Learning to Swim

Tony and I were excluded from everything that had to do with my father’s wedding to Vickie. It was the 70s after all, and I doubt it was very common to have leftover kids from marriage number one hanging around at the ceremony and reception of marriage number two. Or maybe it was just my family. Who knows? Tony and I were still in school for much of the planning, but for the actual weekend of the wedding, Vickie shuffled me off to her friend’s house, and Tony went to stay with his friend Robbie.

It’s all hazy to me now, the memories re-created through the numerous photos in the wedding album, which I would look at again and again over the years—the pictures of a freckle faced Vickie smiling and opening gifts at her bridal shower. The photo of my father in a white tuxedo, twenty-nine and drunk off his ass, who had forgotten to kiss Vickie at the altar, so dipped her as they were walking back down the aisle and planted one on her lips right through the veil.

It’s both surprising and not to think of my father being drunk for the wedding. According to the stories I remember hearing from Vickie, he had been drinking white wine all morning. In every photograph, his eyelids are at half-mast, he’s smiling, and looks absolutely adorable. Many years later, when I remarried at age 27 and had to guzzle two beers just to have enough courage to walk down the aisle, I wonder why I didn’t think of him and whether getting married for both of us was a huge mistake? Or did we just like to drink? Now that I know better, I think that if someone has to get drunk in order to get married, he or she might want to reflect on what's driving the decision.

There were other things I remembered hearing about or seeing in photos from the wedding weekend. For instance, even though a light snow fell that day, my uncle Ardine, Vietnam vet and alcoholic, stripped to just his tuxedo pants, climbed the locked gate of the in-ground pool at the hotel and leaped into the water. My father spilled white wine all over Vickie’s gown and several of the table cloths in the reception hall. The woman I stayed with scolded me for using the word “turd” when I wrote an impromptu song at her piano. “We don’t talk like that here,” she yelled. I never got the chance to see or talk to my brother the entire weekend, and remember nothing about getting back to our normal lives on Halford Street. For whatever reason, which I'll probably never know, Tony and I got lost in the wedding shuffle.

Summer was right around the corner. And since my father had married Vickie, Tony and I no longer went to the Day Camp at Woodrow Wilson. Vickie stayed home and we played with the neighborhood kids, or sometimes we went to her mother’s house. My and Tony’s long days at the shop were a distant memory. No more roaming through the plaza stealing hard candy from Britz, handfuls of peanuts from the Scotch n Sirloin, or coins from the fountains. We stayed with Vickie, and less and less often, saw our father.

One time Vickie took Tony and me swimming at her father’s apartment complex. I had only been “swimming” before at First Ward pool in my neighborhood, and had never left the shallow end. And since my only true experience had been part of day camp, I was always surrounded by capable counselors and lifeguards who could jump in if there was any trouble to save me.

Earlier in the week, Vickie had bought me a pink and white checkered bikini with a ruffle ringing the bottoms. I was excited to wear the swimsuit as Tony’s hand-me-downs had grown less appealing since Vickie moved in. I still liked to hang upside down from trees with my dresses on, much to her dismay, but I didn’t mind looking like a girl. She brushed through my hair, tied it up in ribbons, and traded my Chuck Taylors for Mary Janes. On the drive over to the apartment complex, Vickie said, “Today, I’m teaching you how to swim,” which made me shiver. Something about the tone of her voice sounded sinister, as though I had no choice in the matter.

When we arrived at the pool, an in-ground rectangle surrounded by a concrete deck and chain link fence, I gaped at the sky-scraping pine trees that formed a larger rectangle outside the fence. There were already several people lying out on the deck, hirsute men with gold chains wearing black Speedos, and skinny women wearing crocheted bikinis and gold lamé. Vickie, Tony, and I walked past everyone to get to her father’s apartment because we needed him to give us a key to open the gate. Since we didn’t live at the complex, we weren’t really supposed to swim in the pool. But as I would learn, Vickie was never someone who had a lot of respect for rules.

Vickie’s father Norman answered the door and let us in. His girlfriend, Robin, a diminutive and voluptuous brunette, walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her pubic hair showing itself from the bottom. I tried not to look, but was only six and couldn’t help it. When I glanced away, I caught sight of the skin mags—Playboy and Hustler—my step-grandfather kept on the coffee table. This was no big deal to me as my father had the same magazines at our house. Saturday mornings while watching cartoons, I pored over the pages of Hustler, addicted to, yet confused by the warm tingling between my legs that I felt when looking at photos of men and women soaping each other in the shower, lying on beds with zebra print sheets, or tickling each other with hay in abandoned barns.

