Night Swimmer

Picture this: It's nine o'clock on the night of my twenty-third birthday, and I'm sitting alone at a table in the back of a comedy club waiting to see my mother do stand-up. From where I sit I can see her standing in the wings as the manager does her introduction. She's forty-five and still prettier than I am, with long blonde hair and pale blue eyes and a beauty pageant smile. Tonight she's wearing tight black jeans and a denim shirt, and when she steps onto the stage a man at the table in front of me says he wants to have her baby.

After the applause dies down, Mother pulls the microphone from the stand and says that tonight is a very special night. She wants everyone to wish her daughter a happy birthday. Stand up, Sara! And I do, but no one turns around to look at me. They clap and whistle, but it's all for the woman on-stage. After an awkward moment I sit back down, and Mother starts into her set.

The crowd eats her up, but I've heard all her stuff a hundred times and I'm not really paying attention. I'm playing with my cocktail napkin, making it into a swan, then a dog, then a butterfly, pretending to laugh at the right times and thinking about all the things I'd rather be doing than sitting in a dirty, smoke-filled club listening to my mother talk about stupid commercials and what a bitch she was when she lived in Brooklyn.

When I was younger, I used to go down to the river on nights like this. The North Fork runs right through the middle of town, but a thick swath of trees runs along either bank, and when you're down in the water it's easy to imagine that you're in the middle of nowhere, in Africa maybe, or lost somewhere far up the Amazon. I was a distance swimmer in high school, and when I was feeling more invisible than usual I sometimes stripped down to nothing and swam laps under the Goose Run railroad trestle, a hundred and twenty feet each way.

Mother caught me after one of those times, sneaking back into the house at one in the morning, soaking wet and shivering. She was horrified when I told her where I'd been.

``What if some pervert had been hiding in the bushes, watching you?" she said. ``What if he'd come down while you were swimming and stolen your clothes?"

I pretended I hadn't thought about perverts, but actually I think I was almost hoping something like that would happen. In fact, I once swam a half-mile downstream, to where Route 241 runs alongside the river and the houses are built almost right up against the water. There was a light on in one of the windows of an old A-frame on the south bank, and I could see a man sitting at a table inside, hunched over and working on something with his hands. I floated for fifteen minutes like a crocodile, nose and eyes above water, waiting for him to turn and look out over the river. He never did, and I don't know what I would have done if he had, but the rest of that night I felt dangerous, as if even I couldn't tell what I might do next.

A waitress wanders by my table. She seems about to walk past without even glancing my way, but I catch her elbow and make her stop. She asks what I want and I order a lemon drop, a shot of Citron with a slice of lemon on the side. She's already turning away when I catch her again and say that on second thought I'll have two lemon drops and a coke, enough to hold me for the rest of the set.

Mother's talking about me. She's saying that she once pretended to be sick so she wouldn't have to go on a date with a boy she thought she was in love with because she had a pimple on her nose, which is exactly what I did on Homecoming night my junior year in high school. She and I are the only ones in the world who know about that, but still I feel a flush creeping up into my face, and I can't shake the idea that the drunks in the front row are laughing at me, not her. The waitress is grinning when she brings me my drinks. I pay her, and as she counts out my change she winks and tells me to lighten up. It's a comedy show, for Christ's sake.

She's right, of course. I take a shot in one hand and a slice of lemon in the other, toss back the vodka and almost gag at the sudden, sharp burn, then bite into the lemon and suck until my eyes stop watering. The shotglass is still almost half full. I empty it into my coke. I do a little better on the second shot, and after a minute or two I start to feel a solid warmth begin to spread up my chest and into my head. When the waitress passes by again I tell her to bring me one more. That should be enough. A little buzz fills me in, makes me feel substantial. I have to be careful, though. Too much alcohol makes my face go numb and my vision blur, and sometimes I become transparent even to myself.

After I've finished the third shot and most of the spiked coke a man takes the other seat at my table. He turns the chair so it faces the stage and asks if I mind him sitting there. I don't, but he's already turned his back and I can see that he doesn't really care whether I do or not. His hair is thick and blond and from the back he looks a little like Craig Vetter, the boy who never got to see the pimple on my nose. Mother's into one of her best bits, a routine about divorce lawyers. When she hits the first punch line I lean forward and say ``She's pretty good, huh?"

The blond head rewards me with a profile. He doesn't look much like Craig Vetter after all. ``Yeah," he says. ``She's all right."

``She's my mother."

``Is that right?" He gives me a half-smile before turning away. I wait until after the next punch line, then say, ``She's only been doing comedy for a couple of years. Just since I moved out of the house."

He turns all the way around this time. ``Look," he says. ``I don't mean to be rude, but I paid six bucks to see this show, you know?" I nod. When he turns away again I get to my feet, leave a dollar on the table and drift back through the crowd, past the bouncer and out into the warm night air.

It's a beautiful night. Today was the Fourth of July, and down at Center City Parking they're putting on a fireworks show. When I was a little girl, Mother used to take me to the park at the end of West Cherry Lane to watch the fireworks. I told her I was afraid to see them up close, but the real reason I wanted to watch from the park was that it's the highest point in the city, just at the peak of Harper's Ridge, and from there I could pretend we were actually watching a battle between the fireworks men and the mutant zombie farmers from Winslow for the souls of all the children in Middleburg. I can remember sitting on the teeter-totter with her arms around me and an old army blanket around us both, watching the starbursts and screamers and wondering if Daddy might be down there somewhere, staggering through Center City in search of human flesh.

