The Best of Me(60)

“What on earth has gotten into you?” my mother kept asking.

I wanted to tell her, but more than that I wanted her to notice it on her own. How can you not? I kept wondering. It’s all he ever talks about.

The next swim meet was a replay of the first two. Coming home, I was once again in the “way back”—anything to put some distance between me and my father. “I’ll tell you what—that Greg is magic. Success is written all over his face, and when it happens I’m going to say, ‘Hey, buddy, remember me? I’m the one who first realized how special you are.’”

He talked as if he actually knew stuff about swimming, like he was a talent scout for Poseidon or something. “The butterfly’s his strong suit, but let’s not discount his crawl or, hell, even his breaststroke, for that matter. Seeing that kid in the water is like seeing a shark!”

His talk was supposedly directed at my mother, who’d stare out the window and sometimes sigh, “Oh gosh, Lou. I don’t know.” She never said anything to keep the conversation going, so I could only believe that he was saying these things for my benefit. Why else would he be speaking so loudly, and catching my eye in the rearview mirror?

One week, while riding home, I took my sister Amy’s Barbie doll, tied her feet to the end of my beach towel, and lowered her out the way-back window, dragging her behind us as we drove along. Every so often I’d reel her back in and look at the damage—the way the asphalt had worn the hair off one side of her head, whittled her ski-jump nose down to nothing. What, I wondered, was Greg up to at that exact moment? Did his father like him as much as mine did? He was an only child, so chances were he got the star treatment at home as well as at the club. I lowered the doll back out the window and let go of the towel. The car behind us honked, and I ducked down low and gave the driver the finger.

By mid-July, I was begging to quit the team, but my parents wouldn’t allow it. “Oh, you’re a good swimmer,” my mother said. “Not the best, maybe, but so what? Who wants to be the best at something you do in a bathing suit?”



In the winter, my Greek grandmother was hit by a truck and moved from New York State to live with us. Bringing her to the club would have depressed people. The mournful black dresses, the long gray hair pinned into an Old Country bun, she was the human equivalent of a storm cloud. I thought she’d put a crimp in our upcoming pool schedule, but when Memorial Day arrived, it was business as usual. “She’s a big girl,” my mother said. “Let her stay home by herself.”

“Well, shouldn’t we be back by five, just in case she falls down the stairs or something?” I didn’t want her to ruin my summer—just to keep me off the swim team. “I could come home and sit with her.”

“The hell you will,” my mother said. “A nice steep fall is just what I’m hoping for.”

I thought the birth of my brother, Paul, might limit our pool hours as well, but, again, no luck. It can’t have been healthy for a six-month-old in that hot sun. Maybe that’s why he never cried. He was in shock—the only baby I’d ever seen with a tan line. “Cute kid,” Greg said one afternoon, and I worried that he might win over Paul and my mother the way he had my father.

The summer of ’68 was even worse than the one before it. The club started serving a once-a-week prime-rib dinner, dress up—which meant my blue wool sports coat. Sweating over my fruit cocktail, I’d watch my father make his rounds, stopping at the Sakases’ table and laying his hand on Greg’s shoulder the way he’d never once put it on mine. There weren’t many people I truly hated back then—thirty, maybe forty-five at most—and Greg was at the top of my list. The killer was that it wasn’t even my idea. I was being forced to hate him, or, rather, forced to hate myself for not being him. It’s not as if the two of us were all that different, really: same size, similar build. Greg wasn’t exceptional-looking. He was certainly no scholar. I was starting to see that he wasn’t all that great a swimmer either. Fast enough, sure, but far too choppy. I brought this to my father’s attention, and he attributed my observation to sour grapes: “Maybe you should work on your own stroke before you start criticizing everyone else’s.”

Things will be better when the summer is over, I kept thinking. We continued going to the club for prime rib, but Greg wasn’t always there, and without the swimming there wasn’t as much for my dad to carry on about. When fall arrived, he got behind a boy in my Scout troop. But my father didn’t really understand what went on in Scouts. The most difficult thing we did that year was wrap potatoes in tinfoil, and I could wrap a potato just as well as the next guy. Then one night while watching The Andy Williams Show, he came upon Donny Osmond.

“I just saw this kid on TV, and I mean to tell you, he absolutely knocked my socks off. The singing, the dancing—this boy’s going to be huge, you mark my words.”

“You didn’t discover him,” I said the following evening at dinner. “If someone’s on The Andy Williams Show, it means they were already discovered. Stop trying to take credit.”

“Well, someone’s testy, aren’t they?” My father lifted his drink off the table. “I wonder when Donny will be on again.”

“It’s the Osmond Brothers,” I said. “Girls at school talk about them all the time. It’s not a solo act—they’re a group.”