Laps
Annette Leavy
Nina arrives at the pool desperate for a swim. Her legs ache from trudging hospital corridors—registration to radiology to blood work to neurology. Hospital smells—disinfectant, disease, decay—cling to her skin. There’s a fall nip in the air. The deck chairs are stacked, the cabana shades rolled back in case of rain, but Nina is determined to swim. Chlorine alone can cleanse her; thirty-two brisk laps return her to a semblance of her usual self.
“It’s all yours,” Mike, the head lifeguard, greets her like he’s read her mind. Arms crossed against the chill, he keeps watch over the empty pool.
How good of him, Nina thinks, as though he’s cleared the pool deck for her. There’s no one she must bid good-bye for the season—take care, see you next year.
In the locker room forsaken beach towels and discarded tubes of sunscreen are her only company. The mahjong players have taken their tiles home for the winter. The preteen gymnasts, who practiced headstands on the benches, have gone back to school. Even her fellow lap swimmers have given up on a late-season swim.
As soon as she opens her locker, the to-do list intrudes—Fresh Direct, the dog walker, All Care Medical Supply, the email. By tonight the phone will ring, text messages will ping: How’s Ezra? What did the doctor say? And Nina will be sorry if she hasn’t sent the email.
Dear family and friends…As you know…While Ezra will need…The good news is…We are so grateful. By now she knows the formula—no, recipe is more her style—by heart, the ingredients balanced like a well-made sauce, tough news proportioned with a spoonful of optimism, sincere affection brightened with a pinch of levity.
Christ, go any further and she’ll have her dear ones feasting on Ezra’s woes. The cancer patient’s wife offers her news with the bonhomie of Julia Child.
Unbecoming. No one’s called her that since her mother died. Today the epithet fits. Unbecoming, unseemly, and likely unraveling, Nina hoists her bathing suit over her hips and stuffs her breasts into cups to send the email packing.
Where is that toddler she flirts with? (“What do you have there? Are you taking that duck for a swim?”) Where’s that spot of lax locker-room gossip or, better yet, preschool smut to giggle over? (Granddaughter: “Grandma, your vagina is s-o-o big.” Grandma: “Just you wait.”)
“Ach.” The caw interrupts Nina’s ruminations. “What a stink.”
Lottie; Nina thinks the woman’s name is Lottie. Not the company she would have chosen but better than nothing.
Nina knows Lottie as she knows other women in the locker room, intimately and not at all. They have never shared a cup of coffee. Nina has never wanted to give Lottie her email address. On the other hand, she has noticed for years how the bras and bottoms of Lottie’s two-piece bathing suits never match. She has watched Lottie rub soap fiercely across her palms and the backs of her hands and through each joint before snapping just one paper towel from the dispenser, offering a demonstration of proper handwashing technique, all the while keeping tabs on her fellow bathroom occupants, turning round to peer over her red half-frames. “Barb, did you flush?”
Lottie, Nina had decided years earlier, was eccentric but harmless. She’d nodded when Lottie scolded, “Your shower’s too long” or “You’ll ruin your suit in that spinner,” and thanked Lottie, who instructed, “You should stretch before you swim,” which, in fact, turned out to improve Nina’s stroke.
“It’s been a wet summer,” Nina now answers mildly. From season to season the subterranean locker room retains the odor of chlorine and mildew. Ceiling fans push humidity around without dispelling it. On hot days you sweat before you towel off, and on days like today the room leaves you shivering after the hottest of showers.
“What’s the matter with you? Have you lost your sense of smell?” Lottie scoffs.
“I hope not.” Nina smiles to avoid trouble.
“Well. You reek.”
Thick, dyed-blonde curls bristle off Lottie’s scalp, a Medicare-plus Bart Simpson, Nina scoffs silently in return. Odd is one thing but this time Lottie’s gone too far.
“I beg your pardon?” Her tone is arch but if Lottie was not glaring at her, she would check under her armpits for B.O. and cup her hands around her mouth to test for bad breath.
~ ~ ~
“Easy fix, you’ll do well,” the surgeon had instructed Ezra earlier that day. Perched on the edge of his desk, towering above Nina and her husband, he’d handed down their fate like an implacable god.
Haven’t we done well enough? Nina had wanted to snap. Instead she had ventured gingerly, “And the cancer?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Doesn’t matter? Nina would have liked to knock the beautiful young doctor with his well-defined biceps and well-trimmed beard off his imperturbable wall of confidence, bloody his pressed scrubs and watch his eyes dull with pain, except she needed his vision unclouded and his manicured hands unscarred.
