Chlorine, p.2
Chlorine, page 2
The glory he gave me hung off my neck in medals of gleaming gold. The more he gave, the more I wanted, and the more I took. With each swim meet I gained laurels, yet my craving was never satiated. Jim offered me the training to secure these victories, so I bestowed unto him my love in return. I loved Jim because there was no greater intimacy than that found between athletes and their coaches.
The day I first met Jim was the day I first entered a pool. It feels perverse to recall my first time in water, my now home and most vital resource, as a simultaneous memory of the introduction between Jim and me, but alas. Nearly every human memory is corrupted by the fact that it is a memory of being human.
I showed up on the pool deck during tryout week mortified by the pink swimsuit my mother had forced me to wear. The swimsuit had a frilly tutu attached around the waist. It bobbed wildly, reminding me of its hideousness with my every step. The other team hopefuls looked like professional swimmers, having been dressed in second-skin swimsuits with their hair hidden by swim caps, their demanding parents wanting to vicariously relive their grand ol’ swimming days through their kids. I had no such equipment. It was obvious neither I nor my mother had any real idea what to expect for competitive swimming, but my desire for water compensated for my lack of knowledge.
I had overheard other kids in homeroom at school talking about their prior swim lessons. They bragged about their progress through the YMCA levels, from eel to guppy to minnow to shark, like we were in biology learning about marine animals, while I had never even touched a YMCA membership card. If our outfits and their experiences were any indication, I would likely soon prove myself to be the worst swimmer at tryouts.
High-pitched laughter echoed around the pool deck. I reverted to awkwardly plucking at the mesh fabric of my tutu as an excuse for not initiating any conversation. My arms and legs were overly exposed, like peeled uncooked shrimp. I wasn’t used to being so naked in front of other people who weren’t my parents. My thighs chafed with no fabric between to soothe the abrasions.
Despite my uncomfortable state, the warm air on the pool deck lulled me. I was not familiar with pools, but I could sense I would soon love being there, surrounded by the heavy chemical scent, the lane ropes resembling caterpillars, the unnatural aquamarine-colored water. I was buoyant with the heady sense of a love soon to be, a sort of tingling premonition in my fingers.
A splash rang out, the first of the day. The kids parted to form two columns, everyone laughing at the commotion. The lanky sister who had pushed her younger brother into the pool bowed proudly in the center of the divide. I stood on the right side, watching the spluttering boy tread water, and swiveled my head to the left to observe my competition. I scanned a pasty boy, then a girl with frizzy red curls and thick freckles, dressed in a shiny new swimsuit I immediately coveted. I could tell her parents were ex-swimmers—the girl was prepared, looking sleek and competitive in a way I did not. She plucked at her shoulder strap, which was digging into her shoulders, leaving long, red, aching tire tracks on her skin.
“Enough!”
A man emerged from the pool deck office, bringing in a musty cigarette smell. As he stomped, he shoved a handful of mini cookies into his mouth, followed by a swig of Mountain Dew. Parents were not allowed into tryouts, giving this man full rein of adult authority; intimidated, we instantly quieted, leaving only the sounds of the boy’s flesh gently slapping against water and the low hum of our nervous breaths.
The instant I laid eyes on the big man, my tutu unraveled, its pink thread leaving my fingers to dangle downward, grazing my thighs. I shivered, confused whether my body’s stimulation was from the breezy kisses of the tutu thread or from the sheer presence of such a man. I never forgot the sensation of our first meeting. My body quaked with each tremor of the ground, corresponding with his stomps. I contemplated how he could make me strong. I hoped to impress him, to thrill him.
He stopped at the pool’s edge, between our two rows. His fists were clenched, and his jaw was tight as he ground his teeth. A twitching vein trailed from his neck into the collar of his polo. I stared at him, feeling like I had belly flopped off the diving block into a bottomless pool, and I was sinking down, down, down, with no air in my lungs and no lifeguard on duty. He was scarier than any human male I had ever seen, even scarier than Mr. Sullivan, my third-grade teacher, who showed us National Geographic videos of a ruined Earth during science class. Mr. Sullivan liked to make grand declarations about incoming catastrophic global warming. Because of Mr. Sullivan I couldn’t bear dry summer heat—I craved damp, cold, and rainy days. I craved cold water over hot air.
