Baby Steps

Adapted from Brace for Impact: A Memoir

Gabe Montesanti

A week before my twenty-third birthday, I fell at roller derby practice and felt the bones in my leg snap. I was hospitalized for four days and underwent a surgery in which a metal rod was inserted directly into my tibia. A month after the accident, unable to walk, I entered a lap swimming competition at the local community pool. Whoever tracked the most mileage after the three-month summer season would win a free membership. When I first heard about the competition, I felt a surge of excitement, despite my broken leg. I had been a competitive swimmer from age nine through my undergraduate years. There were two voices in my head, and one was telling me go, go, go. The other voice, though, was gentler. “You don’t have to be doing this,” it said. It was quieter, but it was there.

In the water, I tried to tease out the two voices and what they were telling me. What I knew was that I felt strong—better each day. My arms pulled me across the pool; the burning in my biceps was a nice re­minder that I was getting even stronger. The sun would heat my face each time I turned my head to take a breath, and I closed my eyes for a brief moment so that I could commit that feeling to memory. I wanted somewhere to go at night when the pain in my leg throbbed and surged up my body—somewhere sacred to escape to when everything hurt too much to bear. Swimming, I remembered, felt more natural to me than walking. It had cradled me and supported my healing at eleven, when I had undergone two surgeries to correct the structural abnormality in my feet. The water buoyed my body at all the weights it had ever been. It had been a constant presence the summer after com­ing out, when my home was no longer safe. Swimming was a constant presence since I was nine years old, twice a day sometimes, and even though the activity had become ruled by my drive to win, the water just remained what it was—still, steady, all-encompassing.

Mid-summer, my physical therapists started working with me on learning to walk again in the water. By July, I had a new routine: water walk for twenty min­utes, followed by a swim. I tried to keep my focus on the walking, allowing myself to skip swimming if I didn’t feel like it. It was unnatural to me—leaving the column in my lap swimming chart empty some days. This wasn’t how I was conditioned, after all. Still, it felt like that softer inner voice was directing me away from my old way of being and toward learning to walk again. After a week walking in neck-high water, I graduated to chest-high, where I could feel the painful pressure on my ankle and leg even more acutely. But gradually, it wore off, and I advanced to navel-high, then hip-high. The lifeguards had grown in­vested in my process, particularly one named Dajon, a sixteen-year-old football player who knew about the Ska­tium, the rink where I played roller derby, just from living in South City.

“I’d never mess with any of you roller derby gals,” he said, seriously. “That shit looks way harder than football.”

Talking to Dajon while I practiced walking was a nice distraction from the pain in my leg, and he seemed to get a kick out of my stories about derby and all the roller derby names. When he learned mine, he started calling me Miss Joan of Spark. I had never been Joan of Spark anywhere other than the track before, let alone the swimming pool. It felt like the time in elementary school I had seen my teacher at the grocery store. The knowledge that she existed outside the realm I knew her in felt uncomfortable at first, and then kind of magical, like I was in on a universal secret. Joan of Spark didn’t just exist on the track; she could go anywhere.

As Dajon told me about his dreams of playing for Mizzou—the University of Missouri—I thought about my own sixteen-year-old self, who was as far from Joan of Spark as I could imagine. College coaches had just started calling my house to talk to me about swimming, but I had no clue what any of it meant; I was confused about boys and my ambivalence toward them; I felt pressure from my mother to stay close to her, but she was also pushing me away by telling me I was sloppy and disgusting. In addition to my library job, I had been a lifeguard like Dajon, and the pres­sure to save struggling swimmers weighed heavily on my shoulders.

One hot July day, I was walking in the shallow end, look­ing down at my feet, when the alarms went off. Dajon was stationed across the pool by the diving boards, so I had been entertaining myself by watching the way the light split across the pool floor as I practiced my steps. I knew right away that someone was in trouble. I looked up and saw Dajon on his lifeguarding stand, readying to dive. He gathered the cord for the buoy around his chest and leapt from his perch into the water. When he resurfaced, his arm was around a little girl, sputtering and kicking. I felt a wave of relief pass over my body. He had done it. He got her.

Watching Dajon’s save, it was impossible not to think of my own: it was my second year lifeguarding, and a little boy had gone down the slide and not come up. Little bubbles broke the surface of the water where he had gone under. I hesitated, unsure if I should go in or not. I was afraid of looking stupid; if the boy was just holding his breath under water, I might be jumping in for no reason. But as the sec­onds ticked by, fear washed over my body and I knew what I had to do.

I leapt from the top of the lifeguarding stand, forgetting to issue the two long blasts of my whistle. I landed feet-first a few feet from where the child had gone under, and I relin­quished my buoy so that I could slip under after him. He was hovering just a few feet under the water, paralyzed with fear, it seemed, but as soon as I wrapped my arm around him and heaved him up, he started thrashing. He won’t need resuscita­tion, I realized. Thank god.

The boy calmed when he saw his mother, who was wait­ing poolside to pull him up by both his hands. She didn’t thank me, didn’t even look at me, just draped him in a towel and whisked him away. It was all over in a matter of moments, and then the pool went back to normal. Music played. Chil­dren laughed. It might have been easy to pretend it never happened except for the fact that I was soaking wet.

Right away, I feigned nonchalance. Even though my heart was racing. Even though I had allowed myself to wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t jumped. The pool manager needed me to fill out an incident report, which helped make the save seem real. He asked if I wanted to talk about it, but I said no. I didn’t want to risk feeling anything that could weaken me. In swimming especially, the less feel­ing, the better. We were taught to push through without feeling the pain in our bodies so that we could win races.

Being strong meant being stoic, especially in my family. But watching Dajon save the little girl, I started to cry. It was as if I had experienced a voice-over in the film of my own life that said, It happened, and it was hard. You don’t have to pretend not to feel anymore. I was still crying when he made his way back to the lifeguard stand near me, sopping wet, and sat down.

“Miss Joan of Spark, what’s this all about? Am I going to have to save you too?”

His words seemed to reverberate through my body, back through all the years of my life I’d been waiting for somebody to save me. My third-grade teacher. A coach. My dad. I cracked a smile at Dajon and shook my head. Of course I didn’t need him to save me. But what if I didn’t need to wait for anyone to save me? I could hardly imagine saving myself.

But maybe it looked like exactly what I was doing: taking baby steps in the shallow end of a public pool filled with laughing children. Walking with control, with resistance, steadfastly forward. Listening to my body to know when to stop. Letting go of what no longer served me to make room for Joan of Spark.

Adapted from Brace for Impact by Gabe Montesanti. © 2022 by Gabrielle Montesanti. Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Gabe Montesanti is a queer, Midwestern roller derby player. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from Washington University in St. Louis. Her piece, “The Worldwide Roller Derby Convention” was recognized as a notable essay in The Best American Essays. She lives with her wife in Denton, Texas, where she teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.