ANNETTE KELLERMANN IS MY HERO by Katherine Vaz
The summer I was sixteen, I was in training to be the next Annette Kellermann, the great underwater ballerina and breath-holding champion. I was living with my mother in Mission Viejo, where I joined the synchronized swimming team. I saw it as a good start in becoming Annette.
This wanting to get off the earth full of people who push (that’s a quote from Annette) runs in our family. My father was an alternate to the U.S. Olympic Diving team in Rome in 1960. He ran away from us a long time ago. My mother used to win Masters age-group medals for ocean races like the Swim from Alcatraz, which I also did once, thinking the whole time, how glorious, it’s a complete mystery five hands below me and clearly I am going to die.
* * *
For “I Still Believe in Heroes Day,” I showed the class a picture of Annette. She is sixty years old and stretching like a muscular starfish at the bottom of the Yarra River. From years of holding her breath, she looks like a twenty-year-old. She is in rapture, but the water keeps her from burning up.
A few idiots thought it was very amusing to hold their breaths and turn scarlet – but they couldn’t last more than a minute. Annette requested fish in the aquaria with her during theater performances and said that in water, performing ballet, she entered the kingdom of pearls and women with fish bodies. “Annette Kellermann” has four sets of doubled letters, as if her name stays underwater with mirrored reflections.
* * *
My first shock was how much the swimmers hated us synchros – hated us when they weren’t laughing, calling us baton-twirlers. With a pick-up-sticks, candy-ass sport. Cockteases in tanksuits.
Our practice sessions in the diving well were never at the same time as the swim teams’ workouts, as if we might pollute not only their water but their air space. Their coach once charged over when we were running late and screamed at Coach Stuart that if he had to hear Blue Danube one more time, he would throw our stereo equipment into the water and electrocute us all. The back-and-forth guys liked to hit it hard and grind it out, five, six thousand yards, and I doubted they looked at me and said, That Tall One is only doing this to iron a few artistic moves into her muscles. She’s not a synchro, she’s the next Annette Kellermann.
Coach Robin Stuart’s lectures on us being artists were strained, because she was a brittle human metronome, on the lookout for who messed up the front-pike submarine or whose hips dipped too far during the side-press-to-elevation. There were the matters of the colors of outfits, shades of toenails, and who forgot to use waterproof mascara, and choreography timed to Giselle or the Peer Gynt Suite.
Coach Stuart would yell, Smile, Paganelli! Pretend this is fun!
I hate fake smiles. Annette’s never had to be fake. She loved every moment of being in a water tank on the stage, dancing in suspension.
I was good at the thrusts – the body submerged and then legs pushed into view, open to fishtail, head still under – because I was the best at holding my breath. I liked clamping my feet around Beth’s neck, or Joy’s, with someone else’s feet around my neck to form a waterwheel. It was worth everything, to spin with people underwater! I wasn’t too good with the shark and marlin stuff, arm waves in a circle on the surface; my sculling was too strong and threw me off.
Then I’d hear: Paganelli! Christ! This is a team sport! Coach Stuart’s sunburned face would open in a scream. The team would get on me, too. Alice called me “Jelly Paganelli” when I gained weight, and I thought, That’s it, final, I’ll always hate you. I’d remind myself: People who push. I must learn about them in order to want to get away from them as much as Annette did.
* * *
We won regionals and were in our taper before the State Finals. We were the team to beat but wanted to refine our deck routine. Beth needed work on the Swordfish, a face-down float with one knee bent before a hard scull into a backward somersault, landing us in a back float. We all needed work on our Barracuda pattern.
Lucy, our team captain, was in charge of dismantling the music system. She often dawdled, because one of the diving stars, Hugh Wyman, would come early to practice and sit on the bleachers. I couldn’t tell if he was waiting for us to clear out, or if he liked us. He was destined for the Olympics. Probably the other divers hated him. Sometimes I caught him looking at me. Whenever I climbed from the pool, I wondered if I should seem to need help so he would leap forward, or if I should look as if I needed no one so he would find me magnificent.
My mind was perfecting the scene of him taking five gold medals from around his neck and putting them around mine, and they clanked everywhere I walked.
At the end of our last workout before Finals, Hugh was watching from the stands. Coach Stuart was gone. We had to obey Lucy. Our finale involved lifting her, and we gripped her legs and bicycle-kicked below the surface and hoisted and pivoted her so that the audience could admire her beauty. We tossed her straight up for a back dive into the middle of the star we quickly formed.
