Lessons
Matthew Marcus
Sweating in the steam of the indoor pool of the Riverdale Y, Avi tried, against numerous obstacles, including the dark-skinned woman next to him, whom Avi had a strong notion to engage in conversation, to focus on Middlemarch. He was reading page 279 for the sixth time, with each pass processing one more tortuous sentence. It would take another few passes to piece the parts together into a coherent whole. His test was this: could I tell somebody what I’ve just read? As of now, regarding page 279, the answer would be no. But Avi would persist because persistence was one of his chief virtues.
In the water, Elijah, seven, was in his third six-week session of the “guppies” class. The three other kids who’d started with him had all moved up to the goldfish group, but Elijah, small, weak, and timid, was still barely able to flail himself the width of the pool, always arriving at his destination gargling and coughing. The instructor, Gina, who was young, lithe and beautiful and made Avi wish he could take swim lessons, too, told Avi to be patient, that Elijah was “getting it.” Avi reflected that at the current rate, the boy would still be “getting it” well into adolescence. Back when he was six, maybe it was only five, Avi had mastered the crawl quickly and effortlessly, and his parents had placed him on a local swim team, where he never finished worse than third in a race. He’d also never failed a math or spelling test or lost in the first round of a spelling bee or forced his parents to be called in for special conferences over concerns about his attentiveness. All in all, the boy was a bewilderment. He also looked, for Avi’s taste far too much like his mother, particularly around the eyes.
The swim lessons were her idea. Avi said they should wait another year, at least, until Elijah was stronger. Avi had implicit faith in the power of time to address weaknesses.
“But he needs to be able to swim,” Dora said. “It’s not safe that he can’t be alone in the water.”
“I think we can manage to keep him away from open waters for a while longer.” They were in the waiting room at the lawyer’s office. They had some final details to hammer out in the divorce.
“That’s not the point,” she said.
The missing of points had become a recurring theme in their conversations. Once upon a time they’d been able to follow each other just fine. Or they’d been good at not caring when they missed. Back when they’d had effortless fucking at their disposal.
“I think it is,” he said. “Give me one practical reason he needs to be able to swim right now. He hates it. He already has enough things he’s bad at. Everything, basically.”
“That’s not true.”
“What’s he good at it? Name something he can do as well as other kids his age.”
“He’s very perceptive. He’s emotionally very advanced for his age. He’s very in tune with his feelings. He expresses himself very clearly.”
“That may be the single worst thing a boy can be good at. Bullies don’t stop giving you wedgies because you can articulate your feelings.”
“He says the other kids in his class are being very nice to him this year.”
“They’re not nice to him. They just leave him alone. Give it a year. Second grade is when kids discover the thrill of picking on the weaker kids. I’ve witnessed this first hand in a variety of contexts.”
“Even if he’s bad at it, swimming will make him stronger. It will be great for his body. And his mind. Didn’t you say that swimming is the reason you’re so clear headed?”
He suspected sarcasm, but she’d made a good argument, and as a matter of principle, Avi would not reject a good argument. “I doubt it will make him anything other than soggy, but on the slim chance that it wakes him up a little, I’ll give it a shot. We do one round of lessons, then we give a long, brutally honest evaluation.”
“There’s a session at the Y starting Monday.”
“You’ve done your research, I see.”
Even after living in New York for ten years, Avi still got a kick out of the H, for Hebrew, in the YMHA. Growing up In Roanoke, Avi was always uneasy about the C in YMCA, in whose pool he’d spent a good portion of his childhood and adolescence. Though there was not so much as a crucifix on the premises, at least not that he’d found, Avi nonetheless always walked as quickly as possible through the lobby, vaguely fearful that a mob of Jesus lovers would spot the Jew in their midst and point out, in a most gentle southern manner (for this was a community institution, after all) that whatever the membership roster might say, he didn’t actually quite belong.
At the Riverdale Y, Avi felt equally out of place, but now because he was sure he was the only young, newly-divorced father who was afraid to watch his son’s swim lesson. He wasn’t worried that something bad would happen to Elijah in the shallow end with two swim instructors and lifeguard on hand, plus Avi himself, if it came to that. Rather, he was afraid that the boy would embarrass himself, either by failing or being too timid even to risk failure, and the shame would infect them both for day, weeks, years to come. So Avi tried to absorb himself in the quaintly profound dramas of Middlemarch, and when that didn’t pan out, he started furtively parent gazing.