After Robin got into her swimsuit, she, Tony, Vickie, and I walked down the stairs and out to the pool. My hands were shaking as I unfolded my towel and rested it on the lounge chair beside Robin, hoping that if I avoided Vickie she would forget all about “teaching” me how to swim.

I lay back and look up, the sun shining through the rectangle formed by the tops of the pine trees. Tony took the lounge chair on the other side of me, and Vickie next to him. She wore a purple bikini and slathered baby oil all over her legs, arms, and stomach. Her skin was fish belly white with freckles and I had seen her come home red as a cooked crab before, but was too young to know that the baby oil was for cooking, not tanning. Vickie often covered a cardboard slat in tin foil, then made a cut out for her neck. While lying in the back yard, she held that tin foil slat beneath her chin and lay in the sun. She only got more freckles.

Tony and Vickie jumped into the pool. I lay frozen on the lounge chair, my long brown hair making sweat on my forehead and back of my neck. The air was stifling. Vickie called for me to come in, so I shuffled to the stairs and stood in the water only as deep as my belly button. The ruffles of my bikini bottom floated and I twisted back and forth, watching the pink and white checks sway in the water. I did this for quite some time, before Vickie swam over to me and rested her forearms, underside up, on the surface of the water. “Get on,” she said.

I shook my head and mumbled, “I don’t want to.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she snapped. “Come on.”

“But I don’t want to.” Tears welled in my eyes and I felt like I had a rock in my stomach.

She pulled me onto her forearms and said, “Do it, or I’ll never bring you here again.” I was about to say that was fine, but my brother was shaking his head and giving me the "stink eye" from the deep end.

“Now,” Vickie said, “paddle your arms and kick your legs.” I was suddenly aware of all of the eyes on me. I was not going to let Vickie win. I slapped my arms against the surface of the water in an attempt to soak her. Then, like a crazy person, I started to scream and kick my legs.

“Goddamn-it,” she yelled, “knock that off.” I kept screaming, pounding and kicking the water. I wanted to embarrass her. Make her look like a wicked witch who was abusing someone else’s kid. “If you don’t stop it,” she said, “I’ll take you into that apartment and give you something to cry about.” What this meant, of course, was that she would whip me with a belt or whatever else might be handy. I thought about Norman’s apartment and what weapons might be there that I had not noticed. I hollered, “I don’t want to do this!”

Vickie pushed me off her arms and dove underwater, swimming to the other end of the pool. My face burned with shame in the presence of all of those sunbathers. I climbed the stairs out of the pool and took my seat next to Tony. Robin lay next to me, wearing a giant sunhat. Her full lips and earthy good looks reminded me of Carly Simon.

“Why do you always have to make a scene?” my brother asked. His light brown hair hung to his shoulders. His eyes were bright green and squinting against the sun.

“She’s mean,” I said. “That’s why.”

Vickie slowly ascended the ladder at the pool’s deep end. She walked past the three men who were sunbathing, and each watched her ass. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but as I would come of age, this kind of attention she got angered me enormously. I was pretty sure that my father wouldn’t have appreciated those salacious looks.

I had wrapped myself in a towel, determined not to step foot into the water for the rest of the day, perhaps for the rest of my life. My skin was like goose-flesh. Vickie sat beside my brother. Her blond hair was slicked back off her face. She sat straight up and started again to coat herself in baby oil. “You’re going to fry yourself,” Robin said.

“Yeah,” Vickie answered, “but it’ll turn to a tan.”

Tony turned to me and said, “Come in the pool with me.”

I shook my head.

“Go on,” Vickie said, “quit being such a baby.”

I reluctantly followed my brother over to the stairs. He leapt into the deep end and swam back and forth, as though taunting me. It was him and Vickie against me that day, and I was losing. I walked down to watch him swim in the deep end. The concrete deck burned the soles of my feet.

“Get in there,” Vickie called. I pretended not to hear, looked across the way to the young men lying in lounge chairs, grown ups without anyone telling them what to do. I couldn’t wait to be an adult.

Without warning, Vickie sneaked up behind me, lifted me by the forearms and dropped me into the deep end. I had no time to prepare. The last thing I saw was the dropped open mouths of the people on the deck. And just like in a cartoon, I threw my open hand into the air as a plead for someone to save me. Then the scene went dark.

To this day, I have no recollection as to what happened next. Did my brother pull me from the water? Did Vickie? Or was it one of the hirsute strangers that had watched Vickie’s ass? Looking back, I like to think that no one leapt in to save me. Instead, I imagine my small body in a fit of paddling and kicking rising to the surface. I like to think that I was able to stay afloat in order to catch a couple breaths of air. Then I turned toward the ladder, and in my most humiliating impersonation of the dog paddle, swam to the side. This would be a defining moment in my life, one of the very first times I would be forced to save myself.