Everyone fluttered up and stroked for the ladder, but I stayed below. I had already held my breath for over thirty seconds.
I did not want Hugh to be in awe of Lucy. I wanted him to see what I could do. The girls lined up, waiting for me to emerge. Hugh left the bleachers to lean with them at the edge. He was poised to jump in to save me, and I wasted energy waving, to show that I was fine. He smiled and checked his watch. My breakpoint hit at three minutes, and Hugh must have felt what was happening inside me because he gestured: Come here to me, right now! But my personal best is over five minutes. The world record in a heated pool is 6:41, set by Alejandro Ravelo, but that was without lifting a show-off team captain beforehand.
When the contractions hit, I focused upward. Hugh’s gaze locked down on mine. He was shirtless, in nothing but sweatpants. I had never been so happy. The girls jumped up and down, pointing, though I didn’t know if it was in anger or concern. I never panic when my chest heaves and my nerves start to spasm. I was a virgin but had heard that this felt the same as making love. I stretched my arms into the teardrop shape and hit the surface with one kick.
“You lasted over 4:17, you animal,” he said, grabbing my arm to lift me out. My teammates watched me stand on deck, on watery legs, while Hugh muttered, Nice going, nice going. Lucy stared daggers at me, but Beth nodded and said, “Kick-ass set of air bags.”
“Hit the showers,” said Lucy. The girls turned and stomped off. I did not move.
“Time to hit the showers, tough girl,” said Lucy.
“Let her catch her breath,” said Hugh, and Lucy stormed toward the locker rooms.
I was alone on deck with him, and he said, “Get out of the wind,” and led me behind the supply cage for the pull-buoys and kickboards.
“You all right?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“I’m Hugh Wyman,” he said.
“Everyone knows who you are,” I said. “I’m Mary Paganelli.”
His hand was on my shoulder. I inhaled slow and hard, my ribcage working outward and in, an accordion’s squeeze. His hand still on me, he said,
“What lungs. You’re something else.”
I was electric from what I had done to myself. I started to say that I longed to do so much more than breath-holding, but instead I leaned forward and let my face rest against him, to stay in the concave made by his body. He was over six feet – his jackknife off the platform was stunning – and black-haired. He was maybe nineteen. His eyes were blue and focused. I talked myself into looking back into his eyes. This was a man, I told myself, who stays precisely within what is happening. That’s why he’s a star. That’s why there’s a fullness and also a self-containment to him that people envy.
That’s when he kissed me. My lips brushed everywhere I could land on his face and then he held my head in place for me to be kissed again, before he drew back and said, “Sorry. You need your breath.”
“I can go without breathing,” I said, holding out my arms.
But we heard a noise. The dive team was arriving, and he had to leave. He said that I was wonderful, and he wished us a fine meet.
My kiss with Hugh lasted under twenty seconds.
* * *
Sometimes my mother, a secretary for a company that made designer watches, took time from work to attend my practice. Her name was Helen Gladstone Paganelli, which she described as “blah-American until I met your Italian father.” Today I was glad she had not been there. I could not stop talking about my feat and liked being nonchalant in saying, “Hugh Wyman timed me.”
Mama was so excited by what she called “my victory” that she went to her stand like an airline’s service cart with bottles of liquor, each with silver dog tags that said “Gin,” “Bourbon,” “Amaretto.” My teammate Beth called such displays “Presbyterian water gardens.” Mama poured a glass with mostly 7-Up and a little bourbon and gave it to me, and she filled herself a glass with bourbon and splashed 7-Up on it.
“To our rising family star!” Mama shouted.
“Cheers,” I said, drinking too fast. On instinct I performed the Valsalva maneuver to equalize my air – pinching my nose while trying to blow out, letting my ears open.
When she whooped and insisted that we dance, I pretended that I was in Hugh’s arms. I wanted the night hours to hurry and die with everything in them, including this apartment with its fake-bamboo coffee table and aqua-tinted carpet and banged-up pans in the sink – my mother burned everything she cooked. Tonight would not bring me Hugh, but tomorrow might.
And then I noticed that my mother wanted the person dancing in her arms not to be me, either. I could feel her not feeling me at all. She was staring at the picture framed on the wall of my father, in the team shot for the 1960 dive team. It was from Sports Illustrated. She had kept the original page from the magazine.