But it's too late tonight to catch the fireworks. In fact, I'm surprised they're not over already. It's almost ten o'clock. I wander down past the dark storefronts on Merchant Street as the show downtown builds to a finale and dies away. There's a warm, stiff breeze coming up from the south. It pushes my hair back from my face and puffs out my blouse, and when I catch my reflection in the plate-glass window of a diamond shop I remind myself absurdly of the heroine on the cover of a romance novel, slitting her eyes and leaning into the wind. At the end of Merchant I turn up Duncan Avenue, which is mostly residential, and follow it until it ends in a guard rail at the south bank of the river. Beyond the rail the land falls away pretty quickly for a few dozen yards, then flattens out into a stand of pine trees and elms. I can

smell the water from here, and I think I can just hear it lapping against the bank. This is only a few blocks east of my old haunts, and as I climb over the rail and down toward the trees I remember the feeling of the cold, slow-moving water against my skin and the smell -- brackish and bitter, not like chlorinated water at all -- as it leaked into my nose. My hair was long then. Even tied back it used to trail across my face and into my mouth when I breathed. After a while I stopped trying to spit it out, and it sometimes took hours for the aftertaste of mousse and strawberry-scented shampoo to fade.

The river's a little high tonight, the result of a new flood-control dam downstream and a cold, rainy June. The water laps at the mud at the edge of the trees. The moon is bright silver, almost right overhead. I check the north bank for perverts, but nothing moves for a quarter-mile in either direction. I step back into the trees, kick off my shoes and unbutton my blouse.

Two minutes later my clothes are in a pile at the base of the only elm fronting the river. It's useful to have a landmark, in case the current carries me downstream. The wind kicks up again as I wade into the muddy shallows, and by the time the water reaches my knees I'm hugging myself and shivering. Two steps later the bottom falls away. I find myself swimming.

I haven't been in the water in months, and my first few strokes are short and awkward. My hips are riding too low and I'm rolling almost onto my side every time I breathe. But then I pick up my kick, and the rhythm returns: out, in, down, a flip of the wrist as my thumb brushes my thigh, fingertips low and elbows high on the recovery. The water is cool, the air is warm, and the thin boundary between is smooth as glass until I cut through it. I shouldn't have worried about the current. The river is deep and slow here, and the water barely moves.

It takes me thirty strokes to reach the far bank -- a hundred feet, give or take. When I feel my fingertips begin to drag the bottom I flip, kick up off the mud and start back the other way. Thirty more strokes, then another flip, kick and go. My mind is blank and my ears are full of river water and the only things I can hear are my breathing and the steady rhythm of my strokes. I'm out of shape now, but when I was in high school I sometimes did this for hours at a time.

Two things separate swimming in a river from swimming in a pool. The first is that river water is alive. You can taste the algae every time you open your mouth, and sometimes you even feel a fish brush against your hand or nip at your toes. The second is that in a pool you always know where you are. The water is clear and shallow and lighted, and you can see from one blue cross to the other. In a river you can't see anything. In the darkness I used to imagine sometimes that I was drifting downstream with every stroke, through Pittsburgh and into the Ohio, then the Mississippi, and finally out into the Gulf of Mexico. After an hour of blindness I could almost believe it, and I was always disappointed when I stopped and saw that I was still floating in a dinky river in a dinky town in the middle of West Virginia.

When I've been swimming for long enough to lose track of my laps, I stop half-way across and look for my landmark. The moon is clouded over. In the darkness I can barely make out either bank, but the current feels stronger now that I'm standing still, and I think I may have drifted. I turn and stroke slowly back toward the south bank. Twice I pop my head up to look for my elm, but as I get closer the bank becomes less and less familiar. There's nothing growing here but pine. I stop in the shallows, get my feet back under me and stand.

I've drifted farther than I thought. The trees peter out a few dozen yards downstream, and beyond that there's a house with lighted windows and a concrete dock jutting out into the river. I'm about to turn away when the clouds pull back from the moon and I see someone sitting on a blanket a little way back into the trees -- a teenage boy holding a fishing rod. His face is blank and his eyes are wide and staring. I'm standing right in front of the him, no more than twenty feet away. My first thought is to dive, but this boy doesn't look much like a pervert. His skin is white and doughy, and the moon lends a soft glow to his face. After a moment he lowers his eyes. I open my mouth to ask where we are, but before I can get it out I hear a whistle and a

pop, and the sky lights up in a blaze of red and green. Two more screamers go up, and in the glare of the fireworks I can see a dozen or so people gathering around the edge of the dock, looking out over the river. They're mostly men, some of them comics from the club. Two of them are women. One is my mother.

They stare at me in silence and I stare back. But then one of the men begins clapping, and soon the entire dock is whistling and cheering. I look back at the boy. He's shaking his head and laughing. A rocket bursts right over me, a giant blue flower with a glowing yellow core, and as the light falls around me I tilt my head back and close my eyes. In the darkness the cheering swells to a hundred voices, a thousand. My heart is pounding and my head is spinning, and I wave to my mother and bow.