This is Water

Couples sit and face the sun. Young people talk in a circle: a yellow one, a blue one, a green one, a brown one. The thing about epiphanies is that they’re nearly impossible to keep to yourself, and thereafter, they’re regarded at best as good ideas, at worst, common sense. Maybe the most important thing about having one is that you share it with the right person.

200 years before Christ, the Greek King, Heiro II, asked Archimedes, a mathematician, to see if his crown was pure gold or whether a dishonest blacksmith had mixed it with silver. To calculate the crown’s density it would have to be melted down—but Archimedes could not damage the crown. He was on a deadline and he had reached an impasse, so, worn out from puzzling, Archimedes sought refuge in the tub. But he was distracted and when he lowered himself in, the water spilled over the sides. He stood up, looked down and cried, “Eureka!” He had found the solution to the big problem by solving the smaller one. By dividing the mass of the crown by the volume of water displaced, he could figure its density—by weighing himself, teleologically speaking, he had weighed gold. That’s a golden idea. And he could have made a lot of it if he’d kept it to himself. But he did not even take time to dress before he took to the streets yelling, “Eureka! Eureka!” which translates to “I found it! I found it!”

I was wading in, bending over to toss the water with my hands. I wanted to see how other parts of me looked below the surface, but I could not see my feet through the moving water. And then I looked away and thought of the other things—the things one cannot help but think. And then I looked up at my mother’s bronze cheeks and her satisfied eyebrows and eyes that were savoring the flavor of the coffee in her mouth, and the nice summer weather, and the view from our street-side table at the cafe. I would like to take pleasure from such simple things. And then I looked down and I could see my feet and the rocks that stretched out underneath them. The solution to things, I think, is forgetting them for a while and then remembering.

“I don’t know.”

“What?” she said. And her eyes thinned, and I could not answer, and then she was standing in a lake too.

“Come in! Come in!” my mother was yelling from the shore. It was during the heat wave of 1995. We’d left Chicago for the Indiana Dunes to relax, swim, and cool off. “Riptide! You’re too far out! Honey! Rip! Tide!” People stood on their beach blankets saluting while others ran along the water. The water was fresh and dark out by the rocks, slapping against the rocks, and I knew that I was afraid. My mother was wading in. We often camped near lakes. Mom likes the woods—I used to assume, because my father was like the woods, but now she likes it on her own and she likes to swim—much more than me, but she does not like it all at once. She likes to wade.

You know how it feels when you’re walking into a lake or an ocean? Sometimes I can’t help but do it, but it never feels good—with the waves deciding how to touch and when. It was torture to watch Mom feeling so cold for so long—and so needlessly—so I would prove how silly she was by running out to the point where the water took my legs, lower my head into the darkness and push out hard underneath with my legs and arms with my eyes open, staying below until it felt alright to have been swimming, and then come up, wipe water from my eyes, turn to the beach to get my bearings and then see how things were in the same place they were before, but also not where I thought they would be. It bothered me so much sometimes, watching her tremble and wade, that I’d raise an arm and slap the water. “Just get in!” I would yell and she would smile and say that she was. She was taking her time. So I would go back to the beach and lay down on a towel and shut my eyes. Sometimes I would splash her—I don’t know why, because it ruined the whole day for her. She would walk back out and sit on the beach, looking like a stubborn child, and I would stay in the water because it seemed like I had to. Floating in one place, guilty and angry that we’d switched places.

“Do you ever feel like you’re being torn apart?”

“In what way?” she said, and I realized that I had asked her a question. But she knew I was not really asking her, and that familiar anxiety I feel when I think about how things change without me came in, and I retreated into my well-worn thought: What would I be like if I’d had an insensitive parent. A drunk that beat me, abused me, or withheld kindness. What could be wrong with me then? I suppose I would not have much time to think of that.

