Learning to Swim (3 page)

“He didn't almost let me drown,” I said. “He saved me.”

She picked her fork back up and scooped up some hamburger. “Can you learn how to swim without getting in the water?”

This was the most insane thing I had ever heard. “Um… I don't think so.”

“Then forget it,” she said, before popping the bite into her mouth.

It was time to bring out the big guns.
“Everyone
thinks it's ridiculous that I don't know how to swim.”

“Everyone?”

“Well, Alice does,” I said, meeting Barbie's eyes.

This was not a good idea at all. My mom had this thing about Alice. Quite simply, Alice, through no fault of her own, annoyed Barbie. It was hard to believe that anyone could actually be annoyed by Alice, because Alice was, quite frankly, the nicest person I'd ever met. She was always making cookies for people and helping out sick friends and stuff. She may not have had much in terms of material things, and may have had a filthy mouth sometimes, but if I was at her house
and said I wanted a blanket, she would have given me one, even if it was the only blanket she had in the world. My mother, on the other hand, wouldn't even let me borrow her precious pair of dark indigo Levi's.

“Unfortunately for you,” Barbie said, “Alice is not your mother. I am. And I said no.”

I should've never brought up Alice. I should've known that my mother would take it as a dare, like “I dare you to be as nice and understanding as Alice.” Barbie hated dares. She always said that as far as she was concerned, dares were just thinly veiled threats. Although I wasn't exactly sure what she meant by that analogy.

All of a sudden, I felt this pain in my throat, like a welling of anxiety. Now I wanted those swim lessons more than I'd wanted anything in my life. I could not bear the thought of
not
taking those lessons. Comebacks circled through my head, like “You're everything I don't want to be!” (Used before.) Or a simple “You're right, that
is
unfortunate!” (i.e., I wish you weren't my mom). Or the immature “I don't care what you think, I'm going to do it anyway!” But I never had a chance to say any of the above-mentioned retorts because we were being serenaded by Beethoven's “Für Elise.”

“Your phone is ringing,” I said.

Barbie looked irritated, as if I had conjured up this
interruption in an effort to throw her off course. She grabbed her phone out of her purse and checked the number. I could tell it was a number she didn't recognize because she gave a little shrug before answering it. “Hello?”

And suddenly her whole face changed. It went from hard and kind of mean-looking to soft and flirty. “Heeeeey. How are you?” she said into the phone. And then she let out this sexy squeal of delight.

“I'll be right back,” she mouthed to me, flashing me a little smile, as if instead of being on the edge of a gigantic war, we had been talking about the weather.

Left alone in the kitchen with a lukewarm dish of Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper, I felt a pit form in the base of my stomach.

Stage two: the forbidden phone call.

And just like that, everything changed.

Suddenly, I was reliving our swimming argument fondly, as if it was at least a remnant of normality. A mother-daughter squabble not unlike the other mother-daughter squabbles occurring over plates of Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper across the country. If I was correct (and I was ninety-nine percent sure I was) and this was a forbidden phone call, the lack of swimming lessons was going to be the least of my problems. But there was nothing I could do except fasten my seat belt and hunker down for Ludwig's wild ride.

“Who was that?” I asked as my mother walked back into the room with a big plastic smile plastered on her face.

“Oh, that was Mr. Warzog,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I'm sorry, sweet cheeks, but it looks like I need to go in to work tonight.”

I found her statement offensive on several different fronts. For one, she never called me sweet cheeks. For two, she was assuming that I was so naïve I might actually believe that she would get all excited and turn beet red just because the man I affectionately referred to as Warthog (who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy) had called her. For three, we were supposed to drink a liter of Diet Dr Pepper and play a rousing game of Balderdash that night (note the irony of board-game choice).

“Why?” I asked.

“I don't know why,” she said, still not looking at me. She stood up and grabbed her plate. “Someone probably called in sick.”

“Who?”

“I don't know,” she said. And then she looked at me. “I'm sorry,” she said, softening a bit. “Look, about the swimming lessons. Let's talk about it later, okay?”