Ezra’s last chemo had been on Election Day. Together they’d gone to the polls and the infusion unit. At two in the morning, when it was clear that Trump had won, she’d exhorted, “You can’t die while he’s President,” and pulled the covers over her head.
“I won’t,” he had laughed and crawled in beside her.
Six months later Ezra’s hair had grown back, and a year after that t hey’d returned to France. Now, with the midterms still two months away, there’s a fierce, unrelenting pain in Ezra’s spine, a surgery to get through, and an email she can put off writing for only so long.
~ ~ ~
“I guess you’re so used to it you don’t smell it anymore, your scent,” Lottie sneers.
Sixth grade, another locker room—with dirty pink tiles on the floor, Nina was the only girl who had her period. When she came out of a stall to deposit a soiled Kotex in its telltale white paper bag into the trash, Debbie Riley, Rachel Lutz, and Barbara Shore had trapped her. “E-e-w. Get a whiff of that!” And she’d stared at the floor, wishing that the gang’s voodoo dance could rid her of the dark spikes of hair on her legs, the silkier hair on her pubis, the tender protrusions on her chest.
A half-century later she forces herself to look back at Lottie, who yelps like a bomb-sniffing dog, “Toxic, you’re toxic.”
If the email wasn’t rattling her brain, if she hadn’t run away from Ezra to the pool, Nina would think, Poor Lottie, she’s really gone downhill fast. Instead her question emerges, uncertain and small: “Toxic?”
“Toxic,” Lottie insists.
Nina’s hands are clammy. Sweat and dread dampen the back of her neck and gather between her breasts. Fury and sorrow leach from her pores. She shudders with the sudden conviction that Lottie, of all people, Lottie in her mismatched two-piece, so worn it’s indecent, divines how mean, mad, and putrid Nina has become.
“I’ve had a tough morning,” she confides.
“No excuse,” Lottie thunders.
~ ~ ~
“Only one night in the hospital,” Nina had chirped while she and Ezra gathered themselves at Starbucks over skim lattes.
“Enough to get a staph infection,” he’d answered.
Worst-case scenarios are Ezra’s lucky charms. It had taken years for Nina to stop arguing back, but today she was in no mood for her husband’s Chicken Little routine.
“I need a swim,” she’d blurted out.
“Go,” Ezra had urged.
“I’ll come home to make your lunch first.”
“No, go. The last thing we need is for you to get grumpy without your swim.”
As he kissed her good-bye, she felt the stubble on his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For getting old.”
“Ezra, you’re not…” She’d stopped herself. Ezra hadn’t worn a button-down shirt in months. “Too much bother,” he’d said, slipping jerseys over his head, his feet into loafers that didn’t need him to bend and lace.
“I’ll roast a chicken. It’s cool enough,” Nina had promised as Ezra hailed his cab—as if his favorite supper could restore his youth. When she got home from the pool, she’d find him slumped over his book. “What’s for dinner?” he’d ask.
How could you do this to me? She had wanted to shake him. Instead she’d turned away as soon as he got into his taxi, her steps quick with relief, then sluggish with remorse, but all unfailingly in the direction of the pool, her heart breaking and pounding.
“Before you get in that pool, you’re going to scrub it off.” Lottie points her finger at Nina and then at the shower room.
“How can I?” Nina retorts.
“Don’t mock me,” Lottie snarls.
“Mock you?” Nina puzzles, then reconsiders. “Lottie, what are we talking about?”
“Your scent,” Lottie squeals.
“My…Oh.” Nina flushes. “You mean my toilette water? I’ve used it for years.”
“And I’ve waited years to tell you.” Lottie is red in the face.
“For years? That you don’t like my toilette water?”
“It’s toxic.” Lottie’s arms and legs jiggle as if poison is running through her.
24 Faubourg smells like Parisian flowers. Nina has worn toilette water in summer and eau de parfum in cooler months ever since Ezra brought it home for her twenty-five years ago.
“You smell good,” he still sometimes notices as he kisses her good morning. Nina smiles a private smile.
“It’s not funny.” Lottie brings her to.
