Audio: Lauren Groff reads.
Sara came into the blaze late, the boys already leaping froglike across the deck, the girls gone bald in silicone caps. In the afternoon sunlight the pool was harsh; she’d left it only this morning in the soft plum dawn.
The other team was lined up around the eastern gutter, doing its cheer, a slow solemn clapping that built into syncopated yips and the pounding of feet on metal. The noise made pocks of confusion across the surface of the water.
The diving coach turned to see her coming across the wet deck. You’re late, he yelled over the other team’s noise, but he looked relieved. She shrugged, and took off her anorak to begin her stretching, but he grabbed her hand and lifted it to examine the bloodied knuckles. Brawler, he said. The other girls told me what happened and I didn’t think they’d let you out. She took her hand away. She didn’t tell him that they had not in fact let her out; that when the detention aide had fallen asleep she’d opened a window silently at the back of the room, pushed her backpack out, swung her body over the lip, pulled the window shut with one hand, and hung on the exterior sill for a moment before falling into the fresh pine mulch ten feet below. It was not nearly as soft as water.
The more nervous or showoffy of the divers climbed and dived, climbed and dived, like good little penguins, but she stayed on the deck loosening up and watching the first races, giving a small jump each time the buzzer cracked and the swimmers leaped off the blocks. She loved the churn and the separation of bodies as the slower swimmers fell behind the swifter. Sometimes they let her swim a sprint relay: she was wickedly fast, but in races she forgot to breathe and couldn’t go farther than fifty metres before having to stop. Also, she was no longer a swimmer, not for a year, since she had been discovered to be brushing the boys’ junk in their Speedos with her hand as they swam by in the next lane at practice. Most of the boys hadn’t complained, some had even slowed down as they passed, but it took only one whiner, and then she was forced to switch to diving, which was where she should have been all along anyway.
There was a coldness on her shoulder that slid down her chest, the coach quietly giving her a lime sports drink. She drank it down in one draught; it was a hot day and she had walked all the way from the school. Need a snack? he said softly, and though she hadn’t yet eaten today she said no, because hunger made her feel cleaner. The other girls didn’t like the coach because he wore such short shorts that when he sat in his rusty chair to watch them dive his purplish balls spilled out the leg hole. She liked him, though. He was kind to her, fed her, kept the other girls off her back, which of course made them like her even less. She didn’t care. The other girls barely mattered.
At last the waves in the lap pool smoothed out and it was time for the diving. She didn’t watch the other divers; she didn’t need to. She just breathed and imagined herself held gently within each of her dives.
And then they called her name and she stood slowly and came to the ladder. As she climbed, the person she was, that skinny slinking girl with the bad skin and teeth, fell away. Her nerves clenched inward and there rose up an internal hum that blocked out the voices of the people in the stands and the water lipping at the gutters and the sun itself, and, at last, her own body. At the top she was a pinprick in nothing. She edged backward to the end of the springboard and all of her muscles bunched, ready, buzzing; she raised her arms and gave two giant jumps, then breathed out with the third and lifted herself into the broad air, and there was the delicious pause at the top as she was already in the first backward somersault, so perfect she could stay floating here forever; and even this was not nearly as beautiful as the next part, the falling into the second somersault, which shattered the world into a billion bright and jagged shards flung outward from her spinning body. Now her hands knifed into the water, her body threading after, and there was no splash, she could feel the downward gulp of the water. She gathered herself for a moment under the blue, then surfaced. The coach was in midair, leaping; and then noise returned, her teammates, the other divers, the adults in the stands shouting, and they were shouting for her. She pulled her body up and away from the pool. And it was then that she felt the sting on the back of her neck, the fine rip in the skin where it had just brushed the board, and before the judges saw it and disqualified her she touched it quickly with her split and bloodied knuckles to hide the fact that it was this newer wound that bled a watery red stripe down her back.
