“I leave again next week. It’s an insane stretch. I’m hoping things will slow down this summer.”
But then she starts talking about her husband’s family, and the vacation she has to take with them in August to celebrate an important anniversary of her in-laws. “I wish I didn’t have to go, after three days with them I start to lose it.”
I almost ask: Isn’t that the case with your husband and kids, with your house? Isn’t that why you’re always traveling, why you leave them behind every other week?
I don’t say this. I’m fond of my friend, I let her blow off steam. The sun beats down on us and chafes the skin below my sweater.
In the Pool
Twice a week, at dinnertime, I go to the pool. In that container of clear water lacking life or current I see the same people with whom, for whatever reason, I feel a connection. We see each other without ever planning to. They come at the same time, on those same days, to escape life’s troubles.
Here’s the elderly woman who walks with a limp, leaning on a cane. The space is like an amphitheater and it’s hard for her to make it from the locker room to the edge of the pool. She uses the ladder to get in and always swims with her face above water. Next to her is the guy with the shaved head who dives deep and does laps for over an hour, never stopping. His potent somersaults send him down nearly half a length before he comes up again for air. It’s an enormous pool and the eight lanes are almost always occupied. Eight different lives share that water at a time, never intersecting.
I swim for about forty minutes, maybe fifty, before I get tired. I’m not a strong swimmer, I can’t do a flip turn, I never learned how. The idea of being on my back underwater scares me a little. I typically do the crawl, with a weak but decent stroke.
In the pool I lose myself. My thoughts merge and flow. Everything—my body, my heart, the universe—seems tolerable when I’m protected by water and nothing touches me. All I think about is the effort. Below my body there’s a restless play of dark and light projected onto the bottom of the pool, that drifts away like smoke. I’m surrounded by an element that restores me, one in which my mother wouldn’t know how to survive.
She was the one who brought me to the pool when I was little. She’d wait for me, she’d watch me from above, seated on the bleachers, always slightly nervous as I learned to float and breathe and kick. Water can cover me without drowning me. My mother and I are different that way. Perhaps a few drops enter my nose or ears, but my body resists. And yet, every time I swim, I feel cleansed as if from within.
It’s just that in the locker room, when the other women chat among themselves, I’m prey to terrible stories, brutal information shared as they take their showers, take off their swimsuits, shave their legs and armpits and groins in awkward, contorted poses.
That’s how one day a young mother, responding to a woman who remarked, “I haven’t seen you here lately,” talked about her son’s cancer, a little boy, just eighteen months old. He’s already had two operations. She recounted trips to the best hospitals, the hellish treatment, the precarious recovery.
A few days later two women discussed the adult son of a third woman they both knew. He’d had an accident while on vacation with his family; he’d slipped in such a way that now he was paralyzed, and risked never walking again.
“God, what a nightmare,” one of the women said before turning on the hair dryer and grooming herself.
Today a woman in her eighties who swims four days a week shares a memory that surprises us: she admits that she’s afraid of the sea, because of a huge wave that once knocked her down and twisted her up when she was a girl.
“I was about to drown,” she says, still stunned. “When I was tossed onto the shore, water was pouring out of my nose, my mouth, my ears. My arms were scraped from top to bottom.”
She’d been swimming with an aunt who, seeing her frightened, had held her hand, but that human anchor had only caused more harm. She’d have been better off nearly drowning on her own.
It’s hard to imagine her body when it was young. Over the years it’s lost its shape, she’s hunched over, covered with moles. She gets dressed, combs her hair, and puts on a few gold rings, including her wedding band.
In this humid, rusty place where women congregate, naked and wet, where they show each other the scars beside their breasts and on their bellies, the bruises on their thighs, the imperfections on their backs, they all talk about misfortune. They complain about husbands, children, aging parents. They confess things without feeling guilty.
As I take in these losses, these tragedies, it occurs to me that the water in the pool isn’t so clear after all. It reeks of grief, of heartache. It’s contaminated. And after I get out I’m saturated by a vague sense of dread. All that suffering doesn’t leak out like the water that travels into my ear now and then. It burrows into my soul, it wedges itself into every nook of my body.
The old woman closes her purse and politely says goodbye, but before leaving, as I’m drying my limbs, she says,
“I’ve got a bunch of dresses in my closet that would look good on you. They’re adorable but I can’t wear them anymore. Would you like them, so they don’t go to waste?” She adds, without skipping a beat, “It’s been decades since I’ve had a waist.”
On the Street
I spot them on the street, in the middle of a crowd of pedestrians waiting for the light to change: the couple who live around the corner, my friend and the kind man I cross paths with now and again on the bridge. I quicken my pace to catch up to them, I think of saying hello, but then I realize that they’re having an argument. It’s a wide avenue, there’s confusion right and left. You can hardly hear a thing but they manage to make themselves heard. They talk at the same time, their sentences overlapping so that it’s impossible to know what they’re fighting about. Then I hear her voice: “Don’t touch me, you disgust me.”
I start to follow them. I don’t go into the store I was heading to, it’s not urgent. We cross the broad street together. He’s handsome, lanky. She’s got long hair, a bit tousled, and wears a flame-colored, egg-shaped coat.
They pay no attention to passersby, they’re not ashamed of fighting in public. It’s as if they’re in the middle of nowhere, on a deserted beach, or inside a home. They’re having a bad, bitter fight. It rises above the mayhem that surrounds them; they act as if they’re the only people who inhabit the entire city.
She’s furious, and in the beginning he tries to appease her. But then he, too, loses his temper, and he’s as irritated and spiteful as she is. It feels unseemly, a quarrel so intimate in front of everyone. Their biting words pierce the air as if physically puncturing it, seeping into the blue of the sky, blackening it. And it upsets me to notice that his face has turned mean.