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The divers hold the biggest celebration when someone fails.
Failing in diving is no joke. It is a full-body splat onto a freezing, liquid hardness. The difference between succeeding and failing in diving is the difference between the breathless elegance of a soaring heron and the horror of watching a cat fall out a window.
When a diver fails, the sound and the spectacle are so sensational that the whole team bursts into applause. The diver sometimes limp-swims to the edge of the pool and cries. The fail replays on a television screen just behind the diving boards and sometimes they all watch it together and cringe or cover their mouths.
I think of this often. I fantasize about having a failure party: inviting all of my closest friends or, screw it, everyone I know, over to the backyard for an extravagant celebration with recklessly exploding champagne and fancy pizza and exquisitely dressed salads and little bite-sized raspberry cupcakes to say, I failed! Listen to the sound of that splat! Then we can all toast and applaud.
The most sensational and horrifying fail I ever saw was that of a girl diver, probably fifteen or sixteen, who landed flat on her back with a sound like a textbook slammed on a table. It was the first and only time I ever saw the diving coach hurry to the side of the pool and crouch down beside someone. I thought, she must not be very good and she probably won’t be there long, without even being fully conscious I was thinking these things, until the girl simply stuck around. For years.
The girl has a freckled, round, sweet face and a powerful muscled body, and she is fascinating to watch. She is why athletes can glue people to their TV screens for hours to witness sixty seconds of the human body in motion. Her movements are balletic and transfixing, precise extensions of the arms into wings, hands tucked, chin lifted, heels up, and then a leap and a soar and if all goes well, the slightest of splashes when her body glides underwater.
A few nights ago, she moved up to the 7.5 meter dive. This is basically like diving off the top of a house, okay. It is legit nuts and also really fun to watch from the pool bleachers while one is eating crackers and hummus on a Wednesday night.
The girl is now one of the best divers. Maybe she will go on to a college scholarship, maybe not, I don’t know. I know nothing about her. I cherish the anonymity of watching her every night, as if she were a celebrity, or an elite athlete, all of her condensed into those seconds when she flies and then disappears, slick and kicking under the skin of the water. To truly meet her would be embarrassing, though sometimes as I’m waiting for my daughter I see her leaving, laughing in her fleece robe and flip-flops like any other teenager.
She takes a while to warm up on the 7.5 meter. All the divers have these little rituals, charming and baffling to outsiders. Slapping themselves with small towels and then ferociously chucking the towels down beside the pool. Kicking out a leg and throwing back their heads as if on Broadway. She does these things, then stands on the cusp of the platform. Twenty-five feet down.
The coach gives a nod and she looks up, lifts her arms, leaps. She spins three full times in the air, her muscled body pinwheeling without any visible effort, and she cleaves the water with the perfect arrow of her arms, head and body sliding in behind them, welcomed as smoothly and soundlessly as a raindrop.
The mark of the expert is not fanfare, but the total lack of friction. The oneness of body and water.
The coach jumps and does one of those side-body-fist-pumps that would be accompanied by grandiose music and crying in a sports documentary, but in real life lasts only a second. There is no big celebration like there is for failure. Just a nod, and she is back to it, wiping herself with the little towel, tossing it to the side, lifting her chin in preparation.
I am supposed to be working when I watch the divers. But they’re too interesting. Not because I can extract parables from them about success and failure and persistence and triumph and all that, though the tendency dogs my writer self, but because they are doing weird human things so nakedly (literally – the speedos! One is pink with palm trees!) and with such sincerity and strength.
I need to see the striving. I need to see the need to strive for no purpose other than merging with the world, other than the moment when the water embraces you as its own.
I need to witness the absurd craving to launch the body over and over again twenty-five feet into the air, straining, soaring, flipping, wanting to get it exactly right, the arms a little straighter, the legs pressed a little tighter to the belly, just an inch higher this time, and the prayer of sensing that perfect angle and perfect second when your hands will slip buttery through the glossy sheen, and you will disappear without a sound.
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