WHAT JANET EVANS SAYS: When doing the backstroke flip turn, flip over onto your belly and then take the allowed one hand stroke before flipping at the wall. It will help you flip faster and increase your speed.
WHAT MISTY HYMAN SAYS (THIS IS REALLY HER NAME, EVEN THOUGH IT SOUNDS LIKE A NAME YOU WOULD FIND AT THE BOOB FEST): Think like a dolphin.
NUMBER OF SIT-UPS JANET EVANS DID EVERY DAY WHILE IN TRAINING: 1,000. Core strength is everything in swimming the fly, the kick not so much from the hip but from the whole body. Your body is a whip.
WHAT THE CHILDREN SAY: Enough, enough, enough of swimming!
WHAT WE SAY: Never enough!
WHAT GISELA LIKES TO DO: Go swimming.
WHAT THE COACH IS: A Seventh-Day Adventist.
WHAT I HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT: What it means to be a Seventh-Day Adventist.
WHAT I HAVE FIGURED OUT: The coach is a really good coach. The children have their swim team practice with him first. Then the wife and the team and I have our practice.
WHO HOLDS MY PAGER WHILE I’M SWIMMING IN CASE THERE IS AN ANIMAL EMERGENCY: Mia, who keeps the pager clipped to the waist of her pants, but she is so small and thin, the pager weighs her pants down and she has to keep lifting them up. When there is an emergency and the pager beeps, she comes to the end of my lane and throws a kickboard on my head to get my attention.
WHAT I DO WHILE SAM IS SWIMMING: Just watch him sometimes, the water sliding off his smooth back, the catch of his stroke underwater, speeding him along, the breaths he takes from both sides, his body working beautifully.
WHAT I FEEL AFTER I’VE SWUM: That my levels are low. I will live.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Victoria told me about the place in Costa Rica where they let you stay in cabins for free so long as you help with the turtles.
WHAT I SAY: What turtles? (Victoria is a woman at the pool who is always telling my wife things.)
WHAT SHE SAYS: The turtles that have come to the shore to lay their eggs in the sand. The eggs need moving before the tide comes and steals the eggs away. Let’s go, Jen says. Let’s stay in the cabins and stay up all night and help the eggs.
WHAT I SAY: That’s a vacation?
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Victoria said you can freeze chicken eggs. I never knew this before. You can crack them into ice cube trays to store them in the freezer. People don’t know these kinds of things, she said.
CALL: It’s the voice of the man who calls and hangs up. This time I am ready. After he says hello, I start talking. I tell him the schools I went to. I tell him the places I’ve lived. I tell him the name of my first stuffed animal. Now tell me, I say, just who are you that you keep calling my house and why do you want to know so much about me? The voice lets out the breath again, the breath that sounds like a seashell, and then the caller hangs up.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: I think I’ll work at the kids’ school.
WHAT THE COP SAYS WHO TAKES HER FINGERPRINTS SO SHE CAN WORK AT THE SCHOOL: You have almost no swirls on the pads of your fingers. I once knew a potter with the same problem. Working with the clay at the wheel had worn her pattern away. Are you a potter? the cop asks Jen.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Why, no. I type a lot, though, she said. I have maybe worn off the pads of my fingers with all of my stories.
WHAT I SAY: Sounds like you could commit a murder and get away with it.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Who did you have in mind?
WHAT I SAY: Why that doctor, of course. The one who wears pins, the one more gung-ho about my levels than our parallel universe.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Oh, I thought you’d say that hunter. Sam’s hunter, she says.
WHAT I SAY: No, not him. I am done with him.
WHAT THE WIFE WONDERS: When you take your ice cube tray full of frozen eggs out of the freezer, do you have to defrost the eggs first before you cook them, or do you just throw them onto the pan and they skate around on the surface before the heat of the flame starts to melt them?
CALL: No call. The phone hasn’t rung for two days. You see, I tell Jen. Nobody can afford to treat their animals anymore.
WHAT THE PHONE SAYS: Hah-hah-hah.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Your fly looks so fast!
WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO: Lift my head up above the water only high enough to get a breath in that pocket of air. My chin is really still in the water.
WHAT I AM THINKING: I am a dolphin.
WHAT THE DOCTOR DOES: Calls my house and talks to Jen.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: It’s been weeks, shouldn’t you go back to the doctor?
WHAT I DO: Shrug.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: All they want to do is test your levels again.
WHAT I AM: A dolphin. My feet are my tail. My body is in the shape of a sine curve.
WHAT THE WIFE SAYS: Maybe your levels are lower. Don’t you want to know that?
WHAT I WANT TO KNOW: How Misty Hyman keeps her head so low and her palms facing up to the sky in her recovery. I cannot keep my palms up to the sky for long because it hurts in the shoulders.
WHAT I SHOULD DO: Watch my Misty Hyman video over and over again.
WHAT VICTORIA SAYS: If your ring finger is longer than your forefinger, you’re good at competitive sports.
WHAT MY RING FINGER IS: Slightly longer than my forefinger.
WHAT VICTORIA SAYS: People who are fat are inflamed all the time. The fat presses in on them, causing the inflammation. Their bodies react to this. Their bodies are always working hard to fight the inflammation. Their bodies always feel like they’re sick.
WHAT MIA THINKS WOULD BE A GOOD NAME FOR THE MASTER’S SWIM TEAM: The Sea Slugs.
WHAT THE TEAM IS ALREADY NAMED: The Manta Rays. The logo on the swim caps, instead of looking like a manta ray, looks like a sperm traveling through its liquid medium.
WHAT THE COACH DOES: Takes care of a young man named Ted. Ted is in a wheelchair.
WHAT I DON’T KNOW: Why Ted is in a wheelchair. Ted is not right. It seems like whatever happened to him, happened long ago, before he was born, and just as his cells were beginning to divide.
WHAT TED SAYS TO ME: I do not know. I cannot understand Ted. While I am sitting in a chair on the pool deck watching the children swim, he sometimes holds a magazine or a catalog and he wheels his chair over to mine and points to the pictures and says something I do not understand. Sometimes the pictures are of cell phones or of cars. Maybe Ted is trying to tell me that he wants a cell phone, or that he wants a car.
WHAT TED DID ONE TIME: Fell into the pool in his wheelchair. He was removed quickly. Everyone jumped in to help him. He was smiling when we brought him up, and still holding onto his drenched catalog. Coach thinks that Ted may have released his brake on purpose. Ted likes the water. Ted likes to swim. Coach sometimes straps a flotation device to Ted’s waist and Ted gets into the pool and moves his arms to move through the water. Ted is always smiling when he’s swimming.