To his left a young Hispanic woman, whose son was one of three boys in Elijah’s guppie group, was tapping on her phone, her long nails making audible clicks on the screen. He’d chatted with the woman a few times, learned her son’s name (Diego), her son’s age (six) and his favorite superhero (Batman, duh) and her profession (social work), but he did not know her name, nor she his. Avi struggled with the question of when it was appropriate to exchange names with somebody. In New York, he’d observed, people did it infrequently and only if the relationship seemed likely to extend beyond the immediate present. In the South people were always introducing themselves, offering their hand and telling you their name, often both first and last, with earnest conviction. Avi hated these exchanges because the revelation of his name would be greeted, at best, with a furtive head cock, and then repeated it back to him. “Avi.” The question was implied, but some some people just came right out with it: “What kind of name is that?” “It’s Biblical,” Avi would say, which was true but also safely non-committal. Because even to say, “It’s Hebrew” risked bringing his tribal affiliation into the open. Then he risked being subjected to a battery of questions about what goes on in a “Jewish church” and what did he really think of Jesus, and then on to concerns about his immortal soul, if he’d stumbled upon an evangelical type.
They must have known, regardless, that he was not, ethnically speaking, from “around here,” though he’d in fact been born in Roanoke. He was darker skinned than any of the other white kids, had curly hair and a gently hooked, though not especially large nose. His parents had moved to Virginia from New York in the late 1970’s, but because they were both doctors whose interactions were with the most enlightened segments of the community, they were not subject to the ignorance and condescension that Avi faced, or feared facing, on a daily basis. Or perhaps his parents, aloof in their sophistication, simply didn’t care what anybody thought of them. This could explain why they burdened him with such a conspicuously Jewish name.
“Why couldn’t you have named me Marc? Or David?”
“Because you’re named for your mother’s uncle.”
“I know,” Avi said. “Avraham. Of blessed memory.”
“We liked the pithiness of the diminutive. Hence, Avi.”
“There wasn’t a less ethnic sounding “A” name available? Adam? Arthur? Anthony? OK, that’s a little Catholic. But Adam would’ve worked. It’s as all purpose a name as there is.”
“We liked Avi. And you looked like an Avi when you came out. And why should you have to hide who you are? We’ve tried to make you proud of being Jewish.”
“I’m plenty proud, dad. But the rest of the world isn’t proud of me being Jewish. Not in these parts. They look at me funny.”
“You’re twelve years old, son. It’s natural to feel feel self-conscious. I’m sure it’s mostly in your head.”
“And when people ask me if it’s true that Jews have horns, is that in my head?”
“Somebody really asked you that?”
“Just the other day.”
His father laughed. “Well, it takes all kinds. Tell them your horns don’t come in until after your Bar Mitzvah.”
“Then I’ll have to explain what a Bar Mitzvah is.”
His father laughed. Avi thundered to his room to look at the Penthouse his friends were passing around in week-long shifts.
Avi found the young mother, who was full-figured but well proportioned, with a round-eyed girlish face, alluring. She was not wearing a wedding ring, nor could Avi discern any sort of ring-shaped tan line on either hand. Since his separation Avi had become audacious with women in a way he never had been before his marriage. Unlike in the years before his marriage, he was having no trouble meeting women and getting them into bed, even when he wasn’t sure he wanted them there. The key, he suspected, was that women could tell that he wanted and expected nothing from them and therefore had more to give. Or perhaps the women wanted and expecting nothing themselves.
It felt crude, though, trying to pick up a woman, married or not, at a child’s swim lesson. He liked to keep his roles as parent and predatory male separate. He didn’t really believe in childhood innocence, since he’d never felt innocent a day in his life, but he wanted to model for Elijah something a little better than reckless self-indulgence. He wondered, when he could not resist the urge to wonder, if Dora were dating and if so, if she’d managed to do it without Elijah noticing. He knew she would want to protect her son from the full-blown reality that his parents would never be together again.
The young mother was playing a game on her phone involving numbers, which was perhaps a sign of intelligence, at least relative to, say, tapping rows of blinking jellybeans. He looked at the kids in the water. Diego was having no trouble with his freestyle and could swim from the wall to teacher three lanes away in three fluid strokes. Then it was Elijah’s turn, and the boy splashed and rocked and gurgled for fifteen seconds before Gina reached out to shorten the distance.
“Very good, Elijah,” he heard her say.
The young mother, distracted from her game by the commotion, looked at Avi and smiled. An elegant bit of gloating.
“Well, he’s not drowning,” Avi said.
“You know how I learned to swim?” the woman said.
‘How?”
“My father threw me in the water and said, ‘Swim!” She laughed.
“It worked, I take it. I mean, you didn’t drown. Because you’re here, talking to me.” Avi added a chuckle because she was clearly missing the humor.
“Oh, I figured it out pretty quickly. I wanted to teach Sebastian the same way but his dad said no way, if somebody sees they’ll call CPS on us. Everyone’s gotten so sensitive. That’s why kids are so helpless these days.”
“I hear you,” Avi said. This was a standard line he used when he thought somebody was out of their fucking mind and didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “Anyway, Diego seems to be learning pretty fast the modern wimpy way.”
