I can stand on my hands with my head underwater for three minutes and 21 seconds. I know this because my sister counted on a watch while I did it last year in July. This summer I will see if I can do it for four minutes and zero seconds. My mother is afraid that I will drown, but my sister tells me she will sneak the watch into the pool bag and time me anyway.
I practice in the bathtub on the coral lipstick nights that leave the house empty. I perch on the slick edge of the tub and turn the tap, pulling my shorts up and holding my feet above the tumbling water. When it sloshes up against the rim, I shed my clothes like scales and slither into the not-quite-big-enough space. Some water splashes out onto the smudged tile. I wish that the bathtub were bigger and taller and more like a swimming pool, but a swimming pool wouldn’t fit into our wallet or our house. Maybe for Christmas I can ask for a bigger tub.
I hear the keys jingle in the lock, the sound muffled under the peal of my mother’s laughter. A gravelly laugh follows, and I gasp out of the water. I have to scramble to drain the bathtub and mop up the puddles on the floor, but I’d rather risk spraining my ankle on the slippery tiles than face what’s on its way upstairs. I throw on a sopping towel and creep across the hall to my room, the drain gurgling sickly behind me.
The dark makes it harder to stumble to the bed unscathed, but I make it with just a stubbed toe. I ease under the covers gingerly, and finally let myself exhale. I listen to the distant tinkle of glass in the kitchen, the bump of furniture being pushed against a wall, the murmur of why don’t we go upstairs. The stairs creak under the weight of Oh, Randy, and my mother’s heels. Is he awake? the gravel asks. No, he goes to bed early, my mother says. He’s a good kid. At the other end of the hall, a door clicks shut and the voices disappear.
The pillow is wet and cold on the back of my neck.
I wake up to the wail of the shower turning on, screeching a protest as my mother washes away last night. I wonder why after all these mornings the rusty water hasn’t turned her orange.
Slowly, I remember my dream. The bloated body of a man floats to the surface of my mind, and I grab hold of his hand to keep him from drifting away in the current. That’s not right: the dream started in the bathtub. I’m upside down on my hands with my eyes to the drain, when the bottom of the tub shakes free of the rest of the bathroom and starts sinking. I descend with it into the dark water, past the submerged pipes, down into a bubbly abyss. But I’m not scared. I trust the bathtub.
We go further down, the dusty blue beneath me glowing against the rest of the water. Gradually the water gets lighter, even though we’re still moving down. It gets so bright I have to move my hand to shield my eyes. It’s uncomfortably hot.
Then the water disappears and I’m sitting on green grass in the blinding sun. My sister laughs to my right while my mother throws grapes, and across from me, eating a pickle sandwich—
I don’t want to remember this dream anymore. I shove off the covers and dress quickly, my feet drumming against the aged wood as I race down the stairs. I don’t want to see my mother.
I slow down when I reach the kitchen. My sister is sitting on the counter with a bowl of cereal. Come on up, kiddo, she says with a wave of her spoon. I obligingly fill a bowl with little brown flakes, drown them in milk, and clamber onto the chipping formica. I can almost get up without having to use my knee.
Can you take me to the pool today? I ask through a mouthful of cereal. You have to be 12 to go alone.
She thinks for a minute. Okay, she says, it’s better than seeing the slut before noon. Let me just grab my swimsuit. She slides down from the counter.
Please don’t call her that, I say. My sister looks at me.
What?
That word.
She clacks her bowl loudly into the sink. Don’t you have to put on your swim trunks?
I already put them on, I tell her. What about—–
I’ll meet you outside, she says. She’s already walking upstairs.
The pool is crowded when we get there. I put the bag with my goggles and our lunches in it down on the hot cement. Let’s go back, I say to my sister. There are too many people.
Don’t be such a wimp, my sister says. They won’t bite.
But what if someone knocks me over when I’m practicing?
She punches my shoulder lightly. I’ll stand next to you and push ’em right back, she says, and picks up the bag. I trail behind her as she weaves through a jungle of towels and chairs, finally stopping next to a pair of mismatched folding chairs and a black umbrella.
The umbrella won’t open.
Shit, my sister says. You go in while I fix this.
I get my goggles out of the bag and pad mutely to the edge of the pool. There are a lot of screaming babies at this end. Why do their fat mothers force them into the water if they make so much noise? I don’t understand grown-ups.
I walk down to where the water is four feet deep. There are fewer people in this part of the pool. The babies are always in the shallow water, and people my sister’s age are always in the deep end. Nobody likes the middle, I guess.
I breathe in for 10 seconds, then pinch my nose between my fingers and jump in. The water is cold, but the perfect height: my toes will just stick out of the water. I paddle around, watching my sister grapple with the umbrella. It finally opens, thwacking her in the face.
I hope you aren’t laughing at me, she says when she joins me in the water.
I’m not, I say. That baby over there just kicked its mom in the face.
Sure, my sister says. Get your troll face underwater already.
She times me while I practice. You almost hit three minutes and 45 seconds there, my sister says. I can barely hear her.
What? I say too loudly. There’s water in my ear.
