That summer, I imagined myself as a dolphin, porpoising through the water from one side of the pool to another, arms outstretched, my hands a prow, my ponytail like a fin. I’d break the surface squinting, then dive under the blue, dodging the hordes of other kids splashing in the high summer heat. Every day we’d stash our bikes in the shade of the school building as the morning mist rose off the still water, claim our spot on the concrete with our towels, then race to be the first to jump into the bracing cold. I’d spend entire days at the pool, from open til close, then do it all over again the next day.
During one of my laps, I saw another girl up ahead, standing alone, the water rippling at her shoulders. We were in the middle of the pool, not the shallow end, which was for babies and their moms, and not the deep end, where high-school kids launched themselves into high arcs from the diving boards, piercing the water below, the boards shuddering behind them. This girl was more “developed,” as people said then, like it was some kind of achievement, like building houses on a tract of untouched land, or conjuring a photograph from a bath of chemicals in the dark. To develop was to incur a kind of attention I was in no hurry to attract. I wasn’t one of the girls whose main activity at the pool was to “lay out” on their oversized beach towels, aligned and positioned for optimal viewing by the boys. Though I had no control over my body’s whims, I hoped, through sheer force of will, I could forestall the next phase for as long as possible.
And yet, as I swam past the girl I turned my head abruptly, comically, I thought, the way a cartoon character might, my body continuing its forward motion as my eyes jumped from their sockets, landing wide open at her bikini top. I don’t know why I did it. It just seemed funny, like something my dad and his buddies might do, something like the crude comics they read, or the jokes they told. Like something I’d seen on late-night TV, the way the hosts reduced women to body parts and bad drivers. At the time, I didn’t think those jokes were about me; I wasn’t stupid or ditzy and, though I couldn’t yet drive, I knew I’d be good at it some day. I had no language to perceive the world as sexist, it was just the way things were; you could say it was the very water in which I swam.
I pulled myself out of the pool, where my friends were waiting, and even though I believed the water had provided a cloak of invisibility, they’d seen my maneuver. I can’t believe you did that, they said. I looked for a sympathetic face but found none. I just thought it was funny, I said, shivering as water pooled at my feet. As I tip-toed across the hot concrete to my towel, I felt a double hit of shame, first for doing something I didn’t understand was wrong, then for being caught doing it. My friends and I were entering our mean girls phase, where any sign of non-conformity to the group is perceived as a betrayal, where difference means less-than. Maybe they’d seen something in me before I did.
In the deep end, black iron ladders angled away from the pool wall, leaving just enough space for small bodies to slip through. Kids would dare and chase one another, squeezing their way behind the ladder like minnows when the lifeguard wasn’t looking. One day, a girl got trapped under water, wedged between the ladder and the wall. I hadn’t been at the pool that day, and I didn’t know the girl, but the image of it haunted me. I pictured the lifeguards whistling for everyone to get out! Get out of the pool! and a crowd trembling at the water’s edge. Someone lowered a garden hose to her so she could breathe, I was told, while others pried the ladder from its bolts. It was too harrowing to contemplate, so I never asked where the hose came from, or how it got to her without filling with water, or how she knew to breathe through it, or whether she could have suffered permanent brain damage from being under for so long.
When the buzzer sounded for a mandatory recess, all the kids would reluctantly leave the pool and gather at the concession stand for Red Vines, RC, and Chick-O-Sticks. Unless you went the long way around, you had to walk past the pump house to get there, which was like passing a graveyard, its dank, cool air seeping from the open door. My father sometimes worked in the pump house to supplement his school teacher salary, always wearing pressed dungarees – never shorts – Converse sneakers, and a white T-shirt. Inside, a radio played and the intense smell of chlorine rose from deep, open troughs that men would cross on wooden planks, monitoring the chemicals and releasing the treated water into the pool. No women worked in the pump house as far as I could tell, though I only crossed its threshold once or twice.
On the last day the pool was open, which for us was the de facto last day of summer, the season’s final buzzer sounded, and in a spontaneous show of rebellious solidarity, all the kids refused to get out.
