These little routines require patriotism and gender conformity and a healthy competitive spirit, as if a team were a training ground for the military. This was just one of many torments - the girls who lined up along the wall so I couldn’t climb out of the pool, the ones who told me they couldn’t imagine me dating - that served as a reminder that there’s more to competitive swimming than body meets water, more to being an athlete than physical practice. I vowed to renew my vigilance with shaving cream and a razor.
“Who are you? How did you get my screenname?” After a few evasive answers, I got a message that said, “You’ve been tricked! This is a robot! The first few messages were programmed, but the rest has been computer generated!” The exclamation points made me cry even harder, as if the programmer took pride in this tool created for bullying. I accepted, and a few messages in, she said: “You have so many pubes, lol.” I demanded she reveal herself. I got a chat invitation from a screenname I didn’t recognize, someone who said they were on the team with me. There’s me, maybe fourteen, in front of the computer after a long workout, having, for once, co-opted our dial-up connection. I composed outfits entirely out of different shades of orange. The other swimmers in the locker room wore designer brands, straightened their hair, put on makeup. This wasn’t the only incident with the team provoked by my version of girlhood. It wasn’t my queerness (in all senses of the word) that was a problem, per se, but the idea that it might be catching. She wanted to keep us at arm’s length, to correct my behavior in front of her daughter so she wouldn’t turn out like me. The time her husband wouldn’t let me leave the table until I had finished everything on my plate. The time she told me I ate too much, and too often.
The time she accused my family of spying when we took the blind curve in front of their house too slowly. In hindsight, the other odd comments she made over the years began to make sense. “How dare you let your lesbian daughter in my house, in the locker room, in the pool with other girls?!” I didn’t learn about this phone call until years later, so I can only imagine how it went. Her mother called mine, after scrubbing off the marker with acid, and yelled.
We wrote out all the usual slogans: Eat my BUBBLES! Swim FAST!! Kick BUTT!!! And, inside a heart, my neighbor wrote our initials, with a little plus sign nestled in between. One day, not so different from the rest, we decorated our plastic team water bottles with permanent marker. On hot days after early morning practices we wasted time watching educational cartoons, and hiding from her older brother and his guitar. The girl lived up the hill and around the corner, and sometimes we carpooled together, inventing songs in the back seat. The first person to call me a lesbian was the mother of one of the girls on my swim team growing up. It finally lets me combine the words and the water, the sport and sexuality, that have made up my life, that have engulfed and carried me. That’s not true, but I like the way it sounds. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.