Florence Adler Swims Forever(43)
“Gussie, don’t use that picture.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because why?”
“Because”—Anna hesitated—“that baby is dead.”
Gussie put her scissors down. “Like Hyram?”
Anna nodded.
Gussie placed the clipping back down on the table and smoothed its edges. Was she hurt? Anna couldn’t tell.
“Do you have a bathing suit to wear?” Gussie asked, and Anna wondered if this was the child’s own small attempt to get back at her. She didn’t have a bathing suit. She’d worn a cotton dress to the beach on the day Florence had died, and Gussie knew it.
“I don’t,” Anna admitted, watching Gussie for a response.
“You could wear one of Florence’s.”
“I think that might be unkind.”
Gussie shrugged her shoulders. “She can’t wear them anymore.”
* * *
Anna waited until the apartment grew quiet, Gussie tucked into bed on the sun porch, Esther and Joseph retired to their bedroom down the hall. Then she rose from her own bed, went to Florence’s dresser, and switched on the lamp. She thought she remembered Florence keeping her bathing suits in the top left drawer, but when she slid it open, as quietly as she could, she was confronted with a jumble of slips and stockings. So, she eased the drawer closed and tried another one.
Florence’s drawers were a mess, which came as no surprise to Anna. She was the type of person who left wet bathing suits hanging on bedposts and her shoes in exactly the spot where she kicked them off at night. Magazines and books were left open to the page where she’d stopped reading, a testament to her assumption that she’d return to them before too long.
Anna, who was grateful the Adlers had found room in the apartment for her at all, had been in no position to demand that Florence make her bed or push in her drawers. For the brief time the two girls had shared the room, Anna had just tidied up after her—folding down the pages of Florence’s books and magazines so that they might be stacked on the dresser and lining up her shoes, toes in, under the window, where Anna kept her own. Anna would have liked to think that Florence appreciated her efforts, but she wasn’t sure she even noticed. Florence struck Anna as the type of girl who was used to being looked after, used to getting her own way. She blew in and out of the room with the confidence of a person who had been the family’s baby for two decades, who believed everyone was always glad to see her and that she could achieve her wildest ambitions if for no other reason than that no one had ever told her she couldn’t.
In the third drawer she tried, Anna found what she had been looking for. Among Florence’s underwear and brassieres were a handful of bathing suits. Anything Anna had seen Florence wear in the days before she died was immediately discarded—a Jantzen molded-fit in a burnt-red color and a teal Zephyr with a black belt that cinched at the waist. She shuddered when she realized that the suit Florence had worn to the beach two Sundays ago was, like its wearer, undoubtedly gone forever.
At the back of the drawer was a plain black bathing suit that Anna didn’t recognize. She held it up to get a better look at it. The wool was stretched, the cut not nearly so modern as the suits Florence had worn this summer. Would Stuart recognize it as belonging to Florence? Anna sincerely hoped not. She placed the suit on the dresser top and pulled her nightgown over her head. For a moment, she stood in front of the bureau’s mirror, not moving, just studying her naked body.
She was not nearly so curvy as she’d been in high school. In the last year, there had been the worry over whether she would go to school, then the worry over whether she’d get a visa. Once her visa application had been approved and she knew she was really leaving Berlin and her family behind, it had been hard to eat much of anything, and during the six-day crossing from Hamburg, she’d been unable to hold down so much as a cracker. Even when she’d arrived safely in Atlantic City and Esther had begun spooning generous servings of noodle kugel onto her plate, Anna found it difficult to eat much. Now she blamed homesickness, and perhaps Florence’s death, for the fact that she could count her own ribs. She reached for the suit, pulling the scratchy fabric up and over her hips and then her breasts until it snapped taut against her shoulders. When it was on, she stepped back to examine herself, trying to see as much of her body as the small mirror allowed. The suit cut into her thighs in an unbecoming way, but otherwise, Anna was pleased with the result. She moved her arms through the air in big circles, the way she’d seen Florence do before entering the water.
Somewhere in the apartment, Anna heard a small crash and then the creak of floorboards as Joseph or Esther moved to retrieve what Anna could imagine was a fallen book or a dropped shoe. Terrified that Esther would discover her wearing Florence’s suit, Anna scooped her nightgown up off the floor, switched off the lamp, and dove for her bed. Under the cover of darkness and a thin bedsheet, she wriggled out of the suit and back into her nightgown. What would Anna say if Esther discovered the suit was missing? The poor woman hadn’t set foot in the girls’ room since Florence had died. Surely, she hadn’t kept track of the bathing suits her younger daughter had carted back and forth between the house on Atlantic Avenue, the apartment, and Wellesley?
* * *
Anna was all nerves by the time she left for the Kentucky Avenue beach tent on Tuesday evening. She was nervous to get in the water, where she knew she’d have no control of her own body, but she was more nervous to approach a tent full of lifeguards she didn’t know and ask for Stuart. What if the lifeguards couldn’t understand her accent? Or worse, thought she was one of those silly girls who Florence had liked to make fun of—the ones who chased lifeguards up and down the beach. What if Stuart wasn’t there? It was possible he’d changed his mind about the whole thing. She worried she’d been too forward asking for the lessons in the first place. Ever since Florence had drowned, she’d just felt so overwhelmed. Somehow, her inability to swim felt like an indicator that she was ill fit to be here at all. If, at any point, the ocean might swallow her up, what would the rest of this big and disorderly country do to her?