Then I heard him fall, like a tree landing on the roof. I ran into the bathroom and he had passed out. He was on the white tiled floor, on his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, white as death, seizuring.
I yelled his name at him. I put his feet up on the edge of the tub and held his head in my lap trying to give him a mini blood transfusion. He came to, dazedly. I called 911. I put a comforter around him. A firetruck full of paramedics came. I dressed my son while they hooked my husband up to wires and electrical machines. They put my husband in an ambulance and my son and I drove in our car - the ambulance took the freeway. I took the back roads. I was there 12 minutes ahead of them. At the hospital he lived. We discovered a triglyceride problem that scared the shit out of us.
The next week, driving to work in my car, I got an earache and my skull felt like a lightning bolt fracture had cracked it open.
My father’s voice filled the ball of my head, curled around the lobes and through the canals of gray matter. It closed my eyes and clenched my teeth.
I began to not only hear my father again, but as clearly as you see the face of your husband, your wife, in front of you, I saw
my father’s face at the moment of his drowning. On his back, his eyes wide open, his mouth in a grimace, making strange strangled sounds, seizuring.
I nearly wrecked the car twice, unable to see the road or anything else, my ears gone crazy, the deep baritone of his voice making my brain ache.
How to Hold Your Breath
KID STORIES.
What sad little bobbers we all were.
Here’s a pathetic little image: me at age two in a hooded baby blue parka and little red stretch pants jumping off a 25ʹ dock into Lake Washington, yelling “WIM.”
They say, and keep in mind the story comes from my now dead crackpot parents, they say I’d jump in any water I saw. Pools. Rivers. Lakes. The Shojita’s carp-filled garden pond. That I was simply drawn to water, and I’d run and leap with one of those silly toddler glee smiles smeared across my face, and then I’d sink like a stone.
Somebody, usually my eyerolling sister, would have to jump in after me every time, and pull me sputtering to safety.
So when I was three my mother signed me up for swim lessons. But it was my father who put me in the car, drove me to Lake Washington, took off my little clothes and threw me in.
In November.
I was by far the youngest kid there.
I can’t tell you I remember any of this, but I sure the hell can conjure up an image of my own skin bluing in the icy waters. And I feel pretty certain I have muscle memory in my mouth of my teeth nearly shattering from kid cold chatter. If I learned to swim that year I did it in a frozen zombie state, under the heavy weight of father, who, every time I came running out crying stuck
his hand and arm out of the station wagon window like an angry god and pointed back to the water.
If there is more to that story it drifts away when I go near it - it’s too far back, or too deep.
When I first began writing this story my son Miles was seven. So that means I’m seven too sometimes. I mean my seven year old me swims back during the course of an ordinary day all the time, whether or not I’m ready. Miles absolutely loves swimming pools. The thing is, Miles can’t exactly … swim. When Miles gets in the pool, there is no other way to say this, he’s a spaz. And he’s wearing more weenie water gear than a special needs deep sea diver. Don your protective gear: goggles, life vest. Then he wades in and has the time of his life, prepared for any aqua danger, looking like a water nerd. When he’s in the water he laughs and laughs. He shows me all the things he can do in the water, things that amount to splashy little circles or pushing his way across the pool like a water bug, and says, “Lidia, look, I’m doing swimming.” He throws his little arms around and kicks his unsynchopated legs and holds his head in this sort of strange crane upwards, his mouth in a little smirk nowhere near the water, his goggle-bugged eyes looking my way. It drowns my heart.
When I was seven I won 13 trophies with little faux gold girls leaning over for the dive on top. If my seven year old me saw his seven year old in the same pool? With all the gear? Well first of all my little posse of athletes wouldn’t have gone anywhere near him. Gyawd they would have gone. What’s wrong with that kid? Is he special ed? But the me inside the me would have adored him. I bet my current salary I would have been the one wishing I could swim over and try out his cool gear.
