Emilie T. White

SWIMMING SCHOOL

“What if,” I was forced to say to Mother, for in thinking it I was obligated to say it, and I don’t remember why, “what if a luna moth got in my salad and I accidentally put it in my moth? I mean, mouth. Sorry!” At ten years old I was no longer to speak of moths and moss, such soft but also spongy and smothering words. It was fine that I was nervous, but I was not supposed to “indulge” my nervousness—that would be unattractive; I was not supposed to “revel” in it—that would be vulgar. “You know those veins under their wings?” I pressed. “Will I feel them on my tongue?”

It was dinnertime, just as planned, and it was summer. Cars were passing on the road beyond our woods but always in the same way—you almost couldn’t hear them—while around us ticktocked the empty, gone-away rooms where my father no longer was. He had really gotten out: just hours after he left even his smells were gone, from the bureau drawers and from the towels and from the humid belly of the wicker laundry basket. Before saying good-bye, in his gentle way he had requested we sit together so he could explain why he was leaving. It was just as I expected—like Mother, he had felt “crowded”—and, just as I expected, when I checked the window behind him I saw two moths battering the screen, their four wings, a piebald of black and white, confused and juddering. I had been afraid of moths and moss for years, but now that he was leaving it was just a matter of time before they would take over. They would take over just as pelts of moss had taken over my father’s toolshed, his only sanctuary, fingering their way in bumpy continents across the dirt flooring and over the rims of abandoned clay gardening pots. That, it seemed to me, was the point of moss—that it could take over, just as it could take over my thoughts, reminding me inevitably of moths once they had finally been crushed, their meaty centers spilled and spreading. For don’t you see? There is a relation between moths and moss, and I am the sole witness to that relation. Now, even more so, all the witnessing would be mine, the checking and double-checking—though it never ended there—for my father was escaping, and in the blink of my eye our house would become the headquarters, the luna moth presiding, the air crowding infinitely with hushing sounds and friction.

When he had finished and was gathering his suitcases, Mother pretended to faint—this I had expected as well. We bent over her, my father and I, going through the motions until eventually she had no choice but to sit up. Then he made a break for the kitchen door, only moments later backing out the driveway in the zippy little car he had bought in college, long before he met her, long before he had even imagined knowing either of us. Then only the smell of his engine remained and she ran screaming down the driveway, her voice breaking its own limits, higher and higher until the sound was too shameful to sustain. For what are limits anyway when no one is there to tell you that you have broken them? Soon Mother and I would be setting our own limits in netherworlds of our own design. It was just a matter of time before the laws of my netherworld would be staring back at me with the cool resignation of letters carved in stone. Sometimes I wondered what form her own laws took, whether they made sense to her. And then I stopped, and turned to other things.

“How would the moth get out of my mouth? Would it flap? What if it flapped and I chewed it to shreds?”

“Please, help me, Claire,” Mother managed to say, her eyes darting around the kitchen for someone who might arrive to help her with me, which wasn’t going to happen. She dropped her forehead into her palms and wept. We shuddered in a shared thought: ours were the only two bodies in the house.

“Or what if,” I said, and now I wasn’t even thinking so much of the moth; I was thinking of how she was probably thinking of my father, I was thinking of her thinking of the empty rooms upstairs, I was thinking of how I was straining to do—I didn’t know, to get her to try, I couldn’t say—something. Then I shuddered in my own thought: it is too intimate, the thinking between moths and me.

“What if the henchman moths come in at night because the Luna Moth told them to and they agree on plans and things and have a meeting on the walls? What if they have a meeting on the walls of my bedroom? When you come in and see that, when you come in to save me, will you be scared? Is everyone scared of moths?” Mother cried harder. This wasn’t helping. “Because if it’s just me who’s scared, then I’d be the silly one and we wouldn’t have to worry!”

This could go on all night; it was within my power to ask her these questions all night. She lay her head down on the table and covered her ears with her arms.

“Mother? Hello?”

Like a marionette forced to revive, she throbbed upward to face me again, her head dangling on a thread.

“Or what if the moths get into my room and have one of their meetings and decide to make a blanket out of themselves, like a quilt?”

To make Mother see precisely what I meant, I fanned my fingers just inches before her face, the two thumbs overlaid. Then I made my hands quiver to show her the effect of the struggling wings, for this quilt would not be made of death but of a vengeful, feverish life. How did I get the idea for the quilt? This quickly. The luna moth gave it to me. I’m not making it up.

