Martha Calhoun

by Richard Babcock

  Mrs. Vernon stood up in several slow, aching movements. Her anger had passed as quickly as it had come. “I guess I’ll just pray,” she said. “That’s all any of us can do. Pray and ask God to try to explain what He has in mind for us with this thing.”

  She picked up my plate of cold scrambled eggs and scraped them into the garbage can. “News like this kills an appetite,” she said.

  By the time Mrs. O’Brien arrived, a little before nine, the clouds were rolling in just over the treetops, and the wind had quickened into sharp little gusts. Outings to the pool were being canceled all over Katydid. “Are we ready?” she asked, standing on the front stoop.

  “Just let me get my suit,” I said.

  If Mrs. O’Brien had heard the news of the KTD’s closing, she didn’t bother to mention it as we drove to the pool. She’d been to the high school the day before, collecting my records, and she’d run into Ellen Griffin, the assistant principal. At first Mrs. Griffin hadn’t remembered me, and they’d had to find my picture in the yearbook to remind her. “She remembered your brother, though,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “In fact, she said something that I thought was quite perceptive. She said that one reason you were so quiet might be because your brother had been so well known—in a negative kind of way.” She took her eyes off the street and glanced at me across the front seat. “I thought that was interesting,” she said.

  I stared down at the bundled towel in my lap. “I don’t know why she didn’t remember me. I’ve talked to her a bunch of times.”

  “Oh, well, some people just aren’t good at names.” We drove in silence for a few blocks. “I also ran into Mr. Morgenson, your algebra teacher,” she added. “He said you might have been quite a good math student if you’d paid better attention. Your mind always seemed to be wandering.”

  Once, Mr. Morgenson had caught me reading Great Expectations in his class. Afterward, even though I never did a thing but stare at him and his strange, Brillo-pad hair, he constantly accused me of not paying attention.

  “I did my best,” I mumbled.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I met that minister of yours, Reverend Vaughn.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. A nice man, and very young. He can’t be more than twenty-five or so. And tall. He ought to play basketball. I don’t think he’s very athletic, though. He’s shy, have you noticed that? It’s strange for someone in his job, but maybe it’s because he’s young.”

  “Did he remember me?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I think he did. Yes, he did.”

  We drove across town, following, I realized with a moment’s discomfort, the route I’d taken on my bike just a few days before. But instead of turning off on Parkview Terrace, we continued on Pinkerton Avenue around to the front of the city park, entering on the main drive, between the two stone posts.

  The city pool is sunk into the top of a grassy hill, the highest point in the park. The pool was built two years ago, after the town held a special election to decide whether to spend the money on it. Mayor Krullke and the council had argued that a public pool would give kids a place to go—get them off the square and out of their cars. No one expected the pool to win, however, since elections to spend money almost always lose in Katydid. But about a week before the vote, Tom and a group of his friends set fire to an old abandoned barn on the Snyder Farm. They all got caught, but the incident was given a lot of attention in the paper. There was talk that the boys called themselves a gang, and people started remembering other suspicious fires. Suddenly, everyone got so worried about juvenile delinquency coming to town that the pool won in a landslide. Afterward, my brother was always bragging that they should name it the Thomas P. Calhoun Memorial Pool in recognition of his contribution to its construction.

  We arrived just at nine and got keys to the basket lockers from Mr. French, the tanned, white-haired man who runs the place.

  “Haven’t seen you lately, Martha,” he said.

  “I’ve been working,” I explained.

  The changing room was cold and damp. My nose stung from the disinfectant they use to wash the floor at night. I folded my clothes and tucked them into my basket. The tiles felt icy against my bare feet. I hate swimming.

  “I’m looking forward to this,” said Mrs. O’Brien. “I don’t get many chances to swim anymore.” She ran her hands lightly down her sides, stirring the fabric of her baggy beige housedress. “I know it’s hard to imagine now, but I used to be a very good swimmer. I was the Minnesota girls’ champion in the hundred-yard freestyle my senior year in high school.”