You’re something else, something else. My mother was average height, with long blonde hair and a girl’s headbands. I stooped to put my head on her shoulder. That’s when I think she remembered that I was the person with her, not someone else, and she reared back and wanted to refill my drink.
“No, Mama,” I said. “That’s not what I want.” I began to chant, I want to go to bed, Mama, to bed, to bed – and she led me there and said I was no fun. A steady stream of cars ran outside my window, and I pretended I was in a berth on the sea.
My head was fuzzy as I surfaced awake again through layers of darkness. Yearning without a shape or name used to stir me from sleep, but now it had the form of Hugh. My friends had told me that love lasted only a few minutes and then it was over – but I would suspend them as the world’s best minutes in the rest of my earth-bound life.
I decided to pretend I had insomnia so Mama would have to comfort me. But she was not in her room. I headed for the living room.
She was with her back to me, downing a drink at the silver cart. I stopped and watched. She poured herself another and added some water to the bottle so that I would not notice anything amiss by morning.
* * *
Lucy challenged me to a breath-holding contest and said that she had talked Hugh into being the judge. I couldn’t wait to get to the pool, but when I looked at him waiting on deck, his eyes met mine but he seemed to have forgotten kissing me. When I asked him how he was, all he said, politely, was that he was fine. How was I?
Lucy arrived, and he timed our warm-up: Two minutes of slow breathing. Next we hyperventilated, then went at it deeply again until we were light as sponges. She and I took one last inhalation and attached our nose clips. Hugh said, “Go!” and we slipped into the water and hung in the dead man’s float. We had on weight belts. Here’s my secret: You can always take one second more of anything. The trick is to convince yourself that you are always starting out, just beginning to seize the time.
Lucy’s blonde hair spread out in the water, tinged plant color from chlorine. I’d never met anyone who was as pretty up close as at a distance. Her muscles were ropes beneath silk-and-water skin. She was eighteen, a grownup, and I was a child. When she kicked up and bent over on the deck to catch her breath, Hugh bent over, too, and put his arm around her and brushed wet hair from her tanned face. I watched from the bottom of the pool, dizzy enough for them to blur. How odd that impressionism – the truth behind objects – appears not in focus with hard lines, as I would hope for truth to look, but with throbs and waves, as if the world is underwater. She loves him too, and he has chosen her. While I am winning with a personal high of 5:08, his hand is on her back. I would say to my mother: When I flopped out like a fish, they applauded and then left me. She was gorgeous. Who do you think won?
That night I dreamed I was a flounder on the moon, a new version of my childhood nightmares that someone was holding down my arms. I flapped through the moon dust, my eyes on the same plane so that I could not look anywhere but up into a rain of oxygenless dust, and I waited for an astronaut’s treaded shoe to crush me even flatter.
I love being a fish, but how did I land on a far planet?
* * *
Mama wanted to attend the Crystal Cathedral to pray about the State Finals, and I said, I worry about a God with nothing better to do. But I did want to pray that what I saw from the water was wrong; Lucy was nothing and Hugh was waiting for the perfect moment to call me. Mama drove our Ford Fairlane and said, “What’s with the mood?” and tried to cheer me up, singing, “Bringing in the Sheaves,” and saying “thieves” instead of “sheaves.” Triangular flags like the ones on golf courses, clawed by the Pacific winds, marked clusters of beige tract homes that each cost a third of a million. I only liked Mission Viejo for its water teams and wondered how non-swimmers could breathe.
“You know what triggerfish are, Mama?” I asked.
“Yes!” she said. “They stay in their holes in the sand and shoot out to grab food and then shoot tail-backwards into their holes.” She released a wild laugh. “Okay, Mary, Mary, quite contrary! I like that! You and I live in a place where we’re triggerfish.”
She was too smart for me. I couldn’t even make her mad.
I hated the people arriving at the Cathedral, with their jewelry sending the sunlight in lasers everywhere. The building was nice, like hardened water with a few rainbow bull’s eyes on the panes.
“Rich people with everything,” I said.
“Not everyone here has money. We don’t, right? Everyone just wants to talk to God,” said my mother, and she grabbed my hand. “It does look like a big glass department store, though, doesn’t it?”
I giggled. She herded me through a confusion of scents – citron, lilacs, exhalations of coffee. We crammed inside the glass elevator like an aquarium and while people stared, Mama said, “Ping! Second floor, Petites and Juniors! Misses and Big-and-Beautiful, third floor!”
