Two Lives in Three Times: Swimming

by Gwynne Watkins

Onion grass sizzles under the charcoal sun, the world hums its summer steam, and the reflections of two girls dance through the manmade lake at the center of the park. Easy Rider and Scarborough Fair came here for a birthday celebration, Kelly's or Amy's, they were never sure. Their friends have staked out a picnic table at the foot of the hill with a radio blaring Easy Rider's concert bootlegs. But Easy and Scarborough are drifting steadily on slow airborne tide, up the hill, away from the crowd of half-ironic birthday hats.

Scarborough shields her eyes and looks down the hill, letting the breeze whip her hair into a giant tangle. They're not the only ones departing from the party; Ben and some guy she's never seen are running into the bushes, attempting to be stealthy with their suburban excuse for marijuana…

"Mushroom?" Easy reaches into her ever-present canvas bag and pulls out a green crate of mushrooms, straight from the produce section. Scarborough takes one with reverence. As always, she and Easy Rider are the true subversives.

In the distance, Jim Morrison is shouting about being a lizard king. "Why lizards?" Scarborough asks, picking a stick from the ground. Easy Rider is used to these questions; after trying to justify Sting's name change to Scarborough Fair for an entire afternoon, she accepts them as rhetorical.

A shivering breeze runs through Scarborough Fair. Easy Rider watches her friend's jeans turn from blue to gray as the sun sinks into clouds. The air goes solemn. Easy gets down on one knee. "We should bury something."

Scarborough crouches down, scrapes her stick against the dirt. Easy burrows a finger beside it. Before long, she is all nails, clawing a space into the hill for herself and Scarborough. Scarborough is looking for something to plant: a flower, a berry…

Easy stares into the hole, painted to her knuckles in earth. She pats her pockets: a guitar pick, dollar bills. She dumps the contents of her satchel: tapes, a sandwich, some records (Records? Scarborough thinks. In the park?)… Then she notices the clinking around her neck. She removes the chain.

"Your Dad's dog tags?"

Easy Rider shifts the thin metal plates in her palm. "Not like I believe in war. Anyway, for all I know of my dad, he had these made at the mall." But they both know it isn't true - otherwise, the burial wouldn't be important.

"We'll dig them up next year," Scarborough promises. "Right under the dog tag tree." She tosses some dandelions in the hole as the chain disappears. Easy Rider stands, bringing the sun back. The music grows louder - the party has found the two of them, and is rapidly catching up.

With the party hot in pursuit, Easy Rider dives, straight into the lake with the No Swimming signs and the rental canoes. Scarborough Fair is pushed, laughing as she feels the ballooning of her bellbottoms, the elephant legs forming at her torso, the shirt floating to her shoulders like a lily pad. Easy Rider's clothes cling to her body; she feels her skin grows a second skin, a reptile skin, a lizard layer. As a watersnake, she throws back her head and lets out a roar. The wild call of the rock and roll reptile.

When Scarborough's mother arrives to pick them up, the girls are shiver in the minivan atop layers of sand-and-shell-colored towels, calm and radiant. The lake has taken their muddled selves and, like a kiln, had made them solid, turning the opaque transparent for another few hours.

EIGHTEEN

Summer takes slices of her, like she was a lime, an orange, cut deep to become the garnish in someone's drink. The pool fans out around her on every side, a strangely edible-seeming aqua, a Technicolor set for a film about summer. A 1950s film, chlorinated and oversaturated with unnecessary musical numbers.

Easy Rider gazes up at the lifeguard from indifferent sunglasses. Summer forces you to take off your clothes, but allows you to mask your eyes. Easy Rider can't decide if it's adequate compensation. Who was this man, anyway? No, not the lifeguard, (not you, her squinting eyes say), not this fellow pair of sunglasses seeking out her indifference, thinking she's older than eighteen. No, her thoughts are with the man slicing lemons, spearing olives, popping cherries into drinks that only look innocent.

(How will she tell Scarborough? Not what to tell her - Scarborough will hear everything when she gets back from her family vacation - but how to tell her. That will make all the difference, the difference between everything being back to normal and - well.)

Easy Rider knows she'll never get a chance to see him bartend, except in her head, where he twirls bottles and passes free drinks to girls in biker jackets. He'd had no idea that she was too young to even get into his bar. Not too young to get on the back of his bike, though, as they left the record store. He bought the right bands - Zeppelin, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane - like they'd already had three vital conversations, three shared moments, before he even looked her way. She'd walked along the highway to the record store, but told him she hitchhiked. He had hair the color of black that's almost blue, arms lined with a smooth coat of dark hair and cheeks pressed deep into the bones of his face. They were going to an apartment, a-part-ment, someplace older than Easy Rider in its purpose, its disposition, an ultimately disappointing two-room den of moss-colored carpet and shamelessly bare plaster walls. On a red plastic couch drinking Coke from stolen Guinness glasses, she saw someone who shared her need for freedom, who spoke to her on a level of comprehending her passions, who knocked her down with his lips and asked if she wanted to use a condom, and when she said "no," she meant back up, rewind, put the needle back a song, this one is too fast - but before long it was too late, she lay under him listening to him catching his breath, listening to the record make its repeated dull thudding against the passive walls of the apartment.

