by Nancy Thayer
She had come to swimming too late in her life to think of it as more than necessary physical exercise, a disciplined attempt to keep her good health. As a child she had rarely gone swimming, because she had been raised on a farm in Iowa with her righteous grandparents and her mother and her retired missionary aunt, and they had not believed that young girls should swim. It actually hadn’t even been much of an issue though, because there was no pond or swimming pool near enough to tempt Margaret. Later, after she had married, she had come into contact with swimming pools, but by that time she had two small children, and the pools seemed a place for them, not for her. She had owned swimming suits and only worn them so that she could go into the water with one of her children, to hold them by the waist as they splashed about in the shallow end. And later, when the girls could swim by themselves, Margaret had acquired all that flesh, and felt ugly in a swimming suit, ugly and somehow obscene. She had sat in a flowered beach robe, wearing sunglasses, trying to read, constantly surveying the water to be sure her children had still not drowned. Their screeches of delight and frantic pleasure at jumping, diving, plunging into the water had always been a mystery to Margaret. The water had always seemed painfully cold to her. And the few times that she attempted swimming, it seemed that she had to summon up all her energy to fight against the water, to hit out at it, because it wanted to bury her with its remorseless weight, to close over her, to pull her down.
She still felt that way; she could not relax in the water. Floating took more energy from her, the energy of tension and resistance, than the breaststroke. And she could not get over the feeling that she was still ugly and ridiculous while swimming. She did not like the feeling of herself in a swimming suit, or the fact that others could see her that exposed. It was true that she had lost a great deal of weight, and in street clothes she looked quite trim and lovely. But in a swimming suit certain facts could not be hidden: she had been overweight for too long, and the skin around her upper arms and thighs was, in spite of exercise, hopelessly loose and wrinkled. She would never be firmly rounded, supple and resilient again. The sight of Daisy, almost as fat as Margaret had once been, had thrown Margaret into a silent rage: Daisy’s body had been so beautiful, so slim and graceful and voluptuously ripe. Margaret could close her eyes and envision her oldest daughter as she perched on the diving board during her teenage years; Daisy in a pink bikini with a flat belly and two dimples on her lower back, her smooth sleek buttocks peeking out enticingly from the suit bottom. No, Daisy, no! she had wanted to cry; don’t do this to yourself. Don’t pad yourself with extra flesh, you’ll regret it, you’ll regret it terribly! But Margaret did not want to give advice—and she knew Daisy would only be hurt. Besides, it would not be fair for her to be angry at Daisy’s fat; it was her own that she regretted, and no amount of dieting on Daisy’s part could bring Margaret’s body back to a perfect shape.
But the thought of it, the remorse for both herself and her daughter, made Margaret rise up off the bench, throw her towel off, and dive into the water. On different days she swam with different kinds of energy; hope, delight, exhilaration, or grief, regret, anger. Three times a week she came to the pool and forced herself to do thirty laps. She could still do only one lap across the length of the pool at a time; then she had to grab on to the side of the pool, and hang there, gasping for breath. It took her an hour to swim the thirty laps, and when she finally got out she was usually shuddering with exhaustion. But some days were different from others: some days the water streamed by her freely, as if it liked her, as if it were trying to make her work easy. Other days it fought her, pulled her down, and she lost her timing and swallowed water and choked. If she had been a man, she might have taken up boxing instead of swimming; it seemed a sport that she might have really liked. She might really have found pleasure in putting on heavy padded gloves and hitting repeatedly, with a relentless rhythm, a punching bag or some other hard inhuman object. As it was she could not box, and instead she hit out at the water, as if with each stroke she were knocking away a part of her life that threatened to drag her down: her weight, her past, her wasted years.
