Learning to Swim (2 page)

At which point I picked up my pace, anxious to get away from Keith before Barbie could say the word “crotch” again or reveal any more of my secrets, like how old I was when I got my period. Needless to say, my mom definitely had boundary issues, and countless other issues, at that.

Thankfully, Alice had only one issue so far. She wasn't there to rescue me from all the humiliation.

Later that night, while my mom was back at work, I decided to do just what she'd suggested—curl up on the couch in my sweats and watch TV. There were times when I wished I could be like those girls who found solace in a beloved copy of a classic book, but the truth of the matter was that I liked my TV, especially videos of people falling at weddings and cats with their heads stuck in pails. In my defense, it wasn't like Jones Island was a mecca for culture. The island was a craggy piece
of land about three miles long and two miles wide. Besides the country club, two overpriced convenience stores, a gas station, a coffee shop, and a lousy restaurant, there really wasn't much to do. In any case, I was in the middle of watching a kid get hit in the head with a softball when the doorbell rang. I straightened my sweats, ran my fingers through my hair, and answered it.

Gulp.

Keith McKnight was standing in front of me.
Keith McKnight!

“Hi,” he said, flashing me his famous grin.

“Hi,” I croaked. Thankfully, I had had the common sense to turn off the TV before I answered the door.

“Alice told me where you lived. I just wanted to stop by to see how you were feeling. I hope you don't mind.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I'm fine, thanks.” I immediately reinstated Alice to flawless status.

A lock of thick brown hair fell over his eye and he swiped it back. He was wearing a black T-shirt that showed off his muscular arms, and an old, faded pair of jeans. He was the definition of picturesque.

“Can I come in?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, glancing around nervously. Suddenly I became very aware of my surroundings. Before the bridge was built attaching Jones Island to the rest of the Eastern shore, it was just a bunch of run-down dumpy cottages built by the fishermen who lived there. Although most of the original cottages had since been
torn down and replaced with perfectly landscaped McMansions, a few holdouts remained. Alice lived in one of them, and Barbie and I rented a second-floor furnished apartment in another. (Barbie was no Suze Orman, hence she'd hatched the brilliant “Let's work at the country club together” plan.)

Keith walked into the living/dining/TV room and I caught a glimpse of the Lexus he had parked outside our building. I didn't need this piece of evidence to remind me that Keith was, like, seventh-generation dripping-in-diamonds kind of wealthy. Everyone at Tippecanoe gossiped about how much life insurance money he and his dad got when his mother died. And now Keith was staring at our nasty ghetto-fied sofa, probably wondering if it was safe to park his rear end on it.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked.

“No thanks,” he said. “I can't stay.” He hesitated a beat and then said, “I just wanted to ask if you would like to learn how to swim.”

Everything stopped. It was so quiet I could hear my heart thumping against my chest.

“As a former Boy Scout, I'm qualified to teach you.” He deepened his voice as if to counter the squeaky-clean Boy Scout image. “There'd be no charge or anything.”

This had to be a dream. There was no way Keith McKnight, the hottest guy in a million-mile radius, would be standing in my living/dining/TV room offering
to teach me to swim. Alice was never going to believe this one.

“So,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “What do you think?”

Think? I think YES! Yes, I would love you to teach me how to swim. I would love to spend time with you, I would love to do anything at all with you!

I envisioned us in the moonlight, standing in waist-deep water. My hair would be perfectly slicked back, and I would suddenly have breasts and a really great BCBG bikini. His strong arms would be wrapped around me, holding me so close our chests would be pressed together. I would stare into his eyes and he would lean down toward me, pressing his lips against mine.

But I did not say or insinuate any of the above. Instead I said: “No thanks.”

No thanks?

Say what?

How could I have said ‘no thanks’? Oh yeah, Barbie. It always came back to Barbie…

He nodded, walked back toward the door, and stopped. “It's not safe,” he said. “You live on an island, you work by a pool. You should at least know how to stay afloat.” Then he turned back toward me and said, “What are you afraid of?”