“Could you force the wings apart? Would you try to save me? Could you manage that? I mean, what do you think?”

Mother rose from her chair. Stagger, I believe, would be the best word to describe how she then made her way across the kitchen to her purse, where she rifled among the emery boards and credit cards for her cigarettes. Stagger was pretty much what I had anticipated, and stagger was what I got. Before lighting up she rattled her cigarette at me, but shaking it too hard she broke it. “Jesus!” she said, then, “Puh,” as though expelling a foulness. She then exhumed another from the pack and rattled this one in the same manner as she had the first.

“You are sick,” Mother said. Who could blame her for saying such a thing, and yet I’m not sure I had anticipated it. “You are. Your niggling and vivid little obsessions horrify me. Horrify me! Why we should be having this discussion, why we should be having anything at all, why any of this should be happening at all . . .” She paused, lit her cigarette, regained her focus.

“Why . . . you . . . should . . . even . . . be . . . my . . . daughter,” she said, clenching back every word, though they came out anyway; and it was then that I imagine a very good thing happened for her.

As if summoned she broke off speaking and looked through the kitchen door as if at a magical place that was calling to her from very far away. Horizons, I imagine, were calling to her, reminding her of their very existence; let’s say there were many horizons rather than the standard “one”; and let’s say that these horizons are the several meeting points between several emerald fields and several glittering skies that turn and rearrange themselves in an unwalled, eternal, and kaleidoscopic possibility. There over the fields she sails like a kite, let’s say, buoyant and unencumbered, beautiful and immaterially bedecked, before she was a mother, before she was my mother, before life landed us together to make do as best we could amidst the chiggering encroachments of the suburban woods. There as her kitely self she is everything she was meant to be, everything before and better and breaking now into spaces unbound by their ends. Her name, when I wasn’t calling her Mother, was Delia.

So, swimming would be best.

It would build me up, “physically and morally,” and I would meet other children. We agreed completely—it was the only solution. After all, Swimming School was only ten minutes from our house, which meant that Mother could drop me off without going too far out of her way, then have the whole afternoon to herself. She could visit Mrs. Warnock for lunch. Or Mrs. Dingle, who liked to “linger and chat.” She could go see Helga, who had orange hair, to get her nails done. Mother needed some time off. “Do I ever,” she said. “Besides,” she would add, to Mrs. Warnock on the phone, to Mrs. Dingle on the phone, even, oddly, to me, “Claire needs to get out of her room.” Get out of the house.

I felt that way too. There was a song on the radio that summer, strummed by some happy band, and sometimes I would find myself singing it even when it wasn’t on the radio. The song went, “I’m leavin’ on a jet plane.” I sang with boisterous precision, inserting extra syllables where necessary, to ensure my meaning would be understood. “D-on’t know when ay-ell be ba-ack again!”

That summer Mother took to wearing higher heels than she had before, slim white sandals with a strap at the ankle, and cropped pants checked white and mint-green, like a cool drink. In the car on the way to the first day of Swimming School, I watched her feet on the brake and gas pedals and thought how easily the smooth bottoms of her sandals could slide off of them. I remember her hands too, and her rings—she had not yet remarried and was still wearing silver—and her long fingers, which crooked ever so slightly away from her body: she called them “weather-vane fingers.” She had put me in the backseat behind her; she must have thought I was looking out the window, but I was up on my haunches, peering at her hands.

She sensed me there. “Claire,” she said, her voice lower and softer than usual, as though we had been conferring intimately for some time. “I’ve been thinking.”

You’ve been thinking. Imagine what it’s like in here!

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about your problem. I realize now that you may find consolation at Swimming School, and I want you to remember that.”

Here would come a pause, after which she would request I name the consolation.

“And can you name the consolation for me?”

“I cannot.”

“Moths don’t go in the water.”

It’s true—they can’t get wet. The water rinses the dust from their wings and they never recover. I was impressed. To arrive at this consolation, Mother would have had to have thought like me, pollinating her imagination with mine. In the rearview mirror I nodded to her in acknowledgment of this gesture of love.

But did I? Certainly it’s what I’d like to have done.