Thirty laps. One hour. The repetition of thrashing across the pool, grabbing the side, gasping until her breathing came more easily while her heart clamored in her chest, then pushing off with her feet and thrashing her way back to the other end. It hurt. She sometimes felt like a butterfly pushing her way out of endless cocoons, endless enclosing sacs; she pushed, she flailed, she kicked. There were some things you never got over, so the best you could do was to go through them again each day, and then force them away from you so that for a while you could go free. Guilt. She would endlessly swim through her guilt; would she ever swim free of it?
Daisy had been born ten months after Margaret’s marriage to Harry, when Harry was just beginning his residency at a small hospital in Des Moines. Two years later, Margaret had gone to the hospital to deliver her second child—and it had been a boy, and the little boy had died. Placenta previa was the medical term for the cause of the baby’s death; the placenta had planted itself too low in Margaret’s uterus, and had dug into the wall of the womb. The baby was premature; and in addition, there was massive hemorrhaging. The doctors had had to perform a C-section, and the baby had died anyway, and Margaret had almost died, too. Even now it made her stomach cramp with horror to remember it all, the pain and the sorrow; and then she remembered the clear clean lines of her husband, bending over her as she awakened, weak from loss of blood and from medication. “It’s all right, darling,” he had said. “It’s not your fault. Don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault.” Which of course had meant that he and everyone else thought that it was her fault, that it was her fault that the little boy had died. Oh, God, the grief, the pain, even now it made Margaret churn through the water to remember it.
Two years later she had gotten pregnant again. It seemed an irony to Margaret that Dale preferred her father to her mother, worshipped her father, was really her father’s child, when it had been Margaret who had fought for Dale’s life, who had really saved Dale’s life when Harry had been willing to kill her.
“You should not have another child,” he had said. “You might die. You should not go through another pregnancy.” By then he had many connections with physicians and hospitals and could have easily arranged a legal abortion for Margaret, even in Iowa in 1954, because of the danger to Margaret’s life. But Margaret had fought for the baby, had even threatened to divorce Harry if he did not let her have the child. And so she had had the baby, but again there was massive hemorrhaging, and although the baby was brought out alive this time, Margaret came very close to death. The doctors had decided, while she was unconscious, to perform a hysterectomy, and had done so then and there, after taking out the live baby. When Margaret was twenty-three years old, she had had a hysterectomy. Swim through that, beat at it, it would never change, it would never go away. She had wanted six children. At twenty-three she had carried a void inside her.
But she did have the two daughters, lovely healthy daughters, and so she would not let herself grieve—except occasionally, for the lost little boy. Daisy and Dale. When they had first moved to Liberty, Margaret had overheard a woman discussing the strange names Margaret had given her children: “Mrs. Wallace must be a bit queer,” the woman had said. “She’s got two fine daughters, and she’s given one the name of a cow and the other the name of a boy.” At first the remark had hurt Margaret, then infuriated her, then given her a goal: she would not let the women in Liberty mock her; she would be so good, so overwhelmingly correct that before long they would be naming their own daughters Molly and Frances, Bess and Lynn, Daisy and Dale. The naming had been a simple matter, actually; Daisy had been Margaret’s grandmother’s name, and Dale had been her grandfather’s name, and the grandparents had left Margaret a nice sum of money, and she wanted to do something in return, because she had loved them so.
Margaret was on the sixteenth lap. She had established a routine by now
; this was the lap that she did on her back, with a lazy backstroking of her arms and a casual froglegging kick of her legs. She stared up at the round lights on the ceiling, at the cross beams that marked her progress; now she was halfway across the pool. She would backstroke for three or four laps before turning over and pushing herself through to the end.
And these laps, of course, were for Harry. Margaret felt no guilt over Daisy and Dale, no remorse; she had done for them all that she could. She had done all that she could for Harry, too, until the past two years, when she realized she could do nothing more. And so she had left him, but taken a large weight of guilt with her—and a larger portion of anger, because he stayed in Liberty, being righteous and sad, and not ever understanding that perhaps he ought to feel some guilt on Margaret’s account.
