moved across the floor, bowl of salt water and all. He’d come pounding back into the kitchen from a bedroom lap, covered with sweat and dust, and Kelda would look up at him, holding her book in both hands, and just beam. Swim to me, he’d say, but she was too scared, and it actually takes a huge amount of upper-body strength to swim on land.
I was the kind of coach who stands by the side of the pool instead of getting in, but I was busy every moment. If I can say this without being immodest, I was instead of the water. I kept everything going. I was talking constantly, like an aerobics instructor, and I blew the whistle in exact intervals, marking off the sides of the pool. They would spin around in unison and go the other way. When Elizabeth forgot to use her arms, I’d call out: Elizabeth! Your feet are up, but your head is going down! And she’d madly start stroking, quickly leveling out. With my meticulous, hands-on coaching method, all dives began with perfect form, poised on my desktop, and ended in a belly flop onto the bed. But that was just for safety. It was still diving, it was still letting go of mammalian pride and embracing gravity. Elizabeth added a rule that we all had to make a noise when we fell. This was a little creative for my taste, but I was open to innovation. I wanted to be the kind of teacher who learned from her students. Kelda would make the sound of a tree falling, if that tree were female. Elizabeth would make “spontaneous noises” that always sounded exactly the same, and Jack Jack would say, Bombs away! At the end of the lesson, we would all towel off and Jack Jack would shake my hand and either Kelda or Elizabeth would leave me with a warm dish, like a casserole or spaghetti. This was the exchange, and it made it so that I didn’t really have to get another job.
It was just two hours a week, but all the other hours were in support of those two. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I’d wake up and think: Swim Practice. On the other mornings, I’d wake up and think: No Swim Practice. When I saw one of my students around town, say at the gas station or the store, I’d say something like: Have you been practicing that needle-nose dive? And they would respond: I’m working on it, Coach!
I know it’s hard for you to imagine me as someone called “Coach.” I had a very different identity in Belvedere, that’s why it was so difficult to talk about it with you. I never had a boyfriend there; I didn’t make art, I wasn’t artistic at all. I was kind of a jock. I was totally a jock—I was the coach of a swim team. If I had thought this would be at all interesting to you I would have told you earlier, and maybe we would still be going out. It’s been three hours since I ran into you at the bookstore with the woman in the white coat. What a fabulous white coat. You are obviously completely happy and fulfilled already, even though we only broke up two weeks ago. I wasn’t even totally sure we were broken up until I saw you with her. You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn’t male or female or young or old; it is just smiling. Who I miss now, tonight? is Elizabeth, Kelda, and Jack Jack. They are dead, of this I can be sure. What a tremendously sad feeling. I must be the saddest swim coach in all of history.
I am not the kind of person who is interested in Britain’s royal family. I’ve visited computer chat rooms full of this type of person, and they are people with small worlds, they don’t consider the long term, they aren’t concerned about the home front; they are too busy thinking about the royal family of another country. The royal clothes, the royal gossip, the royal sad times, especially the sad times, of this one family. I was only interested in the boy. The older one. At one time I didn’t even know his name. If someone had shown me a picture, I might have guessed who he was, but not his name, not his weight or his hobbies or the names of the girls who attended that co-ed university of his. If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him. You could only hope that your grandchildren’s children would get to him. But they wouldn’t know what to do; they wouldn’t know how to hold him. And he would be dead; he would be replaced by his great-grandson’s beautiful strapping son. His sons will all be beautiful and strapping royalty, and my daughters will all be middle-aged women working for a local nonprofit and spearheading their neighborhood earthquake-preparedness groups. We come from long lines of people destined never to meet.
All my life I have had the same dream. It’s what they call reoccurring; it always unfolds to the same conclusion. Except for on October 9, 2002. The dream began as it always does, in a low-ceilinged land where everyone is forced to crawl around on hands and knees. But this time I realized that everyone around me was having sex, it was a consequence of living horizontally. I was furious and tried to pry the couples apart with my hands, but they were stuck together like mating beetles. Then, suddenly, I saw him. Will. In the dream I recognized he was a celebrity, but I didn’t know which one. I felt very embarrassed because I knew he was used to being around cute young girls and he had probably never seen anyone who looked like me before. But gradually I realized he had lifted up the back of my skirt and was nuzzling his face between my buns. He was doing this because he loved me. It was a kind of loving I had never known was possible. And then I woke up. That’s how I used to end all my stories in school: And then I woke up! But that wasn’t the end, because as I opened my eyes, a car drove by outside and it was blaring music, which usually I hate and actually I think it should be illegal, but this song was so beautiful—it went like this: “All I need is a miracle, all I need is you.” Which exactly matched the feeling I was having from the dream. I got out of bed and, as if I needed more evidence, I opened The Sacramento Bee, and there, in the World News section, was an article about Prince Charles’s visit to a housing estate in Glasgow, a trip he took with his son, Prince William Arthur Philip Louis. There was a picture. He looked just as he had when nuzzling my buns, the same lovely blond confidence, the same nose.
I typed “royal family” into a dream-interpretation website, but they didn’t have that in their database, so then I typed “butt” and hit “interpret,” and this came back: To see your buttocks in your dream represents your instincts and urges. It also said: To dream that your buttocks are misshapen suggests undeveloped or wounded aspects of your psyche. But my butt was shaped all right, so that let me know my psyche was developed, and the first part told me to trust my instincts, to trust my butt, the butt that trusted him.
That day I carried the dream around like a full glass of water, moving gracefully so I would not lose any of it. I have a long skirt like the one he lifted, and I wore it with a new sexual feeling. I swayed in to work; I glided around the staff kitchen. My sister calls these skirts “dirndls.” She means this in a derogatory way. In the afternoon she came by my office at QuakeKare to use the Xerox machine. She seemed almost surprised to see me there, as if we had bumped into each other at Kinko’s. QuakeKare’s mandate is to teach preparedness and support quake victims around the world. My sister likes to joke that she’s practically a quake victim, because her house is such a mess.
What do you call that exactly, a dirndl? she said.
It’s a skirt. You know it’s a skirt.
But doesn’t it seem strange that the well-tailored, flattering piece of clothing that I’m wearing is also called a skirt? Shouldn’t there be a distinction?
Not everyone thinks shorter is more arousing.
Arousing? Did you just say “arousing”? Were we talking about arousal? Oh my God, I can’t believe you just said that word. Say it again.
What? Arousing.
Don’t say it! It’s too much, it’s like you said “fuck” or something.
Well, I didn’t.
No. Do you think you might never fuck again?