“Now he’s OK. You should have seen him before the first day of class. He was screaming and crying and kicking. I was going to be all tough and be like, ‘Stop acting like a little baby and just get in the water,’ but the teacher sweet talked him in. Then he was fine.”
Elijah had not been fine the first day of his lessons. He wouldn’t admit to being scared, so he kept giving rational reasons why he didn’t need swim lessons.
“I don’t need to be able to swim. We don’t live near the water. It’s not right to make kids do things they don’t want to do.”
Like his mother said, the boy was all too good at expressing his anxieties. Elijah sounded less like an adult—most grown-ups being no more articulate than most children—than like a Greek chorus. Relatives and teachers found the boy fascinating and charming, but his peers found him to be weird, at best. He had only one friend, a Russian boy who spoke a strange pidgin English consisting mostly of computer jargon and superhero names. They played video games together.
Elijah was scared of getting in the water, of course, and had every right to be because he barely had the coordination to get his pants on. Dora had wanted him to get evaluated because he could probably get physical therapy from the board of education, but Avi did not want the boy to be labelled and stigmatized by the forces of educational bureaucracy. He insisted to her, and himself, that Elijah was just a late bloomer. Kids take longer these days because we don’t let them sleep on their stomachs. He’d read that somewhere.
The first class Avi and Dora had taken him together. Elijah stood on the second step, the water up to his ankles, giving his mother pleading looks. He didn’t look at Avi. By the end of the class he’d gotten in up to his waste. Putting his head in was out of the question.
Avi thought they might get better results if he took him alone. “Being around you makes him timid,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s not about you, Dora. It’s a mother thing. A compliment, really, to your nurturing abilities. The infant inside him sees you there and expects to be coddled. He can’t help it.”
“And he looks at you and thinks, ‘Oh, big, tough dad there, better man up and dive in.’”
“Something like that, yes.”
She said he was full of shit but also agreed to give it a try.
The results were scarcely better the next two classes, but Elijah did, as predicted, avoid eye contact with his father. Before the fourth class, Avi had offered an ice cream sundae if he’d put his face in the water.
“That’s not going to work, dad. I’m not going to risk my life for ice cream.”
“You’re not risking your life son. Do you see all those other kids in the pool with their faces in the water, still alive? That’s because putting your face in the water doesn’t kill you. Just wait until it’s out of the water before your breathe.”
“I’ll do it when I feel ready.”
“I need you to be ready now. These classes cost too much money for me to just sit there and watch you be scared.”
“I’m not scared. I’m just being careful.”
“Then be a little less careful. It’s killing me.”
That day, Elijah did get his face wet and allowed the teacher to float him on his back. Avi wasn’t sure if Elijah wanted to please his father or was afraid of killing him. He took many things very literally.
The other parents on the bleachers, some chatting, most just staring into space, seemed very relaxed, perhaps, Avi reflected, because their children were physically competent and unlikely to create a scene in the water. The woman next to him, apparently having said all she had to say to Avi, went back to her numbers game. He’d heard enough of her voice, which was pleasant but forgettable, that she’d lost all mystery for him. He still found Dora more interesting than anybody he’d met since, even during the years of marriage when he’d rather sit in an anechoic chamber than have to converse with her. Because he never really did know much about her, and even when he’d given up trying to understand and be understood, he loved all the parts left unrevealed. It was the things he did know that drove him away, although, technically, the divorce was her idea. “We can’t go on like this,” she said, and though he didn’t know exactly what “this” referred to, he had to agree.
The other members of the class were now standing next to Gina at the edge of the pool. It was time for jumping in. Gina stood in the water, about two feet from the wall, and called the kids one at a time. “OK, Sebastian. You’re first.” Her chipper soprano made Avi’s heart pitter patter. Sebastian took a big breath and went for it, springing up with both legs, tucking his knees to his chest and landing with a splash. His mother clapped.
“He’s never done that before?” Avi asked her.
She shook her head.
“He’s a natural.” He hoped she couldn’t hear the outraged envy.
She nodded.
Then the girl, who was the tallest of the bunch by a few inches, stepped over the edge and fell in with a gentle plunk. Avi looked around to see who the lucky parent might be. He spotted a tall woman pointing and smiling as she spoke to a man next to her. Oh, you lucky, by-the-book parents, bringing your daughter to lessons together, watching her flourish. But just you wait until she hits puberty. Let’s see you pointing and clapping when she learns to say I hate you for making me. Because surely all children would say this, sooner or later.
The other boy, who was black and the smallest of the bunch, took a nonchalant step off the edge and hit the water almost silently, went under for a second, then popped up, shouting, “Woo hoo!” Avi spotted his father giving an enthusiastic nod of affirmation.
“OK, Elijah, your turn,” Gina said.
Elijah looked at her for several seconds, then shook his head.
“It’s OK. I’m right here. Just step in and I’ll catch you.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Elijah said. Even through the splashing in the water and the din on the pool deck, Avi could hear the terror in his voice.