At the beginning it had not been Harry’s fault. Margaret had willingly abdicated her own self, because that was what she had been raised to do. Now, years later, after reading feminist books and psychology books, she saw what she had done, and knew that she had done it to herself, it was her own fault. And for a while she had been happy doing it: happy taking care of the girls, and decorating their new home, and taking care of Harry, and becoming a pillar of the community. But after thirty years of it, when she had wanted a change, only a slight change, Harry had not been able to accept it. He wanted Margaret as she had always been: subservient and worshipful. She saw it now rationally, it helped to see things rationally, and still she hit the water as if it were her past.
Harry had been poor, and becoming a physician had been a victory for him of the largest possible order. And he had been a good physician; he had truly given himself over to his community. He had swelled and thrived on his position as physician, healer, arbiter, guardian, counselor, god. And Margaret had helped him: she had wiped tears and held hands and given advice and loaned money and babysat children and driven out in snowstorms to fetch stranded patients. Their money had accumulated in the bank; Harry never felt secure enough—or conceited enough—to spend much of it until the girls were in their teens, when he took his family each summer on a trip to Europe or Mexico. But the spending of the money had meant nothing to Harry; the having of it mattered. Margaret had never been able to convince him that he would never be poor again, that he could spend money frivolously and still have enough to eat. She could not convince him that there was a complete world out there that existed apart from Liberty, Iowa; from him. When she tried to tell him that the lives of many of the people she had been assisting bored her to tears, that she had been bored to tears for years, he had looked at her as if she were a monster. He had suggested that she was entering her menopause and was not in her right mind.
Oh, it was complicated, complex; the reasons for the fat she had accumulated on her body were as tangled as the reasons she had stayed in Iowa, doing good. First, her upbringing; she had been brought up to do good. She had been brought up to give love. She had been raised to feel that any pleasuring of her own body was vulgar and evil. How tangled, how tangled it was: One fall when Daisy was five and Dale was one and they had not yet moved to Liberty but were living in Des Moines while Harry finished his residency, that fall two things had happened.
First, Margaret had taken Daisy to see Richard Atwater, who was a pediatrician; Daisy needed a medical checkup in order to enter public school. Richard Atwater was a few years older than Harry, but still a young man, and a handsome one, and after examining Daisy he had sent her out of the room with a nurse, and asked Margaret to remain behind. Margaret’s heart had thundered with fear; she was afraid Dr. Atwater was going to tell her that Daisy had something horribly wrong with her. Instead, the physician had made a pass at her. He had said wonderfully complimentary things to her, and crossed the room and taken her in his arms and embraced her. And Margaret had responded. She was twenty-four years old, and had been married for six years, and had not traveled or even gone to a decent theater; to her Richard Atwater was romance. He was also sin to her; and although she agreed to meet him later that week at a motel, she did not keep her promise. She could not. She felt that God would have struck her dead—or, worse, would have killed one of her children. She had fretted and burned to think that she could love her husband yet still respond to another man in such a clearly sexual way as she had responded to Richard Atwater. She had begun eating—not purposefully, not knowing what she was doing or why—but she had begun eating then, had begun gaining weight. Before long she felt fat and safe, secure; no man would make a pass at her. She would never feel guilty again; she would never feel the threat of infidelity overcoming her; she would always be faithful to her husband: she would never have to make a decision. She accumulated flesh as if it were a bodyguard—which, of course, it was.
