Gated fence. Steel rails with pointy tops. Too many of us kids in the backseat of our neighbor’s car. They told Polly Cleary she couldn’t watch eight kids at the lake. They threatened to turn us away. Just once, she begged, all of us sweating in our swimsuits and shorts in the backseat of her Buick. We imitate mice. Some guy guzzle-eyed Maggie’s boobs and waved us in. 

Grey pebbles graze my toes instead of sand. Run. The youngest of us throws their hands up, screaming, and rolls down a slide high as hills. It smells like the beach: tanning oil.  Piña Coladas. Nickels for Italian ices, cherry stains my mouth, tongue, and I feel grown with red lips. 

Swim says Polly. Approach. Wait for the moment of lift off, cough. Chlorine mixed with a peanut butter sandwich.  Sound comes through marbles in my ears. I don’t know how, I say. 

Learn fast, pretend hard; bird pushed. Claw till exhausted, give up. Float. 

Add fifty years. 

My favorite is the frayed orange suit, loose on the bottom. We chose a blue tile design for a thin plastic sheath to hug the concrete. Reminiscent of Mediterranean waters, the Greek Isles. We TikTok travel on Saturday afternoons, our stomachs puff from cookies. Drink the third cup of coffee. Say this: one day, I’ll see that white chapel and the sea crashing. 

Amble outside. Catch stuff with a net. Bug legs twitching, fuzzy bee bodies half-way drowned. They struggle before surrendering. I aim, lift, shake the net. Survey everything I’ve plundered, things that hunger living. All summer long, hardly anyone swims. It starts as a chore. Walk halfway in before plunging -cold. Three times back and forth, and I’m warm. I’m that old lady keeping her head above water, barely. Sort of breaststroke, sort of side stroke. Graceless. Legs squeeze, arms scoop, palms curve. Sound marbles through. Stroke, count, float, reach, push. Water holds.

Not like my side of the bed, which shrinks each day, pushed up against the wall—dogs, elbows, a pile of bills, a book unread, crumpled sheets, coffee stains, a husband. He pulls the blankets from my side, and I pull back, a nightly argument unfurls like a mattress from its package. I eye the glass of water that teeters on my nightstand, edging towards fulfillment, a spill.

In water, thoughts hush. Like the pool, the marbling of sound. I try to hear nothing, the elusive goal. But still, I make out the refrain, close and tight as my own skin.

Just not good enough, not good enough