GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA
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I loved driving on the open road when I first got my license. The last ten kilometres before my parents’ house, where I knew the swerve and dip of the country hills so well, I would take with speed, the windows cracked, the tape player cranked. I was such a cool, skillful driver between the highway turnoff and our driveway that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t parallel park. Early on in my pregnancy, I thought I would swim until the day I gave birth. As the pregnancy progressed, I could still swim with some skill and confidence, but small maneuvers became tricky. As my belly grew, it became harder to get a tight enough tuck to effectively tumble turn. I started to come out of my turns facing the bottom of the pool. Despite my furious kicking, with my abdominal muscles already stretched to hell, I found myself not speeding to the surface, but slowly bobbing up, less like a sea lion, more like that sea lion’s bloated corpse. Too many times I started to run out of oxygen, so I had to give up the tumble turns. Eventually, it became difficult to exit the pool too.
This was a serious swimming pool, and I was supposed to be a strong and limber individual who had no problems negotiating 4.5 feet of concrete and tile. To enter, I could heave-slide myself into the water, but it didn’t take long before I could no longer heave myself back out. I had to start using the ladder. This was the method of entry and exit reserved for older professors only––the distinguished men and women my parents’ age who, before entering the water, slathered their whole bodies with sunscreen so no matter their skin tone they glowed pale and slick like fresh oysters. I felt conspicuous using the ladder. Not because I was clearly seven months pregnant, but, I realise now, because I still thought of myself as one of the young people.
I’m not a young person. I haven’t been for a while. But it’s easy to pretend you’re someone else when you’re submerged––there are only swimmers and non-swimmers. I’ve mistaken a septuagenarian for a svelte nineteen-year-old when watching them swim freestyle. Only when they came to a stop could I see the line of their face, the hang of their neck, the many freckles still visible through all that sunscreen on those tanned bony shoulders. While plowing up and down that pool I’d been able to cling to the sliver of an image I had of myself as still youthful, healthful.
My parallel parking never improved. My solution: park very far away, or drive around the block as many times as was necessary till a larger space cleared and I could swoop in, nose first. Similarly, during those final weeks, I often kept swimming beyond what I could physically handle, up and down the lane, to avoid climbing that ladder. The ladder was embarrassing. And it presented its own challenges. It was slippery when wet, and made even slipperier by what I can only assume was surplus sunscreen left behind by its older users. I was also getting very front heavy, and hoisting myself up on that last rung I had to use all the strength in my arms and legs to avoid wobbling, then falling. I was terrified I would topple backwards into the pool. I pictured myself landing on one of the young people swimming in the outside lanes––this vision seemed worse than the possibility of falling forwards and onto my belly––and then needing to be assisted from the pool using the chair lift. I had only seen that chair lift in action once. It was loud and slow and, no matter how much they wanted to be polite, everyone in and around the pool had stared at its occupant.
I started to obsess about the chair lift. Me inside the chair lift. It got to the point where I would spend my whole swim visualising climbing the ladder, failing, and then needing to be motor-lifted from the pool. Now too heavy and exhausted to keep swimming forever, I began spending a lot of time standing in the shallower end of the pool and pretending to stretch my calves, my hamstrings, my arms, my calves again. The young lifeguards started watching me too. The day of my last swim, as I finally hoisted myself onto the first slippery rung, I saw a young woman guard move from her chair at the top of the watchtower, her gaze fixed on me, as if preparing to rush to my aid. It took absolutely everything I had to get myself standing upright on the pool deck. While I caught my breath, I steadied myself against the ladder’s metal frame and pretended to be interested in something on the other side of the pool: a row of unoccupied orange and blue loungers, a chain-link fence, a student passing on a mint-green scooter. I’d spent so much time not exiting the pool, standing and stretching beneath the Florida summer sun, I’d become dehydrated.
It took me twenty minutes to get dressed. I had to take breaks––sitting and resting on the toilet seat. Then it took me three installments to walk from the pool changing room to where my husband was waiting for me in the car less than fifty yards from the pool complex’s entrance. I slowly wobbled through each installment in an increasing, near-fainting darkness. I fell asleep––passed out––on the way home.
This is still one of the most beautiful pools I have swum in. It is fifty yards long, 4.5–12.5 feet deep, heated in the winter, and cooled in the summer with fun rotating jets of water that, when facing your lane, make you feel like you’re swimming through heavy, cold rain. The young people controlling the sound system have the radio tuned to either a Christian country station or “classic” (nineties) rock. But when your head’s underwater it’s easy to tune out the Soundgarden, or all of those songs about taking her down to the river in your pickup truck while drinking whiskey and wearing tight blue jeans.