It was twilight and the boy was dreaming of smooth gray shifting shapes that emerged out of the fog and dissolved to nothing again. He blinked and saw Sara standing on the other side of the glass door just before she opened it, first sliding her hand in and holding the strand of bells hanging from the frame, then bringing the rest of her body silently inside. Her pale face was a question. He looked at the office and turned back to give her a nod. Then she went quickly to the freezer in the rear of the store and put two frozen dinners into her backpack, and was already at the front, leaning her wet hair into the ice-cream cooler, when the boy’s mother came rushing out of the back, talking at him, telling him in her language to keep his eye on this thieving sneaky little bitch. Yes, Mother, he said to her. Sara came up out of the ice-cream case with a mango Popsicle and flushed cheeks, and put two quarters near the register, sliding them to the boy. He looked at her hand, the tape with its browning spots of blood, curling at the edges from the wet of the pool. He had heard about the fight, the boy in fifth period, her swift snapping. You win? he said. She looked at her hand also and said quietly, Always. He said, No, not the fight, I meant the diving. That’s what I meant, too, she said and half smiled, then waved the Popsicle at the woman, who quivered beside her son, and went into the twilight again.
She walked up the street, her steps growing slower as she came closer to home. There were no basements in this town with its fragile bedrock, but the apartment block was built into a hill, and she lived in the cheapest unit, which was half underground. She entered the linoleum-floored front hall of the building, turned the corner, and went down the stairwell toward her door. During construction, someone had had the idea to filter the hallway light into her dim living room through a series of four colored windows above the bannister, and so as the girl descended she could look inside and see the lump of her mother on the couch lit by the shivering television glow, in red, then orange, then blue, and finally green. Even through the door she could hear the mechanical hum and over it the sound of the program, a man’s voice narrating something infinitely wearisome. She held the Popsicle’s wrapper between her teeth, took her shoes off and left them outside, put her slippers on, and unlocked the door.
The smell crashed into her, sweet rot and her mother’s eucalyptus rub. The dehumidifiers were on, the air-conditioners in the windows were on, and even the ozone generator, which the girl felt sure was slowly poisoning her, was on. She turned all the machines off, save for one air-conditioner, and in the new quiet the television narrator’s voice was painfully loud. A cheetah chased across the screen in gorgeous slow motion. She turned the volume down to a murmur. Her mother’s eyes were closed, and she was in her white cotton pajamas, with her white cotton sheet and pillow covering the couch, keeping her from contaminants. The goblet of pills she was supposed to have taken that morning stood on the coffee table, beside the glass of vodka she used to wash them down, but neither had been touched. Her mother drank nothing but vodka now; it killed the germs, she said. She no longer trusted water, certainly not tap, which had lead and fluoride and bacteria in it, but not bottled, either; who knew where bottled water came from? All she ate were her pills and sometimes a Popsicle, but only mango. Mango, she said, is the cleanest kind of fruit.
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Mom, Sara said, but her mother only moaned and opened her eyes, then closed them again. Sara took the Popsicle out of the wrapper and put it to her mother’s dry lips. She breathed a curl of frosty vapor off the Popsicle, but turned her head away from the taste.
Months ago, her mother had passed out, freeing Sara to call an ambulance. They had spent all night in the E.R., the girl insisting on test after test until there were no more tests to take and her mother wept weakly and begged to go home. In the morning, the young doctor at the end of his shift looked at the girl’s devastated face in the waiting room, and while the nurses were helping Sara’s mother to get dressed he took her to get a hot chocolate from the cafeteria and then showed her the meditation room. They raked the sand at a tabletop Zen garden side by side for a while until at last Sara said, So, what’s wrong with her?
And the doctor said, carefully, Hard to say. How long has this been going on?
I don’t know, Sara said. It’s always changing. It was cell phones at first, then it was mold, now it’s something else, extreme sensitivity to a bunch of things. It’s a mixture, I think.
Huh, the doctor said. And she’s not eating?
She can’t, Sara said. She takes eighty-something pills a day and they fill her up.
But they’re not prescribed? the doctor said.
Oh, yes, they are, Sara said. She has a naturopath and a homeopath and a Chinese-medicine lady, too.
Ah, the doctor said. But none of these people are making it better?
No, the girl said. Actually, she keeps getting worse. She’s real skinny.
Yes, the doctor said slowly, she’s malnourished. And she was dehydrated when she got here.
Sara listened hard, but there was no judgment in the doctor’s voice, so she said, Can you make her stay?
The doctor rubbed his tired face. Oh, honey, he said. Not until she makes an attempt to hurt herself or someone else.
