Night Swimmers

by Betsy Byars

  He realized that his friendship with Arthur was ruined—it had been too good to be true anyway—but he did not want Arthur to see him cry. To see him treated like a baby was bad enough. He began to drag his feet on the sidewalk, pausing every now and then to stand, arms hanging, and look at the ground.

  “Isn’t that your house?” Retta asked Arthur over her shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, shouldn’t you go in? We would like to walk home by ourselves, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind. I’m not one of your brothers, you know. You can’t boss me around.”

  Arthur stopped and waited for Johnny to join him. Johnny, head down, said, “Go on in. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “Well, I just don’t feel right about what happened,” Arthur said, lowering his voice.

  “Me either.”

  “If only your sister would listen to reason.”

  “She won’t.”

  “It’s not like we did anything wrong.”

  “I know, but that’s the way she is.”

  “Stop talking about me,” Retta snapped. She was standing apart from them, waiting. She kept her back to them as if they were too unimportant to notice.

  “Well, that is the way you are,” Johnny said. Arthur’s presence at his side made him feel stronger.

  He glanced up at Arthur for the first time since his sister’s arrival. “Everything always has to be her way. She always has to be the boss.”

  “I got that.”

  “Nothing we want matters.”

  Arthur glanced at Retta’s unyielding back. He said, “Well, maybe she really cares about you guys, only she just doesn’t know how to—”

  Retta spun around, eyes blazing. With the moonlight shining on her, she looked taller than either of the boys. She looked at Arthur with such loathing that he moved back a step.

  “Don’t you dare say anything nice about me!” she yelled.

  RETTA KNEW SOMETHING WAS wrong as soon as she rounded the corner of her block. The porch light was on, and a strange car was parked in front of their house.

  “Something’s happened,” she said. She began to run up the hill toward the house.

  Behind her Arthur and Johnny sensed something too. They moved faster, closing the distance between them. The three of them reached the porch steps at the same time, but Retta beat them through the front door. It was she who saw the colonel first.

  She stopped so abruptly that Johnny bumped into her and shoved her to the center of the room. Then Johnny saw the colonel too and drew back, leaving Retta standing alone. He had only had a brief look at the colonel before—and the colonel had been wearing shorty pajamas at the time—but he knew this was the colonel. He let out his breath in a long, uneasy sigh.

  The colonel sat with his hands on his legs in a pose that looked military. Beside him, crumpled into a ball, lay Roy. He had cried himself to sleep and now lay still, wrapped in one of the colonel’s flannel shirts, drawing an occasional shuddering breath.

  Roy had been, from that first illegal swim, afraid of the colonel. It was the kind of unreasonable fear usually saved for ghosts and wolves and two-headed giants. And in his one dramatic meeting with the colonel tonight, the colonel had seemed to live up to expectations.

  The colonel had been so big, so stern, so all-powerful as he stood above Roy that Roy had quivered with fear. His hands, reaching for him, had looked as big as hams, and his eyes seemed to glow red.

  At the same time Roy himself seemed to be shrinking. It was as dramatic a sensation as something out of science fiction. He could actually feel himself getting smaller. He half expected to disappear.

  This miracle had not happened, however, and he found himself forced into the colonel’s house, forced into dry clothes (that was how he thought of it), forced to tell his name and address. Then—this was worse than being arrested—he was driven home.

  As the car had pulled up to the curb in front of his house, Roy had had a brief hope that the colonel would let him go with a stern warning. He tried to get out of the car with a strangled, “Thank you for the ride,” but politeness did not work.

  The colonel unbuckled his seat belt. He got out of the car. On the way up the walk the colonel said the most terrible words Roy had ever heard in his life: “I want to talk to your father.”

  Now Retta looked from the colonel to Roy. When her eyes met the colonel’s a second time, she straightened her shoulders. “What happened?”

  “Are you his sister?”

  “Yes. I take care of him.”

  “You weren’t taking very good care of him tonight. He almost drowned.”

