(Research report: Couldn’t find a picture of one with the legs stuck together. Most look like this now.)
One whole summer, I taught kids to dive at the Albany JCC. First the sitting dive: sit on the edge of the pool, feet in the gutter or hanging into the water, close to but not in the shallow end. Raise your arms up alongside your head, press your biceps against your ears. Tilt till you fall scalp first into the water. Invariably kids pick their heads up at the last minute, and sputter and splash. Eventually they go in cleanly, especially if I help them tuck over by putting one hand on the back of their head and one on their back. Once you’ve managed the sitting dive you progress to kneeling: Same thing but starts higher up, more a plunge. Your feet might scrape on the tile deck going in, but it’s nothing serious. This transitional dive helps nervous swimmers feel more secure before you try the standing dive: Stand, leaning till you fall, then you learn to swing your arms and push off. Eventually you can spring or jackknife or kick or twist however you want going in.

I was a competitive swimmer as a kid. They hand out trophies to kiddie swimmers like promotional granola bars on street corners. Most Valuable, Most Improved, and for least valuable unimprovables, the Spirit Award. I got Most Valuables. No idea where the trophies are now; I hope my parents got rid of them when they moved from the big old Victorian house to the small single-level after the last kid moved out. The chrome-look figures on the trophies are crudely modeled and the pose is wrong, legs stuck together into one leg, like the symbols on public bathrooms telling you Ladies or Gents. The diver leans slightly forward from the waist, knees bent, looking out towards the other end of the theoretical pool. Her arms wing out to the side at a 45 degree angle.
No one dives like that at a swim meet. You stand doubled over on a block, hands gripping next to your feet which are shoulder’s width apart. You’re loose and tense at the same time, loose with the adrenaline so you can spring the instant the starter pistol goes off, tense with readiness. You’re a spring wound tight and you explode off with a little bucking motion over the water, entering shallow, beginning to stroke soon as possible.
Maybe they dove like the trophies 60 years ago, 1947, baggy-suited and, for the times, immodest. The war over, the economy rising, the House UnAmericans beginning, which is also an ending. Esther Williams backstrokes in lipstick. Look up the clips on YouTube. She slides heavy-hipped through flower-strewn pools, hardly raising a splash. Frank O’Hara is home from the South Seas, at Harvard, funded by the V.A., his poetry ahead of him, not yet talking to the sun at Key West, his liver not yet enlarged. Simone de Beauvoir is traveling America, falling in love with Nelson Algren, describing the U.S. and its women in pronouncements mostly pissed and mostly true. William Carlos Williams is writing Paterson, his health beginning to fail.
What I’m getting at is I don’t know how to be a good mother. I don’t know how to be a good wife. I don’t know how to write poems. This is appalling. Do I have to understand my life to write poems? Do I have to sit down on the pool edge when I already know how to dive, press my biceps to my ears, close my eyes and, terrified, tip into the chlorine and the sound of the water when I know it’s nothing but rush, hum, sputter, roar?

02.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

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