“You don’t have anything to be afraid of. You don’t even have to jump. You can just step in.“
Elijah just stood there, his body rigid.
“Go ahead, Elijah. Make your daddy proud.”
Elijah turned and looked at Avi. He shook his head as he spoke, his lip trembling. “I can’t, dad.”
“Sure you can. The other kids just did it. And they’re alive and smiling.”
“No,” Elijah said.
“I think he needs a pep talk,” Avi said to the young mother. “Better work the daddy magic.”
“Good luck,” she said. Avi believed he heard a note of derision.
Avi, trying his best not to embarrass the boy, which was tempting and all too easy to do, whispered in his ear. “If you do this, I’ll be very proud. And not only that, but afterward we’ll go right to the toy store and you can get a new video game.” Avi wanted to believe he was doing this for the boy’s own good, because he needed to learn to overcome fear, which was what life consisted of, by and large, but he knew it was mainly because there was an audience that would judge father and son as one lump sum of failure.
Elijah’s face relaxed for a moment, but then he turned and looked at the water and the look of terror returned.
“This offer won’t last long, son. Better act fast.” He gave Elijah a pat on the bottom and went back to his seat. He didn’t look at the woman, whose father he now begrudgingly admired for doing the right thing, tossing her in to sink or not sink before she could humiliate herself with cowardice.
Elijah turned and looked back Avi, who gave him a little fist pump.
Elijah took a deep breath and bent his knees.
‘On the count of three, Elijah,” Gina said. “Ready? One . . . Two . . .”
Growing up, Avi often had dreams of jumping from high places with no bottom in sight, then waking up bouncing about in his bed. Once he screamed, and his parents rushed into the bedroom. It may have started when he read about Evel Knievel trying to fly across the grand canyon in a steam-powered rocket, but in the dreams Avi was always somewhere vague and blurry, with no audience and often naked. The leap was always voluntary and pre-meditated, and he always called out the name of a girl as he fell. The first time he had such a dream he was terrified, but once he got used to them and realized there was no actual danger, he learned to embrace the transient thrill.
When he hit puberty the falling dreams gave way to the usual fluid-laced adolescent dreams, usually featuring the classmates least interested in him and some who were but only because he was an oddity. At age 17 when he started actually experiencing some of the encounters he’d dreamed about, the falling dreams resumed, and girls were often rudely awakened by Avi calling out a random female name and bouncing around in the bed. Some of the girls worried about him. Others found it disturbing and would not sleep with him again.
Once he got married the dreams stopped. Perhaps the stability of his relationship took away the falling feelings in his life. Or perhaps he'd lost the ability to be thrilled. He thought the dreams would resume when he was released from the safety and mundanity of marriage, but so far they had not. Instead he started having wet dreams for the first time since adolescence, only now featuring Dora, doing things to and for him she would never have actually done and that he would not have wanted her to do, except in the abstract.
He’d asked Elijah once what he dreamed about.
“I dream about getting new video games,” he said. “And sometimes I dream that you and Mommy live together.”
Well, of course.
Elijah’s knees were bent, his legs shaking, his arms raised.
“Three!” Gina said.
Eliah straightened his legs, and hoisted his body upward, but his feet stayed on the ground. He lost his balanced a bit and almost feel forward, but righted himself.
He looked down at his feet in shame.
“What happened, son?” Avi said.
Elijah spoke but was facing the wrong way, so Avi couldn’t hear him.
“Look at me and say it again.”
Elijah turned and looked at his dad. His face no longer expressed terror, but something much richer and more permanent. Resignation.
“Why didn’t you jump?”
“It wasn’t the right time, OK?”
Avi reminded himself that he was going to be patient and nurturing. The boy couldn’t help his limitations. He wasn’t being a wuss to show up his father, though Avi was sure the other parents were getting a kick out of the ordeal. But it was a lot to take, the boy’s total incompetence at the simplest of physical tasks. And if he was afraid to take a small leap into shallow water, what hope was there for him in the big, cold, dangerous world?
Unlike Dora, Avi did not feel guilty for putting the boy through their divorce. He did not feel guilty because the divorce was not his fault. Nor hers. It was the fault of marriage itself, its suffocating promises of permanence and death. He felt, rather, defeated. Here was one more way life would kick the boy in the rear end, and his own father was aiding and abetting. The least he could do was instill a bit of grit.
He had a notion to pick the boy up and toss him, and that would be that. He’d be reprimanded for sure, maybe barred from the pool for life. Maybe they’d call CPS on him. But he’d have made his point loud and clear. We don’t let fear stop us. Unless love is involved. Then fear wins every time.
Avi did nothing, just shrugged and rolled his eyes. He watched Elijah sit on the edge of the pool and let Gina ease him into the water, where she floated him on his back, cradling his head in her arms.