She was obviously desperate to pacify me in an attempt to avoid an altercation. Normally she never would have backed away from an argument, or even entertained the possibility of reversing a decision on
one of her core idiosyncrasies, like something relating to bodies of water.

“If you want,” she said cheerfully, “I can drop you off at Alice's.”

Considering how much Barbie disliked my hanging out with Alice, I was now one hundred percent certain my mom was about to relapse into love lunacy. And so I took a deep breath, looked her directly in the eyes, and said, “Thanks.”

According to Alice, there was one thing in the world that was a tonic for all that ailed it: lists. It was something a girl in middle school would believe, but again, that's what made her so fun. On her refrigerator were a list of groceries she needed to get, a list of movies she wanted to see, a list of books she had to read, and a list of the hottest male actors of all time (for the record, Alice was obsessed with Keanu Reeves). She was so certain of the benefits of making lists that when I arrived at her house so angry at my mother that I was practically spewing lava, the first thing Alice did was yank out her notebook and pen. The second thing she did was fill the baby pool up with her garden hose.

I plopped down in the white plastic lawn chair and stuck my feet in the water to cool down as Alice wrote:

1. Proof that Barbie is on an illicit date.
   

2. Proof that Barbie is not on an illicit date.
   

A half hour later we were still sitting in Alice's backyard. We had a laundry list of reasons as to why I was so certain that Barbie was about to ruin my life, and absolutely no reasons as to why this whole thing might just be a not-so-silly misunderstanding.

“Oh!” Alice said excitedly. “I have one.”

1. Proof that Barbie is not on an illicit date: She was wearing her uniform.
   

“That doesn't prove anything,” I said. “I'm sure that after she dropped me off, she just went home and changed.”

“But why would she say she was going to work? Wouldn't she come up with a better excuse? After all, she knows you can easily check.”

“That's the beauty of it,” I said. “She thinks because it's so easy for me to check, I won't.”

“It seems so…”

“Crazy? Awful? Rude? Obnoxious…?”

“Terrible.”

I sighed a long, deep “my life is over” sigh as I picked up a pair of binoculars and focused them on the humongous white Mediterranean-style house across the creek, which just happened to be the residence of Keith
McKnight. I had first spotted him trimming some trees in his yard about forty-three days ago, and every time I went to Alice's place (which looked more like a sorority house than an old lady's house—there was brightly colored IKEA everywhere), I peered through the magical magnifying lenses and prayed that he'd come outside with his shirt off. Sure, I saw him topless almost every day, but that was under professional circumstances, not on his own turf.

But even the thought of a potential Keith sighting couldn't pull me out of my funk. In fact, the thought of him just made me feel worse. “I obviously can't take those swim lessons now,” I announced, setting down the binoculars.

“But I thought she said you'd discuss it later.”

“It doesn't matter what she says now. I need to have my wits about me. I can't afford to get love lunacy myself.”

“That's ridiculous, Steffie. Swimming lessons are not going to tempt you to play park the pastrami with a married man.”

Park the
what
? “Keith may not be married,” I said, “but he's got a girlfriend.”

“Even if he was married, it wouldn't matter. You're not your mother. I mean, look at me. Roland was a drinker. That didn't make me one.”

Alice had lost her husband, Roland, to a heart attack five years before. She liked to say that they were happily
married for forty years, but the truth of the matter was that they were actually married for forty-five. The reason why she didn't count the first five is because they were so bad. That would be due to the fact that, unbeknownst to Alice at the time, she had married a total drunk.

One of her all-time favorite stories was how she got Roland to stop drinking, thereby saving his life. No offense to Alice, but it hadn't sounded all that difficult. She simply gave him the old heave-ho, and he dried out in exactly two weeks, which was when he came crawling back, begging for forgiveness. I couldn't exactly throw my mother out either, although I considered going down to county court and filling out emancipation papers after every time we finger moved.

“But Roland wasn't a blood relative,” I said. “Love lunacy is genetic.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Well, my father was a drinker and I didn't become one.”

I could attest to that. The only alcohol Alice had in the house was a grody bottle of peppermint schnapps that was coated in about two inches of dust. “But you did marry one,” I said, thinking out loud. “It's not like you totally escaped.”

