by Alice Adams
Swimming, though: even if you met someone it would be hard to tell anything about them, beyond the most obvious physical facts. For one thing almost no one says anything, except for a few superpolite people who say Sorry when they bump into you, passing in a lane. Or, there is one really mean-looking black woman, tall, and a very fast swimmer, who one day told me, “You ought to get over closer to the side.” She ought to have been in Fast, is what I would like to have said, but did not.
The men all swim very fast, and hard, except for a couple of really fat ones; most men somersault backward at the end of each length, so as not to waste any time. A few women do that, too, including the big mean black one. There is one especially objectionable guy, tall and blond (but not as tall as I am), with a little blond beard; I used to watch him zip past, ploughing the water with his violent crawl, in Fast, when I was still pushing along in Medium. Unfortunately, now he, too, comes to swim in Rec., and mostly at the same times that I do. He swims so fast, so roughly cutting through the water; he doesn’t even know I am there, nor probably anyone else. He is just the kind of guy who used to act as though I was air, along the corridors at Washington High.
I have noticed that very few old people come to swim at Rossi. And if they do you can watch them trying to hide their old bodies, slipping down into the water. Maybe for that reason, body shyness, they don’t come back; the very old never come more than once to swim, which is a great pity, I think. The exercise would be really good for them, and personally I like very old people, very much. For a while I had a job in a home for old people, a rehabilitation center, so-called, and although in many ways it was a terrible job, really exhausting and sometimes very depressing, I got to like a lot of them very much. They have a lot to say that’s interesting, and if they like you it’s more flattering, I think, since they have more people to compare you with. I like real old people, who look their age.
People seem to come and go, though, at Rossi. You can see someone there regularly for weeks, or months, and then suddenly never again, and you don’t know what has happened to that person. They could have switched over to the regular lap hours, or maybe found a job so that now they come very late, or early in the morning. Or they could have died, had a heart attack, or been run down by some car. There is no way you could ever know, and their sudden absences can seem very mysterious, a little spooky.
Garlic for Lunch
Since my mother has to stay very thin to keep her job (she has to look much younger than she is), and since God knows I should lose some weight, we usually don’t eat much for dinner. Also, most of my mother’s money goes for all the clothes she has to have for work, not to mention the rent and the horrible utility bills. We eat a lot of eggs.
However, sometimes I get a powerful craving for something really good, like a pizza, or some pasta, my favorite. I like just plain spaghetti, with scallions and garlic and butter and some Parmesan, mostly stuff we have already in the house. Which makes it all the harder not to yield to that violent urge for pasta, occasionally.
One night there was nothing much else around to eat, and so I gave in to my lust, so to speak. I made a big steaming bowl of oniony, garlicky, buttery spaghetti, which my mother, in a worse than usual mood, ate very little of. Which meant that the next day there was a lot left over, and at noontime, I was unable not to eat quite a lot of it for lunch. I brushed my teeth before I went off to swim, but of course that doesn’t help a lot, with garlic. However, since I almost never talk to anyone at Rossi it didn’t much matter, I thought.
I have worked out how to spend the least possible time undressed in the locker room: I put my bathing suit on at home, then sweatshirt and jeans, and I bring along under-things wrapped up in a towel. That way I just zip off my clothes to swim, and afterward I can rush back into them, only naked for an instant; no one has to see me. While I am swimming I leave the towel with the understuff wrapped up in it on the long bench at one side of the pool, and sometimes I have horrible fantasies of someone walking off with it; however, it is comforting to think that no one would know whose it was, probably.
I don’t think very much while swimming, not about my old bra and panties, nor about the fact that I ate all that garlic for lunch. I swim fast and freely, going up to the end with a crawl, back to Shallow with my backstroke, reaching wide, stretching everything.
Tired, momentarily winded, I pause in Shallow, still crouched down in the water and ready to go, but resting.
Just then, startlingly, someone speaks to me, a man’s conversational voice. “It’s nice today,” he says. “Not too many people, right?”
Standing up, I see that I am next to the blond-bearded man, the violent swimmer. Who has spoken.
Very surprised, I say, “Oh yes, it’s really terrific, isn’t it. Monday it was awful, so many people I could hardly move, really terrible. I hate it when it’s crowded like that, hardly worth coming at all on those days, but how can you tell until you get here?” I could hear myself saying all that; I couldn’t stop.
He looks up at me in—amazement? disgust? great fear, that I will say even more. It is hard to read the expression in his small blue bloodshot eyes, and he only mutters, “That’s right,” before plunging back into the water.
Was it my garlic breath or simply my height, my incredible size that drove him off like that? In a heavy way I wondered, as I continued to swim, all the rest of my laps, which seemed laborious. It could have been either, easily, or in fact anything about me could have turned him off, off and away, for good; I knew that he would never speak to me again. A pain which is close to and no doubt akin to lust lay heavily in my body’s lower quadrant, hurtful and implacable.
