I stood on the concrete pool deck of the high school. It was in the spring of my freshman year and still cool. I pulled my towel around my shoulders. Steam rose from the churning water where the upperclassmen were swimming a preseason workout. At the end of each set, the swimmers leaned against the pool ledges or pulled themselves out of the water to breathe the cool air. They waved at the freshmen waiting on deck—whom they already knew from club teams—male and female swimmers in their Speedos and imprinted latex caps, their upper bodies triangles of muscle perched atop narrow, sleek hips and iron thighs.
I tugged at my baggy suit so that it covered my bottom and pulled my towel more tightly around myself. That fall I’d learned how to swim the competitive strokes at the San Pedro YMCA. I’d swum lap after lap in my ladybug suit, which had faded until it was bronze and gray. After my hair had turned into straw from the chlorine, I bought an old lady’s white rubber cap from the Y’s front desk, complete with chinstrap and flower-imprint pattern. I hadn’t bothered to buy a new suit for high-school tryouts; I wore my old lady cap. I had thought I could swim well enough to get on the team, but I knew better now as I watched the team practice. The swimmers in the pool could swim 150 yards in the time it took me to swim 50.
Once the team cleared the pool, it was our turn. The water was warm compared to the cold air. My toes and fingertips tingled as the blood rushed into them. Coach Terry blew her whistle, and the workout began.
I saw stars after each set of freestyle or butterfly. During each lap I was plunged into the chaos of the white wake of the swimmer in front of me, the clawing hands of the swimmer behind me. When I did backstroke, I drifted into the other swimmers. I was routinely lapped. I almost threw up after the sprints. At the end of the workout, I could barely lift myself from the pool. The tryouts would last a whole week.
Before I went back to the locker room that first day, I asked Coach Terry if she thought I even had a chance. She was shorter than I was, but thin, with spiked, silver hair and tanned skin. She appraised my dripping carcass and rubber cap.
“Well,” she said. “I know if you quit tonight, you’re definitely not going to make the team.”
The next afternoon, Coach Terry wrote on the pool’s chalkboard, “Pain is only temporary; pride is forever” in old-fashioned cursive. It became my mantra that week. I’d fallen in love with swimming, the way my body glided through the water, the way the world’s sounds were muffled, the sunlight softened. I was hypnotized by the black lines at the bottom of the pool.
I even managed to ignore Chrissie and Meghan who, much to my chagrin, had also decided to try out for swim team, turning up on the second day. They were cute in their sporty bikinis, and I saw how the boys smiled whenever they came on deck. And I saw how they smiled at the boys smiling at them. They weren’t much better swimmers than I was, but they were at least in shape. While I gasped for breath at the wall between swims, they giggled about pull buoys, the floats swimmers sometimes grip between their legs in order to strengthen their arms.
“It feels like a gigantic tampon,” Chrissie smirked.
“No,” Meghan said in a loud stage whisper. “It’s like a foam dildo.”
“I bet she likes it,” Chrissie looked meaningfully in my direction.
Something magical had happened in the pool. While normally I would have cringed—maybe even cried, at what they said—in the pool, I just got mad. Being angry made me pull the water harder and kick faster, and by the time I was done with two laps, I’d forgotten they’d said anything at all.
I made the team. It didn’t matter to me that Coach Terry had cut no one. It didn’t matter that I was the slowest person on the team.
On long bus rides home from meets, I made friends. At meets, I cheered for everyone. I wasn’t just me anymore; I was a swimmer. It was easier to walk those crowded halls with my swim parka on.
Swimming was the thing I loved to do best. I would do anything to be able to keep doing it—and the thing I’d have to do was get much faster. They were consolidating our high school with two others starting the next year, and there’d be three times as many people competing for the same spots. The day high school season ended, I started swimming with the San Pedro Y’s team. I was so slow I had to swim with the little kids, but I didn’t mind at all. Little kids thought I was cool simply by virtue of being bigger than they were.
“Swimming is so good for you,” Josette told me a few weeks before summer vacation, as we made crêpes after school at her house, which was also supposed to be my house. “Here, the first one—c’est toujours raté.” She took the spatula from me and cleared the torn crêpe from the pan. “Yes, and you’re getting skinny too. Positively svelte.” I smiled. “What else have you been up to?”
“My friends and I are starting a club next semester.” We sprinkled powdered sugar over two of the pancakes—one for her, one for me. “We’re going to call it Better Our World, so we can do whatever we want to do, like picking up trash at the beach or working at a homeless shelter.”
“That’s good. You should do more of these things because they will help you get into a good college,” Josette said.
“You think I can go to college?”
“Mais!” She shut a cabinet door. “Yes, I think you can go to college, you little monster. It would be a disaster if you didn’t go to college.”
College had appeared on my horizon that first year of high school. My grandfather and Marilyn had probably always expected me to go to college, but I’d never really thought about it before. I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but suddenly, everyone I knew was going to college. Suddenly, college was the place where adulthood started; it was the place you went when you left home.
I sat down at the table.
“Richard and Marilyn want you to go to college, right?” she called from the kitchen.
“Yes, I think so. Sometimes my dad says we can’t afford it.”
She brought our glasses of water to the table.
“He can afford it.” She looked at me over her reading glasses, her gray eyes keeping my own from looking down. “You know, you’re really very smart. I think you know that. But don’t you dare forget it.”