October, 2001

Water Babies

By Matthew Klam

I've always had a thing for big, athletic women. Somebody with a narrow waist, but solid and whole, tough, selfcontained, not some dope with her finger in her mouth waiting for a clue from a father figure boyfriend. I've dated a bubble butt gymnast, a stretched- out tennis champion, a hockey goalie with a soft, white moustache, a hulking, bowlegged, crew cut platform diver, a couple of ocean-rescue lifeguards, enough mountain biking, armpit-haired, always hungry, frisbee-hucking, mogul-skiing, hip-checking, race-you-to-the-car type women to field a soccer team. I liked when they were a physical threat to me. I was lazy and unfocused and looking for the strength and pride that I couldn't find in myself. But no one had the power to prop me up.

I never paid attention to rowers until somebody, a guy, on the University of New Hampshire crew team drowned during my sophomore year. It made national news. I didn't even know we had a crew team. I think that their practice got suspended, and some of them got homework dispensation, dead friend lenience, whatever, athough technically academic study came second to the real UNH student activity of throwing up on your shoes. But immediately rowers had cachet and soon my fraternity brothers and I had identified their members and found out where they drank.

There they stood, in the parking lot at Crew Central, larger than normal people, by a keg in t-shirts in a light snowshower. Some wore wool ski hats. They were talking about the accident. The men were tall and rangy, well-muscled, sullen and drunk. They looked like J. Crew models on steroids. The women looked, well, the same. I'd been hearing all week about the horrific accident, the insane regime of the elite college rower — the 4 A.M. practices, the 400- pound deep squats, how they ate rolled oats from a fifty-pound bag and drank the oat water, how they were universally lauded as people who could suffer more pain — I wanted to feel what they did, be part of it, get closer. I didn't know how to stand in a crowd of obsessed achievers then. At that time in life I had no goals. On top of the physical prowess rowers also pull this Henley-on-Thames, Head-of-the-Charles thing, this unbearable arrogance that's difficult to crack. I didn't row, I was a nobody, they turned their backs, as thick as as turtleshells, to my face. So I left, walked to the sub place in the slush awhile later... And there she was.

She bumped me out of line, half apologizing, tan and flushed, drunk under a baseball hat. Wow, so large, so much better looking than the women I saw at the party. Yes, she'd been there, too, but I hadn't seen her. I don't know how this was possible because she is a big chick. Now I'm not short, but I was kind of looking up at her. Like a Sudanese basketball star, she was exotic and rare, and so, I figured, worth collecting. She told me how the guy drowned, how they should never have gone out on the river that day. She had hair joining the space between her eyebrows. We got our subs and ate in an orange plastic booth. Her face was really pretty and she was very giggly and then emotional and then clearabout the whole thing:she had avoided death while someone she knew did not-- and then calm. I think the calm came from the pain of rowing — the purifying process of having a tortured existence. The next thing I knew we were dating. Things happen fast in college. All those hours training made her stir- crazy and seemingly ready for anything.

She planned to make it to the Olympics. Her work ethic was Nazi intensity, so awesome that I felt in her presence like a slim, dainty, burlap sack of shit.

I wonder how it was for her, dating Mr. Skinny butt, Mr. Saggy Shorts. She couldn't get the zipper up on any dress she tried on. "Goddammit," she'd say, blushing, humiliated, and then go back and try on something stretchy. Her ass was so firm and strong it hung in the air like a helium balloon. She had powerful size 11 quintuple E feet. She confessed once when we were walking somewhere and her sandal broke — it exploded — the bottom fell off, that it was strange being big and she got sick of it sometimes and said, "Some guys just want me for breeding stock." It was a kind of a weird turn-on to watch a woman built like a linebacker paint her toenails.

She was built like a truck.

We dated for a while. In no way did it even come close to working. We were not a match. She would get up at four every single morning for the first of her two daily practices. She'd practically cry,groaning in the dark as she put on her smelly clothes and, while half-asleep, go down to the river that had such a vicious current that if her boat tipped over (and racing sculls tip over easily), she'd drown, too. She would freeze and sweat and pull with explosiveness, yet graceful explosiveness, as though she were rowing a cigarette boat with a cannon mounted on the rail. I know all of this from the stories. I never went to see her practice; I stayed in bed. She was a masochist. She abused herself. Her training went beyond the hell of your imagination. She could run an eight-mile sprint and not perspire.

Everything she did was for the good of the team. In rowing you have to row together, you can never shine by yourself. It's a mindfucker that the best thing you can do in a fast boat is disappear, blend perfectly, feel the boat and what it needs and submit while giving every last effort. What she needed was her team, a big win, a national ranking, a sublime experience of abnegation and pure release. What she didn't need was me.

We knew that we didn't fit together and so did everybody else. Once, we were running along the Charles River in Boston — and a guy sitting in his car getting ready to merge on Memorial Drive yelled at us from his car window (we may have been making out, actually, at that moment), until finally we were like, "WHAT?!" And he said, "Dat whoa-man. She's TOO big for you, Mon!"

I heard later she was dating some Oklahoma football guy.

She never made it to the Olympics.

You know what? My rower wasn't built like a truck at all. I lied. I say that out of insecurity because the truth is I constantly compared my physical prowess to hers, and I lost. She was better at rowing than I'd been at anything in my entire life. Yet She was a girl. She had calves like grapefruits of Mt. Olympus. Her deltoids were poured gold. When we wrestled she'd snake her legs around mine and turn dark red and unless I could tickle her or get somebody to jump in and knock her off me I was screwed. When she wrapped her thighs around my head, she crushed off the air to my brain and I went stone-deaf. And, although I knew that she was just fucking with me, and although I felt sure that she didn't love me, when she got on top of me, and looked into my eyes, and held me, and kept me on the earth, I knew, as I fought for air, that I was alive.