Free Annabel by Kathleen Winter

exactly the same, Dad?”
    “They count,” Jacinta stood in the doorway. “It’s all choreographed.”
    “That explains everything,” Treadway said with his mouth full.
    “What’s choreographed?” Wayne asked. “I like graphs.” He was doing graphs in school. He coloured his in with stripes and tiny dots and different shades of pencil. His teacher had written on his report card that it would be good if he could finish his work more quickly.
    “They practise for months,” Jacinta said. “Years. Choreographed means someone thinks of all the moves and writes them down and the swimmers practise those moves over and over again. And when they’re underwater, they count.”
    “Oh! So if water gets in their ears or they can’t hear the music, it doesn’t matter?”
    “Right. They count and they all come up at the same moment, and everything is identical, and everything matches up perfectly.”
    “Well, their time would be better spent,” Treadway said, “if they went to secretarial school and learned how to do shorthand.”
    “It’s a pattern the whole time, isn’t it, Mommy?”
    “It is. It’s an intricate pattern.”
    “Who decides it? Who choreographs?”
    “They have different choreographers. I’m not sure. But for her solo routine when we were fourteen, Eleanor Furneaux had to choreograph her own piece.”
    “Solo?” Treadway said. “I thought the whole point was to make a fool of yourself with eight or ten other people all doing exactly the same thing. You can’t be synchronized if you’re by yourself. Imagine synchronizing your watch to the right time if it was the only watch in the world.” He got up and put his cup and saucer in the sink and went to the bathroom. He did not close the bathroom door and they heard him pee, then hawk and spit into the toilet.
    At night in bed Treadway lay on his back beside his wife. He did not try to begin lovemaking but left that to her. It was one of the things Jacinta loved about her husband, especially now that her hormone levels had changed. She had taken Eliza Goudie’s advice and sent to Eaton’s for three satin slips with lace boleros. She had bought herself three good brassieres, and wore one each night because it lifted her breasts as if to make a present of them. Eliza had told her to say, out loud, alone, through the day, “I am incredibly sexy.” It wasn’t hormones alone, Eliza said, that dampened a woman’s sex drive. It was not the balding of her husband or the thickening of his belly. It was the woman’s abandonment of her own body. “If you aren’t going to take Valium,” Eliza had told her, “at least buy yourself some beautiful undergarments and negligées and talk yourself into being the most desirable woman your husband has ever known.”
    “Skaters have men,” Treadway said.
    “Skaters?”
    “Olympic skaters. There are men.”
    “Figure skaters?”
    “Even if they are like — what’s his name?”
    “Toller Cranston.”
    “Yeah. And they’re not all like him. There are normal figure skaters.”
    “But Toller Cranston is the best.”
    “That’s a matter of personal opinion. Did he win the gold medal? What I’m saying is, even if Wayne picked skating to go crazy over. But no. He picks the one sport anywhere, in the entire world, that you have to be a girl to perform. There are no boys in synchronized swimming, right?”
    “I hadn’t thought of it.”
    “Just cast your mind.”
    “I’m not sure.”
    In his own bed Wayne looked at the broken ceiling tile, which he knew had only 209 holes in it instead of the 224 in all the others, a fact he had discerned the time he had croup when he was seven and had to stay in bed nine days. He lay picturing the swimsuit of Elizaveta Kirilovna, the soloist for the Russian team. It was the first time he had wished he lived somewhere other than Croydon Harbour. All over the world, his mother had told him, there were swimming pools. Even in St. John’s.
    “Mom?” he asked