The second thing that happened to her when she was twenty-four also involved Daisy. When Margaret had taken Daisy to the public school to sign up, she had met a pleasant young woman with a meek-looking little boy, and over the course of their conversation it came about that Margaret offered to drive the little boy to school for a while, because she had a car and the woman didn’t. Actually it wasn’t Margaret’s car; it was Harry’s, and the only way Margaret could have it to drive Daisy to and from kindergarten was by getting up very early in the morning and dressing both little girls and taking them with her out across the city as she drove Harry to work; then repeating the same thing in the evening. It cost her two good hours of driving in order to have the car to drive Daisy to school. It took her an extra fifteen minutes to pick up Chuckie, the meek little boy, and an extra fifteen minutes to take him home, and as the fall turned into winter and the weather grew rainy then snowy and driving became difficult, Margaret began to regret her offer. She wished that at least Chuckie’s mother would call her on the phone and thank her, or ask her in for coffee, or offer to babysit some afternoon when there was no school because of conferences in order somehow to pay Margaret back. But Chuckie’s mother had almost disappeared after the day of enrollment at the public school. She was represented only by a hand that shoved Chuckie out the door of his small frame house in the morning and was seldom seen at all in the afternoon. Margaret talked it over with Harry, growing more and more indignant: who did the woman think she was, asking Margaret to drive her boy to school, and then not so much as phoning to say thanks after three months?
One early December day, when the roads were icy and the wind was bitter and Dale was whining in the backseat with a bad cold and Margaret had a sinus headache, she decided the hell with it, she would stand it no longer. Instead of letting little Chuckie—who was not an especially endearing child—out at the sidewalk as she always did, she parked the car.
“I’m going in to say hello to your mother,” Margaret said cheerfully. She dragged Daisy out of the car and threw Dale over her shoulder and went boldly up the walk. If nothing else, she would get a cup of coffee from Chuckie’s mom.
She entered the house behind Chuckie, calling, “Hello! Hello?” She tried to make her voice bright and friendly.
Then she stopped, paralyzed by what she saw. The house was indescribably dark and messy, with plastic curtains pulled across the windows and a dirty linoleum floor littered with more things than Margaret could take into account: there seemed to be cans on the floor, and toys, and food, and clothes, and papers, and clumps of dust; it was startling. Margaret had not been prepared for this filth, this chaos: Chuckie was a meek little boy who often had green mucus streaming from his nose, but his clothes were always neat and clean.
Then she saw Chuckie’s mother, who was seated in a torn brown chair in the corner of the room. There was something not right about the woman; her limbs did not come out from her body in the way they should, and her head lolled downward toward her chest like a drunkard’s. Yet her expression was alert; she looked worried.
“Is something wrong?” the woman asked.
“No, no,” Margaret had gasped, still standing stiffly, holding on to Daisy’s hand. “I just thought I’d come in and sa
y hello. I hadn’t seen you for so long.”
The woman made an effort and her head rolled back so that she was looking up. “Has Chuckie been giving you trouble?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” Margaret said. “Oh, no, he’s been just fine. I just—I just wanted to say hello to you. You look—excuse me for asking, but are you ill?”
The woman laughed, and in doing so her body lost some of its control. When she could finally speak, she said, “I’ve got M.S., Multiple Sclerosis. I’ve had it for four years now; I found out I had it when I was twenty. Sometimes I’m better, sometimes I’m worse. Today I just happen to be worse; I’ve been worse for quite a while.”
Tears sprang to Margaret’s eyes: the woman, Chuckie’s mother, was exactly her age. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re driving Chuckie to school,” the woman said. “That’s the biggest help I could have.”
“But who takes care of you?” Margaret said. “Who fixes your dinner?”
“Oh, I can do most of it,” the woman said, and she sounded impatient. “My ex-husband comes around now and then, and I can take care of myself and Chuckie just fine. I don’t need any social workers coming around to snoop. The place isn’t so clean right now, but I’ll get it cleaned up, and Chuckie wants to stay with me no matter how messy the place is.”
“But how do you—” Margaret began.
“Look,” the woman interrupted. “I don’t mean to be rude or anything. But I just don’t like to have strangers see me when I’m this way. I really appreciate you driving Chuckie to school, okay? I really am grateful. But none of the rest of it is any of your business. I wish you would just go on back out the door and pretend you didn’t see me.”