“No…well, yes, a little.” Nina cocks her head. “Anyway, it’s just my scent.” She shrugs at her double entendre, like a child who mutters a dirty word to test the grown-ups, and only then catches the edge of hysteria in her giggle, laughing away the boogieman, unsure if he is real or pretend.
“Ach.” Lottie scrunches her face.
Enough, Nina decides as she turns away toward the pool. How ridiculous to fight with Lottie when she could be swimming. Fight because it’s easier than writing an email that couches her terror in cheer; because she fears Ezra will not smile their private smile when he asks, how was your swim, and she answers, fine but guess what, I met a woman who hates 24 Faubourg.
~ ~ ~
How did it happen? Lottie has beaten her into the pool, doing jumping jacks and jogging in the shallow end, giving the odd little whoop that always accompanies her warm-up. She doesn’t notice Nina or pretends not to. The élan Nina felt as she turned her back on Lottie is punctured and deflates. The composure she achieved standing before the mirror adjusting her earplugs and swim cap was a ruse.
What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room; the women of the swim club abide by this compact. If someone raises her voice to a child or her best friend, curses into her cell phone, or cries into her towel, it is understood that locker-room secrets will never be revealed on the pool deck.
Even Lottie, Nina tries to reassure herself, would be too embarrassed to continue their encounter above ground. Then again, since she descended into the locker room, nothing has been as Nina expected. She hardly recognizes herself.
You could go home, she reminds herself. Instead, wanting her swim more than ever, she takes the lane as far away from Lottie as possible and makes sure to give Mike a wave before she jumps in.
At first she sticks to the breaststroke, lifting her head out of the water to keep an eye on Lottie. It begins to rain. There is nothing Nina likes better than a swim in the rain. Soon enough her arms and legs take over, as if they had a will of their own, and she swims freestyle. Water is her element. On land she is a tortoise, holds banisters, fears falling on ice. Swimming she is a different animal. Her belly is taut; her arms arc and slice the water; her legs are as purposeful as a fin. No lists run through her head. The water ripples but does not break her stride.
When a buoy from the rope that divides the lanes bumps Nina’s side, she ignores it, a second time and a third until her flank nearly grazes the side of the pool. She’s not sure what’s happening. The rain has picked up, but she’s heard no thunder or warning whistle. Reaching the shallow end of the pool, she turns and pushes off to start her next lap. But as she begins her stroke, the buoy seems to take aim and lands a blow on her side. She flails and swerves across the lane into the concrete sidewall. Pushing herself away, she halts and stands up to figure out what’s going on.
Lottie. Of course. Lottie is pumping the rope toward Nina, corralling her against the wall.
Oh no you don’t. “Stop!” Nina cries. She glares at Lottie, resolute and fierce while she grips the rope and pushes Lottie back into her own lane. Planting her feet, she widens her stance, ready to engage in battle.
“Get out of the pool. Get out! You’re killing me,” Lottie screams.
~ ~ ~
Ever since he got cancer, Ezra sees murder everywhere. Trump’s a thug; Netanyahu worse for the Jews than Hitler. “If the cancer doesn’t kill me, the chemo will” had become his stale joke, and not two hours ago over coffee—how could Nina forget? But really she hadn’t forgotten—after they had agreed the surgeon was an arrogant, cold fish, and she had said, “We’ll get a second opinion,” Ezra had exclaimed in return, “It’s too much. You’re killing me.”
He doesn’t mean it, she’d told herself.
“You know I don’t mean it,” he’d said at once. “Just a turn of phrase.”
“Find another one,” she’d snapped, then mollified, “I know how hard it is.”
“No, you don’t,” he’d said.
~ ~ ~
“My perfume can’t kill you.” Nina tries her no-nonsense-now-now-no-more-tantrum voice on Lottie, one last appeal to reason while holding tightly to the rope.
“How do you know?” Lottie retorts.
It’s no use. “I’ll leave when Mike tells me to.” The lifeguard has already descended his perch and is making his way toward them. Even though he’s near her lane, Nina can’t wait. She won’t. Every muscle, sinew, and nerve in her body cries out swim. “You ask him,” she goads Lottie and turns away to start her next lap.
Before Nina can push off, Lottie has grabbed her arm, and when Nina twists to wrench free, Lottie tightens her hand like a vise against Nina’s bicep. Her eyes clamp onto Nina. No one has ever stared at Nina like that. Just you wait, Lottie’s locked eyes assert, it will happen to you.
