Saved from drowning
I want to be like Daryl Hannah's character in Splash, a mermaid in Manhattan, stay underwater - slit gills through the skin in my neck, but there are no want-ads for that.
I guess I have to write about the pool. The pool on the corner of Carmine Street and 7th Avenue. The lifeguard, John, who is 50 years old and has worked at the pool for 30 years, tells me the history of the city. He's from Staten Island and overweight and has a kid who is going to play high school baseball. John was an athlete too - once. Once he was an athlete. Now he makes promises with himself about getting back into shape. He has started doing sit-ups near the deep end when it's just me in the pool. He walks down to the shallow end and wraps a rubber rope around a metal pole and pulls it back and forth and back and forth then up and down up and down - for his biceps and triceps. He won't get in the pool. He tells me he catches people peeing on the side of the rec center - so he washes it down with ammonia - somehow the mixture of urine and ammonia is supposed to curtail the urinators. He tells me he has seen teenagers “doing-it” on his car. 30 years of this. Tells me the outdoor pool is like Club Med 7am lap swim in the summertime. I tell him I have never been to Club Med. He tells me about the cemetery beneath the rec center. The 10,000 bodies that were not exhumed. I think about the corpses while I swim - they swim too. They are not dead they are floating. I float on my back and stare up at the ceiling - tile ceiling - not a mosaic - not a Starry Night - not the Sistine Chapel - but all of these if I squint - and I do because the pool is heavily chlorinated - stings my eyes and dries my skin. Everyone goes silent in pool.
An elderly man wearing a wifebeater is horrible at diving - he rolls in a ball off the side of the deep end. He does one lap and then stops to analyze the value of water - swimming - kick boards. John has a patch of eczema behind his right ear. I try not to stare when we talk. He puts on Midnight Rambler and lowers the lights – I can hear his music before it begins: Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, C.S&N. I anticipate Guns & Roses. He mops up the excess water on the side of the pool. He makes a ton of phone calls. I practice my strokes - sometimes I do handstands and little flips in the shallow end. I have contests with myself - how long can I hold my breath - 1/2 way cross the pool? The public pool people bring towels from home that are not meant for beaches or lap pools. They are bath towels, hand towels, some look like mats. Everyone is underwater and New York is quiet - I never want to come back up.
John says the rec center is haunted. A woman named Helen Jewett wanders the halls. She was a prostitute, murdered in 1836, bludgeoned with an ax and set on fire. Really, her body was exhumed and skinned and used by medical students for study. Her killer was never caught. John does not wear a whistle. He doesn't wear the head to toe orange uniform the other lifeguard wears - which looks a lot like a prison jumpsuit. John wears orange shorts and a white polo shirt.
There are no bodies, just feet splashing water, and there are no children - or pets. Once a young man in a blue speedo and goggles told the lifeguard he saw something in the deep end - the lifeguard got out a long fishing net and waded around until he pulled up what we were all frightened to see - but it was just hair. I got hit in the head with a kickboard by an angry European woman while I stared at the catch. There are some things in a pool that make you never want to come back: dead bunnies, fat spiders, a house cat.
If Carmine is closed I take the bus up to West 25th street to a different pool - it is brighter, bluer, longer - it's beautiful. It is filled with swimmers, one outlasting the next. I don't know the lifeguards at this pool. Upstairs there is usually a Ping-Pong tournament going on. All men, all intensely eyeing the white plastic ball. I walk downtown after 2 hrs. - take 9th Avenue - pass my old apartment - didn't recognize the corner. The vet is gone, the coffee shop is gone, the bodega is gone. I figure I can talk about the goneness with John - he's stuck around 30 yrs. We will discuss Edgar Allen Poe pacing Leroy Street and the bar that no one is supposed to know is a bar. I ask him if they're hiring - he says I wouldn't want to work there - but I keep asking.
If I get to the pool 15 minutes after the adult lap swim begins John calls me a slacker. Same if I get out 15 minutes before lap swim ends. Wednesday, only three of us were in the pool. Two hours, each with a lane of our own. John played Baba O'Riley - nice and long - good for backstroke and then AC/DC, Back in Black, followed by Led Zeppelin. John had his dinner delivered; the delivery came in through the side door off Leroy. I thought it was a burrito - because I wanted a burrito - but I saw him eating french fries one at a time. The last half hour he corralled me into the fast lane - but I'm not fast - he said it was ok – it is roomier, and I would have a nice time. That's a lot of progress for John and me - the first day at the pool I was in the fast lane and he kicked me out - told me I would get run down by the “real swimmers.” I'm real now. I talk to John about how I'm looking for a job, but I don't know what I should do. I tell him about interviews with staffing agencies that I sleep through. He says, "Must be nice" but of course, it isn't nice. I tell him I’m swimming off my anxiety - it doesn't work. The Radiohead song, Creep loops through my head until John dims the lights and puts on Moby.
I go under water, way down deep. When I surface, John hands me a slip of wet paper with three websites on it. He says, "Look for work here." His sister knows somebody. The word "marketing" was written in black ink and "strategist" and New Jersey. I thank him - and think to myself - stop volunteering information. So, the next time I am back at the pool I try to avoid making eye contact with the lifeguard, but he walked alongside the deep end and asked if I looked at those job sites. I told him I had not - and felt a gut load of guilt.
I want to be like Daryl Hannah's character in Splash, a mermaid in Manhattan, stay underwater - slit gills through the skin in my neck, but there are no want-ads for that. When John turned the lights out and said pool closed I went home and looked up why Baba O'Riley is called Baba O'Riley.
