When My Mother Was Esther Williams
Fifteen now: she has scrimped all of last year and half of this one to buy a bathing suit for summer by the pool. Not just any bathing suit, mind you, but something ruched and glamorous, midnight blue with halter strap around the neck, polka dots across the bodice, each one white and round as the moon. How she longs to be mistaken for Esther Williams in an aqua-musical.
Linda knows what this bathing suit will cost her from the start: hours after school minding impossible children, weekends darning socks for one neighbor, mending shirts for another, even tugging weeds from the many, brambled flower beds of Mrs. Wheeler on the corner. “I’ll pay you,” the crotchety woman said, “but I need to see the weeds. Bring them to me in a pail. For every thistle torn out by the root, I’ll give you a penny. If you only snag the leaves, don’t bother bringing them at all.”
Other costs include dinner rolls left untouched in the basket, sweets from the candy shop where all her friends stop on the way home (“for licorice at least—it’s part-medicinal!”), ham on Christmas, ham on Easter, pats of butter on everything, even a slice of cake on her very own birthday, the best her mother knew how to make (“there’s Coca-Cola inside!”). No more Coca-Cola either, though she still dreams the little fizz at the back of her throat as her lips pull away from the cool glass bottle.
Everyone thinks Linda’s saving up for college, which she will do more of now that the suit is hers, stowed away in a subtle cache where even her sister wouldn’t think to look: under the bed, then under the floorboards, wrapped in a paper lunch sack, inscrutable beneath the light grains of balding wood. But tonight she takes a risk, slips the suit on under her bathrobe, secures the door to the one bathroom the five members of her family share. With tub water running a liquid alibi, Linda poses before the mirror. Upright, the firm cups hold her breasts in place—perfect globes of equal size and shape. As she bends forward, she can see the crease between them emerge like a narrow corridor: inviting, inviting. Here, at last, the welcome rift her elders call a cleavage.
Scrubbing her nails over the sink, Linda admires the sharp wings of her shoulders, the way her collarbones jut out now like figures in a Roman frieze. But her legs! She watches them from the lip of the tub, where she stands balancing, imagines diving. They’re leaner, yes, but isn’t a thin stub still a stub? She needs a tall heel to lengthen them, but no one she knows wears a size eleven.
The next day Linda will rise early to dust every figurine on Mrs. Newsome’s shelves. Likewise every piece of china in her cabinet. She will also press the linen napkins and set a nice table for the bridge club. “May I pack you a lunch to go, honey?” the elder woman asks when she is done. “I’ve got beefsteak tomatoes, some good cheese, and a hearty rye bread.” But Linda only shakes her head, feeling the cinch of Lastex under her clothes and knowing her new figure must hold and hold—hold in order to ever be held. She smiles shyly and thanks Mrs. Newsome again as a few bright coins trickle from the change purse into her open palm.
The public pool charges a nickel for admittance, which is what the slim girl pays, knowing full well her mother would call it squandering. She knows her mother deserves, or believes she deserves (does it really matter which?), “the finer things of life.” And who is this daughter then, this treasonous firstborn, secretly socking away a little at a time so she could one day plunk down a sum she longed to call her “hard-earned money”—let alone eighteen crisp dollars at a department store as downtown-elegant as The Bon Marche? Think what Linda could have bought, should have bought, for her mother. But Linda doesn’t want to think these thoughts. Instead, she barrels through the turnstile, strips quickly in the locker room, then covers herself halfway with the towel. Summer is never really warm in Seattle, but the sun is kissing every surface just the same, loving on everyone equally so as to give the illusion of heat.
Now to put the towel down on the bare chaise lounge, to do it slowly, casually, as if no one is watching—and perhaps no one is.
Linda can’t be sure until she takes those tentative first steps toward the diving board. Is hers the prettiest swimsuit on display, the most fashionable, the most expensive? There’s a game of volleyball underway in the shallow end. Some people are watching. Others are reading or dozing, magazines splayed on side tables, ice melting in tumblers. At any moment, Linda could be recognized by someone she knows. This might be harrowing, though it could be magnificent—someone doing a double-take, peering at her over dark glasses, exclaiming, “Wow, is that really you?” And how would she answer?
Now, though, the trouble comes with where to place her hands: on her hips, newly hour-glassed in proportion to her shrinking waist— or across her chest, just there below the perfectly shaped and symmetrical breasts—or loose against her thighs, fingers dangling?
The lifeguard on duty is concerned with a swimming lesson, children entering the water for the first time without a vest. They lower their faces, blow bubbles, turn their heads to each side, bob. He holds the whistle in his teeth, his back erect, his keen eyes darting. As he clasps the white doughnut float in his dominant hand, Linda watches the sun make a halo of his hair.
When it’s her turn to ascend the ladder, her toes curl tightly around each rung. This might be the most beautiful she has ever been, and she’ll have no evidence tomorrow, not even a blurry snapshot. If only she could step outside her body and see it slicing through the air, sleek as a missile entering the water, leaving only a ripple behind. Esther Williams made Bathing Beauty the same year Linda Smith was born—which must mean something good, something lucky, right? Sometimes they showed old movies at the cinema, and she would sneak in through the back door that a boy who worked concessions propped open for her. She knew him from algebra class. She helped him with his homework once, and he never forgot.
From the platform now, Linda scans the landscape of striped towels and slatted chairs, hoping she might catch a glimpse of that boy, who in turn might catch a glimpse of her. She wants to remain unforgettable.
In her mind, she has rehearsed this scene so many times: three long strides, then bouncing in place at the end of the plank the way Olympians do, the way Esther Williams did when she was first discovered by Hollywood, athlete-turned-actress-turned-bathing-beauty. Linda would go up in the air like a midnight-blue, polka-dot balloon, then roll her body downward, uncoiling into one smooth line, piercing the water with her pointed hands.
No one is there to record her moment in sunlight, her plunge that by definition cannot be a fall because she has willed it. Her torso splits the water at a speed she had not imagined. Her head strikes the concrete at the bottom of the pool, hard enough to hear the thwack! in her own ears, slow enough to wonder in the encroaching blear if anyone will come to her rescue. She feels herself dissolving like Alka Seltzer in a glass.
Once, Esther Williams nearly drowned in a studio tank because both ends of the box were painted black, and she couldn’t discern the trap door for the exit. Linda remembers reading this. Linda, suspended. Linda, unmoving. Linda, closing her eyes just as the man’s arm snares her waist, as he pulls her supine onto the hot bricks. “Trying to be Icarus, were you?” he asks, pushing back her wet tangle of hair.
Perhaps Linda drifts away now. Perhaps a small crowd gathers. Surely they notice her swimsuit as their eyes rove over her body—dripping, motionless, still very much alive. Surely someone, perhaps even the lifeguard as he pinches her nose, lifts her chin, and parts her pale lips, finds himself considering, Poor darling! What a bathing beauty she is!
Her eyes are heavy as stones, but she feels his breath enter her mouth. Linda, coming to. Linda, stirring. Perhaps this is kissing or merely reviving (does it really matter which?). Perhaps the aqua-musical is Sleeping Beauty. When later he asks for her name, she’ll him it’s Esther. She’ll hold a bag of ice to her head, fold her stub-legs under her small body. “It’s for the report,” he explains, not looking up. Still, she’ll give him her real number.
Your vivid recounting of your mother’s self-conscious imaginings is so relatable to any young woman who has ventured to the pool in a new, daring bathing suit. And your use of third-person POV to tell her story works as a way to relay the details of her quest to purchase the suit. I’m going to try that approach with a story I’m writing about my mom. Thanks!