Suzy got the idea from a television commercial.
It was a floor wax commercial, but in it they machinegun the glass cockpit of a jet. You can see the white bullets bouncing off. The ingredient that protects the cockpit is in the floor wax. Suzy thought we could make a clear plastic wall out of the same stuff and embed the medals in it. That way you could be sitting in the breakfast area and look out to the living room to watch the television through the clear plastic wall. The medals, she said, would seem to float in the air. I looked into it since I couldn’t think of any other way to display them. All the time I was thinking about burglars machine-gunning the wall, the gold suspended in front of them. You could knock on the air in front of you. But they told me the plastic would turn green with age. And what would I do when I moved?
I started swimming every morning when I was five. I turned from the window and picked up my rolled towel to go with my father to the pool before dinner too. Outside my friends were walking away. My mother had turned them away at the door. He is going to the pool. He is going to the pool. Our parents would be on the decks sunning or in the empty stands reading summer books in the middle of winter. It was always summer. And the light was always reflected from below, aqua and turquoise. It was always summer. My hair was always wet or had those furrows the comb left after I combed it wet. And I thought I was lucky I wasn’t blond, I mean, so the chlorine wouldn’t tint and shine my hair. At college, there were no children. So I would walk off the campus into the neighborhoods or go to the playground and watch the children. There were lots of children in Bloomington. A teacher shooed me away once.
These were the children who had been the test groups for toothpastes. Crest was invented in Bloomington. The unmarked tubes, the new brush, the special tablets that stained the teeth where you missed. All of them brushing together in the school cafeteria after lunch. Those children had been the ones to rush in and say, “Mother, mother, only one cavity!”
We carved teeth in dent school from blocks of clay the size of sugar cubes. When I dream, I dream of two things — teeth that are as large as my head and drowning.
When Suzy yawns, I can see the fillings in her back teeth. I’ll tell her to hold it and take a look in the light the lamp on the end table puts out. She will go right on watching television. I can see it reflected in her glasses.
“When are you going to file my teeth again?” she asks.
She asks me about striped toothpaste and how they get the stripes in it to come out right.
I do recommend sugarless gum.
If you watch television in the right light you can see yourself watching in the glass. I think television is not so much like an eye as like a mouth. I look and look at it, and I don’t know why others see it looking back at them. It’s a mouth, all right. When we go out Suzy turns off the television and brushes her hair while looking at the green glass. Her long straight hair begins to float away from her, drawn by the static of the screen. I like to watch her.
Under the water, as I would go into my turn, I would see Doc’s face, green, in the window. There was a window in the pool wall so he could watch us underwater. Pushing off, you planted your feet on the glass. He watched us and took our pictures. Around the pool, on the walls, are still pictures of me swimming different strokes — the same strokes stopped at the same point or a series of one stroke instances apart, from all angles. My head coming out of the water as my arms pull on the fly, head-on. What am I looking at? Doc’s book was called The Science of Swimming. He developed interval training and hypoxic training. He defined the two-beat crawl stoke and the principles of fluid mechanics. He saw Bernoulli’s principle in my stroke. I developed my stroke on my own by trial and error. When I came to Indiana as a freshman, Doc asked me how I pulled my hands through a crawl. I told him: a straight-arm pull down the middle line of my body. When I saw the first movies, I saw myself using a zigzag pull with my elbows at ninety degrees. How did I develop such good mechanics when I didn’t even know how I swam? Doc said I was a motor genius, and he strapped lights on my fingers and toes that flashed as I swam and made light tracings of my stroke on film.
What I did all at once, swimmers now watch in pieces.
Doc could never get the pieces fine enough. Two pictures that looked identical to me looked years apart to him. They were a slice of a second apart. Like that puzzle in children’s magazines where the quintuplets are really twins and three are impostors.
He no longer recognizes me now that I am not in college.
They say one day Doc was surprised by his own picture in a recent team portrait.
I remember the lights on my fingers and toes. I remember the batteries on my back.
There is this bar in Bloomington, Nick’s, we would go to after practice in the morning. After telling Doc that we had a class to go to. We’d make our way down Kirkwood against the flow of students heading toward the old campus and their first class of the day. As they would close in behind us we would hear them say, “Swimmers.”
Swimmers.
Nobody ever called me by name.
Sitting at the bar, we could look out to the street and the students heading east. Across the street they were building a little mall on the corner of Dunn. Bloomington looked like Indiana then. It probably looks like California now. The stone replaced by redwood, outdoor cafes where the bars with neon signs had been. And roller skaters gliding to school instead of townies leaning into the wind.
The windows at Nick’s were painted over with diagonal panes to make it look English. So we saw all this through diamonds.
You drank your beer from old jars.
They sold beer by the pound at Nick’s.
She misses the interviews.
Plimpton was the last, four years after all the wins.
We showed him around, ran the tapes and films.
He was interested in what I was going to do now. I told him I was going to be a dentist, and he didn’t believe me. I could live on the razor money, he said, sell goggles.
“You could pretend to be a dentist, George,” she said, “and come to the office.” On the televised interviews she sees now, she watches the wives and girlfriends, how they kiss and hold on to the men who are talking. She likes the ones who never look at the camera but stare up at the men.
I ask my patients questions while we wait for the blocks to take. If their mouths aren’t full of cotton, they try to answer. It is hard to talk when half your face is numb. Lips and tongue and jaw are disappearing. I answer the questions for them as they nod their heads.
I keep them in a lockbox at the bank. What can you do with them? I read somewhere in my textbooks about the place in the body that stores gold salts. Like the thyroid and iodine. If you suspect a lesion, you administer some radioactive salts and watch the iodine coat the throat. You need just a little bit of iodine. The same with gold. There is always a bit in the brain. That is where it concentrates, in the thalamus, the seat of emotion. I think about this when I am flushing out a filling, filing it down. There are shavings on the back of the tongue. In the brain, too, a little cavity, a missing piece. If the iodine is not there, you go all puffy. I don’t remember what happens if you are deficient of gold. Sad, I guess.
I think of the medals on my chest, pure and heavy. You could bend them and rub off a mark like the crayon color of gold. Not like the metals I mix now — the silver amalgam. Silver expanding, the tin contracting, the copper’s strength, and the zinc for flow. All mixed with mercury. Not like gold. Gold is perfect. Gold does not discolor if kept clean. It resists crushing stress. It keeps an edge. It will not fracture.