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Show Motherlunge a novel 56 9. How To Use a Ladder One year when Dorothy was very sick and we girls needed to experience the cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and psychosocial benefits of team sports, my sister and I were made to join the swim club. At the university pool, we swam every morning before school. Our coach was mean and mostly unseen; he sat in his glassed-in office off the pool deck and relayed his instructions through a microphone connected to the PA system. Rogers, that's the kind ofhorseshit that '11 get you disqualified. Two hands to the wall, goddammit. Rice, pick it up or go home. Turn it over, Boileau, turn it over. Turn it over. GodDAMmit. Turn. It. OVER. The coach's voice slapped the wet tiles, echoed and amplified. He watched us from behind a window as unrevealing as a mirror. But I learned that if you were in the first lane, below the concrete lip of the pool's edge, he couldn't see you. Here, you could dive deep. You could pull the water past you in great round armfuls, heading down, and grab onto the bottom of the pool's ladder. You could hold yourself there, ears painful with the pressure, until the rushing silence became real and surrounding, like something you could breathe. Here, you could hold yourself like a spider in amber, a stillborn in the sac, preserving yourself for the future. |
