Occasionally a swim coach will show up. I always get the same question. “Did you compete?” I nod and dip back under quickly. It’s not a conversation I want to have any longer, and they often ask me about joining Masters Swimming. I don’t want to join Masters Swimming. I want just to be in water.
In the voiceless blue. In the weightless wet.
À La Recherché du Temps Perdu
SOMETIMES I THINK THINGS OUT IN THE TIME IT TOOK me to win a race. 200-meter butterfly: 2:18.04. How long it takes to walk from my car to my office. 100-meter breastroke: 1:11.2. How long it takes to brush my teeth. It’s what swimmers do. It’s muscle memory.
I remember things badly. When I look back, things are underwater, and when I pick them out and bring them to the surface they float around my idiotic attempts to drag them to land. I wonder what memory is, anyway. What writers are doing when they scratch at it. Usually I think of Proust, who tried to write a sentence about memory and ended up with seven volumes about nostalgia.
In psychology, memory is an organism’s ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. It lives in the head, lights up with synaptic firings, and travels the waters of the nervous system.
400-meter individual medley: 4:55.1. How long to nuke a frozen Lean Cuisine.
According to recent neuroscience studies, the act of remembering triggers nearly the same activities in the brain and its circuitry as the actual experience. They found this truth in rats and lemurs. Little wires sprouting from their heads.
However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience.
The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.
When my father drowned in the ocean it took me the time of winning the 100-meter breast stroke. To reach his body. By the time I had dragged him to shore, I’d won the 200-meter butterfly. By the time an ambulance came, I’d won the 400-meter individual medley, the length of time it takes brain cells to begin dying. The length of time for his heart to fail. For memory to leave. Hypoxia.
The rest of his life, of what he did to us, there was nothing left. Of who or what his daughter were or became, nothing. Of my mother, their courtship — he did have images. In a loop. Like film. Of his greatest architectural achievement, a shopping plaza in Trinidad, and the steel drum music and warm wet air and white sand and dark skinned women he’d found comforted his rage and disappointment, nothing.
My father lost his memory in the arms of his daughter the swimmer.
My mother was his caretaker in Florida until she got cancer and died. So in 2001 there he was, all alone in a house he barely recognized, facing the prospect of the State taking ownership of him and depositing him in a nursing home for the rest of his life.
Have you ever visited nursing homes in Gainesville, Florida? I have. Let me put it this way. Walking in the door of one brings a disgust to your throat like someone grabbed it. They smell like urine and dead skin and Lysol. The creatures tooling around in wheelchairs or “walking” down halls look befuddled. Like hunched over zombies. In the dining room women whose hair and lipstick are not on straight and men who’ve wet themselves shove pureed gruel in their mouths. But what makes them particularly hideous in a Floridian sense is the heat. The humidity. The air conditioning that doesn’t work quite right. The mold on the walls here and there. Cockroaches. Sometimes the old meat sacks sagging toward death in their beds are restrained.
Whoever I am, I am not a woman who could leave someone to rot in a place like that. Even him.
The grief I carried about my mother’s death lodged in me like a baseball I’d swallowed whole. Inside my treehouse sanctuary with Andy and Miles, every night I would dream about her. Every morning I would wake up feeling vaguely like I had been crying. But something else wedged itself between me and my new life. A word. Father.
The man I’d pulled from the sea and breathed life into.
The man without memory.
And so I saved his life a second time, or Andy did, in act of unmitigated compassion and heroism. He flew to Florida to get my father. Then they rode a plane all the way to Oregon together. Briefly they were detained at the airport security arch because my father would not let go of the faux metal box containing my mother’s ashes. He sat in his wheelchair and gripped them and shook his head no. Finally they let an old man through with what was left of his wife.
When Andy brought my father back to me I felt cleaved between two Lidias. A daughter, a tormented and damaged girl. And a woman, a mother, a writer whose life had just been born.
Andy and I found an assisted living facility about 20 minutes away from our sanctuary in the Bull Run Wilderness. The rooms were more like apartments than dungeons. His apartment had a giant window through which you could see fir trees and maple and alder — the Northwest. It was something I could give him that didn’t hurt.
My father lived a quiet life there for two years until he died. In the morning he would watch T.V. In the afternoon too. Sometimes he would just stare out the window at trees and smile. This man who took the place of the father I’d known before was sweet and docile and kind. Even his eyes were kind. Sometimes, I’d let him see Miles. I never saw the happiness that spread across his face like it did when he was with Miles. I mean in my life with him. Though I rarely let him hold my son, when he did, he looked like a miracle had happened. A boy.
A few times Andy and I brought him out to our house in the trees. He marveled at the architecture — muscle memory, I guess. He spoke of the way the light cascaded down the hand crafted wood stairs quite eloquently. The forest took his breath away. He said, “I love it here so much. I wish I could die here.” I think he meant to say “live” here, but I let it go. It was not something I could give him anyway.
I’d ask him about things when I’d drive him to do errands or to lunch — I’d say, “Daddy, do you remember being an architect?”
“I was an architect? No. No, I don’t think so. Was I?”
Or I’d say, do you remember the time when … and I’d try to choose something happy. Like the time he took my mother and me to Trinidad, where his greatest architectural achievement had happened. Steel drum music. A tortoise we saw lay eggs on the white sand beaches. Or living at Stinson Beach. Fruit trees in our yard. The ocean on the breeze. Or my sister singing in The Singing Angels Choir. Or classical music. Or baseball. To all of these he’d smile, sometimes he’d laugh, shake his head yes, maybe a glimpse of something. Mostly he’d stay quiet and look out the window of the car. Once he looked over at me driving and said, “Marilou?” His sister’s name.
“No Daddy,” I’d say, “I’m Lidia.”
“I know that,” he’d say, and laugh.
Among the meager boxes of things he’d brought with him — old photographs and miscellaneous “papers” and a drawing pad and a very fine assortment of pencils and pens — was my first published book. I found it in his room one day. I picked it up and said, “Huh. What are you doing with this thing?” The cover was worn.