Nicola Evans Skidmore
Dive
Pam planned to miss Todd altogether, or at least to ride the bus’s loop around town until she had thought up some cutting remarks. In the past, witticisms had turned him, reminded him of why he has lived with her for a year. But when she gets to the apartment, he is still in it, and she can only sit on the sofa and watch him clear his desk. Last to go is the framed photograph of a black sea receding in fingers from a white shore. To do his best thinking and writing, Todd needs beautiful and stirring things around him. Although she hates his things, she fears that having them pulled out from under her will be like being skinned.
Todd puts the last box in his car and comes back up to say goodbye. Pam reminds him that the volleyball team she coaches plays in the city championships at four o’clock tomorrow.
I’d still really like it if you came, she says. It would mean a lot to the girls.
To Pam’s team of high schoolers, she and her private life are curiosities. They have never met Todd and are content to know of him only what Pam tells them, which is that he works extraordinarily hard and has no time to watch volleyball games. But Todd’s mouth curves down the way it does when he’s considering something, so maybe she has managed to be clever after all. He has written his new phone number on a three-by-five card. In the weeks since he decided to leave, they have talked little, and the wince he makes as he hands over the card, a whisper of air through his teeth, seems very loud. Now he is explaining that the boorish, beer-drinking philosophers with whom he will be living will make finishing his dissertation extremely hard.
But that was my own bastard choice, he says. Wasn’t it.
You’re really going?, is all she can get out, in the end.
Many times, she watched him fall asleep, and the phases his face went through were always the same. The slanted line between his eyebrows—the mark of him, really, in his fervent waking life—faded slowly out. Then, with his freckles and slight frown, he ended up looking as he must have looked when he was nine years old. At that age he would have been already brainy but not yet afraid of failing. She wanted only to caress him, not physically so much as with the fist of her heart. Sometimes she thought that if she had had a brother, she wouldn’t have been so undone when a man put his arm around her, which Todd did for the first time behind the counter of the bakery where she worked. It was near campus and he often studied at one of the little granite tables Pam wiped clean. One night at closing time, when she expected him to pack up his books as usual, he simply stayed, and they sat at the little granite table in the window while the lights in facing shops flicked out. When he asked, she told him why she had left the university just a year shy of graduating. His being a fourth-year Ph.D student didn’t make him think her strange. It wasn’t for you, he said. She said, It wasn’t. She told him about the books she was reading on her own, and how she loved the Greek alphabet. Todd agreed: there were indeed many things to appreciate about that language. She personally liked each letter to the degree that it could be written in one hook-and-loop flail.
His kiss was precise and attentive, and he didn’t kiss her until they had sat at the little granite table together six or seven times, and it was seven more times before he asked her to come to his tiny garret and stay. He smelled to her like something she didn’t understand, like his own warm time, not spring or summer, but a season unto himself. She was glad to pack her own bedlinens away, as they rasped her skin and smelled of nothing. The plan was for him to finish, publish and begin to teach by the following year. Several institutions had already expressed an interest, and it was just a matter now of pushing through. Pam got to bring home all the pastries that came out deformed and unsalable. Todd would take a break and say, munching, This is what pleases me most, and she would wipe the sugar from his mouth, unsure whether he meant herself or a donut. She believed she knew what he meant. He told her, I need steadiness from you if I’m going to carry on.
When she would walk home in twilight along the main street of the university, she had to be careful of joggers, who sometimes jostled her from behind. She walked past the university gymnasium, where a handwritten sign on the door announced community rec volleyball. The sign curled at the corners and faded more each week. Pam peered through the double doors at people scrambling amidst the shriek of their shoes. She had looked in her storage box at the back of Todd’s closet for her volleyball things, the soft cottons and spandex, the kneepads gone to gray, but found none. One night she went into the gym and took a ball from a large trash can full of them. It was light and the leather had been worn down to a scruffy skin. There was no obligation, the people at the sign-in table said. New teams formed every week. Everything else was just as she remembered it, too, from when she had come here to keep her skills fresh during the high school off-season. Here were the middle-aged people happily chatting as they laid their work jackets and briefcases aside. And she had remembered correctly the casual format: three games were always going at once, and people could switch teams whenever they wanted. When it came time to rotate into the back row, she simply moved to the next court over and started again in the front left side. By the end of the night, people were smiling when she appeared on their court. Sometimes, when she got a really nice set, she hit the ball down so steeply that she might have thought she’d failed the clear the net, were it not for the other team’s groans and beaten faces. She had forgotten the warm whooping press of a team after a good play, and the sting of her palm from slapping others’. When a group asked her out for a beer afterward, she laughed and said something about needing to be up early for work. She took these friendly voices home, the happy clamber and press of the makeshift teams repeating in her head.