Once, about fifteen years later, in the car on the way to her twentieth college reunion, we rode together in the front seat and chatted away as though we might someday become friends. As though we already were friends: the early June morning was flecked with blowing elm seed, and Mother and I were coeds on a road trip, sharing cigarettes and singing with the radio. Still laughing at whatever we had been talking about, and without attempting a segue, Mother remarked that, by her senior year in college, she had been “well liked.”

“Quite a few of the other students liked me.”

Immediately we felt ashamed—it was a pathetic thing to say—and so, to distract us from the shame, briskly she was up and clenching the wheel, as though without warning we had strayed into some sort of danger, as though we’d gotten lost, or as though the road had become especially twisting or narrow, which it had not. She was playacting; I knew it, and she knew I knew it, and, because I did not help her out by saying, “Are we lost?” or whatever it was she’d hoped I’d say, she was forced to keep up her pantomime of squinting into the distance and scratching her head, dropping little moans and tsks and oh-mys, while I watched from the other side of the car and said nothing.

It went on that way for quite some time until she said, “Of course, I wasn’t popular, not like some girls,” and here I did help her out:

“But you did have a few friends,” I added quickly.

“Right. You’ve said it exactly right.” She tucked a strand of hair that was already behind her ear more snugly around it and swallowed audibly. “Claire, you’ve grown into such a smart and, well, effectual young woman.”

“Oh no,” I said, cooing, “I think you said it right too”—also a pathetic remark. By this point we both knew there was no way out; each remark would only intensify our self-consciousness. It is strange to say, but the awkwardness of our rapport could make my groin more present to me, make it almost resonate, as though I had just had sexual intercourse, or were about to, even though the thought of sex was probably the furthest from my mind whenever Mother was near. When finally she did turn to face me, she was blinking so rapidly we couldn’t make eye contact—she blinked that way whenever you looked at her directly. At school I had met girls who blinked that way, shy, sympathetic girls with complicated purses and thin, brittle arms; by that time in my and Mother’s life together I recognized myself as far more confident than they. What I wish I had said to Mother in the car, but didn’t, for surely she would have seen through it if I had—Mother could think herself out of any form of love, so convinced was she of a base awfulness threaded through her very marrow—what I wish I had said was, “No surprises there, Mom. I bet there were a lot of girls who wanted to be your friend.”

Mother has blond, translucent eyelashes, like a child’s, but I don’t remember them, or anything else about her face, from the summer of Swimming School.

So, there we were in the driveway of Swimming School—not that I remember it. I don’t remember Mother saying good-bye, or going inside to introduce me, but she and the school lived separately in my mind and always will. There are her feet and there is the mailbox; over there, by the edge of the gravel, the abandoned blue flip-flop; and over here, on the right, the rhododendron, its browning leaves chalky with fertilizer spray; and then there is the gleaming rectangle of the glorious pool on the other side of the high, wooden gate.

Inside, Swimming School was a mess.

Told you so, said the woods.

Ramshackle, Mother would have said.

It was not a school like first grade was a school; it was someone’s home, and the backyard had been made over into something like a camp. Plastic flags in primary colors on plastic white posts lined the pool, but the flags weren’t indicating anything—they didn’t mean anything—so the place had the feel of a child’s birthday party, or a supermarket. A trampoline had been set up for “recess.” Tilted on the knobbly grass lay a single bowl of peanuts, still in their shells, for “snacks.” When I had to go to the bathroom I was led down some stairs to a concrete room with a washing machine and a toilet with yarn on its lid, all the family photos that had once hung on the room’s cork bulletin board now in piles in a corner. I didn’t know these people whose toilet I was sitting on, but, then again, I could smell them; I could smell their bodies and their casseroles and the stifling smell of their sleep. In their shag rugs I could smell their two German shepherds, “Jack” and “Daniels.” Their backyard smelled like everyone’s backyard—geraniums, barbecue, suntan oil—and, like ours, it was surrounded by woods.

Woods: a whole rash of them. More woods, I thought, as I took my place opposite them the first day. More woods, the woods snickered back in the days to come. Of course moss would be creeping across every surface I couldn’t see—there were acres and acres of nervousness here—so I would have to stay alert, and not get drowsy from the sun.

As it turned out, I had more time for nervousness at Swimming School than I had expected. Certainly there was more of it than Mother had expected. Neither of the two instructors—sisters, back from college, fat—had any idea what they were doing. If they’d had an idea, they wouldn’t have allowed me to sit on a towel by the shallow end by myself. Did they know I was there? It wasn’t clear. They wore whistles around their necks, so at least they looked official, but the most they could manage was to keep Jack and Daniels away from the pool; this was quite a job, I think, because the dogs had confused the water, which was always bouncing, sometimes cracking like lightning from the boys’ cannonballs, for another animal.

