8 June 2008 | Vol. 8, No. 2

The Swimming Pool

by CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH

We'll remember this as my daughter's first summer. The point of reference for all her summers. We go to the university's pool, the swimming pool I love because of such public mothering.

I'll remember the way my husband left her in the sun too long, her face made lovely and pink also my first scare for her life. How she lolled in the carseat covered by towels, the cooing that strangers did over her. Their faces. I'll remember putting on a bathing suit and missing the expanse she made of my belly. My son, less afraid of the water than the last time.

This is my son's third summer. He digs his fingers into my hand when kids in the swimming pool get rowdy. He hesitates around the edge. My son has golden hair. It curls and it traps light. I look like the nanny with my mother's olive skin, black hair. In my lap, he's my prize.

It's personality. He is tentative around slides, rides and boisterous children. He has his own brand of wildness. He doesn't like to be bothered by other children's conception of play. He's acting out the stories in his head complete with voices. Anthropomorphizer of napkins.

In the pool my body floats and I allow in all the ideas I miss about myself. A flossy rope ties me to myself. A leash. Heavenly mother. In the swimming pool I am a child making arcs in the snow.

Other mothers swim in the pool with their children, many of the mothers older. The sun puts a glisten on the ends of their hair. Their bodies underwater look unearthly. The woman in the lane next to me has wide shoulders like my grandmother.

We wrap our children in towels the same way: so that their bodies are swallowed warm with them. We hector them about sunscreen.

When I swim and I am entirely alone with my thoughts, my children only pass through my mind as topics.

I think today when my daughter and son lay together on the bed sleeping. His lanky body next to her curve. Is that not a poem?

Her come from your body, mama.

I try to remember the writing ideas that escaped me the night before. The ones I was certain I would remember. I couldn't get up and write because I was stuck between my children's bodies. Now I don't understand the lines.

Divided into lanes, the ghostly bodies of mothers back and forth, back and forth. We are all submerged away from our lives. A woman's daughter stands at one end, yells Mom, mom, mom and we all look.

Th