Todd’s dissertation depressed him, mostly because by the time he had finished it someone else would have had the same thoughts and published them. But what were the chances, when his subject -- shadow and identity in nineteenth-century detective fiction -- was so taxingly complex? Just write it, Pam told him, and it will be its own thing. She kept volleyball to once a week and the other nights sat where she could watch his narrow back leaning over his desk. She read several novels at a time to keep pace, and her high school’s monthly alumnae bulletin, which she got in the mail. It was interesting to look through because Saint Anne’s girls had changed so much. In the glossy black-and-whites, the volleyball team were all long legs and lustrous ponytails. Pam’s teammates had been ordinary, plumpish girls with shy smiles. When she showed Todd to give him an idea of the game, he said, Which were you?, pointing to girls in various stances of play. Whatever Pam had been, it was not in any of those pictures. She was alarmed to see, among the job openings listed on the back page, one for volleyball coach. Something must have happened to Coach Nicely. Todd was alarmed to see it mentioned, in the captions under the academic pictures, that this or that young teacher was herself a graduate of Saint Anne’s. Children model their lives on adults, he said. All they’ll learn from these people is how to move backwards.
At last, Todd put the bulletin in the recycling and got back to his dissertation. His advisors were giving it very favorable reviews. The hard part was still to come, he said, but Pam could tell he was close to bursting with pleasure and pride. She thought she would make a quick call, just to stop her imagination from wandering. The principal of Saint Anne’s School was sorry to have to inform her that Coach Nicely had died. Pam stopped listening for a moment, then. In her mind, Nicely’s square form walked up the concrete steps to his office above the bleachers, and disappeared around a corner that wasn’t there. When she started listening again, the principal was lamenting how many of Nicely’s former players had lost interest in volleyball and committed themselves to other things. The competitive season started in one month, he said, and the girls were entirely up in the air.
She thought she would tell Todd about the job offer right away, mostly because she was tempted not to.
That’s not even funny, he said. Your old high school.
Pam had been a player you could count on, the principal had said, and a nice kid, too. He didn’t know anything, but still his words made her feel better about going to rec play again. She didn’t remember her forearms burning quite this badly ever before, but it seemed only right that at the very least her arms should sting and her calves get burned against the floor. She was telling lies, stories of large tart orders that demanded her entire evening twice each week. Even when she actually was rolling and cutting tart dough, she was thinking about whether she might not be in a month or two. She hoped that, besides herself, it was true what the people at rec play said, that they never got anyone new. Someone new wouldn’t be able to dive after a stray ball and hook it backwards over his head right to where it needed to be for Pam’s palm to redirect it crisply into the other team’s far back corner. She was beginning again to trust the pattern of games, the inevitable sloppy start and the click of rhythm kicking in, and she believed this was something she could explain to other people how to do.
One night, Pam came home, bathed herself, and stood in the living room. Todd’s back was a thin line rising up from his chair. He was so close now to getting everything he had ever wanted, and she wondered whether the atmosphere inside him was quieter or noisier than usual. Things inside her seemed about the same as always, but she wanted to ask him how one judged. She stood for a little while taking her bearings by the desk, the sofa and a tall lamp, which was throwing a blurry, curved shadow. Then she took one step toward the narrow back and put her arms around it.
At two minutes before the start of the championship match, Mary DeForrest has still not appeared, and Pam has to hand in her line-up to the referee anyway. The usual five starters, plus one to replace Mary, are already in the deep crouches Pam has taught them to assume during serve receive: arms straight out, non-dominant foot forward, heels at least an inch off the floor. A few also stretch their thumbs toward the net and unfurl their fingers downward. As always, the sight of this moves Pam. She knows their stomachs are hang-gliding inside them. Attention to detail is her way of managing that feeling, too. As she sits on the bench, she leans forward over her knees as she has seen coaches do. If Mary DeForrest wanted to, she could play in the NCAA next year, possibly even for a Division I school, but Mary has expressed a senseless interest in attending a tiny liberal arts college in Maine. Today was to be the day Pam told Mary DeForrest just what she thinks of a person who would throw a gift like hers away, and she still will tell her this, along with some other pieces of her mind, as soon as Mary gets here.