Well, if that wasn't the most loaded question of the century. Love lunacy runs in my family. I had lusted after him for the last forty-two days, knowing full well
he had a girlfriend and was therefore off-limits. I was already tempted to give in to the symptoms of Barbie's full-blown condition, and that was when he and I had barely had any contact at all. Even if I could explain everything to him, he still wouldn't understand what we'd be up against.

I stood still for a moment, trying to say something, anything, but nothing came out.

“Think about it,” he said softly. And then he left, politely shutting the door behind him.

The next day, Alice and I gabbed away about Keith's swimming lessons offer as we scrubbed the floors in the Tippecanoe dining room. Even though we'd only met six weeks ago, I was very comfortable about telling her everything. When we talked, the time went a lot faster, and to be honest, I just liked how she carried herself. She was confident and funny. I looked at her and saw what I'd be like fifty years from now.

In fact, Alice had this spirit that was just so alive and energetic, sometimes she didn't seem any older than the rest of us. I oftentimes forgot that she had visible wrinkles, wore Poise pads, and took five calcium supplements with every meal. She was that good at being young.

“So let me get this straight,” Alice said as she kneeled down on the hardwood and dipped her scrub brush into a pail of soapy water. “Your mom won't let
you learn how to swim because
she's
afraid of the water? That doesn't make any sense.”

Alice was the oldest member of the cleaning staff, but not the weakest. She was barely five feet tall, and very slender, which made her appear fragile. Still, that didn't mean she wouldn't get down on all fours and scrub until her arms fell off. Not that she didn't have pride. Actually, Alice dyed her hair ink black every week to cover the gray, and man, did she look glamorous, as much as an aging maid could, of course.

I stopped staring at her and wiped off an area of the floor with a dry mop. “Welcome to my world.”

“Well, why is she afraid? Did she almost drown or something?” she asked.

“She didn't almost drown,” I replied. “My grandparents actually
did.”

Alice placed a wet hand on her chest and sighed. “Oh my. That's terrible.”

Truer words couldn't have been spoken. I heard the full story only once when I was about six, and after that it had been referred to as TCI (the Catamaran Incident). Apparently, when Barbie was fourteen, her parents had gone on this second honeymoon to Costa Rica. They booked this private catamaran, and somehow her mom fell into the ocean, her dad jumped in to save her, and they both drowned. (Yes, I had considered the similarities between that event and my close call with Keith, but seriously, Tippecanoe was anything but
a second honeymoon.) Then Barbie was shipped off to live with her aunt Rita for a few years and developed this water phobia before going away to college and meeting my dad, who would eventually die on her, six months before my birth.

Obviously my mother had endured a lot, and it probably was one of the reasons she had developed love lunacy and her obsession with unavailable men in the first place. But regardless, her rationale for keeping me landlocked somehow didn't seem fair.

“Just the mere suggestion of me being submerged in water for any educational or recreational purpose really freaks her out,” I explained. “I'm surprised she held it somewhat together yesterday.”

“Now, Steffie, mothers worry. It's part of the job description, just like wiping crap off the floor is in ours.”

Hearing Alice say “crap” in her trademark grandma voice made me laugh out loud. “I know, I know. But still, this phobia of hers is a real pain.”

Alice stood up and took a bottle of Murphy Oil Soap from our cleaning cart. “I'm sure it is, considering how it's getting in the way of you and Keith.”

“Me?” I asked nervously. “And Keith McKnight?”

“No, Keith Richards,” she said sharply.

“Who?”

Alice groaned in frustration. “Look, it's all right to like him even though he is Mora's boyfriend. And
it's all right to spend time with him too. It's not like they're married.”

“Whatever. He doesn't even like me like that,” I said, matter-of-factly. “He probably just wants another merit badge or something.”

“Regardless, the fact is that you have a crush on him and he offered you swimming lessons. Why are you transferring your feelings about your mom onto him?”

Since when had Alice become Dr. Phil? “Where are you going with this?” I asked, annoyed.

“You should accept the lessons.”