A few people laughed, and some gave her dirty looks.
We settled into the pews that scaled the crystal sides, as if we had shot up on geysers, and I entertained myself with what my teammate Isabel called playing the game: I imagined couples making love. At the opening hymn, I imagined the minister doing it with his wife. Her arms roamed the steel organ as she played “We Gather Together.” Mostly I played in my head the reel of Hugh kissing me. Then I would say: Stop that at once. Too much time has gone by. Inflamed, I said to my mother, “Everyone here wants something, but we’re going to die anyway.”
“Shh, Mary,” said Mama.
“God’s truth!” the minister shrieked.
Everyone screamed back, “Yes!”
God’s truth! God’s truth! A purple carpet rolled up from the nave to the altar like God’s tongue out for us saying Ahhh.
People think that with a name like Mary, I should be religious, but the whole idea of faith makes me want to turn blue. My idea of religion is Annette, because she said to God: What if I reject Your rules about breathing?
We imitated candelabra by holding our palms up. Voices rose: Do this, God; do that! Help me and, oh all right, maybe some others, too! God had overturned this crystal goblet over us to drown out the racket, but as time wore on and the sun beat down it was as if we persuaded Him to lean forward and listen, and His terrible heat was upon us.
My prayer was, God, make Mama stop waiting for my father to return, and oh yes, please make me the next Annette Kellermann right away. That would make Hugh admire me again.
* * *
My mother sometimes played a black-and-white home movie of my father and cried as she watched it, downing drink after drink: He is climbing up a cliff at Mazatlan. The camera is shaking, as if her vision is frantically spinning a safety net below his chiseled flesh. She must be shouting at him, because he turns and smiles at the camera. That’s when the film explodes in oily black spots, as if burning matches are touching it from behind.
* * *
State Finals were on our home turf, and when my mother and I drove up, so did Lucy, in Hugh’s car. She leaned over to give him a kiss. I thought my stomach was going to rise up and go through my throat. They shared some laugh and he gave her another kiss.
Mama said, “Isn’t that Hugh Wyman? Now that’s what I call a knock-out couple.”
“Shut up, Mama,” I said, and slammed out of the car. I marched off and left her, and I was shaking when Lucy sauntered into the locker room and stepped out of her clothes.
She smiled at me. She knew I had seen her kissing Hugh. Swimmers were encasing their top knots in green-spangled snoods, and Isabel was shrieking about a broken nail, and I felt myself sinking to the bottom of a soundless vat.
Outside the team banners were strung up – Irvine, Mt. Eden, San Diego, San Jose – with bags, girls, combs, and costumes flying: high-voltage fussing. I saw my mother with her large purse in the stands, and I knew that meant she had some bourbon with her. She waved at me and I went to sit with her, and I said, “Sorry, Mama. I guess I’m antsy.”
She said, “Take a nip, no one will know.”
And I did. I was in my costume but downing a swig, as good a way as any to wash away the image of Lucy with Hugh. I was trembling. My mother, exhaling lethal fumes, stood up, unsteadily.
“Stop it,” I said. “Sit down.”
“I’m nervous for you,” she said. “I’m off to the can.” She thumped down the bleachers, grabbing people’s shoulders for support.
“Should you go see about her?” said a woman, timidly.
“Mind your own business,” I said.
When I reached the corridor with the rest rooms, I stopped. Emerging from the toilets was someone who had to be Lucy’s mother, wearing a trim suit the color of garibaldis, with an orange pillbox hat like a lid for her cranium; she was put together and pretty in a ferocious way.
My mother staggered out behind her. She was so drunk that her hand struck out at the wall so she could keep her balance. Lucy’s mother said, “Are you all right, dear?” Mama’s face was slack. Her Mexican-print dirndl skirt hung down unevenly in the back, and her black stockings were twisted. Her red flats were scuffed.
Under her breath, Lucy’s mother said, “Good God.”
“Hello,” said my mother, and shook Lucy’s mother’s hand with an exaggeration that made me cringe.
“And you are – ?” said Lucy’s mother.
My mother looked at me, expecting me to introduce her, and I said, “Yes, what do you want?” with perfect evenness, already rehearsing my defense for later. I was in a precision sport, and I hit a note that I could protest was a simple response to her looking at me. Yes, what would she like me to do? Introduce her?