The Holy Family all jump-serve, which is mostly for show and should not be a problem. But every time the server steps far back behind the line and tosses the ball spinningly and high, Pam’s girls panic. Their arms come up under the ball too early and at an odd angle, and it flies off into the bleachers again and again. Pam’s throat feels heavy, as though she has been screaming, though she has barely said a word all afternoon. Her patchwork phrases of encouragement make her wonder where the real coach is hiding, under what pressed suit and smooth hair. She has drilled serve-receive with the team every day for the past three months, and still they skitter and scream at each other after a botched play, and fan their faces in frantic disgust. Overall, they have seemed to like Pam, even if they think she’s a little weird for coming back to this place from which they all are dying to get away. They have expressed interest in her life outside of school, whether it is a happy one. They relish drama, and Pam knows the lack of Mary excites them and that they almost believe their errors are the result of good, aggressive play.
At the break between the first and second games, Pam asks her setter, Cass Ryan, whether she wants to lose this match. Cass’s eyes fly wide open and she shakes her head no. But can Cass deny that every time a Saint Anne’s player has gone up for a hit, there without fail have been four Holy Family hands to block it? Four hands above the top of the net, fingers fanned and overlapping to form a lovely, momentary wall? It would take a Mary DeForrest to push through such a strong block, so Cass is going to need to start playing with some brains, and quickly. Pam clasps the ugly unfairness of what she is saying to her chest, along with the clipboard she never writes on. With heartbreaking politeness, as if Pam might honestly have missed them, the others point out how many errors they made on serve-receive. A few are peering over Pam’s head toward the top of the bleachers and a few are murmuring cynically into one another’s hair. Is he coming? someone says. The edges of the clipboard bite Pam’s hands. It is still early, she thinks. She will take a quick look. She checks the Saint Anne’s side, then the Holy Family’s side of the bleachers. When Todd gets on a roll with his work, he can’t just take off and leave it. He has not yet arrived, but then the game has barely begun.
The one match Todd attended, Pam pointed out to the girls the top of his hair like ocean foam in the back row of the bleachers. They thought they saw him, but they weren’t sure. They asked her why he sat so far away. When she explained through growing impatience that he had work on his mind and could only stay for a little while, the girls shook their heads as sadly as old wives. She remembered from being that age the need to pretend she understood more than she did about grown-up things. Over the course of that game, she felt prouder and prouder of Todd, and that he was her boyfriend. He could so little tolerate the loud jarringness of sports that he had to sit in the back row, but he had come anyway! She would have liked it if he had sat close enough to see the goodness in the girls’ faces and the adultness of her relations with them. She pushed them to try plays that shouldn’t have worked, but somehow they did. That night was the night Todd told her he was moving out, so she forgot to ask him what, if anything, he had thought or seen.
Today, when she tells the girls that Todd would very much like to meet them after the match if he is able to make it, they roll their eyes. They denounce men spittingly, once and for all. Pam fills her voice with a lilt of looking-forward. He really admires you, she says. He was so impressed last time. Some of them won’t meet her eye and she has to remind herself that there is no way they can possibly know. She has been so careful to tell them only happy things, so that they would look ahead to their lives without fear and not make, as she has done, a mess out of a good thing.
We don’t need her!, the team cries when Pam says she is going to try to track Mary down. She flies up the bleacher stairs and into the athletic office, which was once Coach Nicely’s and is now hers, a fifteen-by-fifteen room with a desk, telephone, and stainless steel trash can. The room smells to her of the first time she set foot in this gym, for tryouts her freshman year, of numbing fear and tickling anticipation, both inside her ribcage at the same time. Nicely kept the beige walls bare, so she has put up a calendar and some NCAA championship posters. The tones of Mary’s home phone number in Pam’s ear recall a cheerful children’s tune. When Nicely kept Pam after practice to teach her how to dive, they would start out in this room. Morning after morning in the locker room, she had to stand by while her teammates showed off the bruises that had bloomed overnight in wonderful purples on their hipbones. Nicely would talk to her about the needfulness of sacrificing the body for the game, then they’d go down to the gym floor for a demonstration. She remembers how it embarrassed her that he was willing to demonstrate so many times. He was in his mid-fifties then, and still rode his chest like a surfboard, although by her senior year he was picking himself up a little less easily.
