Learning to Swim Read online

  In fact, Alice had this spirit that was just so alive and energetic, sometimes she didn't seem any older than the rest of us. I oftentimes forgot that she had visible wrinkles, wore Poise pads, and took five calcium supplements with every meal. She was that good at being young.

  “So let me get this straight,” Alice said as she kneeled down on the hardwood and dipped her scrub brush into a pail of soapy water. “Your mom won't let you learn how to swim because she's afraid of the water? That doesn't make any sense.”

  Alice was the oldest member of the cleaning staff, but not the weakest. She was barely five feet tall, and very slender, which made her appear fragile. Still, that didn't mean she wouldn't get down on all fours and scrub until her arms fell off. Not that she didn't have pride. Actually, Alice dyed her hair ink black every week to cover the gray, and man, did she look glamorous, as much as an aging maid could, of course.

  I stopped staring at her and wiped off an area of the floor with a dry mop. “Welcome to my world.”

  “Well, why is she afraid? Did she almost drown or something?” she asked.

  “She didn't almost drown,” I replied. “My grandparents actually did.”

  Alice placed a wet hand on her chest and sighed. “Oh my. That's terrible.”

  Truer words couldn't have been spoken. I heard the full story only once when I was about six, and after that it had been referred to as TCI (the Catamaran Incident). Apparently, when Barbie was fourteen, her parents had gone on this second honeymoon to Costa Rica. They booked this private catamaran, and somehow her mom fell into the ocean, her dad jumped in to save her, and they both drowned. (Yes, I had considered the similarities between that event and my close call with Keith, but seriously, Tippecanoe was anything but a second honeymoon.) Then Barbie was shipped off to live with her aunt Rita for a few years and developed this water phobia before going away to college and meeting my dad, who would eventually die on her, six months before my birth.

  Obviously my mother had endured a lot, and it probably was one of the reasons she had developed love lunacy and her obsession with unavailable men in the first place. But regardless, her rationale for keeping me landlocked somehow didn't seem fair.

  “Just the mere suggestion of me being submerged in water for any educational or recreational purpose really freaks her out,” I explained. “I'm surprised she held it somewhat together yesterday.”

  “Now, Steffie, mothers worry. It's part of the job description, just like wiping crap off the floor is in ours.”

  Hearing Alice say “crap” in her trademark grandma voice made me laugh out loud. “I know, I know. But still, this phobia of hers is a real pain.”

  Alice stood up and took a bottle of Murphy Oil Soap from our cleaning cart. “I'm sure it is, considering how it's getting in the way of you and Keith.”

  “Me?” I asked nervously. “And Keith McKnight?”

  “No, Keith Richards,” she said sharply.

  “Who?”

  Alice groaned in frustration. “Look, it's all right to like him even though he is Mora's boyfriend. And it's all right to spend time with him too. It's not like they're married.”

  “Whatever. He doesn't even like me like that,” I said, matter-of-factly. “He probably just wants another merit badge or something.”

  “Regardless, the fact is that you have a crush on him and he offered you swimming lessons. Why are you transferring your feelings about your mom onto him?”

  Since when had Alice become Dr. Phil? “Where are you going with this?” I asked, annoyed.

  “You should accept the lessons.”

  I squeezed out my damp mop into the bucket and frowned.

  “You're going to have to learn to swim sooner or later,” Alice continued. “You might as well learn from someone you really like.”

  “Explain that to Barbie.”

  “Maybe if you told her that it was purely a matter of safety,” Alice suggested.

  Safety. Once again, I envisioned Keith and me in the water. He would touch his hand to my cheek and I would stand on my tiptoes, so I could look into his eyes. He would lean forward and kiss me softly…

  Mora Schmora. Alice was right. This was a matter of safety, for God's sake. “But I already told him no.”

  “So tell him you changed your mind. But make sure it's okay with your mom first. Remember, she was your age once too. She'll understand how much this means to you.”

