SWIFT CURRENT’S outdoor swimming pool was only a block and a half from our house, up the alley and past the tall dented boards of the hockey rink. I was eight when my mother started working there as a checker. The job involved hefting a wire basket full of each swimmer’s clothes into a numbered position on a long, six-tiered shelf. The number was stamped on a round piece of metal clipped to an elastic band, which the swimmer stretched around an ankle. The baskets were often heavy; workers from the oil fields and construction sites arrived at the end of the day with their big boots, their clothes smelly from their labours. Mom had to dash back and forth across a concrete floor from the boys’ section to the girls’ as people waited for her to give them an empty basket or slapped their metal tags on the counter, impatient to change out of their dripping bathing suits.
The easier job was Mrs. Brewster’s. She was the cashier. Mom got to run the register on Mrs. Brewster’s days off and when Mrs. Brewster left for supper, or when Mom let her sneak home, without their supervisor knowing, to look in on her eldest son, Bobby. He was what we called retarded then. Mrs. Brewster and her husband had tried to put him in the home in Moose Jaw when he was eight, she told Mom, but he’d wailed so pitifully when they walked away that they went back and got him.
Few people knew about Bobby. During the day Mrs. Brewster left him in a room behind a baby’s safety gate, though he wasn’t a baby. He was around twenty, and he hadn’t been expected to live that long. He couldn’t talk or walk but dragged himself across the floor and wore a diaper. Mom told us Mrs. Brewster worried constantly that Bobby would be caught in a fire while she was at work or have a seizure and bang his head against the floor. She had three other kids, younger than Bobby, and perhaps one of them looked after him sometimes. Mom said she understood why Mrs. Brewster didn’t hire someone to care for Bobby. She left him alone because she didn’t want everyone in town to know she had a son like that. It was nobody’s business but her own.
Mrs. Brewster was a friend of sorts to Mom, but she thought herself superior. Rarely would she leave her tall stool at the ticket window to help if Mom was busy. She wasn’t dependent on the income from her job as Mom was, at least that’s what she said, and she liked to rub it in. She claimed she cashiered because the little kids she sold tickets to made her happy, and it was nice to make some money to pay for extras, like cigarettes. Two of the fingers on her right hand were yellow like my dad’s.
The Brewsters owned their house, and Mr. Brewster, who made good money as an agent at the Pioneer grain elevator, didn’t drink. Even in the years when there wasn’t much grain to be bought and sold, elevator agents got a cheque each month. They kept their jobs because people thought the good crops would come again next year. Unlike many local farmers, always on the verge of going under, agents could buy clothes and groceries for their families.
The first summer my mother worked at the pool, Lynda and I hung around it every day. Mom wanted me there so she could keep an eye on me. We’d line up at the window and pretend to pay, but Mom or Mrs. Brewster would let us in for free. Before we were good enough to swim laps, we’d stay in the shallow end, pinch our noses and somersault. We’d sink to the bottom and turn to face one another. Then we’d shout, the bubbles rising above our heads. When we ran out of air, we’d bob to the surface and try to figure out what the other had said. “No,” Lynda would say, laughing and shaking her head, the water flying. We’d kick to the bottom and start again.
By the end of the next summer, after taking swimming lessons, I could survive in the deep end. I spent hours surface diving to the blue bottom near the grates, where everything sounded and looked different; the uncanny colour and the echoes of shouts and splashes converged to form another sense, one that had no name. The water had a body to it: it was tactile and noisy and smelled of chlorine. When you held your breath and peered up through it from the bottom to the sky, it was like looking through a sheet of broken glass, the light golden and refracted.
MOM WAS loved at the pool. She was the only mother on our block who had a job, so at first I was embarrassed, but it didn’t take long before I appreciated my “in” at one of the most popular hangouts in town. All the kids knew her name, and she knew theirs. She found them funny in their little bathing suits, and as they grew older, progressing from beginners’ swimming lessons to juniors’, intermediates’ and seniors’, she enjoyed watching their flirtations, including mine. The boys cannonballed the shrieking girls as we sat around the edge, pretending to read movie magazines instead of watching them.
When I was twelve, I started work at the pool myself. I checked baskets while Mom filled in as cashier or when the pool was madly busy and a person was needed to work each side. I loved the job, because it gave me money to splurge on clothes for school. I bought good things Mom couldn’t afford, like a white cardigan with pearl buttons and a small bottle of Evening in Paris perfume from the Pioneer Co-op store that had replaced Cooper’s at the end of Central Avenue. By the time I was fifteen, and a lifeguard, all the corners of the pool were as familiar to me as the nooks in our house. Once I got hired to paint the girls’ dressing room before the pool’s opening in the spring. The new paint made the dressing room look cleaner, but nothing could help the smell. Chlorine and pee, or chlorine and Pine-Sol: I didn’t know which was worse. Though the floor was swept often, it was yucky to walk across, with its swamp-like puddles of stagnant water. In the toilet stalls, soggy bits of tissue stuck to the bottom of your feet, and everywhere you trod on trails of grit brought into the changing room on people’s shoes.
Perhaps because of the tricks it played on the senses, the pool was a place that deceived you into thinking no one cared where you came from. Kids from both high schools—Beatty, the school I went to at the bottom of the hill, and Irwin, the one at the top—came together in its waters, tumbled and thrashed about, then lay on the concrete, bodies glistening with the baby oil mixed with iodine we’d slathered on our skin so we’d tan the deepest brown. The hierarchy depended on how well you could swim or dive and how good you looked in a bathing suit. There, I did okay. In grades 10 and 11, one of the first girls who dared to wear a braless Speedo, I strutted around the water’s edge with a lifeguard’s whistle around my neck, trying to look as if I could save the drowning. Only once was I called upon to prove my worth, and luckily he was a little kid, easy to pull out. Though I’d been taught how to come at a drowning person from behind and how to break a chokehold, I wasn’t sure how successful I’d be with a grown man.
There was nothing beautiful about the pool itself: it was a fenced-in concrete rectangle surrounded by a wide concrete shore, with not a tree, not a blade of grass, not a picnic table in sight. But those summers at the swimming pool were bright with parity and promise. Rich or poor, you had to put your personal belongings in a mesh basket anyone could see into, tucking your hopefully clean underwear at the bottom. You had to walk across the slimy floor of the dressing room, smell its smell, spread out your towel on bare grey cement. You basked in the sun, despaired at the screams and splashes of the little kids, walked down the apron towards the soft-drink machine as if it were a fashion runway, standing tall, holding in your stomach, hoping your ribs would show. You looked at the other girls and wished for longer legs or bigger breasts or a belly that sank as if weighed down with a stone. No one who didn’t know you could have guessed the kind of house you went to after you’d retrieved your basket, donned your street clothes and walked out the dressing room door to the street, your skin reeking of chlorine.
Some nights in August, when the sun set early and the pool had closed for the evening, I’d climb the tall wire fence, drop down on the other side, remove the clothes that hid my bathing suit and slip into the eerily calm water. It was a dangerous thing to do. I’d be fired as a lifeguard if I was caught, but nothing pleased me more. Light gone from the sky, the water gleaming like a new skin, I was born again, the only swimmer in the world. I was a body in the body of the water, nameless, perfectly in place, origin unknown. I glided in a breaststroke from one end of the pool to the other and back again, barely disturbing the surface. The city around me went about its nightly business; no one knew I was there. I was on another planet, one made of a silky, liquid darkness I somehow never feared. I knew its language of lapping and languid hush, and the water, without parting, took me in.