The kids were even noisier than the dogs. They whipped each other with wet towels, chased each other across the yard, did back-flips off the trampoline into the pool. Down at the deep end, which I knew from the black-stenciled “8” above the waterline was eight feet deep, the older kids played Marco Polo, their sleek heads bobbing on the surface and disappearing, the water they had slipped beneath swaying lightly, and for unendurable lengths of time, in their absence. “People!” the instructors would shout at them. “People, people!” But it was hopeless—the children were underwater, and sounds don’t go underwater.

“This is hopeless!” sang a voice behind me: English, a boy’s, but higher than a boy’s, almost a girl’s. “Every matchbox-head knows that sounds don’t go underwater.”

Had the owner of this voice been thinking my thoughts? Impossible. I turned around.

He was narrow-chested and lithe, his pale, bluish skin a delicate and considered hue, as one might find on finely crafted china. Squatting on his towel, another towel slung movie-star style around his neck, he was holding swimming goggles before his eyes like a pair of binoculars. Apparently he felt it necessary to survey the other children as though from the bleachers of a cricket match. Because of the downward tilt of his thighs, his black swim trunks had slipped over that paler expanse of skin above his groin, the moony whiteness there perhaps strange even to himself. I was sure he didn’t know this, for if he’d known he would have been tugging at his trunks, his whole enterprise lost to shame.

“Heathens!” he said of the children, lowering his goggles and shaking his head. Then he saw me looking at him and replaced the goggles. From behind them he said, “Don’t you agree?”

“Are you talking to me?” I said, knowing full well that he was. This boy was talking to me. To believe it!

“No, matchbox-head. I’m talking to the woods.”

Uh-oh, I thought. How delicious.

His name was Jacques. This name is spelled j-a-c-q-u-e-s. I’m not making it up. He was eleven years old; he often advised the instructors that he be treated differently than the other children because, as far as he could “discern,” he was older than all of them. Besides, he added, he had a passport. In my memory he floats against the two backgrounds of the scene—the flaring green of the summer woods and the quartz-patterned flicker of the sun on the pool’s surface—like a paper doll that doesn’t make any sense there. And yet I do, I do remember Jacques.

Jacques was the only student who knew the crawl, and he was quite proud of it. One day, to get everyone’s attention, he stood on the trampoline and called the other students over so he could demonstrate “the famous crawl stroke,” as he called it. He snapped his fingers. “Children, children!” he cried. No one paid attention.

But I did. For my own part I can say that I could do little else except pay attention to Jacques. Jacques wore girlish, buckled sandals and parted his hair too sweetly in the middle, and when, one day, one of the bigger boys yelled, “Jacques is a mo-rahn!” Jacques only folded his fingers and replied, “Fiddle-dee-dee.” Then smirked and looked at me. Jacques always looked at me. When he swam—and he always swam the crawl—to reorient himself he would tip his head feebly from the water, snap his goggles on his forehead—his goggles often fogged—and then smile at me. He called swimming “taking a swim,” and once he had emerged from the pool, he would quickly recompose himself on the concrete, extending then crossing his legs, then swatting them dry. He wore flippers, too, though only on Tuesdays; Tuesdays were “Jacques Cousteau” days, though the camera people, he hastened to explain, had been temporarily hired out. I was always sitting in the same place and could always be counted on to watch him—that was what Jacques knew about me. Jacques wanted attention, so I suppose Jacques wanted me.

One day Jacques approached me again.

“Hello. I should very much like to speak with you.” He stood at the edge of my towel, his toes poking through the slits in his sandals as though even his feet had tongues and would soon introduce themselves.

I squeezed my legs together—tight, tighter, tightest.

He squatted down to look in my face. “What sort of name is Claire?” he said.

“How do you know my name?”

“I have my ways,” he said, nodding at the woods.

“Are you kidding?”

“Of course I am, matchbox-head.”

“Well,” I said, “what sort of name is Jacques?”

“The French kind,” he replied staunchly.

“And where did you get those sandals?”

“With my mum in a department store in London.”

“They look like girls’ shoes.”

