the Nixionary

Summer evenings arrive here with a bank of clouds pouring blue-gray over the mountains. When I swim after work, it’s a race between me and those clouds, back and forth-ing with one or two other people in the warm water. Sometimes I have to swing out of the way of kids slapping the surface with their hands or those bendy foam noodles, but recently, a little girl swam right next to me, lap by lap, matching me stroke for stroke. I did breaststroke, she did breastroke. I did freestyle, she did freestyle. On the wall, she panted, and we smiled at each other before pushing off again. For a split second looking at her, I saw me there, tanned and tiny, 7 or 8 years old, and eager for everything, especially being noticed. Even if just barely.

The other night, my friend Lizzy and I were talking in her car in a parking lot, and a car pulled up next to us with two strangers in it, a woman and a man. The woman had her hair piled on one side of her head. She shook it so it centered. Her tank top twinkled. He looked straight ahead. The woman looked like she had a little bit of that girl in the pool in her. She looked like a woman who was trying to get kissed.

“Isn’t it weird that those people have no idea who we are and they never will?” Lizzy asked. “To them, we are nothing. But they are probably important to everyone in their lives. We live so separately from the people we don’t know.”

Then the car pulled away.

That night there was rain and the leaves on the trees framing the parking lot were bowed and black. Sometimes if I look at Denver in the right light, it looks like a city I’m just visiting. I don’t do it on purpose, it just becomes a composite of other places–Seattle, maybe, or Boston in the spring. And sometimes when I look at strangers, I feel like I know more about them than I do. I play this game sometimes: knowing and un-knowing the things I don’t know and know. As though that might make unfamiliarity easier.

Tonight while I was swimming, the storm never came. It hovered over the pool and the shadow cast an illusion that the water was being pulled west. A man in long shorts snapped a cap over his head and started swimming laps. We were both doing breaststroke. Underwater, we looked at each other. Then we both swam away.

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A few things have changed since I got back to Denver three weeks ago. Crow moved out. Gone is the spray-painted address on the white stucco wall at the bottom of the dirt driveway. Gone, the trailer with dusty windows streaked into backwards letters by a messenger finger. Gone, his son who smiled and played rap music and who never spoke to me. No more spontaneously appearing vehicles with missing wheels, no Christmas lights hanging drearily in the window, no late night honking from neighborhood boys and girls coming for their meth. I miss Crow in a weird way, since he was the overseer, for better or for worse, of this neighborhood.

Theo, my neighbor who has not changed, told me that Crow’s landlord evicted him even though he’d been paying the rent. This is a slumlord, by all accounts, who only half-painted the house an unnatural, mortuary-esque chalk white, and failed to cover over the thick splatter of orange paint that was slung onto the north side of the house one night with such airborne force, the paint broke one of the windows. That window is still jagged with ribbons of opaque orange curtaining some dark room I look into whenever I walk by before quickly looking away. I found the house on zillow.com, and Crow’s apartment is renting for $600 a month and it still looks like the subterranean crack den that it probably always has been.

Some kid paid full rent for Crow’s place for the months of June, July, and August, and hasn’t yet moved in. The first week I was home, I heard Theo’s door opening and closing across the hallway and assumed it was Theo or his girlfriend who has a white dog named Dignan who, on his first visit across the hall to our place a year and a half ago, pooped a frozen yogurt soft serve swirl of brown right in the middle of our bedroom. But it wasn’t either of them, it was the kid whose rent the slumlord was holding. He was never given the go-ahead to move into Crow’s place, so Theo let him move in up here. Theo is bipolar and sometimes I can hear him yelling obscenities at the can crusher (his girlfriend told me on a walk that inanimate objects incur his rage, not her). Sometimes when Luke’s gone, it’s almost nice to hear them through the walls, to know that someone’s there, yelling and living. Theo is helping Crow find a lawyer so he can get what he’s owed.

Theo drives a hulking gold van and collects everything. Jars, guitars, antique desks, bottles, tables, kennels, metal rods, speakers, pots and pictures and pans. This has changed: when we talked in between our two apartments the other night, I could tell that the mountains behind him had grown. His studio is about half the size of our place, but I think he must have twice the amount of stuff. The containers for our comfort differ between us, but we need them anyways–a drug dealer who waves when you arrive any time of day or a ceiling fan taken from a stack of broken objects in the alley.

