Learning to Swim (5 page)

“One cardboard box, please!” I added with a nervous squeak.

My dad laughed heartily in the silence that had descended on the table. I gambled a look at my mother, and the look in her eyes was positively murderous. Mrs. Carlton’s eyebrows were raised beyond what I thought was humanly possible. Abercrombie just looked bemused.

“Cora, the world traveler. Won’t even eat green beans unless Joan douses them with sugar.” Dad laughed. “I can just see her in the mountains, hunched over, eating French fries with the natives.”

“Well, my boy here is going to Southern,” Mr. Carlton said, clapping the kid on the back of his broad shoulders. “He’s going to play water polo. For my part, I’ll be happy as long as he studies law.”

The parents around the table all twittered, the mothers with hands thrown daintily across their mouths, as though this was some politically incorrect joke. But it couldn’t have been plainer that the man was completely and utterly serious.

And Abercrombie’s face belied no resistance to this fate.

“Cora.” His blue eyes were addressing me. They would have been gorgeous had it not been for his gross, self-assured smirk. “I was hoping you’d come out with me and my friends some time. Everyone is really eager to get to know you.”

This could hardly be true, judging by my previous interaction with what I assumed were his “friends.” But I felt my cheeks burn by the will of those cursed raging hormones and also with the knowledge that my mother was watching this scene with glee.

Damn you, cheeks!

“What a gentleman!” Mom cooed in my confused silence. “Cora, write your number down. We can’t wait to get to know all you kids. Call anytime, Owen, she’s simply glued to her phone.” My phone was currently lost somewhere in the abyss of my pink room.

And then, scribbling my number on a napkin, Mom winked at the guy. She actually
winked
at him.

I heard my phone jingle from the floor. Even hundreds of miles away she had some kind of pull over me. I stirred clothes around, looking for the elusive phone before fishing it out from under the bed to see Rosie’s exultant text.

ROSIE: Call me a wildcat, baby! Cuz it’s official!!!!

She’d been taken off the wait list. That was her first-choice school.

I threw the phone at the floor where it bounced and hit the bed frame with an ominous crack, just as my unassuming mother walked in without knocking.

“What’s this in your pocket, Cora?”

Weren’t you supposed to be happy for your friends? So why was my blood boiling?

“Cora?” Mom had my cream-colored dress slung over one arm.

I looked at her confusedly. It couldn’t be—

“You know how to do laundry?” I asked, incredulous. Joan must have given her lessons, unbeknownst to me, in preparation for this special summer away.

She ignored me. “What is all this?” she asked again, dumping a handful of seashells and the small silver flute on my desk.

I shrugged, not bothering to look up from my book. It would only please her, and I was in no mood to please my mother.

She looked at me seriously for a moment. “Are you okay? We never talked about—I mean—the other night—”

“I’m fine.”

“I just mean, I didn’t know if it would bring back some bad memories of—or make you think—”

“I wasn’t even alive, how could I have memories of it?”

“Cora, I just—”

“Spare me the psychoanalysis, I’m fine.”

She looked crestfallen. But she was in a good enough mood—left over from the successful dinner with the Carltons—that it only took her a moment to recover.

“This stuff is really dirty, Cora.” She turned back to emptying the pockets of my laundry. “Really, you should wash stuff off before you go dirtying your clothes.” She wiped her hands on the lace dress and her face turned wistful. “I remember when you were little, you’d always be putting leaves and things in your pockets.”

I had distinct memories of Joan finding these things. She’d take my play clothes and turn the pockets inside out, scolding me repeatedly, afraid my mother would complain at the state of my clothes.

“You were always so curious, putting the strangest things in your pockets. Helicopter leaves and acorns and dandelions and those honeysuckle flowers.”

“Did Joan tell you that?” I said icily.

It wasn’t nice. Downright mean, really, to follow her attempt at discussing Gretel with that sarcastic remark. But we didn’t talk about Gretel. That was the rule. Her own rule. And she had broken it. It was her own fault.

She was quiet for a moment before picking some invisible lint off her skirt, brushing her manicured hands over the wrinkles, and walking briskly out of the room. These days her mere presence left me annoyed and ready to quarrel with an empty room.

Good riddance
, I thought.
Don’t shrink my clothes.

When she was gone, I got up and retrieved the flute from where she’d left it on the desk. I inspected it as if I was some connoisseur who could read its features. I banged it on the desk to empty the holes of sand and spit on my shirt, rubbing the mouthpiece clean before taking a tentative breath and blowing. It let out a shrill shriek that set Princess to howling downstairs.

“What the hell is that?” was my father’s muffled comment from below.

I hopped down the stairs. “Do you know what this is?” I called.

Dad stopped in the second floor hall. I tossed him the pipe.

“What the hell are you doing making that kind of racket at this time of night?” he was mumbling, as he turned the thing over in his hands. “Looks like a recorder to me. Where did you get it?”

“Found it,” I said.