The man pointed to the boy in the water. “You. Get out of the pool. You’re out.”
He switched his anger onto the sister. “You’re out too. Get out. Go home.”
We watched the boy clamber out of the pool. His sister gathered him into her arms. Both were silently crying. Their wet footsteps echoed as they left the pool.
The man surveyed us, his eyebrows creased. There were thick paunches of skin under his eyes, and I winced when the bags twitched over me.
“If any of you make it on the team, you’d better learn to keep your hands to yourself,” he said.
He chucked the bottle of Mountain Dew toward us. We collectively ducked, and the empty bottle bounced as it hit the tiled floor.
He began pacing back and forth. “I’m your coach. Call me Jim. If you want to make it on the team, you better listen to me.” He fingered his whistle, his large meaty hands obscuring it from sight. He blew a loud shrill. I clapped my hands over my ears. The boy next to me snickered.
Jim began to group us into lanes, herding the taller and older to Lane 1 and the shorter and weaker to Lane 6. I was shunted to Lane 5.
“Okay, everyone. Line up behind the lane.”
I immediately stepped forward, the other kids shuffling behind me. They had proper gear, but I had confidence. I had yearning.
Jim began to pace again. “We’ll start with a simple warmup. When I blow my whistle, the first person can dive in. Count to five after them, and then the next can dive in, and so on. Give me four laps of freestyle to start.”
He inhaled and lifted the whistle to his mouth, but before he could blow, I dove into the pool. I couldn’t wait any longer. I was so close. I wanted to touch water without other children inside it too. Their bodies would have corrupted my experience. And I had already grasped how men liked it when I did things they wanted without them needing to ask first. I wanted to prove to Jim I belonged, despite my unraveling tutu and capless head.
When my body touched chlorine, I grew. The tutu into a tail. My skin into scales. My fingers and toes into webbed appendages. My lungs into voluminous containers. My eyes blinked, and the blindfold I never realized had been tied around my face since birth fell off—I saw clearer when submerged in blue depth. I wiggled through the water neater than how I walked on land. I spun my arms in a messy windmill, scooping water out of my way.
I was alone in the pool the first time I dove in, and I’ve sought the same sense of isolated grandeur ever since.
When I reached the opposite wall, I lifted my head to turn, ears in the air. Jim blew his whistle.
I stopped and looked back, one arm treading water, the other atop the pool gutter. The tutu flared out of my body and spread onto the surface with my hair, forming a pink-and-black composition amid blue. My head was heavy, my hair soaked. Every kid watched me.
I waved. What else could I have done? I understood even then of humans’ thirst for spectacle.
Through my stinging eyes I caught sight of the red curls I had seen earlier, their owner staring at me with her mouth ajar.
Jim strolled along the length of the pool toward me, a patient saunter much slower than his previous pacings. Anxiety flared within me as he neared. Perhaps I had been too brash. Perhaps this man believed I had undermined his authority. Perhaps he would banish me from my newfound shelter, like he had done with that brother and sister.
He stopped in front of where I tread. My eyes were at the same level as his feet. His sneakers were untied, the tongue floppy, the laces soggy with chlorine and old mud.
“Nice initiative!” he announced to the watching children, clapping his hands. “You all should be more like—what’s your name?”
He crouched down and put his ear to my mouth. Pleased, I hissed my name, tasting remnants of evaporated chlorine on my lips.
Jim stood up. I heard his knees crack.
“Ren. You all should be more like Ren,” he declared. My feet, treading water, spazzed in glee. He stuck his hand out for a high-five. I tapped his palm gently, hoisting myself out of the water like a jumping dolphin to reach his height. His hand was moist and humid. His thumb was long enough to wrap around my palm and crush my bones. When we touched, he smiled, and the pool water lapped at my collarbones.
“Beautiful. Just beautiful. And very talented. We’re going to have a great time together,” he whispered, winking.
He blew his whistle.
The other kids dove.
We began.