My mother was shaking so much she had to press herself firmly against the wall.
“Some people,” said Lucy’s mother to me.
“I’m the mother of a breathing-holding champion,” my mother shouted at Lucy’s mother, and she pointed at me.
Lucy’s mother looked at me and waved her hand in front of her face, as if to say: Ah ha, I see, fumes there too, like mother like daughter.
I ran toward the pool, dying to get into the water, where it is impossible to speak. We weren’t up yet. I milled with my teammates, and Joy said, “Whoo. I hope that’s a strong mouthwash.” Coach Stuart was slamming her clipboard, explaining something. My mind blanked out. When it was our turn, I ended up being a beat off with everything.
Before the last heat, Lucy hissed, “Get your fucking act together.”
But I couldn’t. I arched my back too much on all my spins. I tilted Lucy on the lift and couldn’t stay tucked in the pike positions. I threw off our out-of-water arm work by glancing toward the stands to see if my mother was there. I couldn’t spot her. When we climbed out onto the deck, it was not a graceful exit. More points lost there.
Mt. Eden won the meet, and in the locker room, even Beth refused to speak to me. When I asked for a towel, she said, “Get it yourself, or can’t you do that either?” Coach Stuart told us that third place was nothing to be ashamed of; she’d see us for practice tomorrow. We would start regrouping for next year. I could tell she was furious with me.
I found my mother wandering in the parking lot and drove her home and put her to bed. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish’s, clotted inhalations. It was four in the afternoon.
I went to my own room and crawled into bed myself.
It would be best to die in water. At a diving meet, I might be struck by lightning while on the platform. My skeleton would be a hanger for fire. I would dissolve and turn the water black when I hit it.
* * *
My teammates were waiting for me at our next practice, lined up at the pool’s edge. Lucy said, “Oops, I’ve had too much to . . . drink!” She weaved and knocked into the other girls, who hooted and banged into each other and fell crazy-limbed into the pool.
I thought that would be the end, and I did a sitting-dive in, ready to start our warm-up, but they circled me underwater, grinning with puffed-up faces. Isabel clawed my thigh and Jennifer’s elbow knocked my head. I tried to frog-kick away but hands were all over me, yanking me below. Lucy grabbed my right arm, and then Beth and Joy pinned my ankles and Isabel held my other arm. A column of air boiled from my mouth. Their nails scratched red tracks onto my limbs.
At a signal from Lucy, they dropped me and I flailed up, gasping as I clung to the gutter. I heaved onto the deck and vomited water. My teammates bounced out and someone I couldn’t see landed a kick and said, “Thanks for blowing it for us, hotshot.”
The chlorine in my eyes pasted milky smears around the lights, and Lucy was roaring like mad; all of them were laughing. I jumped on Lucy and knocked her over. Her breasts were so surprising against mine when I pinned her that I reared back and slapped them. She screamed and we went at it, her arms and mine, trying to get at each other while everyone was hitting me or pulling my bathing suit straps. Isabel yanked hair out of my skull. Then I felt light; Coach Stuart was hauling me off her, asking if I had lost my mind, marching me toward her office.
The tiny room smelled of sweat and metal. Coach Stuart got out a first-aid kit and said, “Start talking.” She doused a handkerchief with iodine and rubbed it into my cuts.
I said, “I hate this. I can’t stand breathing the same air as any of you. I hate Lucy, and I hate you. I hate this phony, dumb-ass sport.”
“Good,” she said, dabbing hard at my arms. “Have a nice life. Hold your breath until you turn blue, because you are off the team.”
I showed up once more, the next time I knew the divers would practice, and I grabbed Hugh away from a group of his friends.
“Mary,” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”
I led him back toward the supply shed and didn’t care that some of his teammates were grinning and watching.
I love you, I bleated.
“Get a hold of yourself, Mary,” he said. “Please don’t do this.”
I closed my eyes and sobbed: I love you, I love you, I never stop thinking of you, I get up in the morning wanting you to pick me off the ground, I want our sweat to splash everywhere, I walk around with no one knowing that I’m picturing you undressed, sticking your thing into me, and I go to goddamn bed with blankets piled on top of me pretending it’s you and I wake up with everything soaking.
“Mary!” he said. As if spitting out my name would return me safely to myself.