“Well, then I’ll have Mum pick you up a pair the next time we’re over!” But, instead of getting up to go, he stayed, his gaze steady and his freckles there for me to look at, one little map for me to study.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been observing you.” By way of explanation he nodded at his goggles. “And you, my dear, are hopeless. I could be exaggerating, of course, but you stare at those woods all day!”

Then he picked up a stick and began conducting himself in a song, his voice wobbling into a warped, illogical music—bing, bong, boing—like a breaking music box. At first I couldn’t make out the words.

“And I think it’s very nice,” the song went, “to stare at the woods all day.” He paused, tilted his head considerately, as though tuning himself.

“That’s right,” he said. “‘To stare at the woods all day . . .’”

“Lovely,” is what I think I said. Or, it’s what I’d like to have said.

It must have been that night that I made Jacques over into my imaginary friend. It couldn’t have been much later than that because as soon as he’d finished his song I was already very eager. Just as I was turning from Mother at the end of our good-night hug—which was always tent-shaped, our bodies prevented that way from crowding into one—Jacques appeared in the space where she had been standing, as though her only function all along had been to eclipse him. “Welcome,” he said, cheerful, game, snapping me out of any confusion I may have felt. Thus began the first night of our reverie. How do you make an imaginary friend? Place him across the room and start telling stories. Compelled by your private meanings, rise up on your knees, your hands fluttering in the dark. In Jacques’s company I could stop worrying about the netherworlds I knew were flowering mercilessly around Mother’s smooth, girlish head (lying just twenty-two paces from my own head, down the upstairs hall); and if somehow the silence from her netherworld had managed to seep under my door, I had only to assume she was filling it much as I was filling my own: what else was a mother (or a daughter) to do?

We called our excursions, Jacques and I, “nightplay.” Each night I insisted we follow the same routine and each night he consented. First we’d creep across the lawn and stand at the edge of the woods—“at the edge,” he would say (and this amused him, to rib them a little) “of those glowering woods.” Then we’d slip unafraid into their dark pockets. In the woods I would show Jacques many things, for to show Jacques the woods was obviously my destiny. I showed him moths and moss, of course, but I also showed him various combinations. “Moths, moss”: over and over I made him say the words. Some of these were kissing combinations, our lips cankered with lichen. It wasn’t scary at all. We lay down in the meaty greenness. The chalk was made of pistils. I packed them finger-thick.

It was during the day, however, that the real Jacques began having problems. He was trying to force the other children to play his new game, “The French Revolution.” This game mostly involved Jacques climbing up and off the trampoline while waving his white towel and singing “La Marseillaise.” At first they ignored him, but three or four days into it they invented their own game, “Frenchie,” which involved calling him “Frenchie” while chasing him around the pool and writhing their tongues in disgusting ways. Then usually two or three of the bigger boys would tackle him and hurl him into the pool. As Jacques would climb out he would try to wrench his face back to something resembling itself, then skitter like a salamander to his towel under the shade. And I knew that it was impossible that Jacques hadn’t reminded himself of a demoralized little animal too.

Poor Jacques, I whispered to myself, half-lidded and glib. Was I embarrassed for him? Of course I was. I was hot with it, as I’m certain everyone was. What else was one to conclude but that love ends in embarrassment? No, my glibness had more to do with giving up on whatever might happen between us under the light of day, so transfixed was I by that sweeter shame we’d shared the night before.

For sometimes the nightplay involved our bodies. I suppose that was inevitable. Often we would pat each other up and down to find out what the other felt like, but sometimes we asked questions, or made demands. Ultimately I did take off my nightgown and he his swimming trunks and what amused us was that, except for our genitals, we looked exactly the same. “Let’s try this,” he said, placing his finger in the center of my chest, where a third nipple might have grown. He was reinventing me. To which I replied, “No, let’s try this,” and placed my finger on his nose, inventing a new game entirely.

“Now let’s seal ourselves in this,” I said, caressing the moss, “like pupae in their cocoons. Let’s shut ourselves down.” It was the most frightening thought of all. But I was just testing him.

“No need for that anymore,” he said, “beautiful Claire, beautiful green mind.” His voice aged and grew tender, for he knew everything about me. At night our love was perfect, perfectly expressive of what it was.

And in the day, our love sprouted excesses like a mold, a cloistered rottenness. This could not be helped.