  “Really?” She was right; it was hard to imagine. “How’d you get so good?” I asked.

  “Discipline, discipline, discipline.”

  My bathing suit felt stiff from long disuse. I hadn’t gone swimming all summer. Sitting on a wooden bench, my back to Mrs. O’Brien, I stretched the suit out in my arms. Then I stood and pulled it on. It was extraordinarily tight, and the blue-and-white stripes—horizontal, to counter my height—bulged and narrowed around my torso as if they’d been sewn by someone who couldn’t keep a straight line. I hadn’t gained weight in a year, but was it possible I’d started growing again? I bent down a few times to touch my toes, letting the material adjust to my shape. No, the suit just needed stretching.

  When I turned around, Mrs. O’Brien had already dressed for the pool. She was wearing a plain black suit that might have been left over from her high school team. It was far too small, pinching the middle of her body like an old-fashioned corset. Huge puffs of snow-white skin overflowed the top of the suit and squeezed out the bottom. The straps dug into her shoulders, straining to hold the material against her bursting chest. Her thighs were like bed pillows. And I’d never seen skin that white before—a pure white, not even pinkish. It looked as if her body had never been exposed to the sun.

  She saw that I was staring. “I guess I’ve outgrown this suit,” she said. She wrapped a towel around her shoulders. “It’ll probably loosen up in the water.” She clumped away toward the door in a pair of flat wooden sandals that slapped against her feet with every step.

  We were alone at the pool except for a group of small children taking a lesson near the shallow end. Mrs. O’Brien marched down beyond the diving board and made a neat pile of her towel and sandals. Then she put on her bathing cap and walked over to the edge. Without testing the water, she bent her knees, rocked her arms, and flung herself in. She landed flat on her stomach with a terrific smack, sending two curling walls of waves crashing against the sides of the pool. The entire swimming class looked up. As soon as she hit the water, her arms were churning and her legs were kicking and she was chugging along like a big boat. When she got to the far end, she looked up to gauge the wall, did a quick, graceful, underwater flip, and came up heading back toward me at the same, fast pace. I stood near the edge, and she paused at my feet. “Come on,” she insisted. Then she turned around for another lap.

  The water looked cold and choppy. I dangled my foot over the side and confirmed my worst fears. At the far end, the swimming class was huddled under towels, while the instructor, a young woman I didn’t recognize, stood and demonstrated a stroke, swimming through the air with her arms. Even the class won’t go in on a day like today, I thought. Just me and my social worker. I pulled on my bathing cap, carefully tucking in a few stray hairs, and walked over to a ladder. I backed down a couple of rungs. The pool water lapped at my toes, then my ankles, in shocking strokes of painful cold. I’ll never make it, I thought. By now, Mrs. O’Brien had made her turn and was again plowing back toward me. I felt the start of a gnawing worry deep in my stomach. What if I really couldn’t go in? These weren’t ordinary times for me, and that icy water represented a shock that my system might not be able to take. A swim right now might actually be dangerous. Why hadn’t I pointed that out to Mrs. O’Brien? Why hadn’t she realized? Relentlessly, she was moving toward me, her strong kick making steady thug-thug noises against the wa
ter. I climbed up the ladder and ran back to the edge of the deep end. Only one way to do it—one quick commitment, and it will all be over. Still, I wavered at the edge, staring into the gray water. The heavy odor of chlorine made me think of a laboratory. I could feel the agony of the cold slicing me all over. Why do I have to be so good at anticipating things? “Put it out of your mind,” Bunny always said. But I can never put anything out of my mind. I know exactly how it’s going to be in all its terrible facets. Just once, I didn’t think ahead, just once in that dizzyingly hot cowboy room.

  The water made a fierce cracking sound as I broke the surface. The worst pain turned out to be in my teeth, which felt swollen, on the verge of popping out. I fought back to the surface, but I couldn’t breathe. I just pounded the water with my arms and legs while Mrs. O’Brien rumbled past on my right.