Sex
The atmosphere in the pool is not exactly sexy, generally, although you might think that it would be, with everyone so stripped down, wearing next to nothing, and some of the women looking really great, so slim and trim, high-breasted, in their thin brief bathing suits.
Once, just as I was getting in I overheard what looked like the start of a romance between a young man, fairly good-looking, who was talking to a very pretty Mexican girl.
The girl said, “You’re Brad?”
“No. Gregory.”
“Well, Greg, I’ll try to make it. Later.”
But with brief smiles they then both plunged back into doing their laps, seeming not to have made any significant (sexual) contact.
I have concluded that swimming is not a very sexual activity. I think very infrequently of sex while actually swimming. Well, all sports are supposed to take your mind off sex, aren’t they? They are supposed to make you miss it less?
The lifeguards, during swimming hours, usually just sit up on their high wooden lifeguard chairs, looking bored. A couple of youngish, not very attractive guys. Every now and then one of the guys will walk around the pool very slowly, probably just to break his own monotony, but trying to look like a person on patrol.
One afternoon I watched one of those guys stop at Shallow, and stare down for a long time at a little red-haired girl who was swimming there. She was a beautiful child, with narrow blue eyes and long wet red hair, a white little body, as lithe as a fish, as she laughed and slipped around. The lifeguard stared and stared, and I knew—I could tell that sex was on his mind. Could he be a potential child molester?
I myself think of sex more often, in spite of swimming, since the day Blond Beard spoke to me, the day I’d had all that garlic for lunch. I hate to admit this.
The Shrink
An interesting fact that I have gradually noticed as I come to Rossi, to swim my laps, is that actually there is more variety among the men’s trunks than among the bathing suits the women wear. The men’s range from cheap, too-tight Lastex to the khaki shorts with thin blue side stripes that they advertise at Brooks, or Robert Kirk. Whereas, as I noted early on, all the women wear quite similar-looking dark suits. Do the men who are rich, or at least getting along okay in the world, not bother to hide it when they come to a cheap public
pool, while the women do? A puzzle. I cannot quite work it out. Blond Beard wears new navy Lastex trunks, which might mean anything at all.
Most people, including a lot of the men, but not Blond Beard, wear bathing caps, which makes it even harder to tell people apart, and would make it almost impossible, even, to recognize someone you knew. It is not surprising that from time to time I see someone I think I know, or have just met somewhere or other. At first, remembering the peace march kids, I imagined that I saw one or all of them, but that could have been just hope, a wishful thought. I thought I saw my old gym teacher, also from junior-high days. And one day I saw a man who looked like my father, which was a little crazy, since he split for Seattle when I was about five years old; I probably wouldn’t know him if I did see him somewhere, much less in a pool with a bathing cap on.
But one day I saw an old woman with short white hair, swimming very fast, whom I really thought was the shrink I went to once in high school, as a joke.
Or, going to the shrink started out to be a joke. The school had a list of ones that you could go to, if you had really “serious problems,” and to me and my girlfriend, then, Betty, who was black, it seemed such a ludicrous idea, paying another person just to listen, telling them about your sex life, all like that, that we dreamed up the idea of inventing some really serious problems, and going off to some fool doctor and really putting him on, and at the same time finding out what it was like, seeing shrinks.
Betty, who was in most ways a lot smarter than me, much faster to catch on to things, chickened out early on; but she kept saying that I should go; Betty would just help me make up some stuff to say. And we did; we spent some hilarious afternoons at Betty’s place in the project, making up lists of “serious problems”: heavy drugs, of course, and dealers. And stepfathers or even fathers doing bad sex things to you, and boys trying to get you to trick. All those things were all around Betty’s life, and I think they scared her, really, but she laughed along with me, turning it into one big joke between us.
I made the appointment through the guidance office, with a Dr. Sheinbaum, and I went to the address, on Steiner Street. And that is where the joke stopped being a joke.
A nice-looking white-haired lady (a surprise right there; I had expected some man) led me into a really nice-looking living room, all books and pictures and big soft comfortable leather furniture. And the lady, the doctor, asked me to sit down, to try to tell her about some of the things that upset me.
I sat down in a soft pale-colored chair, and all of the funny made-up stuff went totally out of my mind—and I burst into tears. It was horrible, great wracking sobs that I absolutely could not stop. Every now and then I would look up at the doctor, and see that gentle face, that intelligent look of caring, and for some reason that made me cry much harder, even.
Of course I did not tell Betty—or anyone—about crying like that. All I said about going to the shrink was that it was all right, no big deal. And I said about the good-looking furniture. Betty was interested in things like that.