“Do you realize you’re talking to a little boy named ‘Jacques’ while you’re in the bathtub?” Had Mother been eavesdropping through the bathroom door? How dare she. I hadn’t even noticed I’d been talking to him in the bathtub.

“You talk to him in the bathtub, you talk to him in your room, and you skip. I’ve seen you skipping”—she was growing flustered, here—“skipping toward the stairway while having whole conversations with this little ‘Jacques’ who doesn’t exist.”

I hated the scare quotes around his name as she spoke it, as though mine were the only context in which “he” made sense.

“Up the stairs you go, talking to your ‘friend,’ saying ‘bing’ and ‘bong’ and ‘boing,’ singing your sad, breaking, music-box words, with their springs popping loose”—I admired her description here, for it was both accurate and nonsensical—“while I’m left to sit in the bottom of the house wondering what in heaven is going on with my little girl.”

And here I admired her acuity, for in Jacques’s company I had indeed entered heaven.

Then began a list of gently delivered questions meant to distract me from the by then unremarkable fact that no matter what happened between us in the future, she would never feel comfortable in my presence. The first of these was:

“Is there a real Jacques? Is that where you got the idea? Did you meet him at Swimming School?”

And at this I turned from her and spoke in my mind on the subject, spoke with casual elegance, as one might to a radio interviewer fascinated by one’s life and accomplishments. Of course I answered her question quite plainly right then and there; I stood in that “place” and carried on with the daily day; but why retail that exchange now? That belongs to the medium of the “must-have-been,” which, Claire or no, will take care of itself.

And the last of her questions was:

“When do you talk to him most?”

“I’m not certain. I’ll have to get back to you on that. Er, nighttime, perhaps?”

Her solution was to set me up in a cot in her bedroom. This was a nice idea but it wouldn’t work because I had already left her behind. Patiently we lay in our beds waiting to fall asleep. No one, obviously, would be coming in to give us our good-night hugs. Outside, across the road behind a chain-link fence, a lone generator made a metallic crickety noise that told of pipelines deep in the woods where nobody was, and I knew that Mother was as frightened by the thought of these woods as I. That was why every night she left the TV on, with the sound turned off, the cocktails and hats and lunch appointments from the old movies flickering their familiar, aqua-colored shadows over the room.

I worked with these shadows; I made a shipwreck out of them, then an octopus’s lair, the octopus’s many arms folded sullenly in front of him (for he was bored by the “scary fish” cliché I had asked him to fulfill). But mostly what I did in my cot was try not to think of Jacques. I tried to be a normal child and to think pleasant and comforting thoughts, rather than the very real and pressing thought, which was that I was the sort of child bound to try to think pleasant and comforting thoughts. There was one thought I had that I loved, and it was about Mother, though I worried that in exploiting it to become a pleasant and comforting thought I could never, in the end, take comfort from it. Mother, in the thought, was ten, and sitting by herself on a porch, playing with some small thing in her hands. And I, in my thought, was someone, someone tall and airy and toast-colored and nonparticular, neither male nor female—that wasn’t important—but considerably older than ten years old. In my thought I could tease people, could tell good jokes without cracking a smile, wore long trousers that were airy inside and high-waisted and sleekly creased, and the long history I had lived, filled with pain and heroism, I had concealed from all inquirers. I could have been a soldier, a prophet, Cary Grant, a bereft lover, an aerialist in the circus, a humpback craftily padded so no one could detect my hump—and no one would ever know who I was, or what I had suffered, or what I believed. An angel, let’s say. A perfect me. And to Mother, peacefully ignorant of the history we would someday make together, the perfect stranger. She would look up into my face and say whatever she wanted to say.

“I’m especially good at cat’s cradle, better than the other girls.”

I told her it wouldn’t surprise me if she were better at it than the other girls.

“The other girls’ fingers aren’t long enough or quick enough.” She held out her fingers and studied them. “Someday I’m going to be a famous pianist.”

Classical?

“Heavens, no. I’m going to write songs, like Cole Porter. Then I’m going to marry Fred Astaire. How often do you wash your hair?”

I told her it depended on how dirty it was.

“I wash mine twice a week. But I’m thinking of upping to three times a week.”

When she asked if I’d had any fears when I was her age, I told her I had been frightened of moths and moss.

“Moths! That’s preposterous! They’re only helpless little fools.”

I told her she was right, only it had taken me a long time to figure that out.