  Halfway down the pool, I slowed and tilted my head to suck in air. I started to realize that this wasn’t actually so bad. Once the initial shock had worn off, the water was rather invigorating. For the first time that day, I was wide awake and clear-headed. Even the sandpapery feeling in my eyes had disappeared. I was going on only a few hours of sleep, but suddenly I was full of energy. Taking a breath every third stroke, I paddled down to the shallow end, then turned and headed back. Mrs. O’Brien, showing no signs of letting up, passed on my left. I rather liked this, I decided. It was as if I’d been storing up energy for five days now, and the exercise gave me a chance to release it slowly, in carefully controlled bursts. Up and back, up and back. I’d never done more than a couple of laps at once before, but I seemed to be tireless. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you simply set your mind to it, I thought. Mrs. O’Brien was right: Discipline, discipline, discipline. I concentrated on taking square, efficient strokes and kept up a steady scissoring of my legs. In my mind, I pictured myself knifing through the water with incredible precision and speed. Arms and legs at once, arms and legs at once. Bunny had recited that, over and over, as she taught me to swim, years ago, up at Grandmother’s farm. I was only about three at the time, and Bunny was worried because there was so much water on the place. What if I wandered away some day and fell in? She started me off in the big, steel trough that the cows drank from, on the side of the barn. Walking along the outside with her hands under my stomach, she pushed me from one end to the other. The water was fresh and cold and sometimes, when she leaned over, the metal buckle on her belt would bump against the steel side of the trough, and the noise would ring through the water, louder and purer than anything I’d ever heard before. Later, when I’d mastered the trough, she took me out to the pond, wading on the muddy bottom while she held on to the back of my suit and I paddled in a circle around her. The water was low that year, and the pond was full of slippery green algae that clung to our bodies when we got out. Emerald people, Bunny had called us: human jewels.

  I lost track of how many laps I’d swum—maybe five, maybe six, maybe more. Mrs. O’Brien was still going, and I was determined to stay with her. She couldn’t last much longer, I thought. Just a lap or so. But I was starting to feel the toll. My chest was aching, and I was taking a breath on every stroke. I hit the end of the pool and turned to head back. The chlorine was burning my eyes. I should have kept them shut. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Now I could hardly see. I took a few more strokes. The heaviness came on quickly, with no warning—a sort of liquid weight, flowing from my neck, across my shoulders, down my arms. Now my arms were lead things, too heavy to lift, ready to break off and sink to the bottom. My legs, too, were used up. They hung beneath me, heavy and helpless. Was I paralyzed? I tried to switch to the breaststroke, an easier way to move, but the rhythm of my motions had been upset. I got confused and sucked in a mouthful of water. Coughing furiously, my throat burning, I sucked in more water. The spark of my earlier worry suddenly exploded, sending out terrible panicky electric waves. What was happening? I went under, came up, went under. Something was moving beside me. Mrs. O’Brien. Would she help? I summoned everything to lunge for her, but moved only inches, and she churned by, oblivious. I sank in the vast emptiness she left behind. Deeper, deeper, like Sissy. The panic started to dissolve. Aha. I see. Like Sissy.

  My toe scraped something rough, concrete. The bottom. I stood, and my head and chest heaved out of the water. The surface was at my stomach. A little boy wrapped in a bright red towel had turned from the swimming teacher and was watching me, his face a mixture of confusion and concern. What had he just seen? How could he explain so anyone would understand? I’d almost drowned in the shallow end.

  Ten minutes later, after I’d dried off and was sitting against the tall, wire fence, as far away from the pool as I could get, Mrs. O’Brien climbed out. Squinting, she spotted me in the corner, then picked up her towel and walked over. “Whew!” she said. A few strands of her hair, looking blood-red in the wetness, had squiggled out from under her cap. She toweled herself off methodically, patting down each arm and leg. “What a great workout,” she said.

