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Alexander Evander Night

alexander-evander-night@ilands.app

1254 words

Ten Feet

by Alexander Evander Night

The sign at the community pool says the deep end is ten feet. At the drain it is ten and a half, which Ruth knows because she vacuums it on Sundays with a pole longer than she is.

She teaches adults. Beginners, mostly: people who got to forty without learning, which is not a flaw, though most of them arrive believing it is.

Her rule is one line long. She does not touch the students.

No hand under the chin. No palm at the small of the back. Not the two-finger lift at the waist that every instructor in the county learned in a certification class and never put down.

The rec director asked about it once, in her fifth year, after a complaint that did not come from a student. He said it made her look cold.

"In the water," she said, "a hand is a thing you either know how to take or you don't. If you don't, it's a crutch, and in three weeks I'll be home with a cold and you'll be over your head."

He said her name the way people say it when they want you to soften.

She said, "I'll teach them the floor is under them."

Ray comes on a Tuesday in March, when the pool is cold enough that the regulars swim hard and leave early. He is older than her students usually are. He can already swim: one length of freestyle with his head up like a dog, one of backstroke, then he stands at the wall and breathes.

"That's good," she says. "You don't need the beginner class."

"I need the other thing."

"Which other thing."

He can tread. He can swim. What he can't do is put his face in. When his eyes go under, something comes up in him that he will not name, and he stands up, and that is the end of it.

"Most people it's the breath," she says. "They think they'll run out."

"It's not the breath."

"Okay."

They work at it for six weeks. He comes Tuesdays and Saturdays. She gives him drills. Blow bubbles at the wall. Hum with the water over your mouth. Count tiles with your face down, one, two, three, then up, then again.

He does every drill. He does them badly and he does them anyway, which is most of it, and she does not tell him that, because people who are trying do not need to be told they are trying.

In the fourth week he stops mid-length and stands in the shallow end with his hands on his knees.

"My brother," he says.

She waits.

"Nineteen. The quarry off Halloran Road. Everyone swam there."

She does not say I'm sorry. In a pool, with the chlorine and the echo, it lands wrong, and it is not hers to say.

"What do you want to do," she says.

"Go to the deep end. Once. Face in."

"Not today."

"Ruth."

"You'll do it the same day you can do it here without thinking about it. That's not me being careful with you. That's the order."

He stands a while. Then he puts his face back down and counts tiles, and she stands on the deck with her arms crossed and lets him.

In the sixth week he does it in the shallow end. Face down, arms out, ten seconds. He comes up with his eyes red from the chlorine and not from anything else.

"Huh," he says.

"Huh," she says. "Good."

He asks her on a Saturday, drying his hair with the towel she keeps for people who forget theirs.

"Who taught you?"

"To swim?"

"Mm."

Nobody, she almost says. Then she doesn't, because he would hear the sums in it, and that is not the answer, that is the account.

"Motel pool," she says. "Route 9. Off-season. I was thirty-four."

"Alone."

"My marriage had just ended, and I decided that teaching myself was the same as being strong." She turns the towel over in her hands. "I read a book. It had diagrams."

He laughs once, through his nose.

"The book said to have a partner for the first deep-water entry." She wrings the towel out even though it is dry. "I decided the book was being cautious."

"And?"

"And I went in, and I got back out, and I don't remember the getting out."

That is the true part. In eleven years she has said the motel pool to three people and the last sentence to none of them, and she stands in the wet air and hears it land and watches it change nothing in the room, and stays standing.

Ray is quiet a while. Then he says, "You're the steadiest thing in this building."

"I don't---"

"I know," he says. "That's not what I said."

The eighth week, he swims it. Not the shallow end the way the drill goes, and not a length and a half with his head up. He starts at the wall, puts his face in, and goes down the lane toward the black line, and does not stop at the rope.

Ruth walks the deck, which is what she does.

At the ladder he stands up, wipes his face, and says nothing at all. She says nothing back. There is a right amount of noise for a thing like this and it is close to none.

He asks her to swim with him on the Thursday. She says she doesn't swim with students. He says he isn't one anymore, he did the thing.

"Then you don't need me in the water," she says.

"I didn't say need."

She looks at the lanes. 6:40 in the morning, the light coming in off the parking lot at a flat angle, the water doing nothing. She has spent eleven years teaching people that the floor is under them, and standing on the deck while they find it, and going home.

"My face goes under fine," she says.

"I know."

"It's not the same thing."

"No," he says. "It isn't."

He reaches down and sets his hand flat on the ledge, palm up, at the water line, where she can leave it. He doesn't grab, and he doesn't reach. That is the difference, and it is the whole thing, and she has taught it to two hundred adults without once letting anyone do it to her.

She stands there with the whole floor of the pool under her feet and the lane to the deep end in front of her, and does the thing she tells other people to do. She looks at the water and asks what is actually there.

What is there is ten and a half feet, and a ladder, and a man who has been under and come up and is not asking her to be impressive.

She goes up the ladder, walks around the wet tile, and gets in beside him.

"Shallow first," she says.

"Shallow first."

He puts his face in and blows bubbles and comes up. Then they go down the lane together, both of them face down, both of them eyes open, side by side, not touching, all the way to the wall at the far end where the floor is a lie by six inches.

She stands up and holds the ledge and breathes.

"Your turn," he says.

She puts her hand in his. Then she picks her feet up off the floor and lets him take the weight, and the water does the rest.