My eyes stayed shut, with my howls widening and growing fainter, like sound waves billowing underwater to ring around him while he was saying that I had better pull myself together, at once, a moment is a moment, for Christ’s sake, and then it’s gone. A kiss means that something like love is passing by. But how crazy was I? That was then, and this was now.
* * *
My mother was not home, and I dove alone into her water garden. Amaretto floating on scotch is a Godfather, and I poured one and it was pretty, gold with a crimson crown sinking toward the bottom. The Godfather made me wince. I stopped feeling the throbbing where the nails of my departed friends had ripped my arms, and I lost any sense of where my face hurt. I swallowed down another and then another too fast, and then I can not tell you what happened to the time.
Next thing I knew I was lying with my arms and legs open. What a riot! I was at the bottom of a lake clear as air. Giggling, lit up red and yellow with Godfathers, I watched a face hover over mine. It had to be my reflection. I rose through the water to kiss it. But I was laughing very loudly, so why wasn’t this old-woman version of me doing the same?
* * *
Mama once told me the story of a Caliph who feared the magical powers of his ruby ring and threw it into the Tigris. Just as quickly, he wanted magic back again, and he sent five hundred divers day and night for five months to retrieve his ring. One hundred of them drowned.
But the ones who stop my heart, who give me the most pause, were the hundred who dropped dead suddenly many years after their final dive. They keeled over while still young.
The body refuses to forget its traumas.
I told myself that if I started drinking, I would keep going until I drank oceans, and I did not want my time to be over, not yet.
* * *
My mother moved us to Nevada, where she could work as a waitress and drink in peace. I refused to drink with her. Silver City had nowhere to swim. The land was straggly and looked as if it had undergone hair transplant surgery, with the plugs not growing out. When I left home, my mother and I stopped speaking for what seemed like forever.
One day I reached upward to close a curtain and felt a sharp stab: a premonition of being old. I met the love of my life when I was thirty, and he was long gone, but I wanted him right then, before I went over any new brink. But he found another woman, and I waited but by then he loved someone else. Since you have suffered too, you will understand, won’t you, how many days and years are compressed there?
Oh, Annette! What a shock to realize that you were not about time and counting and expecting rescue. You were never on a team. You went after the art of being submerged in the unknown, waltzing with purple fish. You look timeless in those photos in the Yarra River because you declared all mysteries starting with love buoy me up right now.
You never waited for anything.
Being a goddess is always a solo act.
Hugh Wyman made the Olympic diving team and won a gold before starting a movie career. No doubt you have seen him. I refuse to blame him for living in his time, grasping whatever he finds beautiful. I ask myself: Was it Hugh I wanted, or the fame that I knew he was bound for?
Lucy set a U.S. variable-ballast breath-holding record in 1981. Inside Sports quoted her as saying that she was going to retire and marry a schoolteacher. The competition was too vicious.
One day my mother called out of nowhere to report that she had dried out. I persuaded her to visit me in San Francisco, and at first I did not recognize the heavy person before me. I rested my head against her soft flesh. Gardenia powder, white, lined a crease in her neck, and I inhaled it to have her inside me. Her crevices offered a gift of flowers. She whispered, “Don’t cry, Mary. I believe I am what is called ‘no longer beautiful.’” She was wearing a scarf-dress, and a breeze lifted the sleeves so that she appeared as a large fish with sherbet-colored gills. “No, you’re a sweet sight, Mother,” I said, and I meant it.
We went to a Vietnamese water puppet show at Fort Mason. According to the program, the operators of the show risked profound diseases. Dangers lurk in waterways, and ailments can result from the strength required to grip the underwater poles that move the bright puppets. The troupe performed the story of children who slay a dragon to save their village, only to find they have killed the village’s sorcerer.
Why in water? someone asked on the way out. Why not a show on dry land, if water brings the puppeteers more suffering?
Mama looked at them as if to say, poor things, don’t they know anything?
Didn’t they know about the ancient pearl divers?
In their desire to find treasure, pearl divers held their breaths past all human limits – ten minutes, fifteen, time after time, until blood vessels burst everywhere inside their bodies. And they kept on diving.
Their flesh got colored the shade of flames.
They walked around with their eyes dyed a permanent red.
They looked like unquenchable fires barely encased within human skins.
Katherine Vaz is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the Library of Congress. She is the author of two novels, Saudade (St. Martin’s Press) and Mariana (Flamingo). Her collection, Fado & Other Stories, won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her recent stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Bomb Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, Tin House, and TriQuarterly.