A Swim with Gram
– Nonfiction by Kathryn Rice –
On Mother’s Day, Gram and I sit in awkward silence on the stiff floral couch in the living room, while my mother and sisters prepare the crescent rolls in the kitchen. “My friend Patty said you can use her pool when you come visit me in August,” Gram says, before pausing and raising her eyebrows for dramatic effect. I nod politely and widen my eyes, trying to look enthusiastic. At twelve, I’m too old to get excited about swimming in some stranger’s backyard pool, but I don’t want to hurt Gram’s feelings.
Patty Moran lives down the street from Gram. They attend mass together daily at St. Michael’s, an outing which, in combination with the after-service coffee hour, make up the sum total of Gram’s social activities. I’ve never met Patty, but Gram talks about her often, always with a twinkle of admiration in her eye. More than once, I’ve heard her tell Mom about the time Patty encouraged her to sing along to the hymns at church. “You know I told Patty I can’t sing,” Gram says to Mom, “and she said, ‘Well, whatever God gave you—you’re giving it back to him!’” Gram shakes her head in wonder at the cleverness of Patty’s remark. I suppose in Gram’s circle, that kind of talk makes Patty a free spirit.
Gram has been lonely since my grandfather died a few years earlier. She is a shy person, unaccustomed to doing things alone. Perhaps that’s why she’s drawn to Patty, a widow with an active social life who even travels by herself. Perhaps it’s also why my mother is sending me to stay with Gram for a week in August. The plan is for me to spend the mornings at the Fairfield U basketball camp, just a few blocks down the road. After lunch, Gram will pick me up and skirt me around on various outings: a visit with my cousins, a trip to Fairfield beach, and the special treat— Patty Moran’s pool.
The day Gram and I finally trek down the street to Patty’s pool, it is oppressively, murderously hot. So hot, the air blurs everything ten steps ahead of us, making my grandmother’s suburban street look like a cartoon mirage. I’m wearing a shimmery purple speedo, a pair of Umbros, and a pair of Addidas slides; shoes that I insist on wearing even though I find them painful to walk-in, because they contribute to my self-image as an athlete. The slides clop loudly on the pavement, otherwise Gram’s street is quiet and eerie, like a ghost town in a Western movie.
Gram wears a pair of loose-fitting linen pants and a billowy button down that reminds me of a pajama top. No bathing suits for Gram; she doesn’t know how to swim. In fact, the only story I’ve ever heard about Gram’s childhood is the story of her near drowning on a Girls Scout trip. The remembrance of this tale makes me shudder; it reminds me how fragile life is and moreover, how easily my specific existence might have been prevented.
By the time we arrive at Patty Moran’s one-story ranch, we’re glistening with sweat and I’m starting to feel a lot less ambivalent about the pool. Patty isn’t home, but she’s left a key under the mat. We slip through the living room where an ancient grandfather clock dominates with its loud, unbearable clicking. Gram leads me through a glass sliding door, outside is a lima bean shaped pool shaded by fir trees.
Gram finds a lounge chair in the shade and does her usual magic trick. By this I mean she recedes into the background just as she did when I was a small child, almost but not quite disappearing, so that I can immerse myself in play reassured by the knowledge she is hovering nearby. Meanwhile, I take a good look at the pool, skimming its surface with my big toe. Most of the pools I’ve swam in before were powder blue rectangles marbled with sunlight. This pool, by comparison, is deep and dark–like an undiscovered rainforest lagoon.
Satisfied, I kick off my slides and toss my Umbros onto the nearest lounge chair. Heat wafts off the concrete pool deck, scalding my feet as they pad towards the pool’s edge. The diving board gleams white, and I pause at its tip, rubbing my toes along its pebbly surface. For a moment, the world is still and steaming and silent except for the low, almost imperceptible buzz of a distant lawnmower. Midday sun glitters on the surface of the pool, on the white strip of the diving board, and on my glossy speedo. Below, the water is still. On the pool’s vinyl bottom, a swirl of blue tiles: cerulean, lapis, turquoise. Light refracts off this little mosaic, making the pool’s water appear irresistible. I look, long enough to form a memory, a snapshot of kaleidoscope blues.
I close my eyes and jump in.
The water is just what I’d hoped, a blast of cold that sends shivers down my spine. I make a few somersaults underwater before floating back up to the surface. “The water’s perfect,” I say to Gram, who looks up from her paper and smiles slightly.
Since that day, I’ve gone swimming many times, in many other pools. And yet, for some reason, it is this ordinary memory of swimming that outlasts all my other memories of swimming, so much so that whenever I say to my husband, “I want to go swimming”, it is the image of Patty Moran’s pool, with its deliciously blue tiled bottom, that I am calling to mind.
The rest of my week with Gram was quiet and simple. We didn’t talk much; I suspect neither one of us was entirely sure what to say to the other. Gram was a woman from another era, who I occasionally experienced as a stranger. I found it hard to understand how she could be so content with her place within the patriarchy, never seeming to want more than what housewives were supposed to want–a stable marriage, healthy children, and a cabinet displaying porcelain statuettes. I can only imagine she found me, a little girl who wanted to be a professional basketball player, equally puzzling.
Still, she was my grandmother and I never doubted that she loved me. And even though she died seven years ago, I can’t shake the feeling that she loves me still. Because, in her quiet, persistent way, Gram lodged herself permanently in my brain, merging with all the ordinary memories I have of her house and of our time together that August, so that I cannot hear the whirring of sprinklers, the dry crunch of grass underfoot, or the sounds of cicadas at night without feeling her benevolent presence just as I did when I was a kid and she was merely in the other room, having almost but not quite disappeared. And this summer, the next time I leap into some backyard pool, even then, I’ll feel her watching.
About the Author – Kathryn Rice
Kathryn Rice is an educator, writer, and parent living in Philadelphia. Her pronouns are she/hers.
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