The Chronology of Water. Lidia Yuknavitch

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       Suitcase

      SOMETIMES I THINK I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A SWIMMER. Everything collected in my memory curls like water around events in my life. Or maybe everything that’s ever happened to me I understand better if I picture it in a great, aqua, chlorinated pool. Not even Florida could kill the swimmer in me.

      At my senior prom in Florida I armwrestled five boys about to become men. I lost once. After the dance we all got drunk and climbed the fence of the pool in Gainesville, Florida. We went skinny dipping in a 50-meter competition pool - the same pool I spent two hours every morning, two hours every evening in swimming. My body was stronger than it has ever been in my life. I looked like someone’s son. The biceps of a son. The jaw. The shoulders. My hair whiting out gender. Breastless. When it came time for everyone to make out, I did laps.

      That summer was long and wet differently for me than it was for other people. The air got thick with more than heat. In June, letters began to arrive in our mailbox. They were scholar - ship offers. For swimming. Exit visas.

      In the evenings, I’d go out to the mailbox. My breathing would jackknife in my lungs just before I opened the box, and I’d shuffle through our idiotic mail waiting to feel the weight of something different. Waiting for my leaving.

      Five letters came.

      The first scholarship letter was cool and weighted in my hands. It was from Brown. The red and black logo of Brown University on the envelope looked royal to me. I ran my fingertips across it. The envelop felt smooth - the paper announcing its difference. I smelled it. I closed my eyes. I held it against my heart. I walked it to the house almost believing in something.

      Inside, I put it on the kitchen table. It sat there all through dinner - which we ate in the living room watching TV. Barney Miller. I could feel the blood in my ears.

      After dinner, after Taxi, after my father smoked three cigarettes, he finally went into the kitchen. And my mother. And me.

      We sat at the kitchen table like I guess families do. My mother and I breathing. He opened the letter more slowly than a retarded person. He read it silently. I watched his eyes. Blue like mine. In my head I swam laps. My mother sat to the side of me like a drunk lump patting her one hand with the other. I tried not to bite my tongue off.

      Finally, he spoke. A¾ ride. At a Snob school. A snob school for silver spoon girls and rich assholes. My mother looked out the window into the Florida night. I stared at the paper with the Brown logo on it. And my name. I knew it wasn’t money. We had money. It was what came out of his mouth next, his cigarette smoke making shame swirls around my face. Did I think I was special? Like someone squeezing my neck. In my throat I swallowed language.

      The second letter came from Notre Dame. Again we sat at the kitchen table, a mother, a father, a daughter. The cigarette smoke nearly cinematic. I sat in silence, my very skin knew the tyranny of speaking. My mother twisted a lock of hair until I thought it would lift off of her head. Why did he say no? Because he could.

      The third letter came from Cornell.

      The fourth from Purdue.

      No.

      At a kitchen table in Florida.

      All the rooms of our house carried the weight of father. All of them except one. My bedroom held the wet and dark of my body. It smelled like my skin and chlorine and pot. The two windows in front had long been my portals to the night life of escaped girls. In July, on a night so thick with sweat lesser girls would have suffocated, alone in my bed I decided a leaving. I was leaving, and I didn’t care how. I masturbated so hard that night I scratched my skin raw. Just before I went to sleep, I pictured a suitcase. The biggest one we owned. It rested silently in the garage behind my father’s golf bag and boxes from former lives. Black and as big as a German Shepherd. Big enough to fit the rage of a girl.

      At the preliminaries for State that year I sat in the locker rooms with Sienna Torres killing a fifth of vodka. If we’d been sons about to be men, I bet we would have taken one of our father’s cars and headed for Canada. Or took our first punches at authority, not minding the black eye. Instead we sat on the concrete underneath the disgusted gaze of shaved and wellbehaved athlete girls and drank.

      Even loaded I qualified fifth for finals in breaststroke. At finals, a woman I didn’t know with stringy blond hair and glasses thick as a Florida cola bottle came up to me after I got second in the 100 breast. I swam a 1:07.9. She looked like a stoner. She said she was the coach at Texas Tech, and that though she couldn’t talk about it standing there like that, me dripping with water and underage rage, she would call me the next day to talk about a full ride. I didn’t say anything. When my breathing stilled, I looked up at my drunk mother in the stands. She was sort of rocking. I hoped she’d stay up there. My mother: the only thing I knew of Texas sitting up in the stands, slurring her speech.

      When the coach of Texas Tech called my home, my father was at work. I talked to the woman with the stringy hair and thick glasses on the phone. There was my mother’s voice, its sweet southern drawl curling around my shoulders - like honey does to bees - and there was this woman’s voice and there was me. Saying yes. Yes.

      Wouldn’t it be great if that’s all there was to it? A mother’s voice soothing the way for her daughter to leave. Blonde swimmer girl gets on a plane, bye bye y’all.

      A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then she put them in the envelope, grabbed her car keys, and told me C’mawn. In her southern drawl liquor voice. In her real estate station wagon. Driving to the post office with her and watching her drop my freedom into the blue metal mouth of the mailbox-I almost loved her.

      All the rest of July he raged. And August. Every day when he came home from work he’d find another way to fill the house with rage, shake the walls with shame, while the little women took it and took it. Sometimes I thought he might kill one of us. But I was not afraid. In the palm of my bedroom I could feel the walls pulse.

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