I dry my bathing suit in my bathroom - there is one window and I cannot close it all the way. I rinse the chlorine that stinks like bleach off my skin and scrub it out of my hair. I think about my father; he was a long-legged swimmer. Our last days together we swam laps at a beach club on the East End. I had a busted back from a car crash, and he was soon to lose his mind - we swam together - it could have lasted forever. We would towel off and go sit on the shore. He would watch for my mother as she glided up and down with the waves - the glitter of her white hair easily mistaken for white caps. So comforting. Drying in the sun. When we were kids we could not be wrangled out of that water - salty and pruned - outlasting the lifeguards. What was I thinking? Things would never change? I was not thinking – I was swimming.
I wonder, when I'm swimming at Carmine Street, if my father would swim beside me - with its dim lights, dirty sun through the dusty windows - a drain I saw a Band Aid floating over - a lifeguard who doesn't swim - eats dinner and stays on the phone most of the time while playing classic rock. Would my father swim downtown? Probably not. He belonged to Asphalt Green - and invited me to do laps with him uptown, but I never went, I don't remember why. Swimming in the city feels almost subversive - all those barely covered bodies you would normally only see fully clothed on the sidewalk or subway. All of us - so much skin- breathing in and out - disappearing beneath the water.
To be fair, John warned me about weekends at the pool. The crowding in the lanes, the floaters, the nags - the rules, now suddenly in place. I know culprits by the color of their swim caps. I know who didn't shower before jumping in. I see calloused feet without flip-flops, I watch some sink like lead and John stayed home sick - sick or went to church or has a day off or after thirty years couldn't take it anymore - so there is no music, there is no one to guard my life.
The woman, always on Sunday, with her floral bathing suit and white swim cap and blood red lipstick and missing teeth, smiles an entitled smile at me, then swats my side with her hand while doing the backstroke. Miss. Havisham of the slow lane; make up slathered, long sliver hair streams out from under her cap. I move to the middle lane and have my make-believe swimming contests with the other middle lane swimmers. I dive beneath them when they go too slow - and with my goggles – I see the deep end drop, the dark shaded spots on the tile floor - hairy backs and cockroach sized moles - kicking and swimming and panting. The last 15 minutes an old man with a beard that grazes the top of his swimming trunks climbs down the ladder into the pool. His chest has fallen into his belly; his belly has fallen over his trunks. His eyes are bright stars protected by goggles. His stroke is free style and he is a master in the middle lane. We kept a good pace together - fast without stopping. His beard, white as dirty snow, two points at its tip - like a discolored pitchfork growing from his face. He was confused when the lights went out - didn't understand time limits. Who wants to acknowledge limits, especially of time? I watch him pull himself up and out, then I do the same and enter the women's locker.
Hair like trapped tumbleweed covers both drains in the shower - and Miss Havisham wanders back and forth. The bodies of women - bathing women - alone, together without self-consciousness - so soft and full and beautiful. My hair is too long and never dries - I dress and walk toward Hudson Street. The locks on the chain link fence - pad locks - with the dates and death of the lynching of a black man who went out to buy bread during the Draft Riots. St. Luke’s Place becomes Leroy without a curve in the street I don't bother listening to music while I walk - the city is empty - it's cold - and a young couple falls out of a bodega on Morton - the man complaining to the woman "they tried to short change me." Short changed.
John wore the orange jumpsuit last night. He was wearing bifocals while reading – what, I do not know. He seemed tired and serious. He laid out his blue mat and began doing calisthenics. Orange legs stretched out in front of him, then one leg pulled up to his chest, then a twist and repeat. I learned that same routine form Jane Fonda VHS tapes in the early 90s. All us girls dieting for senior prom. We pulled up our multi-colored spandex and gathered in the recreation room of our boarding school’s dorm to stretch and crunch, to look good for our dates. John turned up Comfortably Numb and the pool began to fill with the regulars.
Can I tell you, I have my own lock. The combination is my childhood phone number. The locker I use is the same every night, number 63. It is tall and the last in the row in the back of the room. My backpack is full of plastic bags: one for my towel, my flip-flops, my swimsuit, my cap. All separated and heavy with water on the walk home. I have begun to use leave in conditioner – the chlorine shreds my hair. My skin is rough, and I soak in the tub adding a concoction of oils and moisturizers. I feel drugged after swimming. I feel young and happy and free. I can sleep. I do not think about what job I will look for next or why I still do not know what I am doing with this life. I don’t think about my recurring toothache or a new spot on my face I usually paw at in the mirror – wondering whether or not it’s cancerous. I do not think about my neighbor who is waiting in Bellevue’s E.R. for relief and admittance, his cats, all three, I am left to feed. I think about the pool. The bodies. Floating. I think about how every time I see tattooed skin, I am grateful I never tattooed my skin. I think about how in a body of water it is impossible to be contrary, you are too busy keeping yourself afloat. I think about the island of Manhattan erupting – and how- when the time comes, I will be a strong enough swimmer to cross the Hudson, without a life vest, someone else who is sinking can have mine. I will tread and kick and survive.
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I so loved this, Abigail. wonderful wonderful writing! Thank you. Tabby
“ . . . no one to guard my life.” I never swam there - and just the bandaid over the drain tells me I would not have enjoyed it (bougie is me!). The East End, though . . . Some memories never dry out.