The Best of Me(59)
“Oh no, you don’t.”
If I had been trying to get out of school, she’d have at least allowed me to plead my case, but then she had no presence at school. At the club she was front and center, laughing it up with Ike at the bar and with the girls in the restaurant beside the putting green. Once summer got going, we’d spend all day at the pool, us swimming and her broasting on one of the deck chairs. Every so often, she’d go into the water to cool off, but she didn’t know how to swim and didn’t trust us not to drag her under. So she’d sit waist-deep in the kiddie pool, dropping her cigarette ash onto the wet pavement and dissolving it with her finger.
There was a good-size group of women like her, and they were united in their desire to be left alone. Run to your mother with a complaint, and before she could speak one of the others would say, “Oh, come on now. Let’s not be a tattletale,” or, “You would have lost that tooth anyway. Now get back into the water.” I think of them in that terrible heat, no umbrellas, just sunglasses and bottles of tanning oil that left them smelling like coconuts.
The pool was a land of women and children until swim meets, which usually started at six. Then drinks would be ordered and the dads would arrive. For most of the fathers, this was just one more thing they had to turn up for. Their son was likely on his school’s football or basketball team. Maybe he played baseball as well. For my dad, though, this was it, and the way I saw it he should have been grateful. Look at all the time my fear of sports was affording him—weekends and evenings free.
In retrospect, I was never an awful swimmer, just average. I’d come in third sometimes, and once or twice, if I was part of a relay team, we’d place first, though I could hardly take credit. Occasionally, we’d have intraclub races, us against us, and in those, as in the larger meets, the star was a boy named Greg Sakas, who was my size but a few years younger, with pale yellow hair and legs no thicker than jumper cables. “God, that Greg Sakas, did you see him go?” my father said on the way home from my first meet. “Man alive, that kid is faaaantastic.”
In the beginning, it didn’t bother me. Greg wasn’t stuck-up. His father was decent enough, and everyone adored his mother. She was one of the few moms who could get away with wearing a bikini, a chocolate-colored one that, as the summer advanced, made it look as if she were naked. “That son of yours is really something,” I heard my father say to her after the second meet. “You ought to bring a movie camera out here and film him.”
On the way home, he repeated the conversation to my mother. “I said to her, ‘Send the footage to a professional swimming coach, and he’ll be champing at the bit! Your boy is the real thing. Olympic material, I’m telling you. He’s got speed, personality, the whole package.’”
Okay, I thought. You can shut up about Greg Sakas now.
We had a station wagon at the time, and my sister Gretchen and I were in what we called the “way back”—the spot where groceries usually went. When she was a baby, a dog bit her face and left her with a scar that was almost invisible until she got a tan. Then it looked like someone had chalked the number 1 four times on her cheek and put a strike mark through them.
“It’s the kids swimming against him I feel sorry for,” my father continued. “Those clowns didn’t stand a chance. And did you hear what he said when they handed him his blue ribbon? Who the hell knew Greg Sakas could be so funny? Good-looking too. Just an all-around four-star individual.”
When she was young, my sister was what we called chunky, and the longer my dad carried on about Greg the better it seemed to draw attention to it. “Hey,” I called. “Gretchen’s in a sunbeam. Does anybody else smell bacon frying?”
My sister looked at me like, Weren’t we friends just two minutes ago? Where is this coming from?
“Maybe Mom should put her on a diet,” I said. “That way she won’t be so fat.”
“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” my father said.
My mother, newly pregnant and feeling somewhat chunky herself, put her two cents in, and I settled back, triumphant. This was the advantage of having a large family. You didn’t want to focus attention on Lisa—Miss Perfect—but there were three, and later four, others to go after, all younger and all with their particular faults: buckteeth, failing grades. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Even if I wound up getting punished, it was still a way of changing the channel, switching in this case from The Greg Show to The David Show, which was today sponsored by Gretchen’s weight problem. Meanwhile, my sisters had their own channels to change, and when it got to be too much, when our parents could no longer take it, they’d open the car door and throw us out. The spot they favored—had actually blackened with their tire treads—was at the bottom of a steep hill. The distance home wasn’t all that great, a half mile, maybe, but it seemed twice as long when it was hot or raining, or, worse yet, during a thunderstorm. “Aw, it’s just heat lightning,” our father would say. “That’s not going to kill anybody. Now get the hell out of my car.”
Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I’d remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I’d wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.
Drawing attention to Gretchen’s weight was the sort of behavior my mother referred to as “stirring the turd,” and I did it a lot that summer. Dad wants Greg Sakas to be his son instead of me, I thought, and in response I made myself the kind of kid that nobody could like.