Thirsty

As soon as I hit 33 I became so unbearably thirsty all of the time.

I never needed a water bottle as a kid. I’m not even sure I owned one after I quit youth soccer at the age of 10. I would do 3-hour dance rehearsals and I’m sure I had a bottle of water, but I wasn’t so attached to the water bottle that I have a mental image of it stored away somewhere. It was probably just a disposable one, one of those dinky little 12 oz bottles that crinkle like pop rocks when you squeeze them too hard.

That would not cut it these days. I heft around a vessel large enough to house a school of fish. If I don’t get a minimum of 40 ounces of water a day I can feel it in my eyeballs when I wake up the next morning: my eyelids sticking to them like pith on the orange.

My husband makes jokes, “Well, I guess you’re part camel.” He can survive on dinky bottles.

When I chide him to drink more water he says, “But I’m not thirsty.” He thinks it’s weird I cut my juice with water. “It’s too syrupy,” I say. I’m too thirsty to be satiated by sugar water.

When I was 35 I found my birth mother. She drinks a lot of water, but not like I do.

“Oh!” She said. “Your great-grandmother never left the house without her giant water bottle. She drove around in her red Chevy pick up with her guitar and she always, always had her water.”

“Did she drink anything else?” I ask.

“Eh, a beer from time to time. But always water. She’d water down her sweet tea and juice to where it barely had a flavor.”

Being thirsty is my legacy.

I imagine my great-grandmother up on the stage with her guitar and husband number 4 of 6 backing her vocals. She finishes one song and bends to pick up the glass of water sweating underneath her stool in the hot lights. She drains the glass in one long pull and tilts the glass toward the bartender in a gesture indicating “more, please.”

They call her Jack, but it’s not her legal name.

“I get more gigs when they’re expecting a man to get up there and sing and I show up instead.”

I wonder if I had been kept if I would’ve been up there with her singing for the local bar patrons, cutting my teeth on bluegrass fiddle riffs and two-person harmonies that float above waiting to be caught.

Maybe there would be two glasses on the stage, melting in the spotlights.

Maybe a whole pitcher of water for us.

Maybe I would’ve grown up thirsty, rather than grown into it.