But not yet. Nina stares back, watches Lottie’s face crumple. How terrible, she thinks, to dread the sweet, seductive scent of 24 Faubourg, to be so old that you mistake perfume for poison, so deluded that another woman’s life makes you fear for your own.
The next thing she knows, Mike is beside them in the water. Holding Lottie firmly but kindly in a lifesaving hug, he asks, “Lottie, what’s going on?”
“She thinks my perfume is toxic,” Nina explains sheepishly as Lottie’s hand goes limp.
“You’d better write a report.” Lottie’s command is shrill.
“Yes.” Mike heaves a sigh. “There’ll be a report.” And for a terrible minute, Nina thinks Mike, too, finds her guilty and begins to shiver.
“You must be cold.” Mike turns to her. “There’s a towel.” His chin juts toward a chair at the side of the pool. He guides Lottie out of the pool in the opposite direction, where Carla, the manager, drapes another towel around Lottie, who is led away whimpering like a defeated prizefighter.
“Poor Lottie,” Nina says when Mike returns and means it, standing at the pool’s edge, warmed by the towel.
“We’ve been struggling with this all summer,” Mike confides, then solicits, “What can I do for you?”
“I just want to finish my laps.” Mike is so kind Nina thinks she might cry. Blinking away tears, she sees alarm spread across his face. Poor Mike. There she stands, an almost-old woman with crenelated thighs in her black miracle suit and pink Speedo cap, who must, at all cost, have her swim. He must think she’s as batty as Lottie.
“But your arm! Are you sure?” Mike points to her arm, where she sees three raised, purpling welts across her bicep.
It looks alarming, she has to admit. “Ugly,” she reassures Mike, “but I’m fine,” lifting her arm overhead and circling it around to prove it. You should let him get out of the rain, she thinks, but by the time he answers, “There’s nothing like a swim in the rain,” she’s already back in the water.
The rain is steady. There’s no line between sky and pool. Water seems to surround her. As can happen toward season’s end, her breath carries her effortlessly from one end of the pool to the other without stopping, as though she is swimming in open water with no need to come up for air. She is a sea creature, the whale or porpoise she is meant to be, an orca singing her fear and sorrow, her song booming through the water for her tribe to hear and follow her as far as she needs to go.
Annette Leavy
Nina arrives at the pool desperate for a swim. Her legs ache from trudging hospital corridors—registration to radiology to blood work to neurology. Hospital smells—disinfectant, disease, decay—cling to her skin. There’s a fall nip in the air. The deck chairs are stacked, the cabana shades rolled back in case of rain, but Nina is determined to swim. Chlorine alone can cleanse her; thirty-two brisk laps return her to a semblance of her usual self.
“It’s all yours,” Mike, the head lifeguard, greets her like he’s read her mind. Arms crossed against the chill, he keeps watch over the empty pool.
How good of him, Nina thinks, as though he’s cleared the pool deck for her. There’s no one she must bid good-bye for the season—take care, see you next year.
In the locker room forsaken beach towels and discarded tubes of sunscreen are her only company. The mahjong players have taken their tiles home for the winter. The preteen gymnasts, who practiced headstands on the benches, have gone back to school. Even her fellow lap swimmers have given up on a late-season swim.
As soon as she opens her locker, the to-do list intrudes—Fresh Direct, the dog walker, All Care Medical Supply, the email. By tonight the phone will ring, text messages will ping: How’s Ezra? What did the doctor say? And Nina will be sorry if she hasn’t sent the email.
Dear family and friends…As you know…While Ezra will need…The good news is…We are so grateful. By now she knows the formula—no, recipe is more her style—by heart, the ingredients balanced like a well-made sauce, tough news proportioned with a spoonful of optimism, sincere affection brightened with a pinch of levity.
Christ, go any further and she’ll have her dear ones feasting on Ezra’s woes. The cancer patient’s wife offers her news with the bonhomie of Julia Child.
Unbecoming. No one’s called her that since her mother died. Today the epithet fits. Unbecoming, unseemly, and likely unraveling, Nina hoists her bathing suit over her hips and stuffs her breasts into cups to send the email packing.
Where is that toddler she flirts with? (“What do you have there? Are you taking that duck for a swim?”) Where’s that spot of lax locker-room gossip or, better yet, preschool smut to giggle over? (Granddaughter: “Grandma, your vagina is s-o-o big.” Grandma: “Just you wait.”)
“Ach.” The caw interrupts Nina’s ruminations. “What a stink.”