  “What?”

  “He came swimming alone. He jumped into the deep end of the pool and he can’t swim. If I hadn’t been there, he would have drowned.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Retta stood in the center of the room. She felt as if the middle part of the room had suddenly shifted, leaving her off-balance. She reached out for something to steady her, but she felt only air.

  “I called your father,” the colonel said. “He should be here any minute.”

  Retta stepped back. She put up one hand as if to stop whatever the colonel was going to say next.

  The colonel turned to Johnny. “Who’s in charge of you kids?”

  “She is,” Johnny said.

  Retta closed her eyes. When she opened them, she saw Roy lying on the sofa. Suddenly she realized how young, how vulnerable, he was. She looked at Johnny, who was standing shoulder to shoulder with Arthur. She felt as bewildered as a child whose dolls have come to life and are demanding real care and attention.

  “I don’t know how all this happened,” Retta said, more to herself than to the colonel.

  “Well,” the colonel said, “it happened because—” He broke off.

  There were footsteps on the porch, and Shorty Anderson appeared in the doorway in his hot-pink cowboy suit with the rhinestone lapels. Tears sprang to Retta’s eyes, turning Shorty into a glittering pink circle. As she watched, her father seemed to swirl away like a Frisbee, moving far out of reach in an eddy of glittering lights.

  She blinked and he was, once again, there in the doorway. Just as Roy had looked younger than she remembered, her father now seemed older. The pink velour suit looked a little tight, worn at the seams. Tears came to her eyes again, and this time they spilled onto her cheeks.

  The colonel moved to the doorway. “Mr. Anderson?” he asked. The colonel was so tall he could have been Shorty Anderson’s father. Shorty Anderson took three steps forward in his high-heeled boots.

  Johnny and Arthur pulled back the way bystanders in cowboy movies retreat to safety. Arthur groped for the doorknob behind him.

  The colonel put out his hand. “I’m Colonel Roberts. The kids have been swimming in my pool at night.”

  Shorty Anderson took the colonel’s hand. “At night?” he asked. He looked blankly from the colonel to his children. “Aren’t they in bed at night?”

  The colonel shook his head. “They’ve been coming over and swimming in our pool after we go to bed. It’s not that we mind them swimming there, but it’s dangerous and we’re responsible. Tonight the little boy almost drowned.”

  “You kids have been doing this?” Shorty Anderson asked Retta.

  She nodded, unable to speak.

  “Johnny?”

  “Yes.”

  Shorty Anderson looked at his youngest son on the sofa. Roy stirred. He opened his eyes and saw that he was no longer alone with the colonel. Indeed, the room seemed to be filled with people.

  Blinking with sleep, Roy struggled to sit up. He remembered why he and the colonel were here—to have a talk with his father. The horror of the evening washed over him again. He stood up on the sofa, tottering on the uneven cushions. He clutched the colonel’s wrinkled shirt tightly, as if to give himself extra support.

  Then, in a voice trembling with self-pity, he announced, “It was her fault.” He pointed at Rett
a. He had spoken without thinking, but he saw suddenly it was the truth. Unwittingly he had hit on the real reason they were all standing here. He summed it up in three words. “She left me!”

  Retta stepped back. Everyone was looking at her. She made a gesture with her hand and knocked over Shorty Anderson’s lamp. In the silence that followed the shattering of glass, Shorty Anderson sighed. He looked around him like a man who has just discovered the sun rising in the west. He glanced up at the colonel, down at his broken lamp.

  For a moment he seemed to get even shorter. Then he straightened. “Maybe we better sit down and talk,” he said in a tired voice.

  “NOW, HONEY, IT’S NOT all that bad,” Brendelle said. She had arrived as the colonel was leaving, and she now sat in the kitchen with Retta.

  “Yes, it is,” Retta said. She began to pull at one of the worn spots Roy had made in the table cloth.

