Everyone figured she would break up with him. She had a swim scholarship to that big school out west, and did he even get in anywhere, anyway? There were jokes he would follow her to college. Set up a sleeping bag outside her dorm. Nah, they’ll be over well before then, people said.
Graduation came, and in pictures he stood off to the side, unsmiling but just within frame.
After the photos were done she gave a half-wave goodbye, and took his hand. Her father frowned at his camera, and her mother smoothed some stray flyaways with a tight smile. Her friends all exchanged looks. End of summer, they reasoned, and marked their calendars for August.
The air-conditioning at her job broke halfway through June. When she put her hair up, her manager gasped. Honey, what happened to you? You have a bad fall? She rubbed the purpled skin under her ear. Ah that, she said with a shrug. Clipped the edge of the pool doing laps.
She played a game to pass the time; she used the shop’s radio like a Magic 8-ball and asked it for advice. Once she thought: should I leave him? The Bay City Rollers cried out “Bye Bye Baby” as she handed someone their change; but later, when she wondered, does he love me, 98.4 played “Happy Together” by The Turtles.
Once, after the sticky summer sun had dipped below the strip mall across the street, in the hum of the soft-serve machine, she asked how to tell her parents she was deferring freshman year of college. 104.1 crackled out James Taylor’s “Sarah Maria”, which offered no help. Sarah Maria-ya, ya, ya. She turned it off before the second chorus.
In his car, the backseat buckle would dig into her shoulder blade; afterwards, he would pinch her thigh muscle and joke she should lay off the free samples at work. She wouldn’t answer, just watch the gnats circle the streetlamp outside.
In August, she helped her friends wedge IKEA furniture into their cars, and promised to send them her dorm address. She had already mailed her deferral letter. At the dinner table, her mother had spilled a glass of riesling. Her father had taken his glasses off and pinched the bridge of his nose, and asked in a low voice if this was because of him. She said no, that it would be nice to get to spend some time at home, save up, go to community college for a year. It wasn’t like she was giving up swimming, for Christ’s sake.
Eight deferred semesters later, she worked in a restaurant close enough to the interstate to get the vacationing families, but too far to attract truckers. She set down paper placemats and broken crayons, and picked them up again with scribbles and ketchup stains, and binned them along with the coffee grinds and congealed cheese fries. As she hauled the bags into the dumpster, she watched the cars pull back onto the exit for the I-40, headed for someplace better.
The next fall, she sat in a white-brick Phoenix cafe. She chased a stray, overpriced blueberry around her plate as her high school friends asked how she was. Their tones were light, whipped as latte froth. Wow, they said. Has it really been 5 years?
As they hugged goodbye, one of them suggested she try some meditation. It’s great to clear the head, her friend professed. That evening, she bought an app.
She found the calls on his laptop. She hadn’t even been looking for them.
He was remorseful, shockingly so. He actually got down on his knees, a gesture she had only ever seen in movies and found herself moved by. There was a tremor in the hand that grasped hers. It had not occurred to her that this was something worth leaving over.
That year, she got a pass for the public pool: the basic package, 3 afternoons-a-week access.
The water embraced her as it always had. Same, too, were the kaleidoscopic caustics, the bobbing lane ropes, the smell of chlorine. But there was no starting gun here, and no reason to rush. Gone were the state championships, the tiered podiums, the fluorescent lights. There was nowhere to aim here except for the end of the pool and back again.
All her muscles were sore that first week, and the ache in her body felt a bit like shame.
One night in June, she was rummaging through the fridge when he demanded where she’d been. He wanted to know since when had she started swimming again, and how often, and with whom. With no one, she shrugged. With myself, she corrected. He didn’t believe her. She closed the fridge softly. Cicadas chirped outside. I’m on night shifts this week, he said, and she heard the scrape of the chair as he got up from the table. I’m tired. The least you could do is tell me the fucking truth.
In the end, he only broke her grandmother’s vase. The thrashed yellow daisies laid in a pool of water with their stems bent at odd angles.
She upgraded her pool package and started going in the mornings, before her shifts. On a good day, she would pour her coffee into a tumbler and be on the road before the sun rose. On her drive, she passed the empty Circle K parking lot and her old high school.
She felt, those days, as though she were headed for some sort of contrition. Long before the I-40, Route 66 had cut right through Winslow like a river. As she drove, it was easy to imagine all those migrants and travelers, eyes turned westward in search of a gold rush. What’s more, she imagined them finding it. On the radio, the Bay City Rollers crooned, and the sunrise poured slowly into the car like honey.
Gabrielle Showalter (she/her) is an American-Australian writer with a focus on prose and poetry. Originally from New York, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2021 with an MA in English Literature and now lives in London. Her work has previously been published in New Critique and Lean & Loafe.
Website: gabrielleshowalter.wixsite.com/writing
Twitter: @gabyyshowalter