Dorothy Carroll

Mom was like my grandfather in as much as she treated words and emotions as though they were extravagances.  As a child, I never thought to ask her where she learned to swim with so much grace and so little effort. Maybe I didn’t ask because swimming wasn't a part of her identity, and remained private, like so many other things about her. 

Looking back I realize that she was one with the water, a natural, a disguised naiad in her right element. Mom had a swimmers body, slim and muscular despite having given birth to five children and she kept it more or less even after my three sisters were born. Her face was still unlined back then and there was only a touch of grey in her black hair, cut by my father who was a barber in a pageboy, the style of the day. 

One of our few luxuries as children were our days spent on the public beach. When it was possible mom packed a lunch, and we took the bus or piled into our battered, sun-bleached Packard. I remember her swimming laps between the breakwaters or out to the islands off shore, moving through the waves with an economical crawl like a channel swimmer. 

I imagine that the monotony of long distance swimming emptied her, gave her some solace like her hours spent in church. It was her time of solitude, no children, no demands, no thinking, just the even breathing and rhythmic kicking, the repetitiveness, four strokes, head up and back, breathe, like saying the rosary or a mantra.

It was August. We waited out a thunderstorm that had blown up earlier in the afternoon, on the veranda of the life guard station. Afterward, when the wind subsided, the water was unnaturally calm and reflected the leaden heaviness of the sky. The sharp smell of ozone still lingered in the air. The gulls returned and sat sentinel in neat rows on the creosoted fishing pier, occasionally diving after a scrap that had floated in on the tide, or they pried a mussel loose, flew up with it and dropped it on the rocks or on the tarmac of the parking lot to break it open.

She told me to stay with my little brother and not let him out of my sight. She splashed water on her arms and face before wading out into the water. She looked over her shoulder and told me not to let go of his hand. She didn’t say it in the matter of fact tone of a mother giving a child a command. It was more of an entreaty spoken with the eyes, and I registered the difference. 

She dipped her fingers into the sea like it was a font of holy water, hesitated slightly before making the sign of the cross, lifted her feet from the bottom and moved away with long powerful strokes. She swam past the breakwater, past the floats, the warning buoys and the oyster beds. There were no lifeguards on duty to blow their whistles and call her back.