Lessons

3. THE LAKE

One unbearable night, in the middle of a heatwave, Paps drove us all to the lake. Ma and I didn’t know how to swim, so she grabbed on to Papi’s back and I grabbed on to hers and he took us on a little tour, spreading his arms before him and kicking his legs underneath us, our own legs trailing through the water, relaxed and still, our toes curled backward.

Every once in a while Ma would point out some happening for me to look at, a duck touching down on to the water, his head pulled back on his neck, beating his wings before him, or a water bug with spindly legs that dimpled the lake’s surface.

‘Not so far,’ she would say to Papi, but he’d push on, smooth and slow, and the shore behind would stretch and thin and curve, until it was a wooded crescent impossibly dark and remote.

In the middle of the lake the water was blacker and cooler, and Paps swam right into a clump of slimy tar-black leaves. Ma and I tried to splash the leaves away from us, but we had to keep one arm holding on, so they ended up curling around in our jetty and sticking to our ribs and thighs like leeches. Paps lifted a fistful into the air and the leaf clump melted through the cracks in his fingers and disintegrated into speckles in the water and cigarette-sized fish appeared and nibbled at the leaf bits.

‘We’ve come too far,’ Ma said. ‘Take us back.’

‘Soon,’ Papi said.

Ma started talking about how unnatural it was that Paps knew how to swim. She said that no one swam in Brooklyn. The most water she ever saw in one place was when one of the men from the block would open up the johnny pump, and water would rush and pour forth. She said that she never jumped through the spray like the other kids – too hard and mean and shocking – but instead she liked to stand further down, where the sidewalk met the street, and let the water pool around her ankles.

‘I had already been married and pushed out three boys before I ever stepped into anything deeper than a puddle,’ she said.

Papi didn’t say when or where he had learned to swim, but he generally made it his business to learn everything that had to do with survival. He had all the muscles and the will, and he was on his way to becoming indestructible.

‘I guess it’s opposite with you, isn’t it?’ Ma called back to me. ‘You grew up with all these lakes and rivers, and you got two brothers that swim like a couple of goldfish in a bowl – how come you don’t swim?’

She asked the question as if she was meeting me for the first time, as if the circumstances of my life, my fumbling, terrifying attempts at the deep end, the one time at the public pool, when I had been dragged out by the high-school lifeguard and had puked up pool water on to the grass, 700 eyes on me, the din of screams and splashes and whistles momentarily silenced as everyone stopped to ponder my bony weakness, to stare and stare, waiting for me to cry, which I did – as if it had only just now occurred to Ma how odd it was that I was here, clinging to her and Paps, and not with my brothers who had run into the water, dunked each other’s heads down, tried to drown each other, then ran back out and disappeared into the trees.

Of course, it was impossible for me to answer her, to tell the truth, to say I was scared. The only one who ever got to say that in our family was Ma, and most of the time she wasn’t even scared, just too lazy to go down into the crawlspace herself, or else she said it to make Paps smile, to get him to tickle and tease her or pull her close, to let him know she was only really scared of being without him. But me, I would have rather let go and slipped quietly down to the lake’s black bottom than to admit fear to either one of them.

But I didn’t have to say anything, because Paps answered for me.

‘He’s going to learn,’ he said. ‘You’re both going to learn,’ and no one spoke after that for a long time. I watched the moon break into shards of light across the lake, I watched dark birds circle and caw, the wind lifted the tree branches, the pine trees tipped; I felt the lake get colder, and I smelled the dead leaves.

Later, after the incident, Paps drove us home. He sat behind the wheel, still shirtless, his back and neck and even his face a cross-hatch of scratches, some only deep red lines and broken skin, some already scabbing, and some still glistening with fresh blood, and I too was all scratched up – for she had panicked, and when he slipped away she had clawed on top of me – later, Paps said, ‘How else do you expect to learn?’

And Ma, who had nearly drowned me, who had screamed and cried and dug her nails down into me, who had been more frenzied and wild than I had ever known her to be – Ma, who was so boiling angry that she had made Manny sit up front with Paps and she had taken the middle back, wrapping her arms around us – Ma replied by reaching across me and opening the door as we sped along. I looked down and saw the pavement rushing and blurring beneath, the shoulder dropping away into a gravel pit. Ma held open that door and asked, ‘What? You want me to teach him how to fly? Should I teach him how to fly?’

Then Paps had to pull over and calm her down. The three of us boys jumped out and walked to the edge and took out our dicks and pissed down into the ditch.

‘She really clawed you up like that?’ Manny asked.

‘She tried to climb on to my head.’

‘What kind of…’ he started to say, but didn’t finish. Instead, he picked up a rock and hurled it out away from him as far as he could.

From the car, we heard the noises of their arguing, we heard Ma saying over and over, ‘You let me go. You let me go,’ and we watched the big trailers haul past, rumbling the car and the ground underneath our feet.

Manny laughed. He said, ‘Shit, I thought she was gonna throw you out of the car.’

And Joel laughed too. He said, ‘Shit. I thought you were gonna fly.’

When we finally returned to the car, Ma was up front again, and Paps drove with one hand on the back of her neck. He waited until the perfect moment, until we’d settled into silence and peace and we were thinking ahead, to the beds waiting for us at home, and then he turned his head to the side, glancing at me over his shoulder, and asked, all curious and friendly, ‘So, how’d you like your first flying lesson?’ And the whole car erupted in laughter; all was okay again.

But the incident itself remained, and at night, in bed, I remembered how Paps had slipped away from us, how he looked on as we flailed and struggled, how I needed to escape Ma’s clutch and grip, how I let myself slide down and down, and when I opened my eyes what I discovered there: black-green murkiness, an underwater world, terror. I sank down for a long time, disoriented and writhing, and then suddenly I was swimming – kicking my legs and spreading my arms just like Paps showed me, and rising up to the light and exploding into air, and then that first breath, sucking air all the way down into my lungs, and when I looked up the sky had never been so vaulted, so sparkling and magnificent. I remembered the urgency in my parents’ voices, Ma wrapped around Papi once again, and both of them calling my name. I swam towards their bobbing mass and there under the stars, I was wanted. They had never been so happy to see me, they had never looked at me with such intensity and hope, they had never before spoken my name so softly.

I remembered how Ma burst into tears and Paps celebrated, shouting as if he was a mad scientist and I a marvel of his creation:

‘He’s alive!’

‘He’s alive!’

‘He’s alive!’