Alice got up and smoothed down the back of her pink clam diggers. “Stef, I know it's hard, but even if you're right about the phone call and your mother
is
on the verge of love lunacy—”

“Not on the verge. I missed the verge. I also missed
stage one and barely caught stage two. She's already on stage three.”

“My point is that Barbie has done this… how many times before?”

“Fourteen.”

“Exactly. There's not much you can do about it right now. Your mom needs to
want
to change her behavior, you can't make her.”

She was right about that. God knew I had tried to make her before. I had done everything I could think of: reasoning with her calmly until I was blue in the face, yelling and screaming irrationally until I thought I was going to have a stroke, and once I even called her boyfriend and threatened to tell his wife. None of it worked. Barbie was pretty much a lost cause. That was the scariest thing about it.

“I really wish there was more I could do,” Alice said. “But you can always come over here, any time you need to.
Mi casa es su casa
, and whatever.”

I flashed a brave smile as I stood up and slipped my flip-flops back on. “Thanks.”

She put her hands on my shoulders gently. “So do me a favor and stop beating yourself up about Barbie, okay?”

The only thing I could do was muster up a shrug.

For some reason, Alice seemed to think she had succeeded in getting me to see the light, because she shot
me a very self-satisfied, pleased smile. “Do you want me to drive you home?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. And then I dropped the bomb that wiped the smile right off her face. “I'm going to the club to see if my mom really had to work.”

With that, Alice rolled her eyes and shook her head. She should've known me better than to think I'd throw in the towel so easily. For one, I was a little thickheaded, and for two, well, how could I have lived with myself if I hadn't at least tried to jump in and save my mother? If my grandfather hadn't gone in after my grandmother, he probably would have still been alive, but he would have had to spend the rest of his life knowing that he had just let his wife go.

I took a deep breath as I approached Tippecanoe. Even though the parking lot was crowded, I was able to do a quick scan and surmise that Barbie's car wasn't there. The adrenaline surged through my veins and my heart stopped pounding as my indignation grew. I'd begun to march through the parking lot when
Snap!
the toe thingy popped out of my flip-flop.

Unfortunately, these were no ordinary flip-flops. They were my pride and joy: gold gem-studded Michael Kors sandals; shoes that I had saved for a gazillion months to buy. But even a tragedy as significant as a broken shoe (one that was only a month old, thank you
very much) could not deter me from my mission. So, like a true soldier, I tucked my flip-flop under my arm, walked around the enormous stone fountain with the water-spouting statue of Adonis, and stalked through Tippecanoe's heavy oak doors.

It was Tuesday night and the place was unusually packed. As I stood in the entranceway wearing my Save the Bay T-shirt, oversize green shorts (I like my clothes big and comfortable), and only one flip-flop, I was suddenly aware of how much I didn't belong there. Without my polyester suit of invisibility, my true identity was exposed. I made my way through the bevy of polo-shirted men and pearl-clad sundress-wearing women and into the bar, where I found Warthog chatting up a waitress. He didn't look happy to see me, and I had a sneaking suspicion I knew why. For one, I had the feeling that he didn't like us maids hanging around the clubhouse unless we were on the clock and in uniform. For two, no one was allowed in without shoes.

“Is my mom here?” I asked.

“She's not on the schedule tonight,” he said.

“Didn't you call her in to work?”

He shook his head.

“No one is sick?”

“Nope,” he said.

He was wrong about no one being sick. Because I was suddenly pretty certain that I was going to woof
on club property for the second time in less than forty-eight hours. I spun around on my one good heel and made a beeline toward the bathroom, running smack into an innocent bystander off-duty lifeguard of my dreams, Keith McKnight.

“Whoa!” he said, catching me and holding me up. He was obviously dressed for dinner, as was apparent by his bright green polo shirt. Mr. McKnight was a highly respected member of Tippecanoe, and therefore Keith usually had evening meals there with the rest of the Jones Island upper crust. I had learned this thirty-eight days before, when I was wiping up a vodka-tonic spill caused by some vapid gossiping socialites who included Mora Cooper's mother.