And so on. Jacques played no role in this thought, yet some nights it occurred to me that really what I had been doing was telling Jacques about the thought, as though he were the radio interviewer, and I were explaining my childhood, or hers, from an attractive distance.

That’s very interesting. I’m very interested in you, this Jacques might say. I adore you.

And then one night I must have lapsed and spoken out loud, for with a jolt she sat up in her bed and said, “What?”

“I’m sorry, what?” I said.

“What were you talking about?” Her hair was in whorls.

“I’m not sure.”

“‘Be, be, be’—that’s what you were saying.” She was calm; she was breathing slowly and facing the wall. “‘Bee, bee, bee,’ like a little bee. A little bug. You were talking to your friend and you were buzzing.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Yes! You were!” Because then all of a sudden she was agitated; she got up and was moving across the carpet toward my cot, and without thinking I got up too, because I didn’t want to be lying down when she got there. My body, when we were face to face and finally about to play out our strange scene, felt sodden and tippy, and her breath smelled like milk.

“Let me ask you a question,” she whispered. “Do you think we should send you to an institution?”

“You mean,” I whispered back, “so I can learn how to swim?” I was joking. I was actually cracking a joke.

“No!” She began to cry.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, although the joke wasn’t entirely out of line, for so late in the summer I still hadn’t learned how to swim.

“What am I supposed to do, Claire? What in the round world except stand here in this very room, this”—she looked around, wagging her hands—“place, where apparently without anyone’s help I’m to scream and yell and grow very frightened of my own daughter. To grow very”—she changed tack here—“concerned, and sing ‘bing’ and ‘bong’”—and now she was scare-quoting herself—“and wonder how I ever got here.” She was sobbing heavily now. “Because that’s what I’d like to know: How in God’s name did I ever get here?”

It was a very, very reasonable question.

“God,” she said, pleading with me, her chin trembling, “I’m so tired.”

“I know,” I said.

“It’s exhausting,” one of us said.

“Yes, it is,” the other one said, “and so confusing.”

“I know,” the first one said.

“Then let’s try and sleep,” the second one said.

“I’m sorry.”

I had gone too far. I didn’t know which part of me was which. Clearly it was time I let Jacques go. I could sense it: soon my dearest would be leaving me behind. My dear, raw material.

But I had nothing—nothing!—to do with it when, back at Swimming School, the boys threw Jacques not into the water, but onto the hard, percussive grass. When it happened I didn’t know what to feel; after all, I scarcely knew the boy. One leg at a time he stood up and looked around for the children in whose arms he had just felt his body yanked and twisted in so many directions. Then he checked his watch, then touched various parts of his person—the pocket of his swim trunks, his forehead, his hair. He must have been confused. Unaware of the blood trickling below his ear, he batted the side of his head inquisitively with the heel of his hand, then smelled his fingertips, then saw his blood.

What would happen? Would the story end in pity and regret, or would the boy still be Jacques? Obviously I was astonished—frankly I was riveted—though what interested me most was that the boy still be Jacques. He raised his index finger, opened his mouth—to say something? To die?

“Not quite cricket,” he said. He spoke to no one, for they had all hidden behind the house. “And, I might add, a far cry from Waterloo. But it will have to do.”

He saluted. I did too. He was scouting the field for allies.

The next day Jacques arrived on his towel with a skin-colored patch taped over his ear, singing “La Marseillaise” with an especial fervor. He spent the subsequent hours ensuring his expulsion from Swimming School. He chose the best time to do it: after lunch, when the children were sitting at the table, waiting for their sandwiches to digest. “Children, children,” he cried, “over here!” When we were all finally assembled at the flower bed, Jacques planted his feet among the cedar chips as though on a mound of historical significance. Off went his bathing suit, off shimmied the shiny underwear underneath. With great concentration he made sure that every flower got doused, every flower its just due, the last of the posies snuffed out with small puffs of piss.

Then he danced and sang a sort of poem: “I’m Jacques, I’m Spock. I’m Spick, I’m Span, I’m Jacques.”

Only a half an hour and the instructors had been informed, the phone calls placed, and Jacques’s mother summoned to the lawn of Swimming School—she was wearing white gloves, no less—to take her son away. The boy was leaving. This boy had chosen me.

“Wait,” I said.

