Falling Apple

My mother did not like to swim. She had a bathing suit when I was a kid. It was black watch, skirted and piped in white pique. I know she put it on at least once but she did not go near the water: not the scummy, frog-choked pool at Buxton, not the sleek, shallow bright blue plastic pool in the Jays' back yard, not Cape Cod Bay or the Atlantic, off of Nantucket. She didn't lounge around in the sun, either. Her skin was very fair. Even her arms stayed pale when she gardened in short sleeves.
I never thought much about her not swimming. It was just what she didn't do. Other mothers didn't get up in the morning or didn't drive or didn't work outside the house. Since outdoor water recreation was only enjoyable about four months out of the year in Massachusetts, Dad - on a teacher's schedule - could be the lifeguard parent.
In the last few years of her life, when she was happier living inside her memories than trying to make sense of the present, Mom retrieved a bittersweet episode from her young adulthood which she had never told us before.
She had a beau at Ohio State who was a racy sort of guy. He had a car. He belonged to a fraternity. He liked to dance and joke. And he was captivated by my innocent, doe-eyed mother.
He drove from some distance to visit her during the summer. She was living at home and working at a bank, languishing for something to do. He showed up to take her swimming.
By the age of 20, my mother had learned a little something about swimming. She had to take it as a gym course every semester until she could pass a basic swimming test. Students were not allowed to graduate until they could swim. Mom struggled against the water and failed the test over and over again.
When she and her beau got to the lake, he dashed into the water, racing her to the raft which was floating 50 feet from shore. She got wet and started swimming and couldn't stay on top of the water. The lifeguard spotted her and got her safely back to shore before she had time to drown. Her beau saw none of this occur. He showed up some while later, wondering why she hadn't swum out to the raft. This probably had a lot to do with why my grandmother didn't like the young man.
Some 50 years later, Mom took my sister and her family and and me to Hawaii. My brother-in-law was eager to do some snorkeling, so we rented equipment and headed to the beach across the street from our condo. I had heard that one should never turn one's back on the ocean but I did, and got slammed and dragged by a series of breaking waves. My sister and her husband had swum on ahead and had no idea that I was in trouble. Since then, my enthusiasm for ocean swimming has pretty much disappeared.