I squeezed out my damp mop into the bucket and frowned.

“You're going to have to learn to swim sooner or later,” Alice continued. “You might as well learn from someone you really like.”

“Explain that to Barbie.”

“Maybe if you told her that it was purely a matter of safety,” Alice suggested.

Safety. Once again, I envisioned Keith and me in the water. He would touch his hand to my cheek and I would stand on my tiptoes, so I could look into his eyes. He would lean forward and kiss me softly…

Mora Schmora. Alice was right. This was a matter of safety, for God's sake. “But I already told him no.”

“So tell him you changed your mind. But make sure it's okay with your mom first. Remember, she was your
age once too. She'll understand how much this means to you.”

Alice was right. I had to run this by Barbie. She and I had been getting along fairly well lately, and I knew she had been doing her best to recover from love lunacy. Actually, she had been love free for almost a year now, so she deserved the chance to talk with me, see the light, and hug it out, right?

I knew this wouldn't be an easy task. Barbie's reasons for not wanting me to swim were borderline justifiable, and whenever she invoked the name of her dead parents, she was hard to dispute. Still, I had little choice. I had to give it a shot. I had to hope against hope that somewhere deeply imbedded in Barbie's mind was a sliver of rationality. I had to believe that this sliver was capable of overhauling all the neurons in her brain, and getting her to realize that passing up an opportunity to take swimming lessons (at no charge) with a lifeguard who just happened to be a hottie and quite possibly the future father of my children would be, as Alice had said so eloquently, “a real bite in the ass.”

Later that evening, Barbie strolled into our kitchen, humming an unrecognizable tune. She was wearing short cutoffs and a halter top—clothes that any girl in the popular Mora Cooper crowd would've been happy to wear. The sad thing was, the clothes probably wouldn't have looked as good on them as they did on my mom.

“That smells delicious,” Barbie said.

I finished stirring some Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper and said, “It's almost ready.”

This was Barbie's favorite dish. Alice had advised me just before our shift ended that the way to get someone to do something was to do something so nice for them that they'd feel too guilty to say no. Making Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper was the best I could do.

As my mother sat down at the living/dining/TV room table, I took a deep breath. I had to be very careful about this. I had come to the discussion with irrefutable facts, like:

1. Learning to swim could prevent me from drowning, like I almost did yesterday. It's a safety issue.
   

2. People drink water. Men and women are made up of 60 percent water. Therefore water and boys are good.
   

3. The lessons are free.
   

4. Since she doesn't know how to swim, I should learn how just in case she ever falls into the water. I could save her.
   

5. Keith is the hottest guy I know and I've been totally in love with him for forty-three days. Therefore, it would be inhumane and cruel to rob me of this opportunity. (This was only to be uttered as a last resort.)
   

I brought Barbie over a hot plate filled to the edges with Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper. She licked her lips in anticipation. Alice was right. Barbie's love of the Helper would surely take over, and she'd be putty in my hands!

The only thing I had to do was ask her in a non-confrontational way. Just kind of breezy, like “Gee, the head lifeguard at the club offered me free swim lessons, what do you think?” And then lean forward and open my eyes really wide, like I was hanging on her every word. Like I really cared about what she thought.

I sat down at the table and then swirled the Hamburger Helper around my plate with my fork for a couple of minutes.

Barbie said, “Are you all right? You seem… quiet.”

So far so good. A perfect lead-in. I'm quiet because I'm
pensive.
Because I want
her
opinion.

I looked into Barbie's heavily blue-mascaraed eyes.
Nice and breezy
, I reminded myself. Not confrontational.

“I'm going to take swimming lessons,” I announced.

Oops.

My mother put down her fork and swallowed hard. She leaned forward slightly and said, “Excuse me?”

“Keith McKnight offered to teach me. He said it wasn't safe…”

“Who's Keith McKnight?”

“The lifeguard at the pool. The
head
lifeguard.” I said
this almost proudly, as if I already had bragging rights to him.

“The one who almost let you drown yesterday?”

This was so my mother. She could turn anything around. It really was a gift.