I wanted to reach up and grab the plastic bag from the top of the refrigerator, but I also wanted to look at each child. One was named Trevor, and he was having a birthday party this Saturday. Please come! the invitation said. We’ll have a whale of a time! and there was a picture of a whale. It was a real whale, a photograph of a real whale. I looked into its tiny wise eye and wondered where that eye was now. Was it alive and swimming, or had it died long ago, or was it dying now, right this second? When a whale dies, it falls down through the ocean slowly, over the course of a day. All the other fish see it fall, like a giant statue, like a building, but slowly, slowly. I focused my attention on the eye; I tried to reach down inside of it, toward the real whale, the dying whale, and I whispered, It’s not your fault.
Helena slammed through the back door. She briefly pressed her breasts against my back as she reached over me to grab the bag, and then she ran back outside. I turned and watched her through the window. She was giving Vincent a shot. He was waking up. She was kissing Vincent, and he was rubbing his neck. I wondered what he remembered. She was sitting on his lap now, and she had her arms wrapped around his head. They did not look up when I walked past.
The interesting thing about Positive is that it never mentions HIV. If it weren’t for the advertisements—Retrovir, Sustiva, Viramune—you would think it was a magazine about staying positive, as in upbeat. For this reason it is my favorite magazine. All the other ones build you up just to knock you down, but the editors at Positive understand that you have already been knocked down, again and again, and at this point you really don’t need to fail a quiz called “Are You So Sexy or Just So-So?” Positive prints lists of ways to feel better, kind of like “Hints from Heloise.” They seem easy to write, but that’s the illusion of all good advice. Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself. It is actually hard to write something that will make a terminally ill person feel better. And Positive has rules, you can’t just lift your guidance from the Bible or a book about Zen; they want original material. So far none of my submissions has been accepted, but I think I’m getting closer.
Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.
This is the story I wouldn’t tell you when I was your girlfriend. You kept asking and asking, and your guesses were so lurid and specific. Was I a kept woman? Was Belvedere like Nevada, where prostitution is legal? Was I naked for the entire year? The reality began to seem barren. And in time I realized that if the truth felt empty, then I probably would not be your girlfriend much longer.
I hadn’t wanted to live in Belvedere, but I couldn’t bear to ask my parents for money to move. Every morning I was shocked to remember I lived alone in this town that wasn’t even a town, it was so small. It was just houses near a gas station, and then about a mile down, there was a store and that was it. I didn’t have a car, I didn’t have a phone, I was twenty-two, and I wrote my parents every week and told them stories about working for a program called R.E.A.D. We read to at-risk youth. It was a state-funded, pilot program. I never decided what the letters R.E.A.D. stood for, but every time I wrote “pilot program,” I kind of marveled at my ability to come up with these phrases. “Early intervention” was another good one.
This story won’t be very long, because the amazing thing about that year was that almost nothing happened. The citizens of Belvedere thought my name was Maria. I never said it was Maria, but somehow this got started, and I was overwhelmed by the task of telling all three people my real name. These three people were named Elizabeth, Kelda, and Jack Jack. I don’t know why Jack twice, and I am not completely sure about the name Kelda, but that’s what it sounded like, and that’s the sound I made when I called her name. I knew these people because I gave them swimming lessons. This is the real meat of my story because of course there are no bodies of water near Belvedere and no pools. They were talking about this in the store one day, and Jack Jack, who must be dead by now because he was really old, said it didn’t matter anyways because he and Kelda couldn’t swim, so they’d be liable to drown themselves. Elizabeth was Kelda’s cousin, I think. And Kelda was Jack Jack’s wife. They were all in their eighties, at least. Elizabeth said that she had swum many times one summer as a girl while visiting a cousin (obviously not cousin Kelda). The only reason I joined the conversation was that Elizabeth claimed you had to breathe underwater to swim.
That’s not true, I yelled. These were the first words I’d spoken out loud in weeks. My heart was pounding like I was asking someone out on a date. You just hold your breath.
Elizabeth looked angry and then said she’d been kidding.
Kelda said she’d be too scared to hold her breath because she’d had an uncle who died from holding his breath too long in a Hold-Your-Breath contest.
Jack Jack asked if she actually believed this, and Kelda said, Yes, yes I do, and Jack Jack said, Your uncle died of a stroke, I don’t know where you get these stories from, Kelda.
Then we all stood there for a little while in silence. I was really enjoying the companionship and hoped it would continue, which it did because Jack Jack said: So you’ve swum.
I told them about how I’d been on a swim team in high school, and even competed at the state level, but had been defeated early on by Bishop O’Dowd, a Catholic school. They seemed really, really interested in my story. I hadn’t even thought of it as a story before this, but now I could see that it was actually a very exciting story, full of drama and chlorine and other things that Elizabeth and Kelda and Jack Jack didn’t have firsthand knowledge of. It was Kelda who said she wished there was a pool in Belvedere, because they were obviously very lucky to have a swim coach living in town. I hadn’t said I was a swim coach, but I knew what she meant. It was a shame.
Then a strange thing happened. I was looking down at my shoes on the brown linoleum floor and I was thinking about how I bet this floor hadn’t been washed in a million years and I suddenly felt like I was going to die. But instead of dying, I said: I can teach you how to swim. And we don’t need a pool.
We met twice a week in my apartment. When they arrived, I had three bowls of warm tap water lined up on the floor, and then a fourth bowl in front of those, the coach’s bowl. I added salt to the water because it’s supposed to be healthy to snort warm salt water, and I figured they would be snorting accidentally. I showed them how to put their noses and mouths in the water and how to take a breath to the side. Then we added the legs, and then the arms. I admitted these were not perfect conditions for learning to swim, but, I pointed out, this was how Olympic swimmers trained when there wasn’t a pool nearby. Yes yes yes, this was a lie, but we needed it because we were four people lying on the kitchen floor, kicking it loudly as if angry, as if furious, as if disappointed and frustrated and not afraid to show it. The connection to swimming had to be enforced with strong words. It took Kelda several weeks to learn how to put her face in the water. That’s okay, that’s okay! I said. We’ll start you out with a kickboard. I handed her a book. That’s totally normal to resist the bowl, Kelda. It’s the body telling you it doesn’t want to die. It doesn’t, she said.
I taught them all the strokes I knew. The butterfly was just incredible, like nothing you’ve ever seen. I thought the kitchen
