Bliss, Remembered (9 page)

Well, as a matter of fact, I did very well. I was moving up in competition here, Teddy. I finished second in both the one-hundred-yard and the two-hundred-yard backstrokes, which amazed everybody because nobody’d ever heard of me. Here I was swimming in the seniors, and I wasn’t even in a club. I swam what was called “unattached.” Almost everybody else was associated with some club, but I was just “Sydney Stringfellow, unattached,” and there was only this one girl who beat me in both races—and barely that—but she was really grown-up, maybe twenty-five or something, so, as Mr. Foster told me, at that advanced age, she wasn’t gonna get any better. In fact, driving back home, when we were on the ferry goin’ across the Bay and we went to the lunch counter, he told me that someone from the Shoreham Hotel AC had asked him if maybe I wanted to come down and swim for them when I finished high school.

He told me, “Trixie—I mean, Sydney.” (See, when he had met me, I was Trixie, but then I asked him to change that after Eleanor Holm advised me against being Trixie, so he would forget sometimes.) “Sydney, you might make it to the Olympics in Berlin. You’ve got a chance, I would imagine, if you keep improving, but it’s gonna be tough. Nobody’s gonna beat Eleanor, and there’s two or three other gals who’re pretty good. You couldn’t beat ’em now, but maybe by next year. I will say you should be at the height of your powers for the next Olympics, in ’40. But if you’re gonna do that, you have to go somewhere and swim with a club. I just can’t help you that much anymore.”

So that’s why I told Carter I had to leave Chestertown and go out into the big, wide world. Her first reaction was, “That’s great, Trix, you can join a club in Baltimore, and we can get a place together.”

I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” At that point Carter started to take her straps down, and she said, “Come on, let’s get the sun on our backs like the boys do.” And just like that, she yanked the top of her suit all the way down to her waist. It was absolutely scandalous, even if it was just the two of us girls alone in my yard. But, as I told you, Carter was always out in front of the rest of us. Today, I suppose, you’d say that she’d be ahead of the curve. Anyway, she just pulled her suit down and lay on the towel.

Well, for a moment I worried that Gentry Trappe might be around, but he certainly wasn’t the sort to be a peeping Tom, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day, so yes indeed, I pulled my top down, too, and laid on my stomach with the sun on my back. Teddy, I felt absolutely debauched, but the funny thing was, I think it made it easier for me to think about goin’ out in the world. I mean, if a girl could take her top down outdoors, even if no one was around, it made you feel grown-up.

So I explained to Carter, “Well, there isn’t any swimming club I know of in Baltimore.”

“So where else?”

“Well, there’s a lotta choices. There’s that Shoreham Hotel AC in Washington and the Carnegie Library Club in Pittsburgh and the Broadwood AC in Philadelphia and . . .” I know I paused here, Teddy, because even as absolutely wicked and grown-up as I was with my top down, it was still hard to imagine it: “. . . the Women’s Swimming Association of New York.”

It struck Carter the same way. “New York!” she said.

“That’s what I want: the Women’s Swimming Association.” I got so excited I raised up on my elbow without even thinking, exposing my one side there for all the world to see—even if Carter was all the world that was looking at me at that particular moment —and I told her how Eleanor Holm herself belonged to the Women’s Swimming Association, and that next month when Mother and Mr. Foster were takin’ me up to Jones Beach for the national championships, I was gonna ratchet up my nerve and ask Eleanor if I could get into the Women’s Swimming Association.

“You think you can?” Carter asked me.

I got hold of my enthusiasm sufficient to restore decorum and laid back down on my stomach. “I’ll be honest with you, Car. I don’t see why not. I’m startin’ to understand how good I really am. I’ve only been serious about my swimming for a little while, but that time I made in the hundred down in Washington a couple months ago—Mr. Foster told me it was the ninth best in the country. In the country, Car!”

“The whole country?”

“That’s what I’m saying: the whole country, the United States, and I’m already ninth best. And if I just get a little better in the next year, if I’m third best, I can go to Berlin, to the Olympics, next summer, and even if I don’t make it, if I get to join the Women’s Swimming Association, I know I could be the very best by the ’40 Olympics. They give out gold medals if you win the Olympics, Car. I could get a gold medal in Tokyo.”

“What’s in Tokyo?”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you. The 1940 Olympics are in Tokyo, Japan.”

“Wow,” Carter said. She processed all that. “So, let me get this straight. If you join this Women’s Swimming Association, you’d live in New York?”

“Yeah. I would. I’d get a job.”

“In Jones Beach?”

“No, that’s just where the nationals are. The Women’s Swimming Association is right in the city. They have their own pool and everything. You could come up from Baltimore on the Royal Blue”—that was the fancy B & O train then—“and stay with me in my apartment. I’d have my own apartment.”

“Wow,” Carter said again. “But you gotta look out for the men in New York, Trix. Men in New York can’t be trusted.”

“Come on, Car. Not all of them. There’s some good men everywhere, I’m sure.”

Carter agreed I had a point. Possibly. She was silent for a long time, then. This was a lot for her to take in from her best friend, especially when she thought she was the one who was so daring, going off to big, cosmopolitan Baltimore. But after a bit, all of a sudden, do you know what she did? She sat up and said, “Come on, Trix, we’re halfway. Let’s go skinny dippin’.”