There’s a new neighbor, too, next door in the white house that has been abandoned for years. He has black glasses and tattoos and wears a red cotton tank top when he’s working in the backyard. He owns a salami company called Il Mondo Vecchio–The Old World. I like when he’s working on his shed when I get home. I’ve missed the presence of people outside ever since I left New Orleans. What do people do with their porches if they’re never on them? Why all these flowers if there’s no one looking at them? I asked Mark, the new neighbor, what he was going to put in his shed and he said “my stuff.”

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Natalia came over this morning for sticky buns and coffee. It’s my mom’s recipe—pour a stick of butter, a small bag of slivered almonds, a cup of brown sugar, and a teaspoon of cinammon over 20 frozen Rhoades dinner rolls, and leave them out overnight to rise—and we ate them with juicy, perfect sliced peaches from the western slope. Lexi wandered around feeding single pieces of kibble to Quincy in-tow, and Natalia fiddled with my sewing machine table. She asked me for some thread, but I don’t own any. She discovered a light switch that sends a melted butter glow into the inside of the table. Then we walked around the neighborhood and looked at the house she wants to buy—a sea-foam green beauty on 1^st, with original brass hinges in the doorways and two fireplaces. It is nice to walk alongside someone and feel them fluttering with similar dreams. We peeked in above the eye-level windowsills. We talked about where she grew up—pulling peaches and pears from trees, eating tart cherries and wild currants grown alongside a cold river clean enough for washing clothes.

Natalia wanted an afternoon of tea and Russian chocolates, so we went to get some at the Russian store in East Denver.  She goes there every week, but still chooses everything with careful scrutiny, leaning over the candy bins, and reading the labels before choosing each one she’ll purchase. Natalia is scrupulous about coupons and food prices. She believes in saving money and in bite-sized daily indulgences. After a brief exchange in Russian with the man behind the meat counter, she obtained her one selfish allowance for the week—a stout $14.99 jar of pink caviar.

While Lexi smooshed bags of raw almonds under her small hands, Natalia found one more thing—two tall cans of Kvass—her favorite drink growing up. In the hot car, we cracked one open and assessed it. Like beer. Like cold chocolate. Like coke without the feeling across the tongue of unshakeable sweetness. I wonder why every good thing feels like a revelation, why they don’t sell this stuff at American stores.

Outside, a blonde boy with wide-set Eastern European eyes approached me and started speaking Russian. Natalia interceded and spoke with him for a moment about the protestant CD’s he was pushing. I could listen to them all day, to be in this other-world within my own world, to roll the foreign words around in my head with all the images Natalia has given me of an older life—a life of more consideration where food might be scarce and a girl learns to ride a bike on the only bicycle that exists in her village.

Later, after Natalia has dropped me off and the house is quiet without Lexi’s maybes (Maybe I could have another sticky bun? Maybe I could draw houses and trees? Maybe I could walk Quincy all by myself?) I walk around the Denver Art Museum’s Marvelous Mud Exhibit with girls I have grown up with, here in this city, mentored by priests and dips in the road perfect for soaring over in our mom’s minivans and later in our own cars on Friday nights when there’s nothing to do but we feel we are made for everything. Sometimes I wonder what I am missing, looking back, looking at these girls who contain my past and send all my grade school sentiments unspooling into my present.

At the exhibit, there are cookie cutter clay puzzles put together on the floor that clink together like wine glasses when you walk on them; a strange peace from molded antlers strung between pickle-shaped lights; a room of red with foxes in flight, and there are these quotes on the wall from artists, that I feel were stolen from my psyche:

“I want to give people a place to let language and purpose slip away and to allow the senses to frolic.” –Martha Russo

“I want things I make, even though invited, to be as real and believable as any other familiar object in the everyday.” –Annabeth Rosen

“How is it that we have nostalgia for places we have never visited?” –Kim Dickey

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I woke up and walked to the library downtown this morning, and when I arrived, a few things happened. A voice ratcheted off sky-rise walls, high-pitched but low-pitched at the same time, a rumbly screech echoing from somewhere further away than where the voice was actually coming from. I could hear the voice from a few blocks away, ominous and angry, full-tilt pissed. When I walked across 13th, I could see where it was coming from–a woman with five slumped bags was screaming at the top of her lungs underneath the jagged stack of prisms which is a statue I don’t understand.

