Lengths and Longing

            Someone recently told me, “The best way to learn a language is when you love somebody who speaks that language.” I remembered that as I gingerly slid into the neighborhood pool last summer. Immersion.

            I have been in lots of kinds of water over the last twenty years. The Italian Riviera with my wife, windmilling my legs to stay clear of the craggy piles of barnacled boulders, feet offshore from giving-no-fucks Italian grandmas sunning their dimply swags of flesh in skimpy bathing suits. A cerulean rooftop pool in Miami the day after my brother’s wedding, crying and making a jackass out of myself after too many cerulean cocktails. The hushed women’s hot tub at Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese spa in the mountains near Santa Fe. I find myself also wanting to say, In a birthing pool,but that would be a lie. I didn’t reserve it in time and I probably would have given birth before it could fill up.

            I swim laps with a rubber cap on my head and goggles over my eyes and globs of wax in my porous ears, led by the thick tile line that runs from one end of the pool to the other. To my right, I see a woman doing hypnotic crawl movements. To my left, I see another take six arm strokes before tranquilly taking a breath.

            It took me twenty-one years to get back in the lap lane and methodically swim back and forth for a half mile at a pop. I think I used to swim a mile. I was younger then. I’m working up to it now.

            Then, I’d only spent a few seasons slowly running high school track, a summer doing step aerobics classes with ladies whose pert spandex asses were split by thong-bottomed leotards.

            This was different.

            But first, Cecilia had to make me. In her winning way. Before she did, she swam alone. She biked many miles to the pool and then she swam. And then she biked home.

            I had an unused-in-Buffalo bathing suit. A very modest, black-and-white tankini with a centimeter of exposed midriff that still got me thrown out of the pool at high school Christian camp. Blistering whistle blasts and all, as if I’d been holding the preacher’s daughter’s head underwater.

            I protested to Cecilia that my hair would get in the way, and that chlorine gave me bloodshot eyes. She opened a swimming catalog, picked up the phone, and calmly picked out a cap and goggles for me, with the ease that she picked out my nickname: Candace Bear. I agreed because I wanted to spend more time with her.

            She gave up the bicycle riding so we could take public transportation together. We rode to south campus, to the pool that sat in a moldering limestone building with crumbling everything. North campus was far newer, required a longer bus ride, had an Olympic-sized pool in a state-of-the-art-facility at Alumni Arena, the new building that I almost stubbornly only went to for non-athletic activities, like Rage Against the Machine concerts. The scrunchied sorority sisters owned Alumni Arena, which was sited just far enough from the main campus spine to weed out the lazier among us, especially after Buffalo’s brief, piquant autumns got kneecapped by white-out winters.

            No, my beer-plumped undergrad body was just at Clark Hall’s speed.

            Catching sight of myself in this gormless bathing suit, capped and goggled in the Clark Hall locker room, I noticed that I was obscured, sheathed, amphibian. What a relief. Everyone there was wearing bathing suits heavy on pragmatism and light on sex appeal. No need to suck in my gut, hate my thighs. I was just another offhandedly dome-headed human, heading to a lane. Just a mammal, moving.

            I slid into the pool’s barely warm water and began. There was always a lane for me, and one for Cecelia. She was in her own amphibian world, doing effortless sea serpent flips at each end. She didn’t critique my form or hold my hand. I was on my own to splash, splutter, slowly cover ground, power myself through water using rusty freestyle strokes. The regular breathing gave me the rewards of meditation, something I hadn’t tried but desperately needed.

            Unrequited desire can smell like chlorine. It can feel like a body with muscles so gently sore that moving feels like a series of inner caresses. When you just can’t get beyond friendship with someone, at least you can get to 8,000 meters. And then you’ve wetly, simply accomplished something to brag about.

            After we swam, we showered, bundled up, and walked outside to share a cigarette from Cecilia’s pack, in the woolly-skied late Buffalo winter, or early Buffalo spring; they are resolutely indistinguishable. We had wet hair. We had poached bones. We had common ground, though it was the kind we floated above. We had the swimmer’s limpid high, which lasts for hours.