If Mary answers, Pam will tell her what a phenomenal diver she is. She is not sure she has ever said as much to Mary’s face. She will tell Mary that her dives look as natural and inevitable as a wave landing on the beach. The phone stops ringing but there is no outgoing voice mail message and no one speaks. Pam says who she is and that she is looking for Mary DeForrest.
Oh, shit, says a young man’s voice, which Pam recognizes by its soft roughness as that of Mary’s boyfriend, Rich, who plays volleyball for the boys’ school across town. Rich always looks like he’s strategizing when he watches Saint Anne’s practice, his dark bangs falling more over one eye with the serious tilt of his head. He has been recruited by a Division I school. The other girls have noted in wonder that Rich always looks only at Mary when she’s speaking.
She said you’d never call yourself, Rich says. I only had to worry about someone from the secretary’s office, and tell them she was sick in bed.
Down in the gym, feet are drumming in the bleachers. The second game is supposed to start. Pam wonders whether it would start without her, and whether the game would really be happening, and in what sense, if she decided to stay in here for the rest of the afternoon.
Where is she? Pam says.
You’re not a very experienced coach, Rich says. I mean, that’s cool and all. But did you really think Mary could play six positions all by herself? I mean, if you’re honest with yourself.
Where is Mary? Pam says. May I speak to her?
She lied to me, Rich says. She told me she was never going to give up until she was a great volleyball player.
Can’t I talk to her? Pam asks.
Rich says he has tried, but frankly, he is about ready to give up on Mary DeForrest. He wouldn’t even be helping her out today, except that this championship game is a joke. One of Mary’s early mistakes, he says, was to go to a losing school like Saint Anne’s.
Just tell me where she is, Pam says.
She’s gone, Rich says. Are you happy? She couldn’t take what you were asking of her any more.
He throws something, or maybe it’s just something brushing across the mouthpiece of the phone. He says Mary is going to Maine in a few weeks, to get a look at the college, but that she has already made up her mind. Pam tries to picture where Rich is, but she can only see volleyball things, as if Mary’s room were a sporting goods store. She tries again and sees a gray bed, gray carpet and walls painted soft blue. Where is she? she asks again, above the drumming of the feet, ten times louder now in her head and underneath her, but he has hung up.
The day after her senior year championship game, Coach Nicely called Pam into his office for the last time. He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. It seemed she was supposed to say something, but she didn’t know what. She understood why it had happened the way she understood why she looked like her parents. She was not a diver and so she did not dive. She hated that she had let him waste so much time on her. When he finally spoke, he said he hoped she would continue to play. She felt it was better that she not say anything. The last she saw of him was his wide chest, and the sweat marks across his bright blue T-shirt and under the arms. The last ball of that last game had gone up very high into the air over Pam’s back corner, but by the time the others started screaming her name it was a very low ball, and it would have taken a dive, not a far-flung proper one, but just a little slide under the ball, which Pam could have done, she knew, but at the time what she was thinking was no, and then with its dull little sound, the ball landed, bounced, and the whistle blew its harsh sound that was three notes blurring into one.
There are two ways to lose a volleyball game: in a chain of mistakes that each feed the next, or in a flash at the end. The chain method makes for a sadder but perhaps, Pam thinks, a more realistic game. When she comes out of the office, Cass Ryan is standing at the serving line bouncing the ball in the obsessive way all the girls do to calm their nerves. The referee glares at Pam for holding up the start of game two and blows the whistle the moment she gets to the sideline. Pam wonders whether she could have done something differently with the team from the very start. Cass raises her hand in the flat way Pam has taught her, and lets loose a perfect floater. It’s textbook, with that little quiver in the air that’s supposed to make it harder to receive. It is lovely and perfect until it taps the net on its way across. Cass shoots Pam a pained look, asking for forgiveness. Pam hates the signal she must give the ref for a time-out, hands crossed in a “T”; it makes her wonder what she is trying to ward off. She tells the girls to stop expecting Mary. She tells them that if they are going to serve into the net, there is nothing she can do to help them. As soon as this is over, she thinks, she will tell the principal not to count on her for next season. She is wondering whether, if she hurries home, she can hurry back out again, how quickly, and to where. In the time it takes for Holy Family to get the ball and take it to their line, Pam turns and looks at the top row of the bleachers. Between the shoulders of strangers are only many more strangers, come to see what she will do.
©2003 by Nicola Evans Skidmore
