The Winter Swimmers

by Denise Dooley

That year you grew so bored we started swimming in the frozen over lake. Don’t get me wrong. I know about activities on lakes. By that point I had already used both a folding hand-held saw and a diesel powered auger to bring up yards of tea-colored ice plug to access carp still swimming low and hungry in the winter months. I had winced my skates through roughly dimpled ice. I had heard it crack and laid out like a starfish, I had built covered and uncovered fires out there. All of it. Semi-pro. Ice is a trance.

The swimming though, the swimming came mostly from the realm of the suggestible. You’d seen it narrated on all your scrolls. Having run out of calendars, it occurred to us that the interruptions had gone on too long. We missed being invited to things. Bare hands can freeze to the edge, we were told, but there were neoprene gloves we could buy. The day the gloves found us at home you wore them like a starlet. You bit a single finger with your glossy mouth. I laughed. We wore them with matching bikinis and out of the water our matching wool hats.

The appeal was that swimming left us much to talk about, much to describe.

Under the ice it is different, we’d tell everyone else, making pauses. So bubbled. And the water so plush.

Velvety algaes, you would say, as though only to yourself, but I could hear you, and the microphone was hot, and your mumblings would leave me newly irritated and then, in my remorse, endeared.

Describing worked better on friends who were not also wincing and shivering. When we sat with the other swimmers around the hole we’d hacked, working up the courage or waiting out the sting, our observations were diminished and we found we couldn’t dwell. Too trite. So with our hearts and lungs rewinding we shared accidents we’d known. Some spoke gruesomely—feigning the controlled tone of understatement that belied boasting—while others let their words slope. Some told stories like boning knives so gleaming and slender they more resembled ringing notes than stable tools.

An older northern British man who passed us cups of hot salty orange drink had known in his youth two children who died in separate falls from escalators. They were rarer there, high streets being so flat, and permits so expensive. A glass-faced girl from the plains had falls to offer, too. Children she had played with in elementary climbed ladders up the sides of silos to throw things and feel vertigo and enjoy the view of the cloud bellies and the stitched farms. A hunched person's neighbor was felled by anaphylactic shock from the smoke off a pile of burned poison oak. Another boy the glass-faced girl had known had been killed by stampeding pigs whose legs were no match for their weight and who struggled to stop once they’d begun moving in a group.

The wan vegan theorist knew of a jilted lover who had commandeered a crane at an amusement park and struck the trolley cars of several rides, balls from a tee, before he was stopped by someone’s linebacker father. We all remembered that one, the father on the news, and we were all shocked that we’d so easily forgotten. The dust fire at the cookie factory was much the same—so known, so near here—the warehouse a wide tank of flame. How soon it self-extinguished. How the video showed nothing.

A cough echoed on the ice, and the one wrapped deep in sleeping bags told us in no hurry she didn’t grow up here or know these stories, personally. But a furnace exhaust on a cruise she had taken, a kind of learning cruise, through Alaska, with a great-aunt who had once been a nun and left the folds if you call it that to keep her whole inheritance her own, anyway the furnace exhaust pipe had filled with ice and snow under clear stars, and six girls had been gassed in their sleep. It didn't make the news, she said, because they were from all over, and the bodies were not sent home right away but were cremated in Whittier and dispersed through the mail at intervals, discreetly.

You sat up, suddenly competitive. Aligned your wet braid. Leaned forward.

At a place I worked, you said, the owners’ oldest son was such a dick. You spoke deep and then deeper, a drill press of words. He was already rich and set to inherit the whole chain of restaurants. He would come Saturdays and Sundays to help, or to learn, but really just to swing it around and be nasty. He was awful to the youngest of the baby-faced busboys. He had a blue Audi, and he had his father’s bad habit of sucking and clicking his lip, and the hair at the nape of his neck made a heartbreaking point.

I worried for you, telling it, but they’d already melted right there in your palm.

One morning when the openers came in they found him with his arms out, wingspan, airplane, facedown on the gas range, one dead thumb roasting in the pilot light. He had stolen a car for a joyride two days earlier. He’d found it unlocked with the keys in it but it had been left that way with good reason. The car was a drop spot; by driving it off he stole many precious things by accident. He had a rich man’s mind and sought a rich man’s solution: he called up a friend’s wealthy, troubled father; sold him what he’d found; then bragged to everyone about the stupid-easy money. His killers ate a whole meal up front. They paid, they tipped, then they walked the ridiculous length of the strip mall and up the long alley behind.

The back door to the kitchen was always open. That’s why there were so many flies.

Just children themselves, skinny and strong, the killers climbed up on the sink and from there to the dish and from there to the top of the freezer. They sat comfortably cross-legged between the fans, for hours, waiting until everyone else left. The wounds in the back of the owners' son's neck were mere pinholes. He had been a bad boy. No one was surprised. It was soup that they had ordered, soup and salad.

As you told the rest of the story—the restaurant opening on time for lunch that same day, your screams when you found him, the calm statements of the other waitresses , the sneaker boxes labeled only “incense” and “dvds” that the father brought back, wanting absolution, our making him leave then finding them in the trash—within me grew an overwhelming sense of your fragility. You did not speak as though you believed any of this had happened to you. I knew from how you looked away you understood it was a borrowed lie. But you spoke as though passing it off, gaining admiration, meant everything. One word from me could crumble your foundation and that word, foliate as barcodes, I held tightly silent in an act of low love. It was I who had worked at the restaurant. I had served them the soup. These new friends, the swimmers, would never call you out though I could see they sensed it too. My greatest story. You panicked and thought you needed it. This was incomprehensible to me. But I saw that I could give it, and I did, or I didn’t resist.

That’s so fucked up, I said. No one challenged you, not even the firefighter, who stayed under the longest because he wanted us to think he felt no pain.

He asked, did they come back? No, no, you explained, curt and newly confident, far above it now, moving along. Thin memory of how all the staff suspected the family knew someone, a doctor, how they kept it from the news to keep their business, and how from then on they paid week to week in cash and frequently extra.

All this is to say give me my credit. I took the crystal highball from the hand of your mother the moment she finished. I listened to you tell her we’d been swimming every day for the last year, though we'd held on in the cold for just those weeks. She was impressed. She had to go. I took it and I set it in the cradle of the sink.

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Denise Dooley lives in Chicago. Her essays and stories can be found at Chicago Review, Elderly, Oyez Review, Kill Author, and Noon, among other publications. She has been a participant at Summer Forum, a kitchen volunteer at ACRE, and a writer in residence at SAFTA in Tennessee.