she doesn't see me. My son springs his body straight up and cannonballs into the three-foot deep water, bobbing and gasping to the surface, looking at me in high expectation. I applaud and suddenly he is eight, demanding that I time his breath holding underwater.
When he emerges he is ten, and we are alone. There is no one sitting on the deck watching us or waiting for us in the room. We go through the motions of recapturing past fun. We even steal a couple turquoise pool towels to add to my collection. At home I can chart the years by the descending degree of wear on the turquoise towels; the newer ones still richly coloured, the older ones fading, thinning and unraveling in their own time.
3.
The beginning of summer meant swimming lessons. Early mornings, still chilly with the smell of green earth and blooming plants and baby grass and the sting of chlorine in the air, the cold concrete, the sickening smell of popcorn being popped for the afternoon open swim.
No one learned to swim at swimming lessons. They were grueling ordeals in frosty blue water taught by teenage sadists who imparted at the top of their voices and with steel whistles only a granite hatred and fear of the water. First there were the floating exercises giving one the first opportunity to fill ones sinuses with bleached water. Then there were the rhythmical breathing exercises, designed to cause hyperventilation and suffocating panic attacks. Then the kicking, which was cool until the cramps set in and then arm strokes which were okay if you got into that sort of thing. Putting it all together was another thing entirely. Skinny arms and legs thrashing cold water into bleach foam on steely grey June mornings was not a pleasant sight.
Then there was diving day, where they threw you into the rich cobalt ominous deep end, and you fell farther and farther down until panic seized your brain and you flailed to the top, gasping, swallowing water, being pulled to the side of the pool with a cold metal hook and the instructor smugly sneering, "See that wasn't so bad."
I took swim lessons every June for seven years until I finally gave up. In those