When I’m with him now, if any of the kids playing around in the pool near us who look like they were born fucking seals even GLANCE at him I shoot them a death look so sharp it slicks their hair back, reddens their smug little faces and … well. Let’s just say something a lot worse than water going into your
brain. They’re lucky to have brains at all after I shoot them the look. It’s a look from my father.
Still, at my son’s age, I was a racer. You know those little plastic wind-up bathtub things - contraptions with small flippers or limbs attached to internal rubber bands which, when wound, rotate at alarming speeds? Sending a little dolphin or boat or shark shooting across the tub? That’s what seven year old girl racers look like. Heads down. Twenty-five meters. Maybe one breath. Maybe. Whoever we were on land, once freed in water, we grew dangerously alive.
My son’s been in swimming lessons - level A - three times now. At the end of the lessons they always hand me the green card that says mamma of Miles, your son can barely float, he’ll only hold his breath above the water, if he’s in the water without supervision he’ll sink to the bottom like a tire, and they smile, and I smile, and Miles beams, and then we go home and eat OREOS and I give him another one of my trophies.
When I work with him alone in the pool, he clings to me like a little sea monkey until I let him put his full regalia back on.
It’s his head.
He doesn’t want to put his head in. When I ask him why, he answers incredulously, “Because the water will go in my nose and ears and go into my brain. Duh.”
I look at him for a long minute. He doesn’t back down.
“I see,” I said. “ Where’d you get that idea?”
Quite convincingly, he responds. “Harry Potter.”
Harry Potter.
Goddamn that little bespectacled twit.
I instantly know which Harry Potter scene he is talking about. It’s the one from
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
, where the five students have to compete in the Tri-Wizard’s Cup. One of the trials is an ocean dive to save trapped friends and loved ones who have been suspended underwater by strange little sea witches with pitchforks. Each student must figure out a magical way to breathe underwater, or they’ll die, and all their loved
ones trapped underwater will die, water will go up all the noses and flood all their ears and drown all their brains unless they have special underwater gear. Total kid death fest if they don’t find a way to breathe underwater. Neville Longbottom, the buck-toothed nerd kid interested in animals and botany and ichthyology, gives Harry Potter magic Gillyworms. Then he grows temporary gills and webbed hands and feet.
Christ. Why does anyone become a mother?
I look at Miles. I say, “Miles, you know when you see mamma swimming and swimming in the lap lanes?”
“Yes,” he says, looking solemnly at the floor.
“Well, water has never gone into my brain. Not once.”
He looks at me quite seriously. I can see from his eyes he’s puzzling out an answer. He’s a thinker, that one, so I already know he’s coming up with a good one. He would have been all over Hogwarts. “Let’s hear it then,” I say.
“Then you must have had a waterhorse. A waterhorse who put you on its back when you were little and afraid of the water and then the water horse dove down underwater and taught you how to swim because the waterhorse loved you and you loved the waterhorse and there was magic.” He rests his case, hands on hips.
Of course there was magic. Like in “The Waterhorse.”
Goddamn American kid films.
The year I was seven the kid movies were
The Aristocats
,
Pippi in the South Seas
, and
King of the Grizzlies
. Nobody died from having water go into their brains. Wait.
The Poseidon Adventure
- 1972. That whole Shelley Winters thing. Man. That still gets me. That’s some sad shit. I think I bawled for an hour when they took me to see that. I think we had to leave the theater. And I think my father said “If you’re going to cry like a baby, you can’t go to the movies. Crybabies have to stay home. For christ’s sake.” Pounding the steering wheel. My mother looking out the window with her endless denial. My sister half feeling sorry for me and half glad for another target in the family.
Now that I’m thinking about it, except for swimming, I was a big fat failure at many, many things. Being in public, for one, like at all, but other things too. For instance bike riding. Complete failure. I can still hear him. “Goddamn it! Every kid on this block can ride a bike but you. What are you, retarded or something?” Me pedaling, pedaling, weightless and mindless as air, nothing girl.