Matthew Marcus
Sweating in the steam of the indoor pool of the Riverdale Y, Avi tried, against numerous obstacles, including the dark-skinned woman next to him, whom Avi had a strong notion to engage in conversation, to focus on Middlemarch. He was reading page 279 for the sixth time, with each pass processing one more tortuous sentence. It would take another few passes to piece the parts together into a coherent whole. His test was this: could I tell somebody what I’ve just read? As of now, regarding page 279, the answer would be no. But Avi would persist because persistence was one of his chief virtues.
In the water, Elijah, seven, was in his third six-week session of the “guppies” class. The three other kids who’d started with him had all moved up to the goldfish group, but Elijah, small, weak, and timid, was still barely able to flail himself the width of the pool, always arriving at his destination gargling and coughing. The instructor, Gina, who was young, lithe and beautiful and made Avi wish he could take swim lessons, too, told Avi to be patient, that Elijah was “getting it.” Avi reflected that at the current rate, the boy would still be “getting it” well into adolescence. Back when he was six, maybe it was only five, Avi had mastered the crawl quickly and effortlessly, and his parents had placed him on a local swim team, where he never finished worse than third in a race. He’d also never failed a math or spelling test or lost in the first round of a spelling bee or forced his parents to be called in for special conferences over concerns about his attentiveness. All in all, the boy was a bewilderment. He also looked, for Avi’s taste far too much like his mother, particularly around the eyes.
The swim lessons were her idea. Avi said they should wait another year, at least, until Elijah was stronger. Avi had implicit faith in the power of time to address weaknesses.
“But he needs to be able to swim,” Dora said. “It’s not safe that he can’t be alone in the water.”
“I think we can manage to keep him away from open waters for a while longer.” They were in the waiting room at the lawyer’s office. They had some final details to hammer out in the divorce.
“That’s not the point,” she said.
The missing of points had become a recurring theme in their conversations. Once upon a time they’d been able to follow each other just fine. Or they’d been good at not caring when they missed. Back when they’d had effortless fucking at their disposal.
“I think it is,” he said. “Give me one practical reason he needs to be able to swim right now. He hates it. He already has enough things he’s bad at. Everything, basically.”
“That’s not true.”
“What’s he good at it? Name something he can do as well as other kids his age.”
“He’s very perceptive. He’s emotionally very advanced for his age. He’s very in tune with his feelings. He expresses himself very clearly.”
“That may be the single worst thing a boy can be good at. Bullies don’t stop giving you wedgies because you can articulate your feelings.”
“He says the other kids in his class are being very nice to him this year.”
“They’re not nice to him. They just leave him alone. Give it a year. Second grade is when kids discover the thrill of picking on the weaker kids. I’ve witnessed this first hand in a variety of contexts.”
“Even if he’s bad at it, swimming will make him stronger. It will be great for his body. And his mind. Didn’t you say that swimming is the reason you’re so clear headed?”
He suspected sarcasm, but she’d made a good argument, and as a matter of principle, Avi would not reject a good argument. “I doubt it will make him anything other than soggy, but on the slim chance that it wakes him up a little, I’ll give it a shot. We do one round of lessons, then we give a long, brutally honest evaluation.”
“There’s a session at the Y starting Monday.”
“You’ve done your research, I see.”
Even after living in New York for ten years, Avi still got a kick out of the H, for Hebrew, in the YMHA. Growing up In Roanoke, Avi was always uneasy about the C in YMCA, in whose pool he’d spent a good portion of his childhood and adolescence. Though there was not so much as a crucifix on the premises, at least not that he’d found, Avi nonetheless always walked as quickly as possible through the lobby, vaguely fearful that a mob of Jesus lovers would spot the Jew in their midst and point out, in a most gentle southern manner (for this was a community institution, after all) that whatever the membership roster might say, he didn’t actually quite belong.
At the Riverdale Y, Avi felt equally out of place, but now because he was sure he was the only young, newly-divorced father who was afraid to watch his son’s swim lesson. He wasn’t worried that something bad would happen to Elijah in the shallow end with two swim instructors and lifeguard on hand, plus Avi himself, if it came to that. Rather, he was afraid that the boy would embarrass himself, either by failing or being too timid even to risk failure, and the shame would infect them both for day, weeks, years to come. So Avi tried to absorb himself in the quaintly profound dramas of Middlemarch, and when that didn’t pan out, he started furtively parent gazing.