Lottie; Nina thinks the woman’s name is Lottie. Not the company she would have chosen but better than nothing.
Nina knows Lottie as she knows other women in the locker room, intimately and not at all. They have never shared a cup of coffee. Nina has never wanted to give Lottie her email address. On the other hand, she has noticed for years how the bras and bottoms of Lottie’s two-piece bathing suits never match. She has watched Lottie rub soap fiercely across her palms and the backs of her hands and through each joint before snapping just one paper towel from the dispenser, offering a demonstration of proper handwashing technique, all the while keeping tabs on her fellow bathroom occupants, turning round to peer over her red half-frames. “Barb, did you flush?”
Lottie, Nina had decided years earlier, was eccentric but harmless. She’d nodded when Lottie scolded, “Your shower’s too long” or “You’ll ruin your suit in that spinner,” and thanked Lottie, who instructed, “You should stretch before you swim,” which, in fact, turned out to improve Nina’s stroke.
“It’s been a wet summer,” Nina now answers mildly. From season to season the subterranean locker room retains the odor of chlorine and mildew. Ceiling fans push humidity around without dispelling it. On hot days you sweat before you towel off, and on days like today the room leaves you shivering after the hottest of showers.
“What’s the matter with you? Have you lost your sense of smell?” Lottie scoffs.
“I hope not.” Nina smiles to avoid trouble.
“Well. You reek.”
Thick, dyed-blonde curls bristle off Lottie’s scalp, a Medicare-plus Bart Simpson, Nina scoffs silently in return. Odd is one thing but this time Lottie’s gone too far.
“I beg your pardon?” Her tone is arch but if Lottie was not glaring at her, she would check under her armpits for B.O. and cup her hands around her mouth to test for bad breath.
~ ~ ~
“Easy fix, you’ll do well,” the surgeon had instructed Ezra earlier that day. Perched on the edge of his desk, towering above Nina and her husband, he’d handed down their fate like an implacable god.
Haven’t we done well enough? Nina had wanted to snap. Instead she had ventured gingerly, “And the cancer?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Doesn’t matter? Nina would have liked to knock the beautiful young doctor with his well-defined biceps and well-trimmed beard off his imperturbable wall of confidence, bloody his pressed scrubs and watch his eyes dull with pain, except she needed his vision unclouded and his manicured hands unscarred.
Ezra’s last chemo had been on Election Day. Together they’d gone to the polls and the infusion unit. At two in the morning, when it was clear that Trump had won, she’d exhorted, “You can’t die while he’s President,” and pulled the covers over her head.
“I won’t,” he had laughed and crawled in beside her.
Six months later Ezra’s hair had grown back, and a year after that t hey’d returned to France. Now, with the midterms still two months away, there’s a fierce, unrelenting pain in Ezra’s spine, a surgery to get through, and an email she can put off writing for only so long.
~ ~ ~
“I guess you’re so used to it you don’t smell it anymore, your scent,” Lottie sneers.
Sixth grade, another locker room—with dirty pink tiles on the floor, Nina was the only girl who had her period. When she came out of a stall to deposit a soiled Kotex in its telltale white paper bag into the trash, Debbie Riley, Rachel Lutz, and Barbara Shore had trapped her. “E-e-w. Get a whiff of that!” And she’d stared at the floor, wishing that the gang’s voodoo dance could rid her of the dark spikes of hair on her legs, the silkier hair on her pubis, the tender protrusions on her chest.
A half-century later she forces herself to look back at Lottie, who yelps like a bomb-sniffing dog, “Toxic, you’re toxic.”
If the email wasn’t rattling her brain, if she hadn’t run away from Ezra to the pool, Nina would think, Poor Lottie, she’s really gone downhill fast. Instead her question emerges, uncertain and small: “Toxic?”
“Toxic,” Lottie insists.
Nina’s hands are clammy. Sweat and dread dampen the back of her neck and gather between her breasts. Fury and sorrow leach from her pores. She shudders with the sudden conviction that Lottie, of all people, Lottie in her mismatched two-piece, so worn it’s indecent, divines how mean, mad, and putrid Nina has become.
“I’ve had a tough morning,” she confides.
“No excuse,” Lottie thunders.
~ ~ ~
“Only one night in the hospital,” Nina had chirped while she and Ezra gathered themselves at Starbucks over skim lattes.