That winter a new girl appeared at school, an eighth grader to my seventh. She wore those silky shirts with photo collages printed on them, tucked into low-waisted, bell-bottomed jeans. She had a slight underbite, something that appealed to me but I couldn’t say why. Her light brown hair rested just above her shoulders and framed her face, and her bangs curled to a perfect terminus above her eyebrows. My dark, unruly waves had lost their summer bronzing and had become even more oily and hormonal. I wore braces on my teeth. I carried my books low on my hip, imitating the boys’ simian walk, not cradled to my chest the way other girls did. If I timed it right, I would pass the new girl in the hall between Math and Social Studies. Whenever I did, I made a point of catching her eye and smiling, a drive-by upturn at the corners of my mouth. She was alone and a newcomer to the school, and I wanted to appear welcoming, is what I would have told anyone who questioned me. Is what I told myself. Finally one day I saw her in the cafeteria and stood in line beside her. My heart raced as I approached. Her name was Lauren and she had noticed my smiling, she said. Once again I felt caught out, as though I needed plausible deniability for the thing I wanted, and indeed had worked so hard to get.
Even though my intentions were a mystery to me, I felt I had won a prize. An outsider, from somewhere, anywhere else, was better than any of the friends I already had. Plus, she was a year older, which I felt bestowed a maturity on me I did not possess. Sometimes I’d catch her at her locker before we went off to our respective classes. I don’t remember what we talked about, I just was happy to be in her presence and to be seen with her. I never saw her outside school, because she took the bus home, and I walked. She lived in an old house beyond the city limits, which you could see from the bridge that connected our town to another across the state line. I knew the one. It was ancient, made of red brick with white Victorian trim, and stood alone facing the river, a cornfield behind it that had been turned under for the winter. It was not the kind of place I imagined her living. Her father was ancient as well, and worked behind a desk at the bank in town. I don’t think there was a mother in the picture, just Lauren and her older sister.
One night the following spring, I sat at the kitchen table with my family, as I always did, for dinner. The evening light was holding on a bit longer, the sky visible through the window above the sink. My parents must have noticed something in my countenance, something different from the faraway expression usually fixed on my face. When they inquired, I said I was happy because I had made a new friend at school. I said her name, Lauren. Her last name is lost to me now, but I spoke it. Silence. A quick look between my mom and dad. I tried to parse their expressions; it was not the reaction I expected, but instead was one of the thousand cuts I was growing accustomed to, the disconnect between the weight of my feelings and my parents’ response to them. After the meal my mother announced we were going on a “girls’ trip,” a rare but cherished outing, just the two of us, without my brother and my dad.
She drove us across the river to a donut place – it was dark by then – where we sat on pastel fiberglass chairs bolted to the tables. I wasn’t accustomed to impromptu dessert, especially when it wasn’t preceded by shopping or other mundane chores. I swiveled in my chair, eating the plain cake donut I’d ordered; I didn’t like icing, it hurt my teeth. My mother turned serious and told me I was not to be friends with Lauren anymore because my dad was having an affair with her 18-year-old sister Cindy. I took in this information, but I didn’t understand it. I did not know the meaning of the words she was telling me. I was 12, almost 13 years old and still submitted to the weekly ritual of my mother detangling my hair after I washed it, dragging a comb then a brush through the knotted mass in the back, yanking my neck, causing me to wince with pain. A violent intimacy like being in the donut shop at that moment, just the two of us on our girls’ trip. As I absorbed the news, I burned with indignation. I didn’t care what adults did — I wanted no part of it — and nobody was going tell me who I could be friends with.
It turned out Lauren had her sights set on the basketball coach at our school. Going after older married men seem to be something of a family business. It didn’t occur to me to hold the men accountable, to fault them and not the teenaged girls. Since Lauren was older than me, I thought her endgame was plausible, whatever it was. She had a way of insinuating things to me, and I pretended to know what she was implying, wanting so badly to be privy to her secrets. She saw the coach’s wife as her competition, I guess, and when she learned they were friends of my parents, I realized I had something to offer that would put her in my debt. I took a photo from one of my family’s albums and brought it to school. It had been taken at a party at our house and in it, the coach and his wife sat in our living room, he in the easy chair and she on the ottoman, their drinks in their hands hand and their mouths open in laughter. I had cut a piece of paper, taped it to the back of the photo, and folded it over my mother’s face in the frame, my instinct to protect her somehow. Lauren ripped off the paper overlay, snatched the photo from my hand, and stashed it in her locker with not so much as a thank you. Suddenly I felt that by providing this contraband I had betrayed my parents, not that I had colluded in a joint mission with a special friend.