My mother picked me up after tryouts with a Tupperware of halved grapes plucked off their stems. She wrinkled her nose when I climbed into the car. My wet hair perfumed any small space with rotten chlorine. As we drove home, I profusely thanked her for taking me, but she looked nervous that I had fallen in love with a sport. To her, I was not supposed to fall in love. I was supposed to swim well enough to put it on my résumé, to get me into a good school. Love was too powerful a feeling.
“Are you sure you want to keep going?” she asked.
“Yes, Mom,” I said. “This feels right. Swimming can be my extracurricular activity on my college applications.” I knew how to appeal to her sensibilities. “The coach said I showed raw talent.”
“What’s the coach’s name again?”
“Jim.” I popped a few more grapes in my mouth, sucking the juice off the skin. Jim had pulled me aside at the end of the session to tell me he couldn’t wait to have me on the team. He had stroked my cheek, and the droplets of chlorine stuck on my skin had trickled off with his fingertips. Absentmindedly, I rubbed my cheek, leaving grape juice glistening where chlorine had been.
“Where did he go to college?” she asked.
“Moooooom, why do you care so much about where people go to college? Stop prying.” I rolled my eyes and spat out a grape skin onto the dashboard. “He’s a swim coach. It doesn’t matter where he went, as long as he can coach well.”
I needed to protect Jim from my mother’s high standards. Admiration from an athletic leader was new, and I didn’t want to lose it so quickly—I was surprised to discover how good it felt to be deemed special for my body. I had always hated gym class, my gym teachers judging me useless. I spent that period walking when we were supposed to run laps, ignoring their whistles in favor of looking for four-leaf clovers. Land sports and recess games were impossible too. I didn’t understand why all the kids my age constantly wanted to play outside. I tried my best to fit in. I went along with whatever games the neighborhood kids came up with, learning the rules without prior explanation. But I never dodged quick enough in dodgeball—after every game I’d have circular bruises all over my body. I fell facedown in the dirt during games of tug-of-war. When we played freeze tag, I’d pretend I was frozen even if I hadn’t been tagged, so I could stay still. I was never strong enough to break through arms in red rover, and I played every game in petrified fear of getting called over.
The water was different. My home. And Jim was an adult who clearly saw something special in me.
Under Jim’s watchful eye, my body would blossom.
I was accepted onto the team, along with the girl with red curls, and some other kids from tryout week I recognized but did not know. I eventually learned their names: Cathy. Mia. Luke Jr. Brad the Third. Ally. Rob. Basic human names. English words given meaning, passed down from their grandparents or uncles, some sort of elevation added, like Junior or the Third, to emphasize their long American lineage.
My name was simpler than theirs: Ren, 人, meaning person. Yu, 鱼, meaning fish. Ren Yu was neither a traditional Chinese name nor a typical American English name, but my mother thought it symbolic of the way her first and second language deteriorated from immigration, creating a new language with threads from both.
Ren Yu was an easy name to remember too. My mother believed having a simple name with a simple meaning would help me survive unscathed. Keep me inconspicuous, unnoticed. Yet when Jim made us do icebreakers during the first week of practice, my name drew me special attention. My teammates had trouble with its pronunciation, despite its one syllable.
Brad, thighs and eyebrows as thick as the pool lane ropes, picking his nose: “Your name is Ren? Did you cough?”
Luke, blue eyes crinkled in confusion, scratching his blond head, hands proportionally bigger than the rest of him, effective oars that would help him grow into the fastest boy on our team: “Did you mean to say Jen?”
Ally, standing next to Luke, unrelated, but the two together were the ever-classic question of “siblings or dating”—blond, blue-eyed, and perfect: “Can I call you Renny? It makes more sense to me.”
Mia, stretching her long legs that would eventually propel her to become one of the state’s top backstrokers: “Ren? Never heard of it. Is Ren short for a longer name?”
Rob, the only teammate besides Cathy to ever offer a semblance of kindness: “Hey! We share the same first letter!”
Cathy, with her red curls, who saved me from jumping into the pool during the icebreaker to drown myself from embarrassment: “I love your name.”
Jim, who had already noticed me during tryout week, paid me close attention as the weeks went on. He noticed my beauty at the same time he noticed my swimming talent, because Jim had two great skills: swim coaching and predicting who would be hot. The two skills went hand in hand. The pretty ones were always fast. Did skill beget beauty, or did beauty beget skill?