“Enough to get a staph infection,” he’d answered.
Worst-case scenarios are Ezra’s lucky charms. It had taken years for Nina to stop arguing back, but today she was in no mood for her husband’s Chicken Little routine.
“I need a swim,” she’d blurted out.
“Go,” Ezra had urged.
“I’ll come home to make your lunch first.”
“No, go. The last thing we need is for you to get grumpy without your swim.”
As he kissed her good-bye, she felt the stubble on his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For getting old.”
“Ezra, you’re not…” She’d stopped herself. Ezra hadn’t worn a button-down shirt in months. “Too much bother,” he’d said, slipping jerseys over his head, his feet into loafers that didn’t need him to bend and lace.
“I’ll roast a chicken. It’s cool enough,” Nina had promised as Ezra hailed his cab—as if his favorite supper could restore his youth. When she got home from the pool, she’d find him slumped over his book. “What’s for dinner?” he’d ask.
How could you do this to me? She had wanted to shake him. Instead she’d turned away as soon as he got into his taxi, her steps quick with relief, then sluggish with remorse, but all unfailingly in the direction of the pool, her heart breaking and pounding.
“Before you get in that pool, you’re going to scrub it off.” Lottie points her finger at Nina and then at the shower room.
“How can I?” Nina retorts.
“Don’t mock me,” Lottie snarls.
“Mock you?” Nina puzzles, then reconsiders. “Lottie, what are we talking about?”
“Your scent,” Lottie squeals.
“My…Oh.” Nina flushes. “You mean my toilette water? I’ve used it for years.”
“And I’ve waited years to tell you.” Lottie is red in the face.
“For years? That you don’t like my toilette water?”
“It’s toxic.” Lottie’s arms and legs jiggle as if poison is running through her.
24 Faubourg smells like Parisian flowers. Nina has worn toilette water in summer and eau de parfum in cooler months ever since Ezra brought it home for her twenty-five years ago.
“You smell good,” he still sometimes notices as he kisses her good morning. Nina smiles a private smile.
“It’s not funny.” Lottie brings her to.
“No…well, yes, a little.” Nina cocks her head. “Anyway, it’s just my scent.” She shrugs at her double entendre, like a child who mutters a dirty word to test the grown-ups, and only then catches the edge of hysteria in her giggle, laughing away the boogieman, unsure if he is real or pretend.
“Ach.” Lottie scrunches her face.
Enough, Nina decides as she turns away toward the pool. How ridiculous to fight with Lottie when she could be swimming. Fight because it’s easier than writing an email that couches her terror in cheer; because she fears Ezra will not smile their private smile when he asks, how was your swim, and she answers, fine but guess what, I met a woman who hates 24 Faubourg.
~ ~ ~
How did it happen? Lottie has beaten her into the pool, doing jumping jacks and jogging in the shallow end, giving the odd little whoop that always accompanies her warm-up. She doesn’t notice Nina or pretends not to. The élan Nina felt as she turned her back on Lottie is punctured and deflates. The composure she achieved standing before the mirror adjusting her earplugs and swim cap was a ruse.
What happens in the locker room stays in the locker room; the women of the swim club abide by this compact. If someone raises her voice to a child or her best friend, curses into her cell phone, or cries into her towel, it is understood that locker-room secrets will never be revealed on the pool deck.
Even Lottie, Nina tries to reassure herself, would be too embarrassed to continue their encounter above ground. Then again, since she descended into the locker room, nothing has been as Nina expected. She hardly recognizes herself.
You could go home, she reminds herself. Instead, wanting her swim more than ever, she takes the lane as far away from Lottie as possible and makes sure to give Mike a wave before she jumps in.
At first she sticks to the breaststroke, lifting her head out of the water to keep an eye on Lottie. It begins to rain. There is nothing Nina likes better than a swim in the rain. Soon enough her arms and legs take over, as if they had a will of their own, and she swims freestyle. Water is her element. On land she is a tortoise, holds banisters, fears falling on ice. Swimming she is a different animal. Her belly is taut; her arms arc and slice the water; her legs are as purposeful as a fin. No lists run through her head. The water ripples but does not break her stride.
When a buoy from the rope that divides the lanes bumps Nina’s side, she ignores it, a second time and a third until her flank nearly grazes the side of the pool. She’s not sure what’s happening. The rain has picked up, but she’s heard no thunder or warning whistle. Reaching the shallow end of the pool, she turns and pushes off to start her next lap. But as she begins her stroke, the buoy seems to take aim and lands a blow on her side. She flails and swerves across the lane into the concrete sidewall. Pushing herself away, she halts and stands up to figure out what’s going on.
