Water Practice
On the Charles River, the Mississippi, the Hudson, you will find long, thin boats gliding up and down the water. It is a peaceful sight, a smooth motion creeping along the horizon. Move closer – see the rowers, see the little motorboat carrying a coach and a megaphone, hear him shout every dozen strokes.
The rules are (simply): keep your hands level, your legs must always be parallel, watch the shoulders of the person in front of you, make sure your slide to the catch is three times as long as your stroke, pull through to your ribcage, feather and square your oars with a snap of the wrist and look straight ahead, else you offset the boat. God forbid you should offset the boat! Your stroke will not be in sync with the rest of the rowers’ and you will lose balance; your slide will not be in sync with the rest of the rowers’ and you will check the boat; you will check the boat and lose lengths against your opponents.
o
I am the first and only child of a video-producer mom and a set-designer dad. We are not and have never been a calm family. For ten years I had an image of my father with a clock inside his chest; every few weeks he would wind it up, and when it stopped he would embrace combustion. No one could hear it ticking or predict when it would stop. The only framework I could use throughout my childhood to judge when he was most dangerous became my own measurement between explosions: two weeks this time, three weeks the time before, ten days the time before that. In this way, I grew up.
o
Checking the boat interrupts the fluidity of its motion. It means that each time you pull forward you lurch backwards slightly afterwards, like taking your foot off the accelerator in your car and feeling the instant deceleration. Though you have not stopped moving forward, you have broken the rhythm of your movement – a hiccup.
The feeling of synchronization of the rowers in the boat, the goal that all of these articulated rules intend to help us perfect our craft, is really communicable without language. And it is an intoxicating feeling, getting it right. It is a feeling that we strive for day in and day out – spend hundreds of hours on the water for.
On the river you will find long, thin boats gliding up and down, up and down. It is a peaceful sight, quiet looking, a smooth motion creeping along the horizon. One comes to realize how nuanced and practiced that sense of peacefulness actually is, and how much physicality it takes to create the illusion of effortlessness.
o
From my bedroom in my house I can hear into the kitchen downstairs with almost perfect clarity. I don’t think my parents ever realized how the curving staircase bounced their words up. As my father would grow enraged and impassioned, speaking loudly and with both of his arms, my mother would hush him desperately. I could hear her. He would yell in a lower tone, but between the sound tunnel stairway and the heating vents in the old house, their fighting still reached me. I wanted to escape it even more than they wanted me to, but our old Victorian wood frame was relentless, almost as big a culprit as my parents themselves.
They yelled about money, sometimes. Parenting, usually. Me. Why wasn’t I given chores? Why were there so few expectations I had to meet? My father wanted to know. He was the oldest of six children who could have managed to run the family without their mother, that’s how methodically she delegated the household chores. For a while, my mother delegated the responsibility of raising me by having middle-aged black women raise me. For the most part, I raised me on my own.
o
One cold morning in March I was out with my crew, four of us, rowing through practice. Coach Coleman rode along side us, watching our hands and our oars and our slides and our shoulders. We were splashing and wobbling and each stroke was a little more disheartening than the last. Finally, he stopped us. “You’re never going to go anywhere, you’re not together, and you look horrible.”
Slide, flick, catch, pull, flick. Repeat. Repeat. Four thousand and seventy-eight more times. Repeat. Repeat. Again. “If all of your oars aren’t at the same levels, if you’re not sliding together, you’re going to keep making this mess.” Our rowing was fragmented and broken, and we were wet and cold. After practice we were punished with twelve minutes of jumping squats.
o
When I was almost three years old I was in the car with my mother and we pulled up to our house. “Who lives here?” she asked.
“Mommy and Marissa,” I cooed. She was stunned.
“Where does Daddy live?”
“At work!”
He worked eighty hours a week then. I woke up and he was gone; I went to sleep and he hadn’t returned. He sometimes traveled over one hundred days in a year. When he did manage to be home on weekends he was exhausted, recuperating from his endless days at the office.
o
We practiced, and practiced, and practiced. I watched Molly’s shoulders with such resolve I memorized her freckles. We were determined to get it right, find sync and build speed.
At our first regatta we came third in our heat, even worse in our overall category.
At our second, and third, and fourth, and fifth regattas we won.
New Jersey State Champions in our class.
We won silver at the Philadelphia novice championship.
We won bronze at the Philadelphia City championship.
Our parents beamed with pride. “It’s so lovely to watch you guys out there,” they said. “You look so graceful.” We stood tall on the medal docks, lungs still burning.
o
Some month, some day, some time Dad shouts up to me, sitting in my room, to come unload the dishwasher or take out the trash or carry the clean laundry upstairs. “Uh huh, I will!” Ten minutes pass, then fifteen.
“Marissa!” he would call again, “Now!”
“Uh huh, coming!”
It’s not that I refused to bend to the will of this man who barely lived in my house – who had no standing, as far as I experienced, in my life. I was unused to demands and expectations and unaffected. My mother would ground me and nothing would change, or I would talk her out of it. Or she would ask me to do a chore and instead of making me do it after a while she would just take care of it herself.
Dad had the clock in his chest; its’ count was the ever changing, subjective – DING! He would boil with fury, and it only made things worse when my mother tried to dissuade him. “She’s doing homework…Let her concentrate… Give her some time… Later.”
If I didn’t come quickly enough he bounded up the stairs. On each step I heard the blood rising to his cheeks, his neck tensing, his fingers rolling into fists. He yelled and screamed, he ripped my computer from its cord, or smacked my phone shut as he stormed out, taking my things for the sake of taking them. Within minutes I was sobbing under the covers, or crouched in a narrow space between my bed and the wall.
o
If my parents were to row a double they would be wet and slow, clamoring forward like a fawn, pitching side to side. Their oars would sky and dip, rise and fall. At the shoreline I would watch while mumbling hopelessly under my breath, exasperated, “straighten your shoulders… raise your hands… you’re not fucking doing it right…”
Sometimes I think that if my parents had been rowers, maybe – just maybe – they would have come to understand that peace grows from the practice of unity.