How to Breathe Underwater Read online

  “Hi, gimp,” she says. There’s a smirk. I’d like to whack her with my new weapons. Instead, we head for the door and walk down Via Bufalini toward a café where I can find some breakfast. The sun is out, and the zanzare. Big fat ones. Unlike American mosquitoes, these actually hurt when they bite. It’s the huge proboscis. At least my ankle’s safe from that for a while.

  The doctor has prescribed normal activity, with caution until I learn to use the crutches better. It’s my first time on them—I always wanted them when I was a kid, but somehow managed to escape injury—and I think I will stay home as long as possible. Time to paint. No more vineyards. Aïda can do what she likes for the last two days of her visit.

  At the café we have a marble-topped table on the sidewalk, and a kind waiter looks at me with pity. He brings things we do not order, a little plate of biscotti and tiny jam-filled cookies. Aïda twirls her hair and looks at her feet. She is quiet today and has neglected to put on the customary makeup: something to make her lips shine, a thin dark line around the eyes, a pink stain on the cheeks. She looks almost plain, like anyone else’s cousin. She actually eats the free cookies and biscotti.

  Our waiter sets espresso cups on the table. Aïda’s growth will be stunted forever by the staggering amount of caffeine she has consumed in Florence. Of course her father doesn’t allow it, back home. “Does it hurt?” she asks, pointing at the ankle.

  “Not so much anymore,” I say. “All that good pain medicine.”

  “Too bad about the cast. I really mean it. They itch something awful.”

  Great.

  “Now, can I ask you one question, Aïda?” I say.

  “One.” She lifts her cup and grins at her sneakers.

  “What was all that malarkey about your mother? I mean, for God’s sake.”

  There’s a long silence. Her lips move slightly as if she’s about to answer, but no words come. She sets the cup down and begins to twist her hands, thin bags of bones, against each other. The knuckles crack. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “It was just something to say.”

  “It wasn’t just something to say. You broke into the house. And you made Joseph go with you.”

  “I didn’t make him do anything.” She frowns. “He could have stayed behind with you.”

  “You sorcered him, Aïda. You knew you were doing it.”

  Aïda picks up her tiny spoon and stirs the espresso, her eyes becoming serious and downcast. “I did look up my actual mother once,” she says.

  The admission startles me. I sit up in the iron chair. “When?”

  “Last year. After the accident. I imagined dying without ever knowing her, and that was too scary. I didn’t tell my dad about it because, you know, he wants me to see him as both parents.”

  “But how did you find her?”

  “There was a government agency. France has tons of them, they’re so socialized. A man helped me locate a file, and there she was—I mean, her name and information about her. Her parents’ address in Rouen. My grandparents, can you believe it?”

  I imagine a white-haired lady somewhere on an apple farm, wondering to whom the high, clear voice on the phone could belong. It sounds like the voice of a ghost, a child she had who died when she was twelve. She answers the girl’s questions with fear in her chest. Does a phone call from a spirit mean that one is close to death?

  “They gave me her phone number and address. She was living in Aix-en-Provence. I took a bus there and stood outside her apartment building for hours, and when it rained I stood in someone’s vestibule. I didn’t even know which window was hers. It’s just as well, I guess. She wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyhow.”

  I don’t want to believe this story. It seems designed to make me pity her. Yet there’s an embarrassment in her face that suddenly makes her look very young, like a child who has admitted to a misdeed. “Are you going to try again?” I ask.

  “Maybe sometime. Maybe after my career.”

  “That might be a long time.”

  “Probably not,” she says, her eyes set on something in the distance. “I’ll have a few good years, and I’d better make enough money to retire on. I don’t know what other job I could do.”

  I consider this. “So what will you do with yourself afterward?”

  “I don’t know. Go to Morocco with my father. Have kids. Whatever people do.”