  Alice was right. I had to run this by Barbie. She and I had been getting along fairly well lately, and I knew she had been doing her best to recover from love lunacy. Actually, she had been love free for almost a year now, so she deserved the chance to talk with me, see the light, and hug it out, right?

  I knew this wouldn't be an easy task. Barbie's reasons for not wanting me to swim were borderline justifiable, and whenever she invoked the name of her dead parents, she was hard to dispute. Still, I had little choice. I had to give it a shot. I had to hope against hope that somewhere deeply imbedded in Barbie's mind was a sliver of rationality. I had to believe that this sliver was capable of overhauling all the neurons in her brain, and getting her to realize that passing up an opportunity to take swimming lessons (at no charge) with a lifeguard who just happened to be a hottie and quite possibly the future father of my children would be, as Alice had said so eloquently, “a real bite in the ass.”

  Later that evening, Barbie strolled into our kitchen, humming an unrecognizable tune. She was wearing short cutoffs and a halter top—clothes that any girl in the popular Mora Cooper crowd would've been happy to wear. The sad thing was, the clothes probably wouldn't have looked as good on them as they did on my mom.

  “That smells delicious,” Barbie said.

  I finished stirring some Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper and said, “It's almost ready.”

  This was Barbie's favorite dish. Alice had advised me just before our shift ended that the way to get someone to do something was to do something so nice for them that they'd feel too guilty to say no. Making Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper was the best I could do.

  As my mother sat down at the living/dining/TV room table, I took a deep breath. I had to be very careful about this. I had come to the discussion with irrefutable facts, like:

  Learning to swim could prevent me from drowning, like I almost did yesterday. It's a safety issue.

  People drink water. Men and women are made up of 60 percent water. Therefore water and boys are good.

  The lessons are free.

  Since she doesn't know how to swim, I should learn how just in case she ever falls into the water. I could save her.

  Keith is the hottest guy I know and I've been totally in love with him for forty-three days. Therefore, it would be inhumane and cruel to rob me of this opportunity. (This was only to be uttered as a last resort.)

  I brought Barbie over a hot plate filled to the edges with Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper. She licked her lips in anticipation. Alice was right. Barbie's love of the Helper would surely take over, and she'd be putty in my hands!

  The only thing I had to do was ask her in a non-confrontational way. Just kind of breezy, like “Gee, the head lifeguard at the club offered me free swim lessons, what do you think?” And then lean forward and open my eyes really wide, like I was hanging on her every word. Like I really cared about what she thought.

  I sat down at the table and then swirled the Hamburger Helper around my plate with my fork for a couple of minutes.

  Barbie said, “Are you all right? You seem… quiet.”

  So far so good. A perfect lead-in. I'm quiet because I'm pensive. Because I want her opinion.

  I looked into Barbie's heavily blue-mascaraed eyes. Nice and breezy, I reminded myself. Not confrontational.

  “I'm going to take swimming lessons,” I announced.

  Oops.

  My mother put down her fork and swallowed hard. She leaned forward slightly and said, “Excuse me?”

  “Keith McKnight offered to teach me. He said it wasn't s
afe…”

  “Who's Keith McKnight?”

  “The lifeguard at the pool. The head lifeguard.” I said this almost proudly, as if I already had bragging rights to him.

  “The one who almost let you drown yesterday?”

  This was so my mother. She could turn anything around. It really was a gift.

  “He didn't almost let me drown,” I said. “He saved me.”

  She picked her fork back up and scooped up some hamburger. “Can you learn how to swim without getting in the water?”

  This was the most insane thing I had ever heard. “Um… I don't think so.”

  “Then forget it,” she said, before popping the bite into her mouth.

  It was time to bring out the big guns. “Everyone thinks it's ridiculous that I don't know how to swim.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Well, Alice does,” I said, meeting Barbie's eyes.

