Untitled

I remember that Lara and I used to go to the rock quarries to dive. We were 12, then 13, then 15. We didn't go the year we were 14, because that was the year that Lara's dad was always drunk, and pissing out by the pool because he couldn't make it to the house. Lara and I would cling to the edge of the pool in the deep end, with the very ends of our fingertips, heads as low in the water as we could get them, silent as we could be, hoping not to be seen. We didn't go to the rock quarries that year because Lara's mom was always screaming at her dad and then crying alone in her bedroom, and neither of us felt like being around her, but we also didn't think we could leave her. So we just hung out in the margins of the house and tried not to be seen.

At 12 and 13 we just did pencil dives, banana split dives, nothing head first. Then we were watching some TV show and one of the characters did a huge swan dive off a cliff and into the ocean. We were hooked. It took us hundreds of jumps and watching and commenting on each other to figure out how to do it. We never quit on it, even when each of us took a couple of turns almost killing ourselves at it. We got scared but we never stopped doing it. We did it every single day all that summer. I don't know what it was for her, but for me it was that long trajectory of so much relaxation, in the midst of so much simple and elegant control. An arc, like life, and then a good death.

Those rock quarries were so shitty. Little caves here and there in the woods full of graffiti and empty beer cans and broken glass. Poison ivy. Scrubby oak trees, hard little well-worn foot paths crisscrossing all over. Low stone walls running at angles with each other. Hardly any birds at all.

There were three pits in the quarries. Two were too narrow to swim or dive in. The third one was huge and square. A small cliff above that you could edge out on to get up and over it. Black-green water, freezing cold, never in the sunlight. Not a trace of frog or lily pad or bullrush or anything alive at all. An old knotted prickly rope that someone had tied to a tree draped over the quarry edge and just touching the surface of the water, the only way to get out once having gone in, hand over hand to haul yourself up the side.

We would walk to Lyman's pharmacy and buy a roll of the thickest medical tape they had. Sometimes it would be papery, sometimes plasticky, and sometimes kind of silky. It was always white. When we got to the quarries we would drop our shorts and pull off our shirts and hang them over tree branches. We always had our bathing suits on underneath, already. Then we would tape up our wrists as tight as we could stand it, until they were nearly rigid. We would rip the tape with our teeth to cut the ends.

When you hit the water, your hands would be in front of you, one hand grabbing the opposite wrist to brace it for the impact. And without the tape you would be guaranteed a mild sprain by the end of a few dives, from the force of the water snapping your wrist back, no matter how much you braced for it.

I remember that. I remember that perfect. The overcast sky and the too-still woods. Standing at the very edge of the cliff and looking into that opaque water. Being scared and happy and a little sad at the same time. Then bending your knees as deep as you could, and trying to pop up fast and hard and out. And then not feeling any feelings at all.

Falling and spreading arms as far out as they would go. Flying. Nothing but nothing, air, chest, lungs, arms, fingers fanned and extended and splayed like flight feathers. Thighs and ankles squeezing so hard together.

Popping your eyes open, searching for the water. There. Fast fast fast arms forward, head down, chin tucked, shoulders against ears, left hand grabbing tape on right wrist, grabbing and squeezing and making both arms into one, making a blade out of your fingers.

Then the shock of impact, and another shock of cold, and another shock at the deepness and the dark. Waiting for the dive to stop, underwater. Resisting the urge to kick for the surface, because you can't see the surface, and because you don't know where up is. Rising panic with air hunger as you wait to neutralize, then rise, showing you where is up. And then kicking and kicking for up. Swimming for the rope, scraping feet on the sheer vertical rock while hand-over-handing. Then watching Lara go, standing wet and shivering with dirty feet.

I remember that, although nothing in my life now should bring it to mind. No quarries, no shitty woods, no drunks and crying and pissing, no cliffs, no being 15 with a bathing suit on underneath clothes. It comes back exactly though, everything about it, usually when I'm driving a long drive. I remember the feel of the swanning, arms out and chest and heart bared, and it still makes me feel happy, and a little bit sad, and not really scared anymore.

And when I get out of the car, I sometimes will reach for my right wrist with my left hand, and brace it. I'll brace it when I'm talking to someone about something big or sad, or when I am alone in the basement and its cold, or under the table when everyone is having drinks and laughing very loud. It calms me to do that. To take care of myself, in that one little way, even now.