“Just a piece of junk.”

I trudged back upstairs, already regretting even asking him. I felt as though some of the magic of this little treasure had been rubbed away by revealing it to someone so mundane as my father.

Ceachtanna Snámha

Swimming Lessons

Usually going to bed much earlier than my parents and generally consuming far fewer margaritas, I was up before them in the mornings. I would grab the plastic blue pail and matching shovel from the table on the back porch. I had scoffed at my mother in the middle of the bright store in St. Louis when she had bought the preschool-blue pair in the hopes of early morning family shell hunts. But she had apparently underestimated the nighttime festivities in the old houses, so I usually found myself shoving off down the boardwalk, having emptied the previous day’s finds on the table, with only Princess at my heels.

I would pick my way slowly to the pier, where Princess would sit down resignedly beside me and watch the waves with alert ears, as if squirrels and cats could be found lurking there.

The swimmer, skin wet and shiny, was always there, a few yards away, completely unaware of being watched.

Some days he was slow and gentle with the waves. But others he seemed to move with a renewed vigor, his rigid arms cutting through the waves like the biggest of Joan’s Cutco knives. And I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking. Sometimes he ducked under water completely and I looked anxiously around until he would resurface a yard farther on.

I stayed only until he turned in the distance—maybe it was two miles—and came back toward the pier. Then I’d walk back north and start my day.

One such day was marked with a big red circle on the calendar Mom kept on the purple fridge. She had given me careful instructions on what to wear and where to go before nearly pushing me out the back door. She hadn’t offered to come, but I would have denied her that, anyway.

The city pool was a few blocks off Main Street, and as the day was sweltering, the pool was very crowded. I hesitated outside the tall, black, iron fence, seeing what exactly I had to contend with.

It was a giant L-shaped pool with a diving board on one end and several kiddie pools around it. There was a big, twisting water slide on one side, and mothers in lounge chairs lined the fence. Kids ran everywhere and … there they were.

A teenage girl, probably a year younger than me, was standing near a group of chattering kids. She bit her nails and looked bored, glancing at the clock every now and again. Parents showed up in a steady stream, taking towels and shoes from their kids before retreating to the outer ring of spectators. I was the oldest “kid” by about ten years.

It would have been easy to say I was too embarrassed to go. But that wasn’t it. The truth was that I was downright scared. My stomach had taken up a permanent position near my shoes and the thought of getting into the pool made my skin cold.

I would have been a nervous mess
, I told myself, as I stared between the rectangles in the fence.

Would have been.
Well that settled it. I had already decided that I wasn’t going.

I watched as the teenage girl blew her whistle and tried to get the kids to stop talking before shepherding them toward the shallow end of the pool. It was a scene too familiar for comfort.

The pool in St. Louis where Joan had taken me was eerily similar. Or maybe my memory was playing tricks on me. I had been fairly young, but I knew it was a big, crowded city pool with a flippant, disinterested teenager showing us how to hold our noses underwater. There was a boy named Rufus with red hair who I had a crush on.

It’s the strangest things that a kid’s memory holds onto.

That day so long ago, the first day of what was supposed to be a six-week course, I had been spectacular, or so Joan told me on the way home. We hadn’t done any actual swimming, just holding our breath under water and pool safety. Pool safety. As if that was a point that I, at eight years old, needed to have hammered home one more time.

It wasn’t that pool safety had ever been discussed in our house. Rather, it had
not
been discussed.
Passionately
not discussed for eighteen years. Because that was the way my mother dealt with tragedy. Or anything in life, really. If you didn’t talk about it, it certainly had not happened.

So that day Joan took me to swimming lessons had been the first of its kind in my entire life. But when we arrived back at the house that afternoon, my hair stringy and wet, my mother’s car was in the driveway. I didn’t need to see Joan’s flustered face to know that this was not going according to plan.

And when we went inside, I remember my mother unleashing a fury like I had never seen her possess before. Fury like I didn’t think she had in her. She took in my wet, tousled hair and the big fluffy towel wrapped around my swimming suit. She descended on Joan like a vengeful lioness.

I was sent to my room then, but I was old enough to know that Joan had broken the rules. Caroline Manchester’s child did not swim.

Not until this stupid summer at the Pink Palace.

The Pink Palace, some kind of shining beacon to my mother. She had been oddly emotional throughout my entire senior year of high school. And her solution to this premature separation anxiety was apparently to haul us out here to break the morbid fear of water that had been festering in our family since before I was born. The thing was, she wasn’t all that good at facing up to things. And that’s how I found myself standing
alone
at a public pool, abruptly facing a fear I’d never had to face before—a fear that I’d been encouraged
not
to face for as long as I could remember.

The swimming lesson at the Oyster Beach Public Pool was already getting into the water.
Much too fast,
I thought. But I didn’t stick around to see how they fared.

When my mother asked, I told her it went great.

Bua an Dúlra

Victory of Nature