The Chronology of Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

kitchen table. It sat there all through dinner - which we ate in the living room watching TV. Barney Miller . I could feel the blood in my ears.
    After dinner, after Taxi , after my father smoked three cigarettes, he finally went into the kitchen. And my mother. And me.
    We sat at the kitchen table like I guess families do. My mother and I breathing. He opened the letter more slowly than a retarded person. He read it silently. I watched his eyes. Blue like mine. In my head I swam laps. My mother sat to the side of me like a drunk lump patting her one hand with the other. I tried not to bite my tongue off.
    Finally, he spoke. A¾ ride. At a Snob school. A snob school for silver spoon girls and rich assholes. My mother looked out the window into the Florida night. I stared at the paper with the Brown logo on it. And my name. I knew it wasn’t money. We had money. It was what came out of his mouth next, his cigarette smoke making shame swirls around my face. Did I think I was special? Like someone squeezing my neck. In my throat I swallowed language.
    The second letter came from Notre Dame. Again we sat at the kitchen table, a mother, a father, a daughter. The cigarette smoke nearly cinematic. I sat in silence, my very skin knew the tyranny of speaking. My mother twisted a lock of hair until I thought it would lift off of her head. Why did he say no? Because he could.
    The third letter came from Cornell.
    The fourth from Purdue.
    No.
    At a kitchen table in Florida.
    All the rooms of our house carried the weight of father. All of them except one. My bedroom held the wet and dark of my
body. It smelled like my skin and chlorine and pot. The two windows in front had long been my portals to the night life of escaped girls. In July, on a night so thick with sweat lesser girls would have suffocated, alone in my bed I decided a leaving. I was leaving, and I didn’t care how. I masturbated so hard that night I scratched my skin raw. Just before I went to sleep, I pictured a suitcase. The biggest one we owned. It rested silently in the garage behind my father’s golf bag and boxes from former lives. Black and as big as a German Shepherd. Big enough to fit the rage of a girl.
    At the preliminaries for State that year I sat in the locker rooms with Sienna Torres killing a fifth of vodka. If we’d been sons about to be men, I bet we would have taken one of our father’s cars and headed for Canada. Or took our first punches at authority, not minding the black eye. Instead we sat on the concrete underneath the disgusted gaze of shaved and wellbehaved athlete girls and drank.
    Even loaded I qualified fifth for finals in breaststroke. At finals, a woman I didn’t know with stringy blond hair and glasses thick as a Florida cola bottle came up to me after I got second in the 100 breast. I swam a 1:07.9. She looked like a stoner. She said she was the coach at Texas Tech, and that though she couldn’t talk about it standing there like that, me dripping with water and underage rage, she would call me the next day to talk about a full ride. I didn’t say anything. When my breathing stilled, I looked up at my drunk mother in the stands. She was sort of rocking. I hoped she’d stay up there. My mother: the only thing I knew of Texas sitting up in the stands, slurring her speech.
    When the coach of Texas Tech called my home, my father was at work. I talked to the woman with the stringy hair and thick glasses on the phone. There was my mother’s voice, its sweet southern drawl curling around my shoulders - like honey does to bees - and there was this woman’s voice and there was me. Saying yes. Yes.
    Wouldn’t it be great if that’s all there was to it? A mother’s
voice soothing the way for her daughter to leave. Blonde swimmer girl gets on a plane, bye bye y’all.
    A week later, when the papers came to sign, my father was at work. My mother signed them. I remember watching her hand, a little stunned. She had beautiful handwriting. Then