  “No, it’s not. Now, listen. Nobody got drowned. Nobody got hurt. Nobody’s been arrested.” Brendelle began to tick off their blessings as if they were the lyrics to a song. “And best of all, maybe now that sorry father of yours will take better care of you. You hear me, Shorty?”

  “What?” he called from the living room.

  “I was just saying that, well, now maybe these kids’ sorry father will take better care of them. Did you hear me?”

  Silence.

  “What these kids need is a mother. You hear me, Shorty?”

  Silence.

  “You ought to find yourself a nice girl and get married,” Brendelle suggested.

  Silence.

  “Though I don’t guess they’d be a whole lot of nice girls who’d want you. As a matter of fact,” she winked at Retta, “I can’t think of but one!” She waited; when there was no answer, she reached out and put her hand over Retta’s. Retta looked up and Brendelle said, “It is going to be all right.”

  “I just don’t know what I did wrong.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” She shook her head. “Okay, you went swimming where you weren’t supposed to. But, honey, look, everybody does that. Why, when we were graduating from high school we had this dance and afterwards we all climbed over the fence around the municipal pool and went swimming in our evening clothes.”

  “Did you?”

  “My mom almost killed me because I had on a new pink formal that cost thirty-five dollars and it was ruined. One boy had on a rented tuxedo and he wouldn’t go in so we threw him in. And that tuxedo—they don’t use good dye on them or something—that tuxedo turned the swimming pool water purple. Would you believe it? And when he got out, everywhere he stood he made a purple puddle and nobody would let him ride home in their car.

  Retta was picking at the tablecloth again. She said, “I just don’t see how mothers do it.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Take care of kids and have them turn out right. I mean, I can see how you can be a good mother if you’re there all the time saying, ‘Stop that,’ and, ‘Don’t do this.’ But when they get away from you, well, I just don’t see how mothers do it.”

  “I don’t know either, hon. When it comes to mothering I’m as green as grass. But I do know one thing—you can’t hold on too tight. As soon as you start holding on so tight that somebody knows they’re being held—well, then you’re in trouble.”

  Retta sighed. “You know something? I’ve been hating my brothers all week.”

  “You didn’t really hate them, hon.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Let me tell you something. My sister Rhonda and I, well, we are really close now. We talk on the phone three times a week and she lives in Ohio. Anyway, last year we were going through some old stuff at Mom’s and I found a diary of mine. The whole diary was how much I hated Rhonda. Rhonda got to do everything. Rhonda had the good clothes. Rhonda this. Rhonda that. ‘I hate Rhonda,’ was on every page. Honey, I wrote the word ‘hate’ so hard that fifteen years later the page was still dented.” She took Retta’s hands across the table. “You’ll get over it.”

  “I already am over it, I guess.” Retta smiled for the first time that day. “Everything I say, you say the same thing happened to you.”

  “That’s because everything has happened to me. Everything but one thing.” She raised her voice, grinning at Retta. “Nobody ever asked me to marry them. That’s the only thing that hasn’t happened to me. You hear that, Shorty?”

  “I heard.”

  “You think anybody ever will, Shorty?”

  “Maybe. There’s a lot of fools in this world.”

  “It don’t take but one.”

  Retta looked at Brendelle. For the first time she understood that Brendelle and her father might really get married.

  “What’s wrong?” Brendelle asked. “I turn away and you look all right and I turn back and you’ve got a funny look on your face.”

  “It was just something I thought of.”

  “Something bad?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s good because we have had enough bad thoughts around here for one night.” She turned back to the door. “Shorty, come on in here with us. I’ll fix something to eat.”

  There was no answer.

  “Shorty?”

  Shorty Anderson was sitting in the living room. The evening had been so upsetting that he had not taken off his pink velour suit. The telephone call from the colonel, summoning him home from the Downtown Hoedown, had frightened him. And the sight of his children—who looked smaller, somehow, paler than he remembered—had not made him feel any better.

  It seemed to him that every time his life started getting good, something bad happened.

