While You Were Drinking by Lydia Bird

Author:Lydia Bird [Bird, Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shebooks
Published: 2014-06-25T04:00:00+00:00

1990

I held tight to my mother’s right hand as we ducked beneath the wave, Steve holding her left hand. The three of us punched back through the water’s surface as the wave moved to shore, roiling. Mom sputtered a little, but she was laughing, letting go of my hand to push the hair from her face, there in the warm salty water of the Bight of Benin.

There was so much I could worry about, if I let myself. I could worry about my parents’ lives in Spain, Dad’s deepening dementia, the specter of him wandering off when Mom was drunk. I could worry that Mom would direct some barb my way, as she had the last time I’d seen her, insisting the intervention had done more harm than good, taking pleasure in holding it against me, as she’d always held things against Dad.

But this was Africa. Steve was a diplomat, I was a diplomat’s wife, and my parents were visiting. This swim was what I’d wanted of their visit, more than Christmas morning with ornaments on the potted palm, or outings around Abidjan, or the road trip to Ghana. Maybe it was foolhardy, taking my out-of-shape 63-year-old mother swimming at the riptide-prone beach of Grand Bassin, but the tide today was mild, and she’d been game.

“Here comes another one,” Steve said, and I took Mom’s hand again. “Now!” he said. We all went under easily, and I listened to the rush beneath the surface.

On the far side of the wave I turned and spotted Dad, pacing the beach. He wouldn’t forget who we were, where he was, in just these few minutes, would he?

We swam further out, past the pull of the waves. Mom was winded, so we rested, rising and falling with the swells. “It’s almost as warm as Hawaii,” she said, floating easily on her back, wiggling her toes.

Dad had grown up in landlocked Idaho and had never felt comfortable swimming. Layne swam elegantly but preferred a pool, where she could see the bottom. This was what I’d wanted, to swim with my mom in tropical water, as we had when I was a child, the two of us beyond the big breakers on Kauai.

A few minutes later she said, “We shouldn’t leave Papa for too long.”

Steve, in tune to the waves after decades of surfing, called the lull between sets, and we made it safely back, Mom breathing hard, more frail on land but happy. An African woman walked by on the sand, an infant tied to her back with bright pagne fabric, an enormous basin on her head of small Ivoirien pineapples and a lethal-looking knife. She glanced at us with amused disbelief, this unlikely trio of Européans emerging from the waves. She would have prepared us pineapples if we’d asked, deftly slicing off the skin, leaving enough of the leafy stem to eat them like Popsicles.

Dad approached, agitated. “Hello, dear,” Mom said, squeezing the water from her hair with the easy motion of a young person.

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