Mother had a swim bag filled with flippers and masks and goggles, but there never seemed to be enough to go around. Stepmother taught Girl to spit inside the goggles and rub it around with her fingers to keep the lenses from fogging. Stepmother swam laps with a mask, snorkel, and flippers. Mother used only a pair of goggles. When Girl didn’t have goggles she opened her eyes underwater anyway, until her eyes turned red and one of her parents sent her to the drinking fountain to rinse them. Girl couldn’t ever bring herself to open her eyes in the cold stream of the drinking fountain, but it felt good on her closed eyelids, and she thought her eyes could somehow absorb the benefits of clean water if she blinked with her eyelids almost touching the stream.
Sometimes there were other children at the pool. Girl looked closely at kids with tubes in their ears, the ones who had to wear red or blue ear plugs to stop them up. The plugs looked like Play-Doh, or chewed-up gum.
“Do they hurt?” she asked every kid she saw who had plugs.
“Not really,” they always answered, but Girl didn’t believe them, because how could sticking tubes into your ears not hurt? It was one of the things she was afraid of when she went to the doctor. Mother never made the children use Q-tips at home, so when they went to the pediatrician he always used a long metal tool that had a tiny spoon at the end to get the wax out, and it hurt a lot.
“Dang, I got a sunburn!” a black boy around Girl’s age said to her once, pushing his fingers into his forearm. In the summer, they went out and played in the grass when they were bored with swimming. “You probably don’t think black people can get sunburned,” he said, and he was right. Girl thought he was joking—she had never gotten a sunburn in her life, and she was a lot lighter than he was. All she knew about black kids was that they wore swim caps at the pool more often than white kids, but they mostly didn’t mind playing with her. Not like at day camp, where the kids segregated themselves by race and she was stuck with the few white kids in the urban program. At the pool there weren’t enough kids to be choosy. “Look,” he said as he held out his arm, and pressed his fingertips above his wrist. Girl did the same to her own arm. “See? You can tell by your fingerprints on your arm if you have a sunburn.” Girl looked at his arm, and back at her own, but didn’t see what he was talking about.
Mother always took a long time getting into the pool. She’d walk in slowly, making cold “Ah! Ah!” noises, and splash her body with water for a few minutes, then go “ooooo!” and slide up to her neck all at once. Girl loved to pick Mother up in her arms like a baby and carry her around the shallow end, but Mother only tolerated that for a little while. Sometimes Girl would hold the back of her mother’s bathing suit straps and go for a dolphin ride when she swam laps.
“This is how your grandmother taught me to swim,” Mother said. “I held onto her straps when she swam until I could do it on my own.” Mother’s back was broad and soft, with only one tiny flat mole on her lower right side, so small Girl could only see it when she hung on her back. Mother’s skin was darker than her daughter’s, prettier, Girl thought, and faster to tan. When Girl held onto her mother’s straps they pulled back a little, and she could see the permanent red indentations on her mother’s shoulders from wearing a bra. Girl hoped she never got shoulder indentations, but she did hope she got big boobs, like Mother.
Mother looked different in the pool. It was the only time she didn’t wear glasses, and her mouth was softer, like her lips always wanted to smile. At home, her brows always pulled slightly toward each other, and her lips made a straight line. If you asked her to smile for a picture, she wouldn’t show her teeth. In the water, she smiled with her mouth open and Girl could see all of her teeth.
“Is that your mom?” a new girl asked as Mother walked toward the pool. Girl sighed. She knew what was coming. Mother was fat, but proportional, like a big, soft peanut, and she didn’t dye the gray in her hair, but that wasn’t the major problem. It was her body hair. Under each arm was a round black bush the size of Girl’s fist, and at the bottom of her swimsuit curly hair escaped down her thighs. Her shins were covered in dark hair.
“Why doesn’t she shave?” the strange girl asked, her long, brown ponytail dripping water.
“She doesn’t believe in it. She’s a feminist,” Girl answered, as she had been taught to. She was never, ever to say they were gay. Girl hated anyone to look at her mom like that, like she was weird, or ugly. Mother was the best person in Girl’s whole world. Stepmother didn’t
