drink with a male friend, when two queer women showed up on a
date, and suddenly, I wasn’t. A bunch of their friends arrived, and
I stopped listening to mine, fully entranced by the scene in front
of me, studying the ways they looked at and touched one another,
wanting to be part of it all.
Most of these latent memories — the movie, the Paris trip —
had evaded me for years, boomerangs that returned after a long
period of absence. Eventually, I worked up the courage to tell that
old boyfriend about my new girlfriend. He wasn’t surprised by my
admission: I had mentioned something like this a handful of times
in the relationship, he said. Did I really not remember?
There’s a diff erence, I learned, between knowing something about
yourself and accepting it. A few weeks into class, my swim diary
became a regular diary, and I would intersperse the recordings of
swim lessons with notes about my day-to-day life. I had two dates the
week of my fourth swim class. My entry ended with, ‘‘I can’t believe
I get to do this!’’ I don’t remember which one I meant.
rom the plane, the sight of the water of Turks and Caicos made me
sweaty and excited, as if I were preparing to go on a date. It was the
end of February, and on this vacation I would fi nally swim in the
ocean. But once I arrived, I kept fi nding ways to avoid getting into
it. One afternoon, I sat in a restaurant near the beach, killing time,
when two people peacefully paddled by me in a kayak. Suddenly
competitive with these strangers, I decided that kayaking, for the
fi rst time and alone, might be fun.
If I could get into a kayak in the water, I thought, at some point I
would swim. In a life jacket, I paddled around, pleased for even try-
ing. If I can make it to that dock over there, I can get out. Accomplished,
with ease. If I can make it from the dock to the reefs, I can fi nally leave
the beach. Done!
I was turning back to shore when a father and a daughter came
around the reefs’ bend. ‘‘There’s a shipwreck over there!’’ the child
screeched. I told them I would try to make it over, but it was my
fi rst time kayaking. The dad told me I had nothing to worry about.
‘‘You can swim, right?’’
‘‘Not really!’’ I said in response, already paddling away.
The farther I got out from shore — the closer to the shipwreck —
the choppier the waves became. There was nothing shielding me from
the wind. The pulling became harder. I made it around the bend and
saw the shipwreck from afar, a rusty humpback whale, then stopped
kayaking long enough to catch my breath. A wave crashed me into a
reef, then another. The wind had suddenly increased: I kept trying to
pivot, but I couldn’t pull hard enough. My kayak got stuck between
the reefs as though I had parallel- parked there, trapped lengthwise
inside a little enclosure that kept me hidden from the shore.
I tried to keep calm. When I’m nervous, I sing. I started with the
fi rst song that popped into my head. ‘‘Anything ... you can do ... I
can do better,’’ I sang through gritted teeth, fi sts clenched, trying
to back myself out amid the rolling waves. ‘‘I can do ... anything ...
better than you,’’ I sang to my ultimate nemesis: one of the calmest
beaches in the world on a mildly windy day.
Eventually, the kayaking father returned with another child and
guided me while I backed myself out. He led the way to the ship-
wreck, occasionally whooping with joy. Up close, it was unremark-
able, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know if I was looking at
a scene of death or survival. Still, now that I had done this, I was
pulsing with adrenaline, dizzy with the new knowledge that I could
do practically anything.
I returned to shore, dropped the kayak off , then waded back into
the water. A woman waist deep was taking a selfi e; another womanThe author,
triumphant,
in Turks
and Caicos
in February.
←48
F
Photograph by Seth Casteel for The New York TimesP. The Voyages Issue