Jim would compliment me, guide my arms and legs into proper forms. He loved to touch me. Never where it would count as illegal, as abuse. None of his touches would compel you to stop reading in disgust. None would make you want to stop understanding my story. Everything was coach appropriate: His hands around my arms, pulling them up in a tighter streamline, his hand against mine in a high-five, his hands pushing my hips forward to show me how to undulate on land before I tried in the water. I didn’t mind—I was a beautiful human girl. So beautiful I could understand why he wanted to touch me. Beautiful things demand touch. Hence the taped floor lines at art museums and the roped boundaries between paparazzi and celebrities on red carpets. I was honored to be Jim’s favorite acolyte. I was so radiant under his gracious older male gaze. He directed and I listened, even when the instructions were unrelated to swimming.
“Make sure your clothes aren’t too slutty.”
“Make sure you don’t tease anyone too much with your good looks.”
“Make sure you always come back after graduation to visit. You’ll have to tell me all about the boys you’re dating.”
Even now, years later, I wake up some nights from haunted slumber, panting, my salty sweat droplets mixing with the salt in the sea, his demands echoing through my brain.
With the touching, the purring, the perversity, came protection too.
Every first day of fall, Jim would go apple picking off the funds from the Parent Swimmer Association and toss barrels of apples into the pool. He’d divide us into two equal teams, with an equal number of boys and girls on each. All’s fair in apple bobbing. He’d blow his whistle, and we’d dive into the pool, mouths open wide to bite into the apples we swam past. We’d spit them out onto our team’s respective side of the pool deck. Jim would count them afterward, and the team with the most apples collected could skip practice for the rest of the day.
One first day of fall, a year after I first began swimming, Ally mistook Mia’s forehead for a Red Delicious and tore off a chunk of her skin, swallowing it whole. Red blood streamed from Mia’s forehead and turned the blue pool water purple. Mia had to rush to the emergency room and get ten stitches in the jagged shape of Ally’s teeth marks. Ally joked Mia tasted like a sour crabapple. After the incident I was too scared to join in the game—I’d swim along the wall at the deep end, avoiding my teammates’ chompers. Jim yelled at everyone else for not moving fast enough, not biting hard enough, but he’d let me wallow and stay out of the way. When all the apples were out of the pool, he’d gather apples kept hidden behind his desk and congratulate me, claiming it was my own unbeatable pile. I went along with his lie, basking in my teammates’ envy.
Jim encouraged me to specialize, as having one best stroke would give me an advantage when college recruitment eventually came.
Freestyle, backstroke, and breaststroke were such uncomplicated strokes, with legs kept apart and arms with intuitive movements. Why take the easy way out? So I chose butterfly, the hardest stroke of all four, the only stroke with legs together, using the entire body at once, requiring strong abs, powerful arms, great kicks, and flexible hips.
I loved butterfly because of the way my body skimmed atop the water, gentle as Jim’s caress. In the water I fluttered my arms like wings, dipping my head forward and back to search for pollen, chlorine as my flower. I wrapped myself in a swim cap and goggles like a chrysalis, bursting from its cocoon to drop time.
I began to win heats. I caught the attention of local coaches and competitors, who before would have never considered a girl who looked like me able to beat them.
As a human girl, I adored winning. To win was euphoria, and euphoria was a blackout—black holes, stars, and galaxies forming at the edge of your goggles, an entire outer space dedicated to the Big Orgasmic Banging of first place. Euphoria was the feeling of ascension, a path I recognized when I later shed my human self for mermaid. Euphoria was reaching the edge of fatigue, near fainting, until adrenaline slapped you awake. Euphoria was muscles on fire. Euphoria was to slap the wall first, fist pumping the water, then to bask in the crowd’s uproar, hollering your name. Euphoria was to dip your head in an act of humbleness for the gold medal to be placed around your neck. To shake the hand of your coach as he wipes happy tears from his eyes. To call your parents and tell them you won, again. Yes, again, Mom. I won again. You heard right. Are you proud of me now?
