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 floor would give in and turn liquid and away they would go, with Jack Jack in the lead. He was precocious, to say the least. He actually 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! Atthe 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.
Majesty
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 pr
obably 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? When you said Carl left you, that was the first thing that came into my mind: She will never fuck again.
Why are you like this?
What? Should I be all buttoned up, like you? Hush-hush? Is that healthier?
I’m not that buttoned up.
Well, I would love to go out on that limb with you, but I’m going to need some evidence of this unbuttonedness.
I have a lover!
But I did not say this, I did not say I am loved, I am a person worth loving, I am not dirty anywhere, ask Prince William. That night I made a list of ways to meet him in reality:
Go to his school to give a lecture on earthquake
safety.
Go to the bars near his school and wait for him.
They were not mutually exclusive; they were both reasonable ways to get to know someone. People meet in bars every day, and they often have sex with people they meet in bars. My sister does this all the time, or she did when she was in college. Afterward she would call and tell me every detail of her night, not because we are close—we are not. It is because there is something wrong with her. I would almost call what she does sexual abuse, but she’s my younger sister, so there must be another word for it. She’s over the top. That’s all I can say about her. If the top is here, where I am, she’s over it, hovering over me, naked.
The next morning I woke up at six and began walking. I knew I’d never be thin, but I decided to work toward an allover firmness that would feel okay if he touched me in the dark. After I lost ten pounds, I would be ready to join a gym; until then I would just walk and walk and walk. As I moved through the neighborhood, I re-ignited the dream, reaching such a pitch of clarity that I felt I might see him around the next corner. Upon seeing him, I would put my head under his shirt and stay there forever. I could see sunlight streaming through the stripes of his rugby pullover; my world was small and smelled like man. In this way I was blinded and did not see the woman until she stepped right in front of me. She was wearing a yellow bathrobe.
Shit. Did you see a little brown dog run that way? Potato!
No.
Are you sure? Potato! He must have just run out. Potato!
I wasn’t paying attention.
Well, you would have seen him. Shit. Potato!
Sorry.
Jesus. Well, if you see him, grab him and bring him back over here. He’s a little brown dog, his name is Potato. Potato!
Okay.
I walked on. It was time to concentrate on meeting him; plans 1 and 2. I’ve gone to other schools and discussed earthquake safety, so it wouldn’t be the first time. There’s a school in the neighborhood, Buckman Elementary, and every year they invite the firemen in to explain how to Stop, Drop, and Roll, and later in the day I come in and talk about earthquake safety. Sadly, there is very little you can do. You can stop, you can drop, you can jump up in the air and flap your arms, but if it’s the Big One, you’re better off just praying. Last year a little boy asked what made me the expert, and I was honest with him. I told him I was more afraid of earthquakes than any person I knew. You have to be honest with children. I described my reoccurring nightmare of being smothered in rubble. Do you know what “smothered” means? I acted out the word, gasping with my eyes popping out, crouching down on the carpet and clawing for air. As I recovered from the demonstration, he put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a leaf that was almost in the shape of a shark. He said it was the best one; he showed me other ones he had collected, all of them more leaf than shark. Mine was the sharkiest. I carried it home in my purse; I put it on the kitchen table; I looked at it before I went to bed. And then in the middle of the night, I got up and pushed it down the garbage disposal. I just don’t have room in my life for such a thing. One question is: do they even have earthquakes in England? If they don’t, this is the wrong approach. But if they don’t, I have one more reason to want to live in the palace with him rather than convincing him to move into my apartment.
Then Potato ran by. He was a little brown dog, just like the woman said. He tore past me like he was about to miss a plane. He was gone by the time I even realized it had to be Potato. But he looked joyful, and I thought: Good for him. Live the dream, Potato.
Forget the school visit. I would step into the pub. That’s what they call a bar over there. I would step into the pub. I would be wearing a skirt like the one he lifted in the dream. I would see him there with his friends and bodyguards. He wouldn’t notice me, he would be shining, each golden hair on his arms would be shining. I would go to the jukebox and put on “All I Need Is a Miracle.” This would give me confidence. I would sit at the bar and order a drink and I would begin to tell a yarn. A yarn is the kind of story that winds people in, like yarn around two hands. I would wind them in, the other people at the counter. There would be one part of the story that involved participation, something people would be compelled to chant at key moments. I haven’t thought of the story yet, but I would say, for example: “And again I knocked on the door and yelled,” and then everyone at the bar would chant: “Let me in! Let me in!” Eventually, all the people around me would be chanting this, and the circle of chanters would grow as they gathered in curiosity. Soon William would wonder what all the fuss was about. He would wal
k over with a bemused smile. What are the commoners doing now? I would see him there, so near to me, to every part of me, but I would not stop, I would keep spinning the yarn, and the next time I knocked on the door, he would shout with everyone else: Let me in! Let me in! And somehow this story, this amazing story that had already drafted half the English countryside, would have a punch line that called upon William alone. It would be a new kind of punch line, totally unlike “orange you glad I didn’t say banana.” This punch line would pull him to me, he would stand before me, and with tears in his eyes, he would beg me: Let me in! Let me in! And I would press his giant head against my chest, and because the yarn wasn’t quite over I would say:
Ask my breasts, my forty-six-year-old breasts.
And he would yell into them, muffled: Let me in, let me in!
And my stomach, ask my stomach.
Let me in, let me in!
Get down on your knees, Your Highness, and ask my vagina, that ugly beast.
Let me in, let me in, let me in.
The sun was collapsing with a glare that seemed prehistoric; I felt not only blinded but lost, or as if I had lost something. And again she appeared, the woman in the yellow bathrobe. This time she was in a little red car. She had not even put on her clothes; she was still wearing the robe. And she was yelling “Potato” so desperately that she was forgetting to stick her head out the window, she was yelling into the interior of the car uselessly, as if Potato were within her, like God. Her vaulted cry was startling, a true wail. She had lost someone she loved, she feared for his safety, it was really happening, it was happening now. And I was involved, because amazingly, I had just seen Potato. I ran over to the car.