But could the fast-swimming older woman be that shrink? Well, she could be; it seemed the kind of thing that she might do, not caring what anyone thought, or who might see her. But she would never remember or recognize me—or would she?
Looking for Work
The job search is something that I try not to think about, along with sex, general deprivation. It is what I should be doing, naturally; and in theory that is what I do all day, look for work. However, these days I seldom get much further than the want ads in the paper, those columns and columns of people saying they want secretaries, or sales people. And no one, not in a million years, would think of hiring me for either of those slots. Secretaries are all about the same size, very trim and tidy-looking, very normal, and so are people in sales—just ask my mother.
Sometimes an ad for a waitress sounds possible, and that is something I’ve done; I had a part-time waitress job the summer I got out of Washington High. But in those days I was thinner, and just now my confidence is pretty low. In my imagination, prospective employers, restaurant owners take one look at me and they start to sneer: “We don’t even have the space for a person your size,” or some such snub.
Instead I swim, and swim, swim—for as long as I can, every day. I can feel my muscles stretching, pulling, getting longer, in the warm strong water.
Hello
An odd coincidence: on a Tuesday afternoon—short Rec. hours, one-thirty to three—both Blond Beard and the big black woman who told me to swim closer to the side, so crossly—both those people on that same day said Hello to me, very pleasantly.
First, I had just jumped down into the pool, the shallow end of the lap section, when Blond Beard swam up and stood beside me for a minute. Looking up at me, he said Hello, and he smiled. However, his small pale eyes were vague; very likely he did not remember that we sort of talked before (hopefully, he did not remember the garlic).
I concentrated on not making too much of that encounter.
Later, when I had finished swimming and was drying off and dressing in the locker room, I was half aware that someone else was in there, too, on the other side of a row of lockers. Hurrying, not wanting to see anyone (or anyone to see me!), I was about to rush out of the room when at the exit door I almost bumped into the big black woman. In fact, it was a little funny, we are so nearly the exact same size. We both smiled; maybe she saw the humor in it, too? And then she said, “Say, your strokes coming along real good.”
“Oh. Uh, thanks.”
“You re a real speeder these days.”
I felt a deep pleasure in my chest. It was like praise from a teacher, someone in charge. We walked out of the building together, the black woman going up across the playground, where the peace marches gathered, maybe toward Geary Boulevard. And I walked down Arguello, out into the avenues. Home.
Warmth
The water in the pool is warm. In our cold apartment, where my mother screams over the higher and higher utility bills and keeps the heat down, I only have to think about that receiving warmness, touching all my skin, to force myself out into the cold and rain, to walk the long blocks to Rossi Pool, where quickly undressed I will slip down into it.
And swim.
In January, though, the weather got suddenly warmer. The temperature in the pool also seemed to have suddenly changed; it was suddenly cooler. Distrustful, as I guess I tend to be regarding my perceptions, I wondered if the water only seemed cooler. Or, had they turned it down because of the warmer weather, economizing, as my mother does? In any case it was disappointing, and the pool was much less welcoming, no matter how falsely spring-like the outside air had turned.
“Do you think the water’s colder?” It was Blond Beard who asked this of me one day; we were standing momentarily in the shallow end. But although I was the person he had chosen to ask, I was still sure that for him I was no one; he remembers nothing of me from one tiny, minor contact to another. I am a large non-person.
I told him, “Yes, it seems a little colder to me” (not wanting to say too much—again).
“They must have turned it down.”
Swimming
Since the pool is 100 feet long, a half mile is 26 lengths, which is what I try to do every day. “I swim three miles a week,” would sound terrific, to anyone, or even, “I swim a little over two miles a week.” Anyone would be impressed, except my mother.
On some days, though, I have to trick myself into swimming the whole 26. “I’m tired, didn’t sleep too well, 16 lengths is perfectly okay, respectable,” I tell myself. And then, having done the 16, I will say (to myself) that I might as well do a couple more, or four more. And if you get to 20 you might as well go on to 26, as I almost always do.
On other, better days I can almost forget what I am doing; that is, I forget to count. I am only aware of a long strong body (mine) pulling through the water, of marvelous muscles, a strong back, and long, long legs.
The Neighborhood
; Sometimes, walking around the neighborhood, I see swimmers from the pool—or, people I think I have seen in swimming; in regular clothes it is hard to be sure.
Once, passing a restaurant out on Clement Street I was almost sure that the waitress with her back to the window was the big black woman, formerly cross but now friendly and supportive. Of course I could go in and check it out, even say Hello, but I didn’t want to do that, really. But I was pleased with just the idea that she might be there, with a waitress job in such a nice loose-seeming coffee place. I even reasoned that if they hired that woman, big as she is, mightn’t someone hire me, about the same size? (I think swimming is making me more optimistic, somehow.) Maybe I should look harder, not be so shy about applying for waitress jobs?