  His song, “You’re Fifty Pounds Too Much Woman for Me,” was on the charts, and now, just when he wanted to devote his full time to making it a hit, the burdens of fatherhood fell upon him. It made him feel so low he didn’t even want to write a song about it.

  “Shorty, did you hear me calling you?”

  “I heard.” He got up slowly, walked into the kitchen, and opened the refrigerator door.

  Brendelle watched him. “I hope you’re not planning to eat while you’ve got on that suit,” she said. “You know how you spill stuff. One spot of mayo and that pink velour is ruined.”

  He stood tiredly at the refrigerator.

  “Now you go take off that suit and I’ll fix you a sandwich. What kind you want?”

  “Fried egg.” Obediently he started for his room.

  “Corning up. Retta, you want one too?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Then you go on to bed. Somebody’s got to start giving orders around here.”

  Retta nodded. She got to her feet. “Good night, Brendelle.”

  “Good night, hon.” She hugged Retta to her. “And you sleep late in the morning. That’s another order. I’ll fix a bunch of fried egg sandwiches and put them in the fridge. You can have them for breakfast.”

  “Do they keep?” Retta asked. Suddenly she began to feel her own fatigue.

  “Hon, they get better. The grease goes right through the bread and when you toast them—well, you just wait till in the morning and see.”

  “All right.”

  Retta left the kitchen and paused in the hallway. Her father was standing in his room, in front of the mirror, having one last look at himself in his pink suit before he took it off. He turned sideways. The sight of himself in velour, a star’s material, made him feel a little better. His fatigue began to ease.

  Watching himself, he sang, “When you get eatin’ off of your mind, I’ll get cheatin’ off of mine. I don’t want no extry woman in my aaaaaarms.”

  He caught sight of Retta watching him and said, “Did I tell you ‘Fifty Pounds Too Much Woman’ is number eighty-nine on the charts?”

  She nodded. “I hope it goes all the way for you.”

  “Oh, hon, me too.” He came out into the hall. His energy was returning. Grabbing Retta, he square-danced her into the living room. He steered
her through the dining room, into the kitchen, around the table, back into the hall.

  Brendelle called, “Shorty, you are supposed to be changing and Retta is supposed to be going to bed.”

  “First things first,” Shorty Anderson called back. “I’m dancing with my daughter.”

  He swung Retta around in the hall, turning her until she was dizzy. Then, still humming to himself, he released her, danced alone into his bedroom, and began taking off his pink velour suit.

  STANDING IN THE HALLWAY, still slightly dizzy, Retta had a funny feeling. Everything had changed and yet nothing had changed. It was like those stories where a person is whisked away to a different time zone, lives a whole different life, and then returns to find that no time has elapsed at all, that everyone is still in exactly the same place.

  She glanced into her brothers’ room. They were asleep. She walked softly into the room. Roy stirred and lifted his head.

  “Is that you, Retta?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Just standing here.”

  “You can get in bed with me if you want to.” This was Roy’s peace offering. He could not imagine anything lonelier than having to get in a bed by yourself.

  “All right. For a minute.”

  Roy wiggled to the edge of the bed, and Retta crawled over the foot and slid between Roy and Johnny. She turned onto her back. The mattress springs rattled comfortingly.

  “What will we do tomorrow, Retta?” Roy asked sleepily, more out of habit than because he wanted to know.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She swallowed. “I imagine Johnny will go play with Arthur and you’ll go play with somebody. I don’t know exactly.” She paused. “Is there anything really special that you’d like to do tomorrow?”

  There was something final about the way Retta asked the question. It was as if what they would do tomorrow, this special thing, would mark the end of something.

  He looked at Retta. She was staring up at the ceiling. In the light from the hall, her face had a strange, still expression. For a moment she looked so much like his mother that he held his breath. He noticed for the first time that Retta had the same nose, the same full bottom lip, the same statuelike eyes as his mother. And the hall light almost seemed to be a spotlight, highlighting her features.