“I don’t want to. Besides, you row at four thirty in the morning.”
“I row at five o’clock,” he said as if this made it so much more reasonable. “I only leave the house at four thirty.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“No.”
“But why?”
“Because that’s when I sleep.”
“Easily solved. We’ll go to bed early.”
“No.”
“First I’ll introduce you to the rowing machine—we call it the erg. They have some at the boathouse, but I’m going to build one for home use. Then we’ll move to a boat— a shell. By April we’ll be skimming across the bay, watching the sun rise, our long strokes clicking along in perfect unison.”
But even as he said it, Calvin knew the rowing part wasn’t possible. First, no one learns to row in a month. Most people, even with expert instruction, can’t row well within a year, or sometimes three years, or for many, ever. As for the skimming part—there is no skimming. To get to the point where rowing might resemble skimming, you’ve probably reached the Olympic level and the look on your face as you fly down the racecourse is not one of calm satisfaction but controlled agony. This is sometimes accompanied by a look of determination—usually one that indicates that right after this race is over, you plan to find a new sport. Still, once he’d hatched the idea, he loved it. Rowing a pair with Elizabeth. How glorious!
“No.”
“But why?”
“Because. Women don’t row.” But as soon as she’d said it, she regretted it.
“Elizabeth Zott,” he said, surprised. “Are you actually saying women can’t row?”
That sealed it.
* * *
—
The next morning they left their bungalow in the dark, Calvin in his old T-shirt and sweatpants, Elizabeth in whatever she could find that looked remotely sporty. As they pulled up to the boathouse, both Six-Thirty and Elizabeth looked out the car window to see a few bodies on a slick dock doing calisthenics.
“Shouldn’t they be doing that inside?” she asked. “It’s still dark.”
“On a morning like this?” It was foggy.
“I thought you didn’t like rain.”
“This isn’t rain.”
For at least the fortieth time, Elizabeth found herself doubting this plan.
* * *
—
“We’ll start off easy,” Calvin said as he led her and Six-Thirty into the boathouse, a cavernous building that smelled of mildew and sweat. As they walked past rows of long wooden rowing shells layered to the ceiling like well-stacked toothpicks, Calvin nodded at a bedraggled-looking person who yawned and nodded back, conversation not yet possible. He stopped when he found what he was looking for— a rowing machine, the erg—which had been tucked in a corner. He pulled it out, positioning it in the middle of the bay between the stacks of boats.
“First things first,” he said. “Technique.” He sat down, then started to pull, his breaths quickly becoming a series of short torturous bursts that seemed neither easy nor fun. “The trick is to keep your wrists flat,” he huffed, “your knees down, your stomach muscles engaged, your—” But whatever else he said was lost in his urgency to breathe and within a few minutes, he seemed to forget Elizabeth was even there.
* * *
—
She slipped away, Six-Thirty at her side, and went to explore the boathouse, pausing in front of a rack holding a forest of oars so impossibly tall, it looked as if giants played here. Off to its side sat a large trophy case, the early morning light just beginning to reveal its stash of silver cups and old rowing uniforms, each a testament to those who had proven faster or more efficient or more indomitable, or possibly all three. Brave people, according to Calvin, who’d shown the kind of focus that put them first over the finish.
Alongside the uniforms were photographs of strapping young men with gargantuan oars, but there was one other person, too: a jockey-sized man who looked as serious as he was small, his mouth fixed in a firm, grim line. The coxswain, Calvin had told her, the one who told the rowers what to do and when to do it: take up the rate, make a turn, challenge another boat, go faster. She liked that a diminutive person held the reins to eight wild horses, his voice, their command; his hands, their rudder; his encouragements, their fuel.
She turned to watch as other rowers began to file in, each of them nodding in deference to Calvin as he continued to erg on the noisy machine, a few revealing a trace of envy as he took up the stroke rate with such obvious smoothness that even Elizabeth could recognize it as a sign of natural athleticism.