If Carter Kincaid had suggested we rob the Queen Anne’s County Savings and Trust, I couldn’t’ve been any more shocked. “But, Car, it’s the middle of the day.”

“There’s nobody around.”

“Maybe Gentry Trappe.”

“Well, then it’d just be his lucky day,” Carter said. Teddy, she’d made up her mind. She was already pullin’ her suit down over her thighs. I could see, there was no stoppin’ her. And you know what?

I went right along. In another minute, I was naked as a jay bird, too, and here we were, in broad daylight, runnin’ down to the river and out on the dock and divin’ in. And the water never felt better, Teddy. You’ve been skinny dippin’, haven’t you?

Doesn’t it feel just wonderful?

Yeah, we splashed around and swam underwater some, just like little girls, and I remember, I came up and I was treadin’ water, and I said, “You know what the Women’s Swimming Association bathing suits look like?” It was sort of strange to think about a bathing suit when I didn’t have one on, but it came to me. Carter, of course, didn’t know. “There’s like a shield here,” I said, drawing it with one hand, right in the middle of my chest. “And right in here”—I pointed to my cleavage—“there’s this big S.”

“S?” Carter asked.

“Yeah, S for swimming. And there’s a smaller capital W on this side and an A on the other. I could just see myself in that.” There I was without a stitch on, and I could visualize myself in the best swimming club in America, with the likes of Eleanor Holm herself, wearin’ that suit. It’s funny, Teddy, this was before Superman—

“With the big S on his chest.”

Exactly. But years later, whenever I’d see him taking his shirt off in the phone booth, I’d think back to the dreams of me wearing my own big S on my chest. I don’t know, maybe whoever it was that dreamed up Superman had seen Eleanor Holm with her S, and that was his inspiration. Any man who saw Eleanor in a bathing suit, even just a picture, was gonna stop and dwell on her. I can assure you of that. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Superman got that S on his chest that way. Because of a girl.

And so we swam around a little longer, the sky so perfectly blue, the sun beating down on us, and it was as if I could see the future, all laid out for me. It was like Daddy had never been killed and there was no Depression, and I was gonna make the U.S. team and go to Berlin, and then I was gonna come back and leave the Shore and move to New York and join the Women’s Swimming Association, with the big S right there on my chest, and Eleanor Holm would be gone by then, off making movies or singin’ and whistlin’ along with Ted Weems, and I’d be the star of the backstroke, gettin’ ready to win a gold medal in 1940.

It was absolutely amazing how clearly I could see all the tomorrows stretched out before me, Teddy. In fact, I don’t think I ever had another day like that—one when I’d ever been so sure of things ahead of me—until maybe right now when I know I’m going to die pretty soon, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.

We watched the swimming from Athens again that night. It was an especially important evening for Mom because the finals of her old event, the hundred-meter backstroke, were on. With grand expectation, we settled in before the TV set. “You know what they called us then?” she asked me.

“Naiads.”

“Well, that’s right. I told you that. But that was all the girls who swam. I meant what they called the backstrokers?”

“Just the girls?”

“No, the girls and the men.”

“Mother, you know I haven’t got the foggiest idea in the world.”

“They called us ‘dorsal swimmers.’”

“Excuse me?”

“Dorsal swimmers. Dorsal means the back or something like that.”

“There’s dorsal fins on, like, sharks, aren’t there?”

Mom nodded. “I don’t know whether it was the fin or just the back in general, but they called us dorsal swimmers. It was pretty dopey.” I nodded in agreement. “We never called ourselves dorsal swimmers, that’s for sure.”

It was, however, evidently going to be awhile before the swimmers came on. Instead, NBC was showing the girls’ gymnastics. The floor exercises were on, and it was terribly boring. At Mom’s request, I muted the sound. “They’re so little they’re creepy,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “None of ’em have any boobs or heinies.”

“I haven’t heard anybody say ‘heinie’ for a long time,” I noted.

“Well, it’s better than ‘butts,’ don’t you think? You say heinie, you know exactly what you’re talking about. Butts are cigarette butts and gun butts and butt in and butt out and all that. Heinie’s a good old word that isn’t ambiguous. Anyway, those little gymnasts don’t have any, whatever you want to call ’em.”

I let that pass. It was not a subject that had previously engaged me. Anyway, suddenly Mom clapped her hands and cried out, “Let’s get the damn swimmers out here. They look like real women.” Natalie Coughlin was the favorite in mother’s race, and since she was an American, Mom was particularly interested. “That Natalie, she could even give Eleanor a run for her money in the looks department.”

“She is good looking,” I said, agreeably, remembering her from the trial heats.

“Get outta town, Teddy. Are you losin’ it in your old age? She’s a real fox, that girl.”

“Nice heinie,” I said.

“There you go,” Mom said. “You’re still my red-blooded American boy.”

“Okay, so to really get my blood racing, tell me more about Eleanor,” I said. It was like she was just waiting for her cue.

Well, Teddy, never mind how pretty she was, she was also the nicest thing to me before my first big race. Did I tell you about Chicago?

Well, if I was gonna try for the Olympics I needed one major meet under my belt, so to speak. There were really only two big ones each year during the Depression. There was the national indoors and the national outdoors, and that was about it. For us girls, anyway. The outdoors were usually at Jones Beach, and the indoors were always in Chicago in April, and in ’36 I had to go out there. I simply had to. I couldn’t start off and try to compete nationally the first time in the Olympic Trials themselves.