But she is hurting herself, Sara said. Or someone else. That’s exactly what she’s doing.
But not to the point of hospitalization yet. It’s delicate, the doctor said.
Then they were silent until Sara put down the little rake and, looking away from the doctor, said so quickly that she seemed angry, But maybe she’s not sick? Maybe she’s just pretending? And the doctor regarded her fully and his eyes felt so heavy on her face that she glanced up at him and saw his thick black eyebrows that bunched behind his glasses and the kindness there, and these things together, absurdly, made her want to kiss him.
Listen, he said. We don’t know what’s causing your mother’s pain. But you need to know that wherever it comes from, whether from her body or from her brain, it is real.
O.K., she said. But that was the moment when she knew he would lie to her, and everything in her spun away from him, and he was the one she hated as she walked out the door.
Now Sara put the Popsicle gently on the plate beneath the full goblet of pills, and went to the bathroom to shower and change into her own bleached white pajamas. Her mother insisted that both bleach and white fabric kept the germs of the outside world away.
The bathroom was luxurious, the best place in the apartment, gray-veined white marble; her father had redone it with tiles he’d taken from a construction job a long time ago. Somewhere in the heap of things beside the television was a tape Sara’s parents had made of her as a baby swimming happily in the claw-foot tub, sleek and fat and shining, before she could even crawl. But this was all she knew of her father—he was long gone—and the bathroom had become her own place, her mother barely visiting it.
Tonight, Sara didn’t want to leave it, she wanted to fill the tub and soak herself in heat, but she forced herself to come out into the living room again. On the television was a family of elephants in the glossy mud, flapping their ears against the flies and spraying water on their backs. The narrator was saying portentously, “Elephants keep cool on a blazing day.” Her mother hadn’t shifted, but her ribs moved shallowly with her breath.
Sara took the frozen dinners from her backpack, slit the plastic, put them both in the microwave, and watched them spin for eight minutes. Then she took them steaming in the dishtowel to the couch.
Her mother smelled the food and groaned, then her eyes opened and she whispered, Baby. She moved her feet painfully to make room for her daughter, then thought better of it and said, Help? She no longer owned consonants, only soft vowels. The girl put her food on the floor, and lifted her mother. She was a skin bag with chalk in it, far too light to be human. Sara took her to the bathroom, and held her over the toilet, and gave her the paper and pulled up her underwear and took her back to the couch. This time, she laid her mother down in the opposite direction so that her mother’s head was in her lap. Sara set her food on the armrest, so that if she spilled it she wouldn’t burn her mother’s papery skin. She ate without tasting, which may have been a blessing: the food was just hot brown in brown sauce. She finished, and put her hand on her mother’s cool head.
On the television, the elephants transformed into lions and lions transformed into great huffing buffalo. The night went full black in the apartment’s windows. As a male springbok climbed aboard a female springbok, and the narrator’s voice grew husky with excitement, Sara became aware of a deeper and stranger silence underlying the murky underworld of the apartment, something like darkness throbbing in the places where the television’s light didn’t reach. She held her breath and heard only the air-conditioner, the narrator, her own heart in her ears. And then all at once she felt it, a slippage, a slickness, and even though it wasn’t taking place within her own body, she could see the slow and uncontrollable dilation downward and outward, into a vast sun-bright plain full of golden grasses swaying as though brushed by a great hand, and a horizon that didn’t stop in the vagueness that came at the end of sight, but pressed on into the palest and most fragmented of blues.
For a long time, Sara did not move. She held her body tightly within its stillness as her mother’s ear pressed heavy, cooling, into the flesh of her leg. Sara was frozen within time even as the television scrolled onward through the miracles of the savanna and the lifting of white names through blackness, then the program leaped a continent into the icy reaches of the North, with its glaciers like green inverse cathedrals and its savage dark beasts swimming in the waters beneath. She kept herself still and ached, and yet forced more stillness upon herself, because she knew that the moment her body weakened and moved despite her ferocious will, that movement would reawaken time; and it would all catch up to her in a bound, and the terrible thing now happening would have to be reckoned with, the future rising and rising ever upward, and she would be drawn into the denser and darker and far lonelier stuff that would make up the rest of her life. ♦
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