It was as if I had been tugged by strings from above: suddenly I was up and standing and moving across the lawn, a vertical thing with intentions, the frayed and graying club towel on which I had spent nearly all of my summer—oh rag!—a thing of the past.

“Wait!”

But they were all pressing against him, really mauling him—for his autograph?—so I would have put some oomph! into it.

“Wait!”

I had little time to spare. At first I proceeded as though Jacques had remembered to fetch his goggles, soon happily to discover I’d been misinformed: there they were, tumbled gaze-down next to the peanuts, which would mean that his flippers would be waiting only paces from the goggles. A small victory; an increment, merely, but a victory nonetheless. I strapped on my assemblage—nearly frustrated to tears, at one critical juncture, by the wiggle of the rubber—then hurried toward the pool, turning round to the others every few steps so I might hold the picture of him in my mind, might cherish it forever, crying, “Wait!” and then, “Please wait!” but by now the crowd had nearly enshrouded him, they had positively forced my hand, so I screamed really terribly curdlingly, “Wait!” and then jumped—“Jacques!”—in.

Under the water, there were three things.

There was the light show and there was the sound and there were the stairs.

The light show was the sun, which was chunkier underwater than it was up above. It floated above me in chunks. And then there were the cylinders of sun, which hit the surface and pooled into the pool. I thought about the many meanings of the word pool and then gave it up.

The sound was this: “Faa-nels. Faaa-nels.” It was one of the instructors calling her dog, her voice now buried above me in the air, the d of the dog’s name buried in an f.

I should add here that although I claim there were three things under the water, I could just as easily claim there were seventy-two things. I could select any number at all, immersing myself in a cesspit of combinations. Because really what the pool was, was one thing, seamless and ongoing and bright, no separateness there I could name, the edges of the floor, the edges of the walls, not edges, not floors, not walls at all. The edges of the stairs soft, like breasts that I could clamber over, but because stunned and flattened by the brilliance of the sun, not stairs, not breasts at all. I stared and stared at it. Because really what the pool was, was an eye staring. Not an eye in a face, but an eye. And not a pupil in the eye, just the eye. A tireless, iron eye. I stared and stared and waited. Really? Is that really what it was like at the bottom of the pool? asks the radio interviewer.

“Oh, yes, absolutely,” I say. “That’s what I did. I stared and waited.”

Very interesting, says the radio interviewer. I’m very interested in you.

Then the radio interviewer asks why I would ever be talking about the pool in the first place. Why, the radio interviewer wants to know, would I be talking about any of it? My mother, the boy, any of it? What has set me talking?

“Well,” I say, “haven’t you asked me to talk about it?”

The radio interviewer laughs attractively in a knowing laugh and reminds me I know full well that that’s not how it’s working.

“Oh, right,” I say, also laughing attractively, hoping the laughter will conceal my embarrassment, for the radio interviewer has just found me out.

“Well, if you’ll let me just indulge myself for a moment,” I continue, “I don’t really think of these events as lining up in a chronology, such as, first, you ask me a question and then, second, because you’ve asked me a question, I answer the question, if you see what I mean. I understand why someone would want to see it that way, but that’s not really the way I see it. Rather, I should like it very much if all the different parts should always be talking to one another, and, in this way, always keeping one another from growing lonesome: the her and the me, the then and the now, and, most dearly, the him and the me. The Jacques and the me. Oh, and I suppose also the you and the me, though I hope that doesn’t make you uncomfortable. I should like it very much if all the parts were always weaving together all by themselves in some wonderful watery loom; or, to picture the process differently, for unfortunately I could picture the process any way I’d like, ticking back and forth in some wonderful watery game—and now I must think of a game—well, of badminton, my hand, you see, nowhere near the shuttlecock.”

But then I realize I have spoken too insistently about myself and have grown unappealing. This stumps me. That I have grown vulgarly unappealing knocks the wind out of me and I can’t think of what to say next. All at once we’re seized by an awkward silence and I’ve got to find a way to end it.

Caught in the act!

One of the instructors jumped in and pulled me out by the armpits and put me on the grass with everyone running toward me. The ground rattled with their pounding. The air seemed startled but refreshed. I looked around but Jacques was nowhere to be found. Someone knocked me on the back. Someone else mantled me in a towel. One of the smaller girls made her approach and slowly blew a dandelion in my face. My key to the kingdom? She was laughing. Together we watched as the cottony sphere dispersed. After the girl I don’t remember anything else from Swimming School.