1.   Would you rather be a dolphin or a horse?

Would you rather eat only candy for your whole life and be sick five times or only fruit

           and be sick for ten?

Would you rather eat only peas for the next twenty years (frozen) or only hot dogs for

           the next twenty-two?

Would you rather have an alarm clock wake you up every morning at three with a

           terrible cuckoo sound, and then again at four, or fall from a ten-story building and

           land on your neighbor’s head?

All the questions and negotiations and possibilities for terror, multiplied.

I would like to swim, I tell my daughter. To swim forever, in an ocean, and make a click                     language out of my words. To swim, and exist in swimming. To have humans 

           swim by and have them nearly touch, to feel the waves of their passing, and yet

           not to touch them; to remain in my own lane of water, as if in a quiet force field.

Not be a galloping horse, or a distracted mother with a cuckoo, or a bear. Only to swim, 

           and have the every-four-arm-strokes breathing soothe me, and let the rhythm of 

           that breathing crystallize, and feel I was dancing, shifting from the very inside.

Of course, I do not tell her all of this, only a dolphin.

I would like to have a very small brain, she says. Then I would not have to think.

Did you know that the kangaroo cannot hop backward?

           I did not know that, I said.

 

     2.   After the miscarriage, at only seven weeks—waking up to a sharp cramp, at four

           in the morning, sitting on the floor, asking for the doctor, the way a child would 

           ask for her mother—I blamed myself., I lifted a ten-pound weight, and resolved 

           that, the next time—if there was a next time—I would refuse to carry anything, 

           and do no exercise that could cause any harm. When I shut my eyes, I could still 

           see myself lifting off the bed in the ultrasound room, having seen the cluster of 

           cysts that might have been—but perhaps had not been—a child, and the sheet of

           blood I left behind, so much blood even my husband remarked he didn’t think 

           such a new pregnancy could have left so much. He noticed how pale I looked, he

           later told me, but didn’t want to say anything, not wanting to frighten me even more.

 

Sophie, only four at the time, would soon come to ask me why I could not lift her to the 

           monkey bars, why I could not bring the groceries inside, why I’d cleared my bag 

           of all extraneous books, rather than carting around half the library, as I usually 

           did. I came to seem, without meaning to, fragile, a China plate that could not be 

           shaken or dropped. I would break, I feared, or the child inside me would.

 

And then came Halloween, when I had made it to six months, and had asked my 

           husband, nearly every day, at the close, if he thought I’d have a miscarriage 

           tomorrow. No one knows, he said. And I agreed. No one knew. That was the 

           terrible thing. And the more the time passed, ironically, the less safe I felt. I 

           wasn’t getting closer to a pregnancy being over, and to having a healthy child. I

           was getting closer to having an even later miscarriage, sure to be more painful 

           than the first. And yet it was Halloween, and I ignored the new sciatica shooting 

           down my spine, and  set aside the special cushion with a hole in it I’d bought to

           sit, which appeared to have little effect, and  helped Sophie dress as a pirate,

           and headed out into the Boston streets. There was an oyster bar that had been 

           transformed into a haunted house. There was an entire street that had been 

           cleared of cars and festooned with RIP signs and fake smoke and faces lit up by 

           flashlights, in masks, adults and children in alligator costumes and Transformer 

           suits, so they could lie on the floor and pretend to be almost dead, but then rise 

           from the dead and become robotic, monstrous. There was the sound of cackling 

           laughter, screeching and candy highs and the commenting of neighbors on every 

           corner. There was spilled wine and the reek of everything good.

 

“Come on,” she told me, pulling my arm, with her fake sword in the other hand, and her

           pirate costume—black and white stripes, a skull on the shoulder—oversized but 

           making her look oddly powerful. “We’ve only filled up half my bag, okay?”

 

“Okay.” I held the back of my aching leg and followed, navigating through cheese hats 

           and wild bears and princesses. I breathed in every quiet breath I could.

 

     3.   If you swim so many times, the water feels like it will cut you.

If you swim through blizzards, peeling off your coat and snow boots and every other 

           layer to put on a suit already damp from yesterday.

If you swim because you imagine you can be no colder than you already are.

If you swim after telling yourself you will not swim tomorrow.

If you swim because a bit of water on you, as you wash your face, feels like ice, but a lot 

           of water feels like an almost forgettable thing.

Because being a dolphin is not an option.

Because you have no language other than the human one.

Because your mind needs water, and the deprivation of it, after a full day of sound.

If you swim because the way the water catches you is like nothing else.

If you swim because it is the only thing, you have convinced yourself, that will keep your 

           unborn child safe.

If you swim because no one will swim in your place.

If you swim because your limbs know more than your mind does.

If you swim so your fear won’t take hold.