In the third drawer she tried, Anna found what she had been looking for. Among Florence’s underwear and brassieres were a handful of bathing suits. Anything Anna had seen Florence wear in the days before she died was immediately discarded—a Jantzen molded-fit in a burnt-red color and a teal Zephyr with a black belt that cinched at the waist. She shuddered when she realized that the suit Florence had worn to the beach two Sundays ago was, like its wearer, undoubtedly gone forever.
At the back of the drawer was a plain black bathing suit that Anna didn’t recognize. She held it up to get a better look at it. The wool was stretched, the cut not nearly so modern as the suits Florence had worn this summer. Would Stuart recognize it as belonging to Florence? Anna sincerely hoped not. She placed the suit on the dresser top and pulled her nightgown over her head. For a moment, she stood in front of the bureau’s mirror, not moving, just studying her naked body.
She was not nearly so curvy as she’d been in high school. In the last year, there had been the worry over whether she would go to school, then the worry over whether she’d get a visa. Once her visa application had been approved and she knew she was really leaving Berlin and her family behind, it had been hard to eat much of anything, and during the six-day crossing from Hamburg, she’d been unable to hold down so much as a cracker. Even when she’d arrived safely in Atlantic City and Esther had begun spooning generous servings of noodle kugel onto her plate, Anna found it difficult to eat much. Now she blamed homesickness, and perhaps Florence’s death, for the fact that she could count her own ribs. She reached for the suit, pulling the scratchy fabric up and over her hips and then her breasts until it snapped taut against her shoulders. When it was on, she stepped back to examine herself, trying to see as much of her body as the small mirror allowed. The suit cut into her thighs in an unbecoming way, but otherwise, Anna was pleased with the result. She moved her arms through the air in big circles, the way she’d seen Florence do before entering the water.
Somewhere in the apartment, Anna heard a small crash and then the creak of floorboards as Joseph or Esther moved to retrieve what Anna could imagine was a fallen book or a dropped shoe. Terrified that Esther would discover her wearing Florence’s suit, Anna scooped her nightgown up off the floor, switched off the lamp, and dove for her bed. Under the cover of darkness and a thin bedsheet, she wriggled out of the suit and back into her nightgown. What would Anna say if Esther discovered the suit was missing? The poor woman hadn’t set foot in the girls’ room since Florence had died. Surely, she hadn’t kept track of the bathing suits her younger daughter had carted back and forth between the house on Atlantic Avenue, the apartment, and Wellesley?
Anna was all nerves by the time she left for the Kentucky Avenue beach tent on Tuesday evening. She was nervous to get in the water, where she knew she’d have no control of her own body, but she was more nervous to approach a tent full of lifeguards she didn’t know and ask for Stuart. What if the lifeguards couldn’t understand her accent? Or worse, thought she was one of those silly girls who Florence had liked to make fun of—the ones who chased lifeguards up and down the beach. What if Stuart wasn’t there? It was possible he’d changed his mind about the whole thing. She worried she’d been too forward asking for the lessons in the first place. Ever since Florence had drowned, she’d just felt so overwhelmed. Somehow, her inability to swim felt like an indicator that she was ill fit to be here at all. If, at any point, the ocean might swallow her up, what would the rest of this big and disorderly country do to her?
The beach was beginning to clear, and while the beach tent was full of guards hustling back and forth, it was easy to spot Stuart, who had to be half a head taller than most of the men on the Patrol and was definitely the most handsome.
“I’ve been keeping an eye out for you,” he said as he stacked a bunch of oars against one of the walls of the tent.
“Am I late?”
“No, not at all.”
He threw a final oar on the pile and shouted to someone inside the tent, “Bernie, I’m out of here.”
Anna was surprised when Stuart started toward the Boardwalk and not the ocean. She hesitated to follow him, wondering if perhaps he was just retrieving something, but he called over his shoulder to her, “You coming?” so she hurried to catch up.
“Where are we going?” Anna asked as Stuart stopped at the base of the steps that led up to the Boardwalk to brush the sand from his feet.
“You can learn to swim in the ocean but it’s easier to learn in a pool.”
“Pool?”
“Sure,” he said, gliding his feet, still sticky with sand, into a pair of old moccasins. “You’ll save yourself being clobbered by waves, and I’ll be able to see your stroke.”
He stood then and took the stairs two at a time. Anna’s sandals were full of sand but she felt self-conscious around Stuart and didn’t want to keep him waiting while she removed them to shake the sand out. As she walked up the stairs