  I think of those pictures of my uncle in couture evening gowns, his skin milky, his waist slender as a girl’s. His graceful fingers hold roses or railings or billets-doux; his hair hangs long and thick, a shiny mass down his back. He now wears turtlenecks and horn-rimmed glasses; there are veins on the backs of his hands, and his beautiful hair is gone. I wonder if such a thing can happen to Aïda. She seems eternal, the exception to a rule. Can she really be mortal? Even when she fell off the bridge and chanted fever songs I knew she would survive to see international fame. In the glossy pages of Signora Cellini’s magazines and those of women all over the world, she will never, never change.

  But here on the sidewalk at the café she bites a hangnail and looks again at my foot. “We should get you home,” she says. “You need some rest.” I wonder if she will survive what will happen to her. I wonder if she will live to meet her mother. There are many things I would ask her if only we liked each other better.

  One afternoon, perhaps a month after Aïda’s return to Paris, I buy a bottle of inexpensive Chianti and a round loaf of bread and head down to the ancient marketplace by the Arno. There, in the shadow of a high colonnade, the bronze statue of Il Porcellino guards the empty butcher stalls. It’s easy to move around on the crutches now, although the cobbled streets provide a challenge. I wear long loose dresses to hide my cast.

  At the center of the piazza the white-robed Moroccans have spread their silver and leather goods on immaculate sheets. They sing prices as I pass. Because I have some lire in my pocket, I buy a thin braided bracelet of leather. Perhaps I will send it to my cousin. Perhaps I will keep it for myself. Down by the river, pigeons alight on the stones and groom their feathers. I sit with my legs dangling over a stone ledge and uncork my round-bellied bottle, and the wine tastes soft and woody. It’s bottled by the Cellinis. It’s pretty good, certainly not bad enough to make them go broke. I drink to their health, and to the health of people everywhere, in celebration of a rather bizarre occurrence. Two days ago I sold a painting. The man who bought it laughed aloud when I said he had made a bad choice. He is an opera patron and food critic from New York, the godson of my painting professor back in the States. He attended our winter exhibition last January and happened to be visiting Rome when the Del Reggio gallery was showing our work.

  It is not a painting of Aïda dancing in the grapevines, her hair full of leaves. It is not an unapologetic self-portrait, nor a glowing Tuscan landscape. It is a large sky-blue square canvas with two Chagall-style seraphim in the foreground, holding a house and a tree and a child in their cupped hands. It is called Above the Farm. In slightly darker blue, down below, you can make out the shadow of a tornado. Why he bought this painting, I do not know. But there’s one thing I can tell you: Those angels have no feet.

  Although it’s interesting to think of my painting hanging in this man’s soaring loft in Manhattan, it makes me sad to think I will never see it again. I always felt comforted, somehow, looking at that child standing by his house and tree, calm and resigned to residence in the air. Five hundred feet off the ground, he’s still the same boy he was when he stood on the earth. I imagine myself sitting on this ledge with Aïda, when she is old and I am famous. She will look at me as if I take up too much space, and I will want to push her into the Arno. But perhaps by then we will love ourselves less fiercely. Perhaps the edges of our mutual hate will have worn away, and we will have already said the things that need to be said.

  The Isabel Fish

  I am the canker of my brother Sage’s life. He has told me so in no uncertain terms. Tonight as we eat hamburgers in the car on the w
ay to our first scuba class, he can’t stop talking about the horrible fates that might befall me underwater. This, even though he knows how scared I am after what happened last November.

  “You could blow out your eardrums,” he says. “Or your lungs might implode from the pressure.”

  “Shut up, Sage,” I say.

  “Did you know that one in twelve scuba divers gets attacked by sharks?”

  “Not in a pool,” I say.

  Sage is sixteen, plays drums, smokes unfiltered cigarettes, and drives his beat-up black Pinto to school every morning, with me practically hanging onto the rear bumper because I’m slow getting ready. I know he sees me as a problem, a younger and more stupid version of himself, and a girl, not popular, sort of plain, with my hair pulled back in a knot most days and a walk some people make fun of. He used to be cruel to me in the normal sibling sense, but now it’s worse. He is far from forgetting Isabel, and who can blame him? She’d been his girlfriend for six months before the accident, and it’s only been four months since. Four months is a short time in the grand scheme of things, shorter than it’s taken Sage’s shaved hair to grow long again, shorter than it’s taken me to grow twenty-six fighting fish from eggs for my science experiment, “The Relationship Between Aggression and Hypertension in B. Splendens.” I got the eggs one month before the accident. When I showed them to Isabel, red and clumped together in a small tank, she laughed and said she could hardly believe that bunch of caviar would become real animals. Well, guess what? They are now.

