The Fiber Optic Heart

My daughter Ramona’s coach puts her in backstroke at meets, since she’s still afraid to dive, but freestyle is her favorite. When she does the 100-yard free, at practice, her face is in the water too much for me. Like now, as she’s finishing up and the other kids are getting out of the pool. She turns her head and breathes, but not often enough for me to watch her with my mouth closed. She loves it in the water, but I want her out of there. She needs air, so after practice, I lower all the windows even though her hair’s still wet. She’s on her phone, reading fan fiction about the fantasy novels her grandpa gives her.

Last week, I made her come with me to the ski trails for a walk in the woods – where things are real, there are no dragons, no winged warriors – and then to the rock shop. They had crack-your-own geodes and agates cut and polished like thumbnails and Petoskey stones in the shape of Michigan’s two peninsulas. I found a piece of quartz that fit perfectly in my palm, with little recesses it felt like my own fingertips had made a million years ago. When we stopped, I thought maybe I’d get her a rock tumbler, though I worried she’d be bored of it before we saw results, since it had to run for a few months to really wear down the rock to what was beautiful. (“That’s no time at all,” the guy at the store consoled, “compared to how long it takes nature to polish a stone. Centuries!”)

Instead, she wanted a shiny tractor-green chunk of recycled fiber optic cable already built in the shape of a heart, the only manmade thing there. What do I know, anymore – maybe plastic is what she thinks is beautiful. Maybe fantasy novels mean something to her. After all, reality was a drag when I was her age too. I never even saw my dad, who had moved out east and married someone else, made himself a new family. And Ramona’s already fifteen, and in a few years she’ll move out on me too. No time at all, I know, compared to the quartz I still gripped in my stick-shift hand on the ride home.

Online I find out fiber optic cable isn’t even plastic. It’s glass thin as hair. That means sand and dolomite and limestone and works like this: data travels through as light, bouncing off the sides until it gets where it’s going. And any little piece of dirt can get in the way, can scatter the light. Just a fragment and the whole message gets lost. It’s all too small to even make sense.

And I don’t even believe glass is manmade. It feels like something you’d find outside, in winter, like it should be made of ice or gypsum. Glass should be made of teeth, or storm clouds. The glass that holds my dad’s gin as he tells me I need to find that girl a father – how can that be made of anything, really.

He sits on a different bench at the next meet, at the other end of the pool. A swimmer himself, back in the day, he’s full of advice for Ramona about things I don’t understand: her propulsion, her visible kick. She shoots down the lane, like a message from a world I don’t understand, carried to me by creatures that couldn’t exist. She gets out of the pool, so wet I feel cold, her world probably foggy and soft behind her goggles. I learned this online too: plastic is made of oil, of dinosaurs, now of corn. Nothing is manmade, in the end. Her coach tosses her a towel, and my dad moves over toward her. I want to throw the rock at him – the rock that fits better in my hand than even my daughter’s does anymore – simply because he’s part of her, because she’s made of him, if you dig far enough back.