. Her real estate signs were in the trunk. Nothing happened, she didn't ask me anything, she didn't tell me anything, and after that I was able to move.

Or I think of all the mornings she drove me to swim practice at 5:00 a.m. Or the sound of her voice singing I see the moon. Or the day she brought the shoe box out and showed me the story she'd written, and the redbird drawing my father had done - the lives they could have lived. Or her face when she told my father she'd signed the scholarship letter, and that I was going to college, that I was leaving.

Or I think of Israel and Becky Boone.

So when I tell you what I said to her maybe it will sound deluded or trite, since this woman is where my trouble started, since she let us down so terribly, and birthed an unforgiving darkness into us forever.

I said thank you mamma. I love you so.

And then she died.

It was 2001, the year my son was born. Her urn was a faux gold box about the size of a coffee pot. My father wouldn't part with it - brainbird that he was by then - and so I didn't try to take it until after he died. Then I put it in our garage on a shelf for two years. I didn't look at it, I didn't talk to it, I barely thought about it. It just sat up there with nails and cans of paint and summer storage items and garden tools.

But one day I was in the garage hunting for corner braces to build a frame for a painting and I saw it on the shelf looking all ...well. So I called my sister and asked, uh, do you want to do something with mother's ashes? My sister who had been estranged from my mother from the time she was 16.

Oddly, she said, I guess. So I drove my mother in a box up to Seattle. She sat in the pa.s.senger's seat.

Sitting in my sister's living room on her brown leather couch that smelled vaguely of cat p.i.s.s, we stared at the motherbox between us.

She said, "You wanna open it?"

"Sure," I said. Then I examined the edges more closely, and I jammed my fingernails into the joints, and saw that there wasn't a clear way to do it. So I said, "Do you have a knife?"

My sister left the room, went into the kitchen, and came back with a b.u.t.ter knife. I stared at it in her hand. Then I took it and tried to pry my box of mother open.

No luck.

"You have a flathead screwdriver?" I said.

"I think so," she said, and went off in the direction of her garage.

"And a hammer," I yelled after her.

I put the box on the living room floor. My sister knelt next to me. "Hold the bottom of it," I said.

"Don't hit me with the hammer," she said.

"Move your head," I said.

I placed the flathead screwdriver at the line where the box edges joined, and then I whacked it with the hammer. The box shot across their hardwood floor. "Look at it go!" Came out of my mouth before I could stop it. Then we both nearly died laughing, rolling on the floor like kids.

I swear to G.o.d we tried everything to get that G.o.dd.a.m.n motherbox open. At one point I even dropped it from the roof of her deck hoping it would sort of break open, but no. I briefly considered running over it with the car. There was no way into the motherbox of ash.