Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck

Author:Cheryl Peck [PECK, CHERYL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC011000
ISBN: 9780759509856
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2003-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

mother learns to swim

WHEN I WAS four years old my father took me to a large body of water and threw me in, and when I came up shrieking and grabbing for air he said, “Good—she can swim.” We have no idea how many children there should have been in our family. He only kept the five that were waterproof. The only non-swimmer in our family was our mother, who spent most of the leisure hours of our youth either back on shore, or in the boat, her hand welding their own grips in the gunwales as we raced and swooped around the chain of lakes where we played.

Our mother was a confirmed non-swimmer. She didn’t like to get her face wet. She hated to be splashed. She was happiest about ankle deep with a fearless toddler to guard, conveniently preventing her from coming out into the depths where the rest of us were. By the time the youngest among us was born, I was a certified junior lifesaver and the UnWee and the Wee One were both better swimmers than I was; we took it upon ourselves to free our mother by teaching the baby to swim. He was a large, happy, round baby who never talked until he was three and never walked until he was four—both because he never had any reason. Since he was carried everywhere he went anyway, he never seemed to notice he was in water. We would play with him until we became bored and then just float him like a small air mattress. When he started to drift away, someone would reach out and grab a foot or his hair and pull him back to us. The baby loved it. It seemed perfectly natural to us. Citing his continued need to survive his siblings, however, our mother signed up, at the age of about thirty-four, for swimming lessons.

This seemed fairly foolish to us. We had all taken swimming lessons. Every summer for as long as we could remember we had been thrust into our suits, issued beach bags with our names on the outside and our clean underwear to change into and a towel on the inside, and ferried to the beach for swimming lessons. Although I was not a lesbian at the time and would not become one for another twenty years, I learned to get my face wet voluntarily to please my beauty queen/lifeguard teacher, Delores. I would have dog-paddled to China for Delores. At the time our mother learned to swim I could swim the required ten body lengths under water and both the UnWee and the Wee One could dive off one shore of the lake and come up on the other. We felt qualified to teach.

Mom’s first lesson was to get her face wet. This is a huge stepping-stone for non-swimmers, but for children who dove out of the car, raced down the beach and plunged headfirst into untested waters, it was a difficult trauma to take seriously.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.