Miles and I spend a lot of time at the pool.
Him not putting his head under.
Me swimming the laps of the racer I was.
We’re making our first progress, though. As long as I’m the waterhorse, he puts his arms around my neck in a near choke hold and, gasping for air and speech, I swim around and go, “OK, I’m diving down now,” and we go down into the dangers and depths of public pools. He holds his nose tight enough to pull it off.
After we eat the multi-colored gummy worms, that is. You can’t even think about going underwater without eating gummy worms.
My father never learned to swim.
Water
THERE IS A PLACE ON THE OREGON COAST CALLED Gleneden Beach. It’s between Lincoln City and Newport, both tourist towns. The main thing that is at Gleneden Beach is a mildly well known resort called Salishan.
The resort is nestled up against a little saltwater bay and estuary. Beyond that, the ocean. It has a famous golf course, which I’ve actually played. When I was a kid. My father took us to this resort as a family. It is the only thing we did together as a family that worked.
I don’t know exactly why it worked, but I’d watch my father sit out on the balcony of the luxury hotel room and look out at the ocean. At the windblown signature tree of the resort. At the birds and the way light changed over the water. He looked at peace.
At the resort there is a fine swimming pool and hot tub. As a family my mother, father, sister and I spent hours in the waters. My mother would side stroke her suddenly weightless swan body up and down the pool, smiling like a girl. My sister and I would swim the goof off way kids do - going under and up and splashing and racing and treading water and diving for coins. Despite our age difference. My father would wade in up to his hips, his chest, sometimes up to his chin. Since his feet were still touching the bottom, he felt safe. And though he’d only venture halfway down the pool to avoid the depths of the far end, he
looked happy. Five years we went back to Salishan - until my sister left.
Of course, Salishan is not just a resort. The Salishan languages are a group of languages of the Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. They are characterized by fusional and inflected language and astonishing consonant clusters. And all Salish languages are either extinct or endangered. That’s not something I knew as a kid. But the word embedded itself in my head and heart differently than other words anyhow, and so it had a meaning secret from regular talking. Sometimes when I was hurt or angry or scared as I kid, I’d close my eyes and whisper, “Salishan. Salishan.” Hoping it could work some kind of magic on the terror of family.
After we moved back to Oregon, when my son was about five, I took him and Andy back to Salishan. I did not know what would happen. Perhaps that kind of return would bring me nothing but sadness, and we were driving to the ocean of my childhood. But I trusted the ocean’s pull. When we got to within a mile of the resort - when we drove past the estuary and around the corner where the Douglas Firs make a mound of forest in the heart of which is Salishan, my heart let loose. It wasn’t the resort. It was the word. It was a space of ocean or peace that offered hope differently for a child. I rolled the window down and the salt air bathed my face. My son seemed excited but didn’t know why.
My husband Andy said, “Is this it?”
“Yes,” I said, this is the place.
My son had never been to a fancy place like that, so he spent the first 10 minutes running around the room in a little kid glee dance. Then he found the white terrycloth robes in the closet, stripped naked, put one on, went out on to the balcony, and said, “This is the life.”
Then we all went down to the pool. The pool of my childhood hope. Miles kept saying the word Salishan. Words carry oceans on their small backs.
Joy.
A word. An act of imagination. Me, Andy, Miles. In the pool we work on Miles’ water skills. My husband swims and floats and laughs, dives down like a kid, making his nose run from the chlorine. Not caring. He can swim the deep end.
When I am in the Salishan pool with Miles, I play. Usually we play water games Miles has invented, all of which involve him getting to keep his head above the water. This time he tells me he has a very important game. I say, “OK. What is it?”
“I’m going to put my whole head underwater,” he says.
!
I nod and stay quiet, trying not to blow it. I move toward him to hold him so we can dunk down together quickly. Painlessly.
“No,” he says, “you stay over there and do it and I’ll do it over here and we’ll look at each other and try to hold our breath as long as we can.”
!
“OK.” I say.