Somehow, the family pool is a harder place to be now, as if the other kids and their mothers could see the ring of water she wills around herself. The chlorine would protect, would purify her. And behind her glasses, she stares down the golden-haired lifeguard, trying to see what motives lay behind those golden eyes, trying to think if his night job might involve the occasional broken glass.

TWENTY-TWO

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (breath) hmmmmmmm (breath) hmmmmmmmm…

This is the hard part, the rhythm. Scarborough can't do it without hearing the tone in her head. She isn't sure if she's humming. Can the people across the pool hear her one-note, the note of not-drowning, punctuated by gasps of percussion? Underwater, she watches their glowing white Republican legs. The YMCA is a showdown: the senior citizens spending their day at water aerobics versus unemployed Scarborough Fair, learning to swim.

It's not that she doesn't know how to swim. It just isn't a skill she has retained, it has curled up and died for lack of use. Her legs and arms feel like something she must control by wires and pulleys, an uncoordinated piece of machinery. Even so, Scarborough feels herself being cleansed, purified by the pool. Oddly enough, it isn't the water - it's the smell. Chlorine, sterilizing her sense memory, cleansing her mental palate like a harsh olfactory sorbet. A chemical bath for her memory, turning its grays to black and whites with the efficiency of a developing photograph. The smell permeates every floor tile and gym locker in the YMCA. Scarborough's hair will retain it when she returns home, and she will start the daily job hunt with a head that at least seems clear to one of her senses.

While Scarborough plows through the green-blue, her thoughts play on a reel in the corner of her eyes, past the bracing smell and the windshield of her goggles. Today, the memory loop goes back to her brief, singular college girlfriend. Through the protective chlorine, it returns, over and over: the smells.

This is what Scarborough had discovered about women: there were too many smells. Her girlfriend, Leia, had been a bouquet of deodorant, shaving cream, body wash, face soap, hair rinse, salt scrub, hand lotion. She was like one of those wine descriptions Scarborough had spouted off during her high school waitressing job without comprehension. Here it was: the floral overtones, fruity medium-bodied notes, the lingering aftertaste of freshly ground coffee and the woods after rain. It all overwhelmed Scarborough at first; men were so simple in their smells, sweat laced with aftershave, a predictable deodorant, the occasional puff of cologne or switched shampoo lingering in the nose suspiciously. But Leia's smells and tastes shifted every day.

Leia was accustomed to women being pressed up against her skin; thinking back, Scarborough sees that she always lingered too long, her senses taking too much time to focus. Leia's great trick was always managing to look innocent, the opposite of the fake world-weariness to which Easy Rider had accustomed Scarborough long ago. It was in the cats' eye marbles of her eyes, or the doll limbs that would flop and fold into furniture; Leia would sit perfectly composed behind a book, always seeming like she had been posed by an outside hand. Scarborough would shudder with anxiety at the notion of disturbing her. As a result, Leia was usually the instigator, late at night, pouting at Scarborough from under the covers, or arriving at her door after a night of dancing, chocolate body dust mingling with sweat, glitter pooling into each clavicle bone, her body a map of sweetness and salt. At these times, Scarborough ate her up, devoured her, wouldn't stop until she begged. But nothing could stop the feeling that tugged at the back of her neck, that sat uneasily in her stomach: I am a predator. A lecherous, awkwardly large parasite, feeding off the small spitfire with the perfectly angled eyelashes. She felt as though she was molesting a doll, treating it clumsily because her body didn't know the careful navigation of another woman. And Leia was there, then less there, then not there at all, and it was just as if she'd become smaller and smaller and harder to hold, until one day she became so delicate and far away that Scarborough blew her away with an accidental sigh.

Life is supposed to be simpler now, singular, focused, driven. It's supposed to be composed of motivational clichés and clearly defined salary brackets. Scarborough knows that when she leaves the pool, the world will dissolve into its usual muddle of colors and scents. Suddenly, in mid-stroke, she feels her leg go down when it should go up. A cramp seizes her, her head jerks in panic, and her nose fills with the overpowering sting of chlorine. She sputters to the side of the pool, where she clings to a mildewed ledge.

Even going in a straight line, I choke. Scarborough feels the terrifying absence of someone to hold her. The lack of a Leia. She pictures Easy Rider right at this moment, placing a book on a shelf, moving the author to the correct part of the alphabet, self-assured in her small, concrete goals. When did Easy Rider become the stable one, the eye of the storm, while Scarborough reels in a thousand directions?

Scarborough grabs the rail of the pool and pulls herself up. Water pours from the wrinkles of her damp swimsuit and the heat from above the pool turns her goggles to fog. Even with the smell of chlorine, everything manages to be blurry.

The Next Section will be posted in May...