After that, I began to grow tired of Lauren, how she always talked about boys or men and never really seemed interested in anything I had to say. Her attention was focused elsewhere, and even if the things that preoccupied her might be the same ones awaiting me next year, when I’d be older and more sophisticated, I suspected they wouldn’t interest me. Nevertheless, the thought that I was her only friend weighed on me. I had pursued her but now I was ready to let her go. The school year ended, and with it, our friendship, such as it was. I was relieved we lived so far from one another to make getting together difficult. I was glad for the excuse of
At the start of summer, a new house went up in the woods next to ours. One day the construction stopped, leaving a frame of plywood, 2 x 4s, and drywall standing among the trees. Sometimes I’d venture into the shell of the house, climbing the stairs to what would be a bedroom or a bathroom, roaming the empty spaces to the echo of my footsteps and the smell of freshly milled lumber. The late-summer breeze drafted through rectangles where window panes would go, and I would sit on the unfinished floor, wanting the house to hold me hidden in its rooms. I imagined living in that house, my daydreams a blank slate of possibility, yet fully aware of its dangers: the stairwells with no railings, the second-story windows open to the ground below and, most perilous of all, the prospect of not being found.
I went away to Girl Scout camp in the mountains, reluctantly. I wasn’t much of a joiner – this was my last year of Scouts – and didn’t relish the thought of leaving the incipient summer for long pants and sweatshirts in the high country. On the first day of camp we had to take a swimming test, which entailed crossing to one side of the pool and back, without touching toes on the bottom. Easy. This would determine who was allowed in the deep end for the rest of the week. One by one, girls dove in, swam their lap and got out. When my turn came, I followed suit, but the shock of the cold water caused me to hyperventilate, and I stood immobilized, heaving in panic and frustration with each rapid breath. I couldn’t make it to the other side. For my trouble, I was issued a red bathing cap and made to wear it in the pool, a scarlet letter of latex that told a lie about my ability and relegated me to the shallow side of the rope.
While I was at camp, my parents began the work of packing up our house to move. My father would be teaching at a new school in the fall, thousands of miles across the country. I wanted to see Lauren before we left. I hadn’t talked to her all summer, but I suppose I felt some measure of guilt for not saying goodbye. Perhaps I also hung onto my defiance about being prohibited from seeing her, which was a stronger impulse than maintaining the friendship. If I knew her phone number, I was afraid to call it, but I went into the bank one day and approached her father at his desk. His white hair and gray suit made him look stern, even sinister. I asked him to tell her I said hi, and he smiled in a way that suggested he knew who I was, not only to his younger daughter but to his oldest. I darted from the bank, feeling as though all eyes were on me as I pushed through the doors.
I sensed it wasn’t a good idea for Lauren to come to my house, so we arranged to meet at the top of a hill nearby. From there we could see a new neighborhood below, rows of unfinished houses where a field used to be, whose sidewalks were still pristine, whose lawns were covered with straw, the driveways stacked with roofing materials. A song stuck in my head, something that attempted to rhyme “feel right” with “all right,” though I may have lodged it there myself, as a way to fill the empty space between us. I had nothing to say to her. She had been an idea of something I couldn’t quite name, something I had hoped would take shape — her shape — but in that moment I felt the urgency of being two thousand miles away.
I sometimes return to this view in dreams, cresting the hill to find a highway on the other side in one dream, in another a field, in yet another an ocean. It’s one in an atlas of liminal landscapes, a place and time on the precipice of change, where the view is both murky and expansive, like swimming under water and coming up for air.
Cheryl Graham is a writer and artist living in Tucson, Arizona. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, PopMatters, Sierra Magazine, Essay Daily, Barren Magazine, Identity Theory, and others. She studied nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.