“Forget about it,” I said. The day was passing on. People rose into the white reflecting light of the glass tables and floated from the cafe back into the street looking a little uncomfortable and off-balance until righted by the crowd that swallowed them. It was still a nice day, but it did not feel all-nice anymore. I had not meant to alarm her. It was nice out. The street was full of faces. I really did not mean to alarm her. I pointed to a little boy who was throwing a misshapen ball against the ground. He watched in amazement as it bounced from the sidewalk to the grass, against the fence, zigzagging unpredictably until it rolled to a stop along the curb. He ran after it. A voice caught him from behind and he stopped and dropped his head and his mother picked the ball up and asked him: "How many times have I told you to stay away from the street?"

Why do children collect things on the beach? Show mother a shell and she keeps it. Give father a stone and he casts it across the surface of the water. There are plenty of good rocks. Some are great, flat as pancakes, and smooth and cool against your palms, good to hold but better to throw. And then you know how good you are at skipping stones.

We were both looking at the spot where the boy had been when she said, “I remember when you were just a little guy. It seems like yesterday you were—” she was struggling for the words “—like this!” she said, and placed her palm face-down several feet from the ground and squinted at me and looked old and smiled. She lowered her coffee seriously. “I used to wonder what you would look like grown up. I had these dreams where this man would be walking toward me down the other side of the street and I would look closely and realize it was you. All grown up." 
"How did I look?"

“Well, you were just so cute as a kid. Then, you still are. You've always been very handsome.”

“But don’t all moms think that about their sons?”

“Well,” she said, and looked sort of school-girlishly up at the sky, squinting, weighing what she thought about her son, and what other mothers thought about their sons. “It doesn't mean you’re not.”
We were not talking about what I wanted to talk about. How does that happen? Right. The boy and his ball. Gone now. The ball pulling the boy along the shaded elms. 
Many fish probably think there are fish shaped like human feet that live in shallow water. Many fish probably think there are fish shaped like the-fish-shaped-like-human-feet that are bigger and have legs and live in deeper water. Many fish probably think that there are fish shaped like the-fish-bigger-than-the-fish-shaped-like-the-fish-shaped-like-human-feet that thrash against the ceiling of the water and then swim below, with heads and arms and faces just like people, far deeper than any fish.

We were standing on the beach together when I was very young. Someone was taking our picture, and it is from the pictures that I remember that day. I don’t know who was taking the pictures. We were wearing jackets and long pants. Mom’s hair was permed and frizzy and we both looked ugly. We stood side by side and faced the camera. The sun behind the clouds made the look of grimaces on both our faces. It was a brisk fall day on the East Coast, the ocean behind us had whitecaps, shortly after my father died.

Have you heard the story of the three fish? It goes like this. Two young fish were swimming along when they came upon an old fish headed in the opposite direction. The old fish paused and said, “How’s the water? but he did not stop and the two young fish continued on their way. Then one of the young fish stopped and asked his friend “What the hell is water?”

I did not want to swim. It was a cold day and the water was grey and choppy, but Mom said she had to, at least, put her feet in. She looked at Gary and I and said, “We’re at the beach!” And we were. But it was fall and the whole surface of the water was wide. Repeating a cycle of grey, dark grey, and white. And the wind-whipped waves at the point of the sun on the horizon, the point where I often like to look (and maybe everyone does) did not seem distant from the place where my mother was walking. The waves crashing on the waves at the shore, and the seagulls above turning sideways, then righting as their bodies to go limp against the wind. I wanted to tell her to come back, to yell out, but the trees were yelling out, blowing toward the water, and I did not know how to say the words. “Oh boy,” Gary said, nervously, as she kicked off her sandals, “she’s going to be cold.” He did not know her well at all. And when I looked up, she dove in.

I wanted to apologize, for everything, but I looked down and found myself sitting where I wanted to be sitting, with everyone across from me smiling in the sunshine and enjoying themselves, so I did not say that I was sorry—because suddenly I did not know what I was sorry for after all; I did not wish for rain, or for time to speed up or to slow down. We would stay late together if we wanted, drink coffee, talk or sit in silence—one and then the other. The beach is pretty today. The wind is not hot or cold. And the air and the water where all the children are swimming is blue.