Her voice bounced off the Denver Art Museum, then off the Mad Greens restaurant, then off the bull sculptures–a papa and its calf bedded down, huge and black-brown pewter-shiny, together about 1500 square feet. I know what 1500 square feet look like because I’ve been looking at houses. I know I shouldn’t be because my mind fills rooms before they’re mine, but there’s something in my hands that wants to paint a home of our own, something in my knees that wants to not walk up 16 stairs with my groceries, something in my nature that wants to fill kitchen cabinets that have doors, unlike ours. The woman shouted racist obscenities and hissed while I picked up my pace, and her voice rattled like a strangled can of uncooked beans.

When her voice had stopped coming off the buildings, I came to the lawn next to the library and ate half a grape jelly and bacon biscuit from the Denver Biscuit truck. I thought maybe I shouldn’t eat because she might have been homeless and how insensitive would that be, but I was hungry, and I couldn’t hear her voice anymore, so I did. Next to the library, there’s this statue:

This is not me in the photo. This statue confuses me. It is shiny and I like it, but I’m not sure why. I know it’s a play on smallness and point of view, because it’s outside the children’s area of the library. Another Lighthouse instructor named Terry was at the Biscuit Truck and he started raving about the statue, how much he loved it, how the original horse had so much hail damage, they had to put a second one up and the mayor (or someone locally famous, I’m not sure) now has horse #1 in his house.

I have never been good at understanding art. When I took an art history class in college, I was amazed at how much I didn’t know but then knew as soon as someone else told me it was true. On the DPL website, they explain the statue: “The scale of this work is meant to recall that time in life when even everyday objects seemed monumental.” So maybe that’s why I like it.

After I left the library, I drove by another homeless man with a Hollywood face, cinnamon brown hair pulled into a ponytail, and a beard like the thick strap of a hat around his chin. His sign said, “I need a miracle.” It gave me goosebumps. I wonder if miracles, I mean real miracles, really happen.

When I got to my neighborhood, I drove past the house for sale that I love, and there was an old man leaning into the doorway with a paint brush. I’ve been watching that house–how its windows went from streaked to silvery clean, how it had been emptied out then refilled with bland modern staging furniture, how purple flowers were standing straight up from red, wet-looking wood chip mounds one morning. The repairman invited me inside and told me to take my time. I went into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the mudroom. I opened all the closet doors upstairs and I tried the master bathroom’s sink. My favorite part was the separate garage out back and my mind did what I told it not to–a dinner party started under paper lanterns strung in Z’s, and I laid a tray of pink salmon in between glasses and plates.

Frank, who has been working on the house for a few weeks, said he used to write short stories. Then he said he read some poetry some time ago and he thought it was something, so he started doing that, too. His parents came from Poland and settled in Wisconsin, and that’s where he learned to swim, he said, something they aren’t teaching kids anymore. I don’t remember why he brought up swimming and poetry, but I thought it was perfect, and he said it was a solid house, and he loved to have dinner under strung-up lanterns. I almost shook his hand when he said that (not that shaking his hand is something I would usually do, but a hug would have been awkward and anything I could have said in response would have been cliche–that’s exactly what I was thinking, or, you read my mind) so I thanked him a few times for letting me walk around and told him to have a nice day. Sometimes when I talk to people, I sound boring to myself.

It consoled me to think that Frank took pleasure in lanterns, too, and I wonder now, after learning what that statue means, if everyday objects aren’t still monumental to some people. Sometimes I feel materialistic, peeking into houses I’ll never buy or trolling for old tables in thrift stores and boutiques, but these searches are what bring meaning, too. I bought a table this afternoon. A man in a yarmulke named Isaac sold it to me in a musty antique store on Mississippi. “Looking’s free,” he said. And then when he ran into me in the hallway he said it again.