  This was not a good idea at all. My mom had this thing about Alice. Quite simply, Alice, through no fault of her own, annoyed Barbie. It was hard to believe that anyone could actually be annoyed by Alice, because Alice was, quite frankly, the nicest person I'd ever met. She was always making cookies for people and helping out sick friends and stuff. She may not have had much in terms of material things, and may have had a filthy mouth sometimes, but if I was at her house and said I wanted a blanket, she would have given me one, even if it was the only blanket she had in the world. My mother, on the other hand, wouldn't even let me borrow her precious pair of dark indigo Levi's.

  “Unfortunately for you,” Barbie said, “Alice is not your mother. I am. And I said no.”

  I should've never brought up Alice. I should've known that my mother would take it as a dare, like “I dare you to be as nice and understanding as Alice.” Barbie hated dares. She always said that as far as she was concerned, dares were just thinly veiled threats. Although I wasn't exactly sure what she meant by that analogy.

  All of a sudden, I felt this pain in my throat, like a welling of anxiety. Now I wanted those swim lessons more than I'd wanted anything in my life. I could not bear the thought of not taking those lessons. Comebacks circled through my head, like “You're everything I don't want to be!” (Used before.) Or a simple “You're right, that is unfortunate!” (i.e., I wish you weren't my mom). Or the immature “I don't care what you think, I'm going to do it anyway!” But I never had a chance to say any of the above-mentioned retorts because we were being serenaded by Beethoven's “Für Elise.”

  “Your phone is ringing,” I said.

  Barbie looked irritated, as if I had conjured up this interruption in an effort to throw her off course. She grabbed her phone out of her purse and checked the number. I could tell it was a number she didn't recognize because she gave a little shrug before answering it. “Hello?”

  And suddenly her whole face changed. It went from hard and kind of mean-looking to soft and flirty. “Heeeeey. How are you?” she said into the phone. And then she let out this sexy squeal of delight.

  “I'll be right back,” she mouthed to me, flashing me a little smile, as if instead of being on the edge of a gigantic war, we had been talking about the weather.

  Left alone in the kitchen with a lukewarm dish of Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper, I felt a pit form in the base of my stomach.

  Stage two: the forbidden phone call.

  And just like that, everything changed.

  Suddenly, I was reliving our swimming argument fondly, as if it was at least a remnant of normality. A mother-daughter squabble not unlike the other mother-daughter squabbles occurring over plates of Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper across the country. If I was correct (and I was ninety-nine percent sure I was) and this was a forbidden phone call, the lack of swimming lessons was going to be the least of my problems. But there was nothing I could do except fasten my seat belt and hunker down for Ludwig's wild ride.

  “Who was that?” I asked as my mother walked back into the room with a big plastic smile plastered on her face.

  “Oh, that was Mr. Warzog,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I'm sorry, sweet cheeks, but it looks like I need to go in to work tonight.”

  I found her statement offensive on several different fronts. For one, she never called me sweet cheeks. For two, she was assuming that I was so naïve I might actually believe that she would get all excited and turn beet red just because the man I affectionately referred to as Warthog (who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy) had called her. For three, we were supposed to drink a liter of Diet Dr Pepper and play a rousing game of Balderdash that night (note the irony of board-game choice).

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don't know why,” she said, still not looking at me. She stood up and grabbed her plate. “Someone probably called in sick.”

  “Who?”

  “I don't know,” she said. And then she looked at me. “I'm sorry,” she said, softening a bit. “Look, about the swimming lessons. Let's talk about it later, okay?”

  She was obviously desperate to pacify me in an attempt to avoid an altercation. Normally she never would have backed away from an argument, or even entertained the possibility of reversing a decision on one of her core idiosyncrasies, like something relating to bodies of water.

  “If you want,” she said cheerfully, “I can drop you off at Alice's.”

