Megan H. response to Bloom's "Surfacing"

[Anonymous]

#567

In Lynn Bloom’s piece, I think the “I” wants so badly to embody a group voice, noting the recurrence of the “we” perspective and Bloom’s praise for the “cocktail-party atmosphere with water the beverage of choice, the talking nonstop, energy level to match” (45). Yet, prior to feeling engaged by the “we,” I felt the need to be drawn in by a particular “I.” Maybe I felt a slight absence of an individual prior to the chatty voice on p. 40 listing the disparate pieces of information available in the locker room. While Bloom’s perspective and voice certainly creates a feeling of eavesdropping on an informal, private, quirky community, the lens into that community is still interpolated with her own thoughts and feelings, which seem to come from a distant periphery where we, as readers, weren’t poised to look.

Still, I think Bloom’s free extrapolations about the meaning of companionship and the need for human communication from locker room conversations are mostly gentle and concise, and they offer a means to universalize her specific experiences. For instance, there’s a sense that life’s movement can be rapid and changes constant, but she continually finds her center within the group dynamic of a locker room: “Into the shower’s ebb and flow, the lap lanes, the new therapy pool with warm water, the women come and go…Others leave for good — new jobs, new climates, new marriages, reunion, repatriation…But I like it fine, right here” (43). In regards to structure, I think her chosen motif of women’s locker rooms provides one very clear thread with which she can present various segments of travel without losing purpose.

While I was not as interested in her voice as I was in Malinowitz’s, I think Bloom aims to end on a beautiful sentence, which, while elegant, seems to force an ending and try a bit too hard for harmony: “The water, too, embraces all as we plunge in, move through, at our own speed, closing over each as we leave, surfacing — ever hospitable, ever open.” However, in her unsettling description of being assaulted in Stockholm, her invigorated voice tells of an exclusively individual experience, which strangely begins to endear her to me, because it offers how her mind works when contemplating herself rather than the group – “Then time slowed down, inside my head, the way it does when you think your car is going to crash as it goes into a skid, and I could hear the voices, all mine, in cacophony” (44).

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