Coming Back Up
“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”
We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.
I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again, and for a while, I didn’t. Each time we sat down for dinner, I wondered if this would be the night he returned, home from work, just like usual. It wasn’t ever. Mom, my two younger sisters, and I ate alone together, and that’s how, as I approached eight, I started to understand gone.
“I don’t really feel like talking about the reasons I’m unhappy.”
“Just put your face in!” Mom called from her poolside chair.
At four, I wouldn’t go under the water. Not at five either. In the shallow end, I let my chin sit semi-submerged so that the water lapped at my lips.
“How will I not drown?”
She started to speak, then pulled her words back in, took a breath, and exhaled an eddy of an answer, which didn’t give me much confidence. “You will just come back up.”
The difference between going underwater and drowning, of course, is that if you drown, you don’t come back up.
“How do you know you’ll come back up?” I called, as my toes buoyed me off the bottom and onto my back to float safely on the surface.
“You just do.”
“I feel like we are in this headlong rush into old age. Everything is one big sacrifice for the kids.”
On the cusp of turning six, I learned to hate the ocean.
Mom announced we were taking a family vacation to Panama City that summer. This is where I met the Florida beach and the salty sea that pulled at it. I didn’t want my toes anywhere near the dark, stringy seaweed lining the sand, so I spent every afternoon at the hotel pool with Da.
He catapulted me through the air and into the water. The thrill of sailing above the pool—the terror as I plunged into it—the relief when I ricocheted back up. My return to the surface was the sort of sorcery that only vacations could conjure.
His throwing me across the hotel pool drew a lot of eager eyes. Soon other kids were lining up to get tossed. Da threw them all for a while. And then he needed a break. His arms were tired.
Hanging off one of them, I begged for him to keep going. He took a second to catch his breath and then changed the rules of the game with what he said next: “I’ll throw you again if you go under.”
I let go of his arm and swam around him, considering this. When he threw me, I didn’t go under every time, but the times I did, the momentum of my body crashing into the pool ensured I bounced back. My time under the surface was so short I could breathe again before I even needed to. Slipping under would be slow. Deliberate.
No, the fun of getting tossed wasn’t worth the risk of drowning. “That’s okay. I’ll just swim,” I said and started to doggy paddle away. His voice stopped me before I got very far.
“I won’t throw anyone again until you go under.” I floated in place. I looked at the sky and then down at the surface of the pool where the sky was again, reflected, both so blue.
“If you could deal with working a little and sacrificing some of your time with them, then our lives would not be so hard all the time.”
In dreams where my life depends on escaping and I try to run but get nowhere, I feel as if I am under water. The world is viscous and vicious. Despite my desperation, my limbs move sloth-like. I know this is how it ends. I know the many ways water can freeze.
“We could pay for a housecleaning service, lawn service, dry cleaning, more vacations, decorating, etc.”
Beneath the surface, my body worked differently. Time did, too. I was afraid it would run out. I was certain I was drowning until I came back up—Da cheering for me, and the other kids cheering for the play to continue.
Mom and Da told me I learned to be brave that summer in Florida. I wasn’t one to deny a compliment, but I didn’t deserve it. I was even more afraid when summer ended. I could sense we were all being thrown into the beginning of the end of something else.
“And I don’t think it would hurt the children.”
We sold our house. We were moving to a new city, but not before taking a ski trip out west with Da’s family. In Utah, I came to understand that the higher your elevation, the harder it is to breathe.
When we returned to Ohio, we didn’t return home. The new house was flat. Even though Mom explained that there was no upstairs, I opened all the closet doors one by one and peered at their ceilings, hoping to discover the kind of attic stairs that could be pulled down with a string.
I checked every room, but I didn’t find any. It was as if whoever built this house forgot to finish. A whole story was missing, and it tasted like the plain hamburger Mom ordered me from McDonald’s that turned out to be just ketchup on a bun.