  Every day I feed them and give them liquid vitamins and alter their blood pressure with drugs, and still get my homework done and make it to school just as if I were fully recovered. Which I’m not, in many ways. My parents are aware of this. As a kind of remedy, they came up with the idea of a spring-break trip to St. Maarten in the Virgin Islands. We’re not a family that tends to take spring-break trips. We’ve never taken one, in fact. So when my father rose from his chair at the dinner table and asked Sage and me what we thought about going to St. Maarten, I took it to mean we’d reached a state of emergency.

  They’ve been talking about the problem between Sage and me for months, our psychologist mom trying to give us counseling, our dentist dad distracting us with jokes. Now scuba lessons, in preparation for the trip. What our parents don’t understand is that their son has become cruel and unusual, and he shows no sign of changing.

  We stop at a red light and Sage eats a handful of fries all at once. I stare out the window. Beneath the streetlights, snowflakes swarm like moths. It’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t winter. Sage crumples the greasy bag in his lap and tosses it into the back seat.

  “Anyone could fuck with your tank underwater,” he says. “One turn of a knob. That’s all it would take.”

  I lower my sandwich from the eating position. The feeling I remember is being in Isabel’s car with the water coming in, filling my mouth with its cold fishy taste, and me groping in the dark for my seat belt, my lungs already hot and tight, and Isabel in the seat beside me bleeding into the darkness. Sage must know what I’m thinking about, but he won’t look at me or say anything more. He revs the motor hard, three times, and then the light turns green and we’re off.

  At the YMCA I follow Sage into the lobby, where the chlorine smell of the pool stops me cold. Sage doesn’t notice. He doesn’t even look back. He just disappears down the hall toward the men’s locker room, leaving me standing there alone. I look at the trophies in a glass display case, silver swimmers and wrestlers and softball players, all frozen mid-sport. The lobby is full of kids and old people milling around and getting snacks from the machines. I sit down on a bench and think about my tropicals, my pet fish, the ones I don’t do experiments on. It calms me to imagine them swimming in their pH-balanced environments, the clown loaches loaching around near the bottom of the freshwater tank, the pearl gouramis flirting in a stand of bamboo plant. I have a marine tank too, with three yellow tangs and two fireworks anemones and a dusky angelfish. Tonight, for the first time, I’ll begin to know what my fish have known all their lives: how to breathe underwater.

  When I get calm enough I go to the women’s locker room and find an empty locker. All around me, teenagers are tying back their hair and putting their naked bodies into tank suits. Someone in the next row of lockers says she heard we’re not actually scuba-ing today, just learning about the equipment and doing some laps with fins to get used to the feeling. That makes me feel a little better. When I go to St. Maarten I will have my own fins, according to my father; we have already looked at examples in the window of Arbor Valley Sea and Ski, and I have admired a translucent blue pair with a matching mask. They seem like they’d be almost invisible underwater.

  Looking at those fins made it easy to imagine swimming, but now that I’m here at the Y it seems crazy. Sure, in St. Maarten there are a lot of fish you can see living their lives around coral reefs if you happen to know how to scuba. That kind of thing is attractive to an ichthyophile like me. But I am also a person who almost drowned. When my dad told us about St. Maarten, with its great diving, I wanted to ask if he and my mother were crazy. Did they think I would voluntarily walk into the ocean and let it close over my head? Before I could respond, my mother said she’d found us a scuba certification class at the Y. She and my father gave Sage and me these hopeful, anxious looks. I was speechless for a moment, and then I blurted, “Scuba?”

  “We think it’ll be good for you,” my mother said. “We think it’ll help you form positive associations with water.”