To his left a young Hispanic woman, whose son was one of three boys in Elijah’s guppie group, was tapping on her phone, her long nails making audible clicks on the screen. He’d chatted with the woman a few times, learned her son’s name (Diego), her son’s age (six) and his favorite superhero (Batman, duh) and her profession (social work), but he did not know her name, nor she his. Avi struggled with the question of when it was appropriate to exchange names with somebody. In New York, he’d observed, people did it infrequently and only if the relationship seemed likely to extend beyond the immediate present. In the South people were always introducing themselves, offering their hand and telling you their name, often both first and last, with earnest conviction. Avi hated these exchanges because the revelation of his name would be greeted, at best, with a furtive head cock, and then repeated it back to him. “Avi.” The question was implied, but some some people just came right out with it: “What kind of name is that?” “It’s Biblical,” Avi would say, which was true but also safely non-committal. Because even to say, “It’s Hebrew” risked bringing his tribal affiliation into the open. Then he risked being subjected to a battery of questions about what goes on in a “Jewish church” and what did he really think of Jesus, and then on to concerns about his immortal soul, if he’d stumbled upon an evangelical type.
They must have known, regardless, that he was not, ethnically speaking, from “around here,” though he’d in fact been born in Roanoke. He was darker skinned than any of the other white kids, had curly hair and a gently hooked, though not especially large nose. His parents had moved to Virginia from New York in the late 1970’s, but because they were both doctors whose interactions were with the most enlightened segments of the community, they were not subject to the ignorance and condescension that Avi faced, or feared facing, on a daily basis. Or perhaps his parents, aloof in their sophistication, simply didn’t care what anybody thought of them. This could explain why they burdened him with such a conspicuously Jewish name.
“Why couldn’t you have named me Marc? Or David?”
“Because you’re named for your mother’s uncle.”
“I know,” Avi said. “Avraham. Of blessed memory.”
“We liked the pithiness of the diminutive. Hence, Avi.”
“There wasn’t a less ethnic sounding “A” name available? Adam? Arthur? Anthony? OK, that’s a little Catholic. But Adam would’ve worked. It’s as all purpose a name as there is.”
“We liked Avi. And you looked like an Avi when you came out. And why should you have to hide who you are? We’ve tried to make you proud of being Jewish.”
“I’m plenty proud, dad. But the rest of the world isn’t proud of me being Jewish. Not in these parts. They look at me funny.”
“You’re twelve years old, son. It’s natural to feel feel self-conscious. I’m sure it’s mostly in your head.”
“And when people ask me if it’s true that Jews have horns, is that in my head?”
“Somebody really asked you that?”
“Just the other day.”
His father laughed. “Well, it takes all kinds. Tell them your horns don’t come in until after your Bar Mitzvah.”
“Then I’ll have to explain what a Bar Mitzvah is.”
His father laughed. Avi thundered to his room to look at the Penthouse his friends were passing around in week-long shifts.
Avi found the young mother, who was full-figured but well proportioned, with a round-eyed girlish face, alluring. She was not wearing a wedding ring, nor could Avi discern any sort of ring-shaped tan line on either hand. Since his separation Avi had become audacious with women in a way he never had been before his marriage. Unlike in the years before his marriage, he was having no trouble meeting women and getting them into bed, even when he wasn’t sure he wanted them there. The key, he suspected, was that women could tell that he wanted and expected nothing from them and therefore had more to give. Or perhaps the women wanted and expecting nothing themselves.
It felt crude, though, trying to pick up a woman, married or not, at a child’s swim lesson. He liked to keep his roles as parent and predatory male separate. He didn’t really believe in childhood innocence, since he’d never felt innocent a day in his life, but he wanted to model for Elijah something a little better than reckless self-indulgence. He wondered, when he could not resist the urge to wonder, if Dora were dating and if so, if she’d managed to do it without Elijah noticing. He knew she would want to protect her son from the full-blown reality that his parents would never be together again.
The young mother was playing a game on her phone involving numbers, which was perhaps a sign of intelligence, at least relative to, say, tapping rows of blinking jellybeans. He looked at the kids in the water. Diego was having no trouble with his freestyle and could swim from the wall to teacher three lanes away in three fluid strokes. Then it was Elijah’s turn, and the boy splashed and rocked and gurgled for fifteen seconds before Gina reached out to shorten the distance.
“Very good, Elijah,” he heard her say.
The young mother, distracted from her game by the commotion, looked at Avi and smiled. An elegant bit of gloating.
“Well, he’s not drowning,” Avi said.
“You know how I learned to swim?” the woman said.
‘How?”
“My father threw me in the water and said, ‘Swim!” She laughed.
“It worked, I take it. I mean, you didn’t drown. Because you’re here, talking to me.” Avi added a chuckle because she was clearly missing the humor.
“Oh, I figured it out pretty quickly. I wanted to teach Sebastian the same way but his dad said no way, if somebody sees they’ll call CPS on us. Everyone’s gotten so sensitive. That’s why kids are so helpless these days.”
“I hear you,” Avi said. This was a standard line he used when he thought somebody was out of their fucking mind and didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “Anyway, Diego seems to be learning pretty fast the modern wimpy way.”