While I couldn’t find a second story, I wondered if maybe that’s where we were. Perhaps there was no first story. I wasn’t on a mountain anymore, but I still found it difficult to catch my breath.
I started to suspect something in the house was stealing it. Something quiet and sly. I kept watch, peering around corners and pausing at doors. I pressed my ear to the floorboards when the house talked. Mom called it “settling.” That’s not what I heard. She was right that we were sinking though.
Around the house, Mom materialized one moment and de-materialized the next. Folding clothes. Vacuuming. My sisters played underground, retreating to the cement-floored basement with their toys. With Da gone at work, it was easy to forget I wasn’t alone here.
“I just feel like my time is not respected.”
I went to school without realizing we were all slipping under. In my first grade music class, song lyrics broke over my head like waves. I stole surreptitious, sideways glances at my classmates’ mouths to better guess the words we were supposed to be chanting. When molding my lips around silent letters felt unconvincing, I quietly sang the word “watermelon” on repeat, a trick a friend taught me during a Christmas choir performance. Everyone’s singing drowned out my quiet hymn, and still I was terrified of getting caught. Meanwhile at home, Mom had just returned from the grocery store and saw a note on the counter. She reached for it just as my class reached the only line of the song I knew. Putting my hands up to the rollercoasting rhythm of the chorus, I warbled, “Down, down baby / I’ll never let you go!” The note let go. Its lyrics would throw us through the air and under icy water, into an after with bated breath.
“There isn’t any other woman involved. I can’t think of a moment where you didn’t know exactly where I’ve been.”
The next time I saw Da, it was just over my shoulder as I was walked to the neighbor’s house. I could not concentrate on the games this family tried to make me play. I kept my eyes peeled, so opened they stung, focusing on wall that stood between their house and ours, as if I just looked hard enough, I might be able to see through it like water. When I returned home, I found the house even emptier than before. Da had taken what he’d left behind.
“I hope you don’t slam the door on me.”
The meaning of divorce came in small, sticky pieces, like the blue taffy Mom had made while Oprah played on the TV and I’d first heard the word. We ate a lot of cereal, PB&J, and mac and cheese, which was fine by me because the milk in the cereal, the bread of the sandwich, and melted cheese on the macaroni could all be dyed blue and I was eating only blue foods. Mom didn’t seem enthusiastic about our diet.
“Logistically, I could live with JT free for a while.”
After a few weeks, Da did return, though not to stay. When he arrived, Mom left, saying she’d come back after his visit was done. I hoped Da would explain his absence, but he said nothing about it or about his sudden and apparently temporary return, and the next day he was gone again, and Mom was back, and she didn’t say anything either.
Da continued to come and go with no explanation. Did he not know he was gone? I wondered. But, as this became the routine, I realized he knew. That he had meant to leave and meant to stay away.
By the time I catch my breath, I realize I have been holding it.
“I could come over every other night to spend time with you and the kids.”
Finally, Mom broke. The quiet settling of the house ruptured, then erupted. They were at a standoff at the door to the garage, Da trying to say something and Mom screaming at him to, “Get out! Get OUT!”
“Don’t shove!” He shouted back.
Mom turned, frenetic and blind, and I was afraid for her more than anyone. She grabbed at whatever she could reach and threw it.
My sisters wanted it to stop, and I did too, but not before the alchemy had run its course. Now I saw that she knew Da was gone too, and really knew it, and everything was too much. It was too much that he was gone. Too much that he was back. I was horrified and also relieved as I watched them thrashing. Da had left, and it was not okay.
“Poo, you are a good, strong, loving person who is so unselfish for the sake of the children.”
My sisters and I foraged in Mom’s closet. We borrowed her flannel Lanz nightgowns with lacy collars and cuffs. I pulled on the bluest one, and the hem hit the carpet.
One at a time, Mom bunched the gowns up to the collar and slid them over my sisters’ heads. I watched them disappear within the fabric. We all became Mom for the night. Morgan, Stephanie, and Sydney disappeared as we gathered in Mom’s bed. The house was empty but for one, and maybe she wasn’t even there either.
