Albatross

After twenty-five years and an hour of cash bar drinks, the ballroom-sized venue is stuffed with chatter and assessment. From classmate to classmate, you listen to the stories fat with nostalgia or self-regard, all of them rooted in achievement. You nod and smile and sometimes spew your own stories, pleased by the attention. Your wife, who graduated a thousand miles from here, has slimmed down for the evening. As if she is here to discover your past, she listens more closely than you to what your classmates say. She follows your eyes from woman to woman.

More than an hour, it takes, for the classmate you dreamed about in biology, chemistry, and physics to reach you. After graduation, all summer at the pool, she was a lifeguard, but you only imagined her in a swimsuit because you worked a union factory job. Also, if you were honest, because you couldn’t swim. Regardless, your wife is comparing her to the yearbook photos you have shown her more than once.

You feel sixteen again, nearly afraid, but she talks as if you were more than a dreamer, plunging into her story about another boy who could not swim. Hand-over-hand, she says, that boy must have edged to deep water along the dock that claimed part of a lake for the summer camp where she worked after college. No matter the reason, he’d lost his grip and gone under while she’d scolded another boy for running, adding a minute between her whistles for buddy checks. “Last warning,” she quotes herself saying to the running boy. “Don’t let me see that again.”

For twenty-two years now, she says, her dreams often have soundtracks of whistles and screams. Always, there is water-with-shadow, a still life. She wakes with what feels like a heavy weight yoked over her arms. Twice each night, she rises to check the breathing of her four children who sleep paired in two rooms.  A trilling in her ears insists that she evaluate the pillows, examine the chests for the temporary relief of rise and fall.

You don’t mention a word about how, though you still can’t swim, you have practiced CPR on a dummy called Mike Muscles, bringing him back from the dead with your hands and breath because you coach something as landlocked as a tennis team. “Imagine yourself watching a boy dragged from a swimming pool,” the class instructor had told you. “Imagine your well-trained hands on his chest is the only way to resurrect him.”

Now, you don’t say a word at all, but you notice she is looking at your name tag, her mouth forming and then reforming the three difficult syllables of your last name. As she begins to turn away, your wife says, “Michael and I are both so sorry.”

The woman lays one hand on your wife’s arm. “Safety is impossible,” she says, her voice hushed as if speaking only to your wife. “There’s no shame in the inability to comfort.”