“Now he’s OK. You should have seen him before the first day of class. He was screaming and crying and kicking. I was going to be all tough and be like, ‘Stop acting like a little baby and just get in the water,’ but the teacher sweet talked him in. Then he was fine.”
Elijah had not been fine the first day of his lessons. He wouldn’t admit to being scared, so he kept giving rational reasons why he didn’t need swim lessons.
“I don’t need to be able to swim. We don’t live near the water. It’s not right to make kids do things they don’t want to do.”
Like his mother said, the boy was all too good at expressing his anxieties. Elijah sounded less like an adult—most grown-ups being no more articulate than most children—than like a Greek chorus. Relatives and teachers found the boy fascinating and charming, but his peers found him to be weird, at best. He had only one friend, a Russian boy who spoke a strange pidgin English consisting mostly of computer jargon and superhero names. They played video games together.
Elijah was scared of getting in the water, of course, and had every right to be because he barely had the coordination to get his pants on. Dora had wanted him to get evaluated because he could probably get physical therapy from the board of education, but Avi did not want the boy to be labelled and stigmatized by the forces of educational bureaucracy. He insisted to her, and himself, that Elijah was just a late bloomer. Kids take longer these days because we don’t let them sleep on their stomachs. He’d read that somewhere.
The first class Avi and Dora had taken him together. Elijah stood on the second step, the water up to his ankles, giving his mother pleading looks. He didn’t look at Avi. By the end of the class he’d gotten in up to his waste. Putting his head in was out of the question.
Avi thought they might get better results if he took him alone. “Being around you makes him timid,” he said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s not about you, Dora. It’s a mother thing. A compliment, really, to your nurturing abilities. The infant inside him sees you there and expects to be coddled. He can’t help it.”
“And he looks at you and thinks, ‘Oh, big, tough dad there, better man up and dive in.’”
“Something like that, yes.”
She said he was full of shit but also agreed to give it a try.
The results were scarcely better the next two classes, but Elijah did, as predicted, avoid eye contact with his father. Before the fourth class, Avi had offered an ice cream sundae if he’d put his face in the water.
“That’s not going to work, dad. I’m not going to risk my life for ice cream.”
“You’re not risking your life son. Do you see all those other kids in the pool with their faces in the water, still alive? That’s because putting your face in the water doesn’t kill you. Just wait until it’s out of the water before your breathe.”
“I’ll do it when I feel ready.”
“I need you to be ready now. These classes cost too much money for me to just sit there and watch you be scared.”
“I’m not scared. I’m just being careful.”
“Then be a little less careful. It’s killing me.”
That day, Elijah did get his face wet and allowed the teacher to float him on his back. Avi wasn’t sure if Elijah wanted to please his father or was afraid of killing him. He took many things very literally.
The other parents on the bleachers, some chatting, most just staring into space, seemed very relaxed, perhaps, Avi reflected, because their children were physically competent and unlikely to create a scene in the water. The woman next to him, apparently having said all she had to say to Avi, went back to her numbers game. He’d heard enough of her voice, which was pleasant but forgettable, that she’d lost all mystery for him. He still found Dora more interesting than anybody he’d met since, even during the years of marriage when he’d rather sit in an anechoic chamber than have to converse with her. Because he never really did know much about her, and even when he’d given up trying to understand and be understood, he loved all the parts left unrevealed. It was the things he did know that drove him away, although, technically, the divorce was her idea. “We can’t go on like this,” she said, and though he didn’t know exactly what “this” referred to, he had to agree.
The other members of the class were now standing next to Gina at the edge of the pool. It was time for jumping in. Gina stood in the water, about two feet from the wall, and called the kids one at a time. “OK, Sebastian. You’re first.” Her chipper soprano made Avi’s heart pitter patter. Sebastian took a big breath and went for it, springing up with both legs, tucking his knees to his chest and landing with a splash. His mother clapped.
“He’s never done that before?” Avi asked her.
She shook her head.
“He’s a natural.” He hoped she couldn’t hear the outraged envy.
She nodded.
Then the girl, who was the tallest of the bunch by a few inches, stepped over the edge and fell in with a gentle plunk. Avi looked around to see who the lucky parent might be. He spotted a tall woman pointing and smiling as she spoke to a man next to her. Oh, you lucky, by-the-book parents, bringing your daughter to lessons together, watching her flourish. But just you wait until she hits puberty. Let’s see you pointing and clapping when she learns to say I hate you for making me. Because surely all children would say this, sooner or later.
The other boy, who was black and the smallest of the bunch, took a nonchalant step off the edge and hit the water almost silently, went under for a second, then popped up, shouting, “Woo hoo!” Avi spotted his father giving an enthusiastic nod of affirmation.
“OK, Elijah, your turn,” Gina said.
Elijah looked at her for several seconds, then shook his head.
“It’s OK. I’m right here. Just step in and I’ll catch you.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Elijah said. Even through the splashing in the water and the din on the pool deck, Avi could hear the terror in his voice.
