(1985) World's Fair by EL Doctorow

Author:EL Doctorow [Doctorow, EL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76296-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-11-09T14:00:00+00:00

At P.S. 70 we were now deemed of an age to be sent once a week to the below-ground swimming pool, a vast chlorinated cavern of tile, where first the boys and then the girls were set to swimming if we could, or taking instruction in waving our arms and holding our breath. The boys’ teacher was old Mr. Bone, the Poseidon of the place. He didn’t speak, he roared. His deep voice bounded over the water in echoes of itself. He was the school’s swimming coach and lord of this underworld, a fat bald man with steel-rim spectacles who wore a white cotton undershirt stretched taut over his enormous belly, and white ducks and rubber sandals. He also had a gimpy leg. But that he was fit we all understood by the size of his arms, rounder and thicker, even, than my father’s. And that he was dedicated, there was no question—he spent his sunless life down here, whereas we had to endure the pool and showers only once a week.

The girls were instructed by his associate, Mrs. Fasching, as skinny as he was fat, with red hair curling from under her bathing cap, and in a black-skirted swimsuit, which successfully hid her person except for the freckled legs and arms. It was common knowledge that the girls wore bathing suits to swim, while we did not. Even during their showers they wore suits, which seemed unjust. How could you take a real shower while wearing a bathing suit? Brown soap was available at each position, big hard cakes of it, and if we were not seen by Mr. Bone to be adequately scrubbing ourselves, he would warn, in that voice like a whale’s call, that we had better get to it properly or he would come into the shower and show us how.

That weekly visit to the realm of water tested my courage. I was not ready to swim and didn’t care to shower in public. There was no air to breathe down there, only a fetid mist that seemed to turn to oil on your skin. It did no good to tell Mr. Bone you had had a bath the night before, or that you bathed at home twice a week: under the shower you went. And it’s true, for some children the P.S. 70 shower was the only water they saw from one week to the next. It was because of those same children we had to endure health checks in the nurse’s office, where our scalps were examined for lice and ringworm. The nurse also turned up the children who were discovered to need eyeglasses. It was my mother I always went to for explanation of the complexities of money and class. “Some children are from families too poor to have their own doctors,” she said. “They don’t come from good homes and school showers are the only water they see. They are the same children who need to stay in school for lunch because there is no lunch waiting for them at home.

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