            On the way home, we stopped at the Old Pink, a reeking, listing, cozy dive bar in Allentown. There we drank happy hour Rolling Rock beer and shot pool, really terrible pool, with bemused, tough-jawed men who were disarmed by Cecilia’s glinting good cheer and wet blonde hair, which she often bleached at the same time that she re-dyed her mass of black t-shirts in the bathtub.

            I twisted the cube of chalk against the pool cue tip, which always reminded me of a cervix after I saw one in Women’s Studies class on Body Awareness Day.  A big-hearted lesbian volunteer dropped her jeans around her ankles, popped in a speculum, leaned back in a chair, and invited us to have a look-see. As I shot the ball across the felt, I sometimes sank a ball and sometimes didn’t. With damp hair and a cold, sweating beer in my hand, skin gleaming like a pearl, an easy magnetism hummed through my veins.

            After I finished my four years in Buffalo and moved to New York City, I found a boyfriend and joined the local public rec center. I was eager to reconnect with swimming again, and he feigned interest. I put on my bathing suit, my bathing cap, my goggles, and looked for a free lane (harder to come by, big surprise, in Manhattan). He stood there with a pose that reminded me of a cranky toddler, to be honest, and said, “I’m cold. The water’s cold. I don’t want to share a lane.” But probably the worst thing that he said, with all the purse-lipped, hissy shaming of a not-fun aunt, was: “Oh my god, your pubic hair is showing. You need to shave! We have to leave.” I looked down at the few sprung, sparse hairs that had served as the mouse to his elephant stampede, and lost my anonymity. I was an embarrassing girlfriend, a slattern. I was keeping him from his routine. I was not in Buffalo anymore, where an unrequited love had proven more soul-nurturing than this granted pairing.

            I let that put the kibosh on swimming laps for a while, and a while stretched into twenty-one years. I exercised in other ways: jogging, tennis, dance class. All of them were great when I felt like being out there in the world, but were inconceivable when I didn’t. I am not always a ta-da person. Cecilia saw before I did that I go in and out, like the moon, or a hibernating bear. Candace Bear. So I did nothing, passively waiting for some greater force to nudge me back into the sun.

            Love led me to a pool once, and love led me here again. My son, at 11, wasn’t a confident swimmer yet. That, and I was catching him way too often in a stolid tablet trance. I knew that he sprang into tireless motion in pools, and asked him to swim laps with me. We swam back and forth until the old rhythm caught me like a hook. He sloshed away to play tag and water cannon games with his sister, but occasionally challenged me to a race, and I took him up on it. Sometimes he won, sometimes I won. Either way, I felt proud. He’d gone from doggy paddling to slicing through the water with enough facility to slap the wet concrete wall before I did.

            Now that we’re well into autumn and the community pool has closed, he’s playing soccer at recess. And I go to the crumbling Santa Fe public rec center on the site of a Spanish colonial fort, and slide into the mercifully warm water. I swim lap after lap in between a whippet-like high school swim team star and a hairy-chested guy who vibes stockbroker. I wear a cap, goggles, and a bathing suit that I like because it’s un-chic and comfortable and I don’t have to care here.

            Two weddings, two kids, several houses and jobs later, I feel that old, poignant song uncoil from my muscles. The yearning that teased me along in my youth is gone, and I want to tell my younger self that Cecilia and others will not stick around, that she will never be what I want her to be, that wanting someone to be something is a really good way to waste energy that could be better used to make yourself what you want to be. That Cecilia was like the first book I picked up in a library of thousands of volumes, each one with a different gift for me.

             I want to tell her that this unlikely affinity for swimming, at the time just one tendril of my life with Cecilia, will be the one I’m left with, one that took its time to bloom into the best possible outcome.

            I swim through the conversations that didn’t go the way I wanted, the disappointments, the unavoidable drudgeries and rues of my deeply satisfying life and requited love. I count the laps, I breathe, I track my arms’ rotations and the twist of my torso. After I finish, walk dripping and clammily barefoot across the tiles that lead me to the showers, and blast off the chlorine with hot tap water and hoarded hotel samples of body wash, my clothes slide on like an embrace.  The high still lasts for hours.

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