Lottie. Of course. Lottie is pumping the rope toward Nina, corralling her against the wall.
Oh no you don’t. “Stop!” Nina cries. She glares at Lottie, resolute and fierce while she grips the rope and pushes Lottie back into her own lane. Planting her feet, she widens her stance, ready to engage in battle.
“Get out of the pool. Get out! You’re killing me,” Lottie screams.
~ ~ ~
Ever since he got cancer, Ezra sees murder everywhere. Trump’s a thug; Netanyahu worse for the Jews than Hitler. “If the cancer doesn’t kill me, the chemo will” had become his stale joke, and not two hours ago over coffee—how could Nina forget? But really she hadn’t forgotten—after they had agreed the surgeon was an arrogant, cold fish, and she had said, “We’ll get a second opinion,” Ezra had exclaimed in return, “It’s too much. You’re killing me.”
He doesn’t mean it, she’d told herself.
“You know I don’t mean it,” he’d said at once. “Just a turn of phrase.”
“Find another one,” she’d snapped, then mollified, “I know how hard it is.”
“No, you don’t,” he’d said.
~ ~ ~
“My perfume can’t kill you.” Nina tries her no-nonsense-now-now-no-more-tantrum voice on Lottie, one last appeal to reason while holding tightly to the rope.
“How do you know?” Lottie retorts.
It’s no use. “I’ll leave when Mike tells me to.” The lifeguard has already descended his perch and is making his way toward them. Even though he’s near her lane, Nina can’t wait. She won’t. Every muscle, sinew, and nerve in her body cries out swim. “You ask him,” she goads Lottie and turns away to start her next lap.
Before Nina can push off, Lottie has grabbed her arm, and when Nina twists to wrench free, Lottie tightens her hand like a vise against Nina’s bicep. Her eyes clamp onto Nina. No one has ever stared at Nina like that. Just you wait, Lottie’s locked eyes assert, it will happen to you.
But not yet. Nina stares back, watches Lottie’s face crumple. How terrible, she thinks, to dread the sweet, seductive scent of 24 Faubourg, to be so old that you mistake perfume for poison, so deluded that another woman’s life makes you fear for your own.
The next thing she knows, Mike is beside them in the water. Holding Lottie firmly but kindly in a lifesaving hug, he asks, “Lottie, what’s going on?”
“She thinks my perfume is toxic,” Nina explains sheepishly as Lottie’s hand goes limp.
“You’d better write a report.” Lottie’s command is shrill.
“Yes.” Mike heaves a sigh. “There’ll be a report.” And for a terrible minute, Nina thinks Mike, too, finds her guilty and begins to shiver.
“You must be cold.” Mike turns to her. “There’s a towel.” His chin juts toward a chair at the side of the pool. He guides Lottie out of the pool in the opposite direction, where Carla, the manager, drapes another towel around Lottie, who is led away whimpering like a defeated prizefighter.
“Poor Lottie,” Nina says when Mike returns and means it, standing at the pool’s edge, warmed by the towel.
“We’ve been struggling with this all summer,” Mike confides, then solicits, “What can I do for you?”
“I just want to finish my laps.” Mike is so kind Nina thinks she might cry. Blinking away tears, she sees alarm spread across his face. Poor Mike. There she stands, an almost-old woman with crenelated thighs in her black miracle suit and pink Speedo cap, who must, at all cost, have her swim. He must think she’s as batty as Lottie.
“But your arm! Are you sure?” Mike points to her arm, where she sees three raised, purpling welts across her bicep.
It looks alarming, she has to admit. “Ugly,” she reassures Mike, “but I’m fine,” lifting her arm overhead and circling it around to prove it. You should let him get out of the rain, she thinks, but by the time he answers, “There’s nothing like a swim in the rain,” she’s already back in the water.
The rain is steady. There’s no line between sky and pool. Water seems to surround her. As can happen toward season’s end, her breath carries her effortlessly from one end of the pool to the other without stopping, as though she is swimming in open water with no need to come up for air. She is a sea creature, the whale or porpoise she is meant to be, an orca singing her fear and sorrow, her song booming through the water for her tribe to hear and follow her as far as she needs to go.