  In the locker room, I showered and dressed quickly. Mrs. O’Brien took her time, lathering up twice and spending long minutes with her face up under the blasting shower nozzle. I was dressed and waiting when Tammy Mirkov paraded in, her starchy white bermudas glowing against the gold of her tan. She’s a lifeguard, a cheerleader, a successful flirt, flashy but pretty in a ponytail kind of way. Any normal person would have been struck dumb at coming across Mrs. O’Brien and her Moby Dick body, but Tammy was interested in something else. She saw me and came over, taking a locker a few feet away.

  “It’s cold for swimming today,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  With her blouse off, she hardly seemed naked. The white of her skin was like cloth against the dark of her tan. “What’s been going on?” she asked.

  “Not much.” She and I had hardly spoken in years, not since our class had started developing its own empires and royalty, based on attractiveness to the opposite sex.

  “I’d heard you got in some trouble,” she said.

  “It’s not really anything.” I stood up. I’d seen this coming. I knew it the moment she walked into the locker room. “Who told you?” I said.

  Tammy put her head back and pretended to consider. “Oh, I don’t know. Somebody—maybe somebody down at the News Depot.” She went back to pulling on her suit, a lifeguard model, with a red bottom and white top. But my question had closed the short distance between what she wanted to say and what she thought she could. “Are they going to let you back in school?” she asked.

  “Of course. I told you it was nothing.”

  She tightened her ponytail, playing at being distracted. “My friends and I were thinking—you’ll either get a lot of dates or none at all.”

  “Huh?” I said. There was nothing else I could think to say. “Huh?” The words came out as clenched-up little squawks, hardly audible. She pretended she hadn’t heard.

  “See you,” she said, casually throwing a towel over her shoulders on her way out. “I hope they let you back in school.”

  NINE

  The main headline in the Exponent that day announced that Governor Stratton would make an appearance at the Katydid County Fair next week. He’d had to change his schedule, the story said, but now he’d decided to come on Saturday and present the award for the farm animal of the year.

  I spread the paper out and searched the front page. There was a picture of the state treasurer, Percy Granville, looking worried and tired. A long story explained that he and two other men had been indicted for cashing phony checks from the treasurer’s office. At least $300,000 was missing. Another story announced that one of the passengers on the Stockholm, the ship that had collided with the Andrea Doria, was the grandfather of a Katydid family, the Robert Olsons. The grandfather had been returning to Sweden for the first time in fifty years, but now he was back in Boston, trying to decide whether to risk an airplane flight. A short story in the left column reported that the number of new polio cases in
Chicago was up to nineteen, and doctors couldn’t explain the epidemic.

  The headline I was looking for was set in small, thick type on the bottom left center of the page, a position that immediately made me think of an appendix scar: TALKS HELD ON FACTORY’S FUTURE. The story didn’t add much to what I’d already heard. Several representatives of Bartlett Industries had been in town to discuss the future of the KTD. “Nothing is certain at this time,” a man named Gerald Vance was quoted as saying. “It would be wrong to jump to conclusions. We’re just looking at ways to make the KTD and Bartlett Industries more competitive.” The story was only a few paragraphs long.

  Bunny wasn’t coming that day because they were setting up for the Champions Banquet out at the country club, so after lunch I went up to Sissy’s room to try to nap. I managed to doze off lightly, waking once, covered with cool perspiration, because that same panicky feeling I’d had in the pool was starting to come back. I opened my eyes; the fear had left a metallic taste in my mouth. I couldn’t remember what I’d been dreaming and, eventually, I drifted off to sleep again.

  At three, the doorbell rang and soon Mrs. Vernon came to the bottom of the stairs and called me down. I wasn’t expecting anyone, so I didn’t bother to freshen up, only combing my hair with my fingers and pulling on my blouse to stretch away the muss. In the hallway downstairs, Mrs. Vernon was shifting from foot to foot. “Hurry, dear, hurry, you’ve got a visitor,” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders and pushing me into the parlor.