  “You don’t have to dive at all, of course,” my father said. “But we hope you’ll consider it.”

  After all their planning, how could I say no thanks? Even Sage, who for months had hated everything, seemed interested in the trip. The next day he called the Y and signed us up for scuba lessons, and the rest of the week he walked around with a strange half-smile on his face. Now I think he was already coming up with mean things to say to me, things that would make me feel as scared as I do now.

  As I get into my tank suit I cannot help noticing the mistakes of my body. The magazine look nowadays is breasts but no hips; I am the opposite. Thin, still, but with hipbones like cup handles. My chest is too flat, my legs too skinny, and there is a scar running the length of my left thigh. Under the water, car metal sliced me in a neat line. I didn’t even feel it. Only at the edge of the pond afterward did I look down and see the blood. One doctor sewed it badly in the emergency room, and another had to take the stitches out the next day and do it again. Meanwhile I was in a kind of trance, not wanting to believe what my parents had told me about Isabel. Now the scar is thin and white, like a dress seam. I turn my leg back and forth, looking. A dark-haired girl in a red suit notices, then glances away.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “It’s just a scar. You can look if you want to.”

  She bends down and looks, and when she meets my eyes again she seems unimpressed. “I also have a scar,” she says. She pulls her hair up to show me a jagged pink keloid at the back of her neck. It looks as if someone tried to cut her head off and failed.

  “Wow,” I say.

  The girl looks about my age, but she speaks like the Romanian women who work at the bakery near our house. “My sister threw a broken glass,” she says. “She was little, six years old.”

  “Ouch,” I say. “Are you in the scuba class?”

  “Yes,” she says. “You?”

  “Me and my brother.”

  I see her giving me a side-eye look, and it occurs to me that she might recognize my picture from the news or newspapers. Then I realize this is an extremely egotistical thought, given how many unfortunate things there are on the news and in newspapers over four months. She locks her locker and throws her towel over her shoulder, then adjusts the strap of her goggles. I realize there are probably only ten or fifteen minutes between me and the experience of getting underwater again. For a moment I wish my mother or father were here. Then I remember I am fourt
een and lucky to be alive.

  “Ready?” the girl says. And I am, I think.

  But nothing has prepared me for the experience of actually seeing the pool. It seems to go on forever, lanes and lanes of water strung with red-and-white dividers. Lines of black tile stretch along the bottom, all the way to the diving part of the deep end, where the water darkens to a holy blue. Sage is nowhere to be seen. I sit down on a bench and put my head between my knees to feel better. All around, the echoes of voices bounce off the water and the high ceiling. I’m hoping Sage will come out and just sit near me, and not say anything about messing with my tank, but when I look up again I see him talking to some guys at the other end of the bleachers, as far away from me as possible.

  The instructor is a college student, a girl with blond hair and muscular thighs. She wears two tank suits like they do on swim teams. My brother is obviously looking at her breasts, which surprises me because of how much I know he still misses Isabel. But I suppose certain things do not go on hold. As we learn the names of different parts of the gear, we are required to take notes in the small notebooks we bought for the class. The girl in the red suit sits beside me writing very neatly in her notebook. She writes buoyancy control device, pressure gauge, primary regulator, mouthpiece, with small pictures next to each word. I try to make mine as neat as hers. We learn what seems to be a basic fact but one I never knew, that scuba stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Over on his end of the bleachers, Sage is writing fast and using a lot of pages. Later he won’t be able to read what he wrote and will come crawling to me for help. In my notes I write Too bad your handwriting sucks so much, Sage! but then I cross it out, thinking of how Isabel saved all of Sage’s notes to her, those scrawls on torn notebook paper that they found in a Japanese box under her bed.

  When we have gone through the basic principles of the equipment, the instructor invites us down to select a pair of flippers. At first it looks like there won’t be enough to go around. I wait until everyone has a pair, then take my own, realizing nothing will save me now from going in the water. The girl in the red suit clomps around with her toes turned out. “Like a duck,” she says, and smiles at me.