Women on the Verge: Lesbian Tales of Power and Play by Susan Fox Rogers

Author:Susan Fox Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466876163
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-07-22T04:00:00+00:00

A Pool Supreme

Andrea Cohen

At times when I swim I’m an icefish. I’m an otter, a seal, an eel in the Sargasso Sea. I am kelp and carp and driftwood. Parrotfish, marlin, mudminnow. Fifteen years spent logging eighteen thousand miles in swimming pools around the globe have afforded me ample time to imagine myself as all manner of watery flora and fauna, flotsam and jetsam, at one with the world’s fluidity. But the roots of this obsession reach back to childhood, when I chanced upon a dog named Cocoa.

For most of us, swimming is a summery rite. A playful social pastime enjoyed in an outing to the ocean or lake or in a backyard pool between bites of barbecue. We float and bob and loll and drift. My earliest recollection of swimming is at the Blonders’ kidney-shaped (oh, why never liver- or spleen-shaped, I wondered) pool. Dale Blonder, a six-year-old child of conflicted morality, had devised the intricate rules to a game called Queen of the Deep, which entailed a swift, headlong descent down the twisting, sixteen-foot trajectory of a state-of-the-art aqua-slide. Dale conscientiously informed me that anyone going down that slide in the presence of Cocoa, the standard poodle, would get bit. The warning was accompanied by a dare. I slid; Cocoa bit.

From a tender age, we are driven toward pleasures despite the risks. From that moment, I comprehended vaguely that dogs and their furless companions are guided as much by instinct as good sense, and that wanting to claim a place as one’s own can be irrational and painful. The experience might have made me fear both dogs and water; instead it made me love them more.

In the tranquil neighborhood where I grew up, I wandered through woods and yards with my own dog, the two of us dipping into one chain-link hemmed pool after another. We cooled ourselves in the lily-crowned stone ponds of abandoned estates and waded through shallow, coppery creeks. And then, in the summer of 1973, I became a polar bear.

At a rambling camp in the red clay hillocks of northern Georgia, I was a member of an elite corps of children. We distinguished few donned swimsuits before sleep and woke in the dew-damp dark to stumble under kudzu-covered pines and oaks down to the still, hushed lake. We were the polar bears. Each morning we leapt from the rotting pier into the chilled, murky waters to swim, as instructed, in the style of a lumbering, white Arctic creature. Hands in tight fists, heads above the water, we barked the call of the polar bear: chock, chock, chock!

The stroke, like the sound, was neither efficient nor elegant. Nor was it based upon the behavior of any real bear. It was a nonsensical invention conjured by a few adolescent counselors experimenting with mild hallucinogens and the limits of childish faith. But to us, being a polar bear was special. Polar bears braved the cold and dark. While mere campers slumbered, we were proprietors of the day’s most glimmering hour.

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