Life with Sudden Death. Michael Downing
By then, my sister Elaine had finished her missionary work in Oklahoma. She was living at home and working as a laboratory technician at St. Luke’s Hospital. She wasn’t a nurse, but she had natural talents in the field, so she was allowed to take my blood at home one night. Maybe I was sick and we were getting a discount on the blood work. More likely, my mother thought Elaine needed practice to keep her new job. I know that Joe was in his bed and told not to watch. He’d seen Elaine practicing with needles on oranges around the house, so he didn’t think I had anything to worry about.
I asked if it would hurt.
Elaine said, You’ll feel a pinprick.
My mother said, You won’t feel anything.
Elaine adjusted the desk lamp so it spotlighted my veins and I couldn’t see her face. She rubbed a cotton ball on my arm and said I should look at the Ice Capades banners. She had a soft voice that made you think she would not end up hurting you.
My mother said, When you’re nervous, Elaine, you make the patient nervous.
She didn’t have a nursing degree, either, but she was always very informed about professional standards.
Elaine said, He has big veins.
My mother said, He’s a real Martin, which was her maiden name. I was pleased. The kids who were more like my father’s relatives had practically no veins.
Elaine jabbed my arm.
I watched the needle draw out brown sludge, and I asked about the unusual color. I didn’t want her to feel bad, but I thought she should know she’d probably tapped into the wrong system.
Elaine said, Blood isn’t red.
I looked to my mother.
She said, That’s enough. He’s just a child.
This made me think it was just for practice.
I never found out what they did with my blood. After they were gone and the room was dark, Joe said, How’d it go?
Okay, I said.
He said, I suppose no one’s ever heard of the school nurse around here.
I especially trusted Elaine because she was the best of the natural swimmers in my family. That summer, she and my mother surprised me by coming to watch me swim in the county championships. I took this as an apology. It was common knowledge that nobody in the family had to attend sporting events for Joe and me.
As usual, I had trained for the big meet by practicing my racing dives for a couple of days and asking some kids at the lake if they knew what time we had to be at the pool. In between my events, when other kids were eating dry Jell-O or taking cold showers, I cheered for kids I knew, especially Barbara Jean. Barbara Jean’s grades and conduct marks were as good as mine from first grade through fourth at Notre Dame grammar school. She was also able to win almost every swimming race she entered. She wore a red-white-and-blue-striped tank suit, like Olympic swimmers, and by fourth grade, no one had beaten her in anything but breaststroke. It was just good luck that breaststroke was my best stroke, so swimming did not interfere with my crush on Barbara Jean.
There were usually between ten and thirty kids entered in every event, but they put all the kids they thought had a real chance in the last heat. I’d finished sixth or seventh in a couple of events before my mother and Elaine showed up, and then I had to swim the breaststroke. I dove in, and after the splashing died down and I’d taken a couple of strokes, I counted how many kids were ahead of me, which cost me a couple of seconds. But I had to keep my head above water for a while to make sure I’d counted everyone. My goal was not to let any more kids pass me. This was my idea of a competitive strategy.
When I finally finished counting, I looked to the end of my lane and saw my sister Elaine. She was small and compact, with short dark hair, and her eyes were almost almonds, making her pretty in a peaceful, Eskimo way. She was the quietest of all my sisters. When I saw her, though, Elaine was bent over at the waist, and she was holding her hair off her face with one hand and using her other hand to make a cup around her mouth. I’d never seen anything like it. I kept my head up for a couple of strokes just to hear what she was saying, and I realized she was screaming at me—Put your head down! Pull! Pull!
I did. I thought Elaine might get in trouble. I’d seen other kids’ parents and older brothers doing this, and my family had explained it was a low-grade form of cheating. Pull harder, Elaine shouted, correctly guessing I wouldn’t remember to keep it up. You’re in fifth place, she yelled, which was really a surprise, unless I’d miscounted.
As I hit the turning wall, Elaine really let me have it. YOU HAVE TO PULL HARDER. MICHAEL! PULL ON EVERY STROKE. FASTER!
I’d never been so excited in my entire life. No one had ever cheered out loud for me. It was a big help. I passed one kid, and Elaine kept yelling, Pull! whenever I popped my head up for a breath of air. I pulled even with two other kids, and I felt my hands slam against the wall. I came in third or second. I don’t remember.
I do remember that an embarrassingly handsome college guy wearing a white-and-green-striped bathing suit and a stopwatch and nothing else told me I was invited to join the county team for a championship meet in Springfield, Massachusetts. His name was Donny. Donny told me that the kid who’d won my event was turning thirteen in a couple of days, and he needed an eleven-year-old “who can really turn it on in the last lap.” Donny had a perfectly even all-over tan. He was reading across columns on a stack of papers he had attached to a silver clipboard. I was watching how the sun gave his reddish brown hair highlights. Donny also thought I could drop my time with better starts and turns.
I was eager to sign on for the whole Donny program. It was the first swimming medal I’d ever won, and though I would go on to win more medals and a few trophies and a varsity letter, I knew right then that I was in danger of becoming a fanatic with the wrong priorities.
The story of my surprising performance was told often, to my delight, even though my medal was not the point. Elaine’s performance was rated as much more surprising. She completely forgot where she was, my mother would say. It was a public embarrassment, but we laughed it off, knowing it would never happen again. I came to understand that it was perfectly okay to get caught up in the excitement of something pointless like a swimming race while it was going on. This was part of our natural competitiveness, which was fierce but fleeting. No one in the family attended my races after that. I learned to lie to other swimmers and myself about how much I practiced between meets so my victories could always be the result of my natural abilities and my losses could be chalked up to my well-rounded character and coming from a family with good priorities.
The next summer, Joe convinced my mother to let him go to the Catholic Youth Center’s basketball camp for two weeks instead of the regular CYC day camp we’d attended for a couple of years. She sent me along, too, and I blamed Joe for robbing me of the pleasures of adding to my collection of plaster molds of the Holy Family’s Flight into Egypt and squandering whole afternoons in the woods with boys from St. Mary’s and St. Mark’s parishes, who shared their cigarettes and clove gum if you agreed to pee with them on piles of pine needles and bark they set fire to when we were supposed to be capturing a flag. In truth, Joe had argued for keeping me in the regular day camp. He said I was a swimmer, and he was the basketball player. This distinction was lost on my mother.
Joe and David C. and a couple of other skinny sixth-graders with acne practiced lay-ups and passing plays while the shorter kids I liked complained about the Gatorade being warm and begged to go swimming. For a couple of days, the counselors tried to make us run laps in the sun for being lazy, but finally a fat kid threw up and aimed it onto the court, so they dismissed the rest of us most afternoons. All we had to do was take fifty foul shots every day.
It humiliated Joe that I’d sometimes shoot underhand, and he mentioned it every day when we were walking to catch the bus.
I said I was bored.
He said it was bad for his reputation.
I said I didn’t complain about the crazy way