  Considering how much Barbie disliked my hanging out with Alice, I was now one hundred percent certain my mom was about to relapse into love lunacy. And so I took a deep breath, looked her directly in the eyes, and said, “Thanks.”

  3

  According to Alice, there was one thing in the world that was a tonic for all that ailed it: lists. It was something a girl in middle school would believe, but again, that's what made her so fun. On her refrigerator were a list of groceries she needed to get, a list of movies she wanted to see, a list of books she had to read, and a list of the hottest male actors of all time (for the record, Alice was obsessed with Keanu Reeves). She was so certain of the benefits of making lists that when I arrived at her house so angry at my mother that I was practically spewing lava, the first thing Alice did was yank out her notebook and pen. The second thing she did was fill the baby pool up with her garden hose.

  I plopped down in the white plastic lawn chair and stuck my feet in the water to cool down as Alice wrote:

  Proof that Barbie is on an illicit date.

  Proof that Barbie is not on an illicit date.

  A half hour later we were still sitting in Alice's backyard. We had a laundry list of reasons as to why I was so certain that Barbie was about to ruin my life, and absolutely no reasons as to why this whole thing might just be a not-so-silly misunderstanding.

  “Oh!” Alice said excitedly. “I have one.”

  Proof that Barbie is not on an illicit date: She was wearing her uniform.

  “That doesn't prove anything,” I said. “I'm sure that after she dropped me off, she just went home and changed.”

  “But why would she say she was going to work? Wouldn't she come up with a better excuse? After all, she knows you can easily check.”

  “That's the beauty of it,” I said. “She thinks because it's so easy for me to check, I won't.”

  “It seems so…”

  “Crazy? Awful? Rude? Obnoxious…?”

  “Terrible.”

  I sighed a long, deep “my life is over” sigh as I picked up a pair of binoculars and focused them on the humongous white Mediterranean-style house across the creek, which just happened to be the residence of Keith McKnight. I had first spotted him trimming some trees in his yard about forty-three days ago, and every time I went to Alice's place (which looked more like a sorority house than an old lady's house—there was brightly colored IKEA everywhere), I peered through the magical magnifying lenses and prayed that he'd come outside with his shirt off. Sure, I saw him topless almost every day, but that was under professional circumstances, not on his own turf.

  But even the thought of a potenti
al Keith sighting couldn't pull me out of my funk. In fact, the thought of him just made me feel worse. “I obviously can't take those swim lessons now,” I announced, setting down the binoculars.

  “But I thought she said you'd discuss it later.”

  “It doesn't matter what she says now. I need to have my wits about me. I can't afford to get love lunacy myself.”

  “That's ridiculous, Steffie. Swimming lessons are not going to tempt you to play park the pastrami with a married man.”

  Park the what? “Keith may not be married,” I said, “but he's got a girlfriend.”

  “Even if he was married, it wouldn't matter. You're not your mother. I mean, look at me. Roland was a drinker. That didn't make me one.”

  Alice had lost her husband, Roland, to a heart attack five years before. She liked to say that they were happily married for forty years, but the truth of the matter was that they were actually married for forty-five. The reason why she didn't count the first five is because they were so bad. That would be due to the fact that, unbeknownst to Alice at the time, she had married a total drunk.

  One of her all-time favorite stories was how she got Roland to stop drinking, thereby saving his life. No offense to Alice, but it hadn't sounded all that difficult. She simply gave him the old heave-ho, and he dried out in exactly two weeks, which was when he came crawling back, begging for forgiveness. I couldn't exactly throw my mother out either, although I considered going down to county court and filling out emancipation papers after every time we finger moved.

  “But Roland wasn't a blood relative,” I said. “Love lunacy is genetic.”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “Well, my father was a drinker and I didn't become one.”

  I could attest to that. The only alcohol Alice had in the house was a grody bottle of peppermint schnapps that was coated in about two inches of dust. “But you did marry one,” I said, thinking out loud. “It's not like you totally escaped.”