She repeats it, but I dive back underwater before she can finish her sentence. That’s still 15 seconds not good enough.
After we climb out of the water and dry off, my sister tells me that she won’t be home for dinner. I’m going out with Ruth and Jen, so I don’t have to witness anything unpalatable.
She says it like a word she just learned from a book. Unpalatable.
I look it up when we get home. My sister is changing in the bathroom, so I go into her room and look through her peeling dictionary. I find it between unpaid and unparalleled. Unpalatable: displeasing or unpleasant to the taste. Disagreeable. I shut the dictionary and put it back on the shelf. My sister comes back.
I’ll be back after you go to sleep, she says, picking up her purse. So don’t stay up.
Bye, I say as she walks out the door. I roll my new vocabulary word around in my mouth.
I eat chicken nuggets for dinner, but I don’t microwave them for long enough, so the middles are cold. It hurts my teeth when I bite into them, but I swallow anyway. On TV, a family is laughing loudly around a table piled high with food. There are four place settings. I change the channel, and watch sharks instead.
My mother comes home, her keys jingling. I hold my breath, but hear only the rustle of a paper bag as she shuts the door. She only bought some things at the grocery store. Do you want something to eat? she asks from the hall.
I already ate, I say. It’s nine.
Oh, she says quietly. I’ll put these away then. She fumbles around in the kitchen for a few minutes, then goes upstairs. Sleep tight.
Good night, I say. On the screen, the sharks have just eaten a chunk of tuna. The water is red. I wonder what would happen if I went swimming in red water.
I don’t realize that I have fallen asleep in my chair until I hear the roar of a car leaving the driveway. My sister is home. She is careful about shutting the door quietly behind her, but I am already awake. I push the blankets off my legs, getting ready to walk upstairs.
Then I hear my mother’s voice, and I hold my breath.
Honey, she says, I want to talk to you.
Now? my sister says. It’s past my bedtime, don’t you think?
I’m sorry, my mother says. I’ve been bad about that. I haven’t eaten dinner with you in so long.
My sister laughs. Can you spare the time between rounds?
My mother is silent.
Then she takes a breath. That’s unnecessary, she says quietly. You won’t see Randy anymore. I broke up with him.
There is another pause.
I am still holding my breath.
Good, my sister says finally. He was a terrible substitute, anyway.
Her footsteps disappear up the stairs. A door slams, and then I exhale. I’m brave enough to climb out of my chair now. I go into the hall, and see my mother sitting against the closet, hands on her temples.
I sit down next to her. Mom? I say, touching her shoulder.
She rubs her face, and turns to look at me. I bet I look a mess, she says.
You’re still pretty, I tell her. Even with snot on your nose.
Oh, honey, she says, and laughs wetly. I climb into her lap. You’ve always been so funny, she says into my hair. I’d forgotten that. Her face is damp against my cheek. I fall asleep to the rhythm of her fingers stroking my head.
I have another dream.
In it, I am sinking to the plum bottom of the pool’s deep end. The white jellyfish shapes of goggles float around me, but otherwise I am alone. If I look down, I know I will see the rusty grille at the bottom, hungrily sucking water into its mouth and hoping for a plump meal like me to come around. I keep my gaze up. Distantly, I see my mother’s face like peach Jell-O through the surface of the water. Her eyes are all runny and black, but I tell myself it is just the water, distorting her features. Her mouth is moving like a silent rubber band, or a pink gummy O, opening and closing. I notice that she isn’t wearing any lipstick.
She stops moving her mouth so much, and starts smiling. I smile, too, and wave. She waves back at me, and we stay there, greeting each other, while my lungs fill with something that isn’t air.
Author Bio
Stephanie Bastek just completed her senior year at Richard Montgomery High School and will attend Reed College in Oregon in the fall. She has worked as both a contributor and editor on her high school’s literary magazine, Fine Lines.
Bastek says her story, about a boy who wants to set a record for holding his breath underwater as part of an effort to cope with a difficult family transition, was inspired by a short piece she read in The Washington Post’s Kids Post last summer about the flight-or-fright response of horses, and how it evolved. “I’m actually a riding instructor, too,” she says, “so I dorkily read the whole thing and was struck by the phrase ‘stay apparatus,’ which is the mechanism by which horses are able to sleep standing up, so as to enable them to quickly escape becoming some mountain lion’s next meal. I wrote the phrase down, thinking of all the ways that defense mechanisms applied to human relationships, and pounded the whole story out in a night.”
Bastek says she decided to tell the story from the point of view of a young boy because she finds that children observe more than they consciously absorb. “Their observations are refreshingly free from the scars of adult life. Everything is distorted by our perspectives, as though underwater. That’s one of the reasons I chose to leave the ending ambiguous: It’s up to the reader to decide, through the blurring of water, what to believe.”
At Reed, Bastek plans to major in English literature, and perhaps study German literature. Although she intends to keep writing, she’s aware that passions can change over time. “I have four years to decide,” she says, “so for all I know I could switch to neuroscience.”
Judge’s Comments:
“A poignant, beautifully descriptive story…The writer’s strong voice, originality and use of precise, lyrical detail set this story apart.”