“I just don’t feel like we are working on the same page right now.”
Da took my sisters and me to dinner at Mios, a local pizzeria with a ceiling painted like a Greek sky. The tables were covered with generous strips of butcher paper, and the staff handed customers with kids a four-pack of unbranded crayons.
To pass the time, Da drew gallows—a line for a base, a pole rising up from it with an arm sprouting out the top. Hangman.
My sisters and I took turns guessing letters, and I took turns with Da choosing the word. We all took turns drawing parts of the body for wrong guesses. Whenever we were about to lose, Da let us add features: a face with eyes, a nose and a mouth and, for the really dire cases, fingers—five on each hand. By the time the pizza arrived, the paper was covered with unfinished bodies hanging in various stages of completion.
Taking us back to the house he no longer resided in, Da sang along to the country song twanging on the radio. His attempt at a southern drawl used to crack me up. Even more so when he insisted that it was good. But this night, sitting in the passenger seat of his maroon Pontiac, I was distracted by the lyrics of Tim McGraw’s “I Like it, I Love It.” Da crooned, “Don’t know what it is ‘bout that little gal’s lovin’, but I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.”
It was a love song. My parents were getting divorced. So, Da wasn’t singing about Mom. A woman had started to appear the summer before, when I was learning how to swim. She was almost a decade younger than Da, and I knew implicitly that she was “little gal” whose love Da wanted more of, and once I realized it, I couldn’t get away from it. I wished I could discreetly plug my ears. I wanted it to be over. I wanted out of the car.
I raced through the garage to Mom once we parked and tried to explain, “Da played a song that’s about what he’s doing.” This wasn’t quite right. I didn’t have nearly enough words to explain the way the song stopped being just a song, the way it leapt out of the radio, a fish out of the water, and bit into my softest flesh.
Mom could see my growing distress at not being able to say what I wanted, and the next thing I knew, her voice punched through the phone, “Don’t play inappropriate music!”
I crushed my face in my hands, then I reached up for her, protesting, “No, that’s not what I mean,” but she turned away from me, and all I managed to grab was the elastic coil of telephone line.
The back and forth of the vocal boxing match continued, and I was caught between them, Mom in front of me, and Da at my back. This fight shouldn’t have happened. A lot of things shouldn’t have happened.
By the time the phone was slammed onto the wall, I was afraid Da would be mad at me, and I was mad at Mom for not listening, and it felt like I was mad at the wrong person, and I worried I’d widened the gulf between them. I didn’t realize yet that it was already the size of the immeasurable eternity between before and after and traversing such a large body of water is never safe. Life would require I swim.
“I know this will be hard to read, after you have read it, and thought about it, call me, and I can come home to talk about it.”
There is nothing inevitable about coming back up, even if that’s what my mom wanted me to believe when I was first learning how to swim. But she was right about part of it: if you come back up, you just do. There is no wizardry beyond will and the stars, which I suppose are each their own kind of magic, and this is how I lived.
“Maybe we can meet in the middle.”
Eventually, I’d realize we all were drowning. For months, and then for years, I’ll go under and come up, go under and come up. I always come back up but gasping. It looks a lot like swimming, I imagine.
In Brené Brown’s TedTalk on the power of vulnerability, she explains that “the original definition [of courage] was to tell the story of who you were with your whole heart.” Perhaps my parents just wished I’d learned to be brave that summer because they could not be. Not then at least. I wasn’t ready either. The summer I learned to go under, I learned not bravery but to bury my child heart in blue. And in the blue I would eventually learn to swim.
-Morgan Rose-Marie
Morgan Rose-Marie is a queer writer and an Assistant Professor at Utah Valley University. She has a PhD from Ohio University and an MA from Colorado State University. Her work has been featured in The Normal School, Sonora Review, Entropy, Bending Genres, Thin Air Magazine and Heavy Feather Review.