“You don’t have anything to be afraid of. You don’t even have to jump. You can just step in.“
Elijah just stood there, his body rigid.
“Go ahead, Elijah. Make your daddy proud.”
Elijah turned and looked at Avi. He shook his head as he spoke, his lip trembling. “I can’t, dad.”
“Sure you can. The other kids just did it. And they’re alive and smiling.”
“No,” Elijah said.
“I think he needs a pep talk,” Avi said to the young mother. “Better work the daddy magic.”
“Good luck,” she said. Avi believed he heard a note of derision.
Avi, trying his best not to embarrass the boy, which was tempting and all too easy to do, whispered in his ear. “If you do this, I’ll be very proud. And not only that, but afterward we’ll go right to the toy store and you can get a new video game.” Avi wanted to believe he was doing this for the boy’s own good, because he needed to learn to overcome fear, which was what life consisted of, by and large, but he knew it was mainly because there was an audience that would judge father and son as one lump sum of failure.
Elijah’s face relaxed for a moment, but then he turned and looked at the water and the look of terror returned.
“This offer won’t last long, son. Better act fast.” He gave Elijah a pat on the bottom and went back to his seat. He didn’t look at the woman, whose father he now begrudgingly admired for doing the right thing, tossing her in to sink or not sink before she could humiliate herself with cowardice.
Elijah turned and looked back Avi, who gave him a little fist pump.
Elijah took a deep breath and bent his knees.
‘On the count of three, Elijah,” Gina said. “Ready? One . . . Two . . .”
Growing up, Avi often had dreams of jumping from high places with no bottom in sight, then waking up bouncing about in his bed. Once he screamed, and his parents rushed into the bedroom. It may have started when he read about Evel Knievel trying to fly across the grand canyon in a steam-powered rocket, but in the dreams Avi was always somewhere vague and blurry, with no audience and often naked. The leap was always voluntary and pre-meditated, and he always called out the name of a girl as he fell. The first time he had such a dream he was terrified, but once he got used to them and realized there was no actual danger, he learned to embrace the transient thrill.
When he hit puberty the falling dreams gave way to the usual fluid-laced adolescent dreams, usually featuring the classmates least interested in him and some who were but only because he was an oddity. At age 17 when he started actually experiencing some of the encounters he’d dreamed about, the falling dreams resumed, and girls were often rudely awakened by Avi calling out a random female name and bouncing around in the bed. Some of the girls worried about him. Others found it disturbing and would not sleep with him again.
Once he got married the dreams stopped. Perhaps the stability of his relationship took away the falling feelings in his life. Or perhaps he'd lost the ability to be thrilled. He thought the dreams would resume when he was released from the safety and mundanity of marriage, but so far they had not. Instead he started having wet dreams for the first time since adolescence, only now featuring Dora, doing things to and for him she would never have actually done and that he would not have wanted her to do, except in the abstract.
He’d asked Elijah once what he dreamed about.
“I dream about getting new video games,” he said. “And sometimes I dream that you and Mommy live together.”
Well, of course.
Elijah’s knees were bent, his legs shaking, his arms raised.
“Three!” Gina said.
Eliah straightened his legs, and hoisted his body upward, but his feet stayed on the ground. He lost his balanced a bit and almost feel forward, but righted himself.
He looked down at his feet in shame.
“What happened, son?” Avi said.
Elijah spoke but was facing the wrong way, so Avi couldn’t hear him.
“Look at me and say it again.”
Elijah turned and looked at his dad. His face no longer expressed terror, but something much richer and more permanent. Resignation.
“Why didn’t you jump?”
“It wasn’t the right time, OK?”
Avi reminded himself that he was going to be patient and nurturing. The boy couldn’t help his limitations. He wasn’t being a wuss to show up his father, though Avi was sure the other parents were getting a kick out of the ordeal. But it was a lot to take, the boy’s total incompetence at the simplest of physical tasks. And if he was afraid to take a small leap into shallow water, what hope was there for him in the big, cold, dangerous world?
Unlike Dora, Avi did not feel guilty for putting the boy through their divorce. He did not feel guilty because the divorce was not his fault. Nor hers. It was the fault of marriage itself, its suffocating promises of permanence and death. He felt, rather, defeated. Here was one more way life would kick the boy in the rear end, and his own father was aiding and abetting. The least he could do was instill a bit of grit.
He had a notion to pick the boy up and toss him, and that would be that. He’d be reprimanded for sure, maybe barred from the pool for life. Maybe they’d call CPS on him. But he’d have made his point loud and clear. We don’t let fear stop us. Unless love is involved. Then fear wins every time.
Avi did nothing, just shrugged and rolled his eyes. He watched Elijah sit on the edge of the pool and let Gina ease him into the water, where she floated him on his back, cradling his head in her arms.
