Learning to Swim(2)

It was a hot, sticky afternoon in late July and the pool was jammed. I held on tight to my plunger as I maneuvered through the crowd. As I rounded the deep end, steering around the long line for the high dive, I saw Keith. Clad only in his red swim trunks and wearing his trademark Ray-Bans, he looked like a head lifeguard should: tan, tall, and totally wow. Keith had already graduated by the time I started at Brucker's High, but Jones Island was so tiny, everyone knew each other's business. And being a maid who was practically invisible to Tippecanoe's young and fabulous patrons, I was able to eavesdrop and get some good tidbits on Keith.

His mom died when he was twelve years old. (How could I not love someone with a dead mother? That would be unconscionable.)



When he went to my school, he was captain of the football team and a leader of a Boy Scout troop. (Word on the street was he had twenty-five merit badges!)



He was also homecoming king and thereby forced into dating the captain of the cheerleading squad, as per the International High School Social Code of Conduct. (But I never held that against him. All he was doing was obeying the law.)



He had sex with said cheerleader girlfriend. (This I kind of held against him. He should have been saving himself for me.)



He broke up with her during his freshman year at college after he started studying philosophy and registered with the Green Party. (This proved beyond a doubt that God exists.)



Last summer he hooked up with Mora Cooper, his current girlfriend. She was the most popular girl in my class and the new captain of the cheerleading squad. It was rumored they also had sex. (Subsequently, I bought a book on atheism and read it cover to cover.)





Naturally, like every other girl at the club, I couldn't take my eyes off his shaggy auburn hair, his long lanky limbs and toned muscles, his full lips, the dimple in his chin, his deep brown eyes…

Suddenly, some little boy barreled into me and splash! I was submerged in a hundred gallons of chlorinated water. Most people started laughing at first. They must have assumed I could swim (um… wrong!) and thought it was funny to see a maid get tossed into the pool. But eventually they would realize that this was more of a 911 situation than an amateur attempt at slapstick comedy. Or at least, one person would.

As soon as I stopped splashing, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I kept my eyes open and just stared up out of the water at all those blurry faces. My plunger filled with liquid and it became an anchor, dragging me down to the bottom. Instead of letting go, I held on for dear life. I had this weird thought that I should just stay down there in the deep end until the pool closed and everyone left. Hey, it was a traumatic experience, and therefore I was entitled to a little irrational thinking.

Before I knew it, Keith had jumped in and yanked the plunger out of my hand. He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me up to the surface. All the other lifeguards helped hoist me out, and then Keith began pushing down on my stomach with his hands.

For one brief moment, I thought, Oh my God! Keith McKnight is feeling me up! And then I got sick.

“Back up, everyone!” Keith yelled, as if anyone wanted to get close to the spewing vomit. And then he wrapped a towel around my shoulders and led me into the lifeguard office, a small room between the bathrooms I was supposed to tend to in the first place. He sat me down on a chair and leaned over me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded, trying to avoid looking at him.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded again.

“What happened?” he asked. “Did you have a seizure or something?”

A seizure? I wish. “I can't swim,” I said simply, even though the story behind this was anything but simple.

“Do you want to call anyone?”

“Not my mom,” I said quickly. Barbie was not known for being a pillar of strength when the chips were down. I could only imagine how she would handle the news of my near-death experience.

“How about a friend?” he asked helpfully.

I immediately thought of Alice, who is the closest thing to a best friend I've had in years. Because of the dreaded love lunacy and the equally dreaded finger moves, I never had enough time to build any good, solid, long-lasting friendships. But when I met Alice, it felt as though I'd known her forever. Maybe it was because she was a fellow maid who knew what a drag it was to clean up after people. Maybe it was because she was sweet and treated me like an adult instead of a child. Or maybe it was because she had the eyes of a wise sixty-year-old woman who had seen the world and truly experienced life. She had the body of a sixty-year-old woman too, because she was, well, sixty years old, give or take.

Just as I was about to tell him to call Alice, the door flew open and the room filled with the smell of hair spray and L'Air du Temps. There stood my mother, breathing like she was going to have a heart attack, tears the size of golf balls rolling down her cheeks. She was wearing her cocktail waitress outfit, which consisted of a short black skirt and a tight white button-down shirt with a black bow tie. Her long blond hair was curled and expertly tousled, and despite the tears, her makeup was still impeccable.

“OHMYGODohmygodohmygod!” Barbie said, practically shrieking.

I held up a hand to ward her off. “I'm all right,” I said, marveling at how quickly my mom had appeared on the scene. Barbie had always loved drama.