The table has an antique sewing machine built under the hinging lid, and when you angle the machine down into the dark, the head and arm of it disappear smoothly under the top like they never existed. Whoever owned it last left blue thread in the needle. I can picture the self-stitched hem of her dress, the music crackling from a slick record. Her feet pumping in matte Mary Janes.

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One bummer about Sitka this summer is that the town didn’t have enough money to keep the pool open. When I go to the gym, I look past the dark glass doors and into the hole that once had water and I wish every day that it was full.

I spent the last week in Anchorage, finishing my MFA degree. Some of my best friends are in the program. It’s hard to be there and it’s harder to leave. Being in a low-residency writing program is kind of like being in an in-patient therapy group. For two weeks of the year, the last four years, I have lived with and written with and listened with a small group of eight other nonfiction writers. We know stories about each other that our spouses haven’t even heard. We share bathrooms without fans, books scrawled with notes we’ve written to ourselves and would be too self-conscious to lend to anyone else. Some people have purposely not finished their coursework just so they can be in the program another year.

This time in Anchorage, I found a new pool. I have swum in Anchorage before, in the heavily chlorinated pool at UAA, but the pool I found on the Alaska Pacific University campus is even closer to the dorms and it’s a salt water pool. I don’t know much about how salt water chlorination works, but I do know that this kind of water stings less and my skin isn’t as dry after swimming salted laps.

And I also realize that the longer I struggle against the pain of weight-bearing knees, the more I need to swim. Last spring, returning to New Orleans, I found that the pool at Tulane had been converted to salt water, too. Both places where I’ve gotten degrees are places where I have found solace in salt, in those repetitions of free and fly, in thinking without speaking, and in contemplation without having to call it something as serious and uncertain as prayer or meditation.

Someone recently recommended that I read Lynne Cox’s essays on swimming. I consider her a hero–she broke the men’s and women’s world records for swimming the English Channel when she was 15 and 16 years old. She was the first person to swim the Bering Strait, separating the U.S. from Russia, thus opening the border between the two countries for the first time in 48 years when she swam without a shark cage or a wet suit or lanolin grease. I’ve only competed in open-water races a few times in Colorado when people have cheered from the sandy beaches of sun-warmed lakes. But I have jumped into the numbing water up here and felt that thrill of being part of a forbidden body of water, treading above deep black, limbs throwing water fast, and racing, not out of pride but out of instinct.

As I sit here in the library, the water pushes and pulls in and out of the cove a stone’s throw from the window. Luke drifts by in his boat, but doesn’t know I can see him in here as he shoves halibut carcasses off the swim step with a booted foot. I want to get in the water here, and I’ve been reading about how different the techniques are between pool swimming and open water swimming. Luke says if I swim in the ocean up here, we’ll have to tie a flag to my butt or I’ll have to haul a kayak behind me so ships know where I am.

I’m fine with that. It’s amazing how little I have known about stroke until I started looking it up–you can be graceful and have a long glide in a pool, but in open water, the chop can cut your forward motion in half. Hips drop, you miss your “catch” (the moment when your hand enters the water and should pull you ahead), you might over-rotate when you lift an arm to take a breath. I wonder what else I’ve been doing in isolation, in my own easy pools, without knowing that there are techniques for improvement.

It has been cold up here. Rain like a crappy showerhead that neither drenches nor consists. This is not swimming weather, people say, but to Lynne and to me, it is, it always is. “I knew this was a sea of dreams, almost a sacred place,” Lynne Cox writes in Swimming to Antarctica, upon arriving at a pool where she will learn to change everything about the way she swims. I think that looking out at the water here, its surface flickering like static on a screen this afternoon, the wake from Luke’s boat sending a white line towards these windows where I’m waiting.

I’ll be back in Colorado in a week, where it’s 100 degrees and I can swim 50 meters without stopping to turn around. I look forward to life in both places, but the coming and going never feels tide-like, natural. I wrench myself from each place, from the friends, from the sea, from the pool behind locked doors, and I know that I’ll miss it here too as soon as the islands spread out, bird’s eye view–my favorite way to see them–as I’m leaving. Right now, the cruise ship is pulling out of town and the fog is pulling in over Sealing Cove and I can look out this window and see what Lynne means.

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