Swim Like a Butterfly
Nina Gaby
Word Count 1490
The three-and-a-half-foot deep Family Pool was open that afternoon because the Olympic lap pool had a leak. All the lap swimmers packed up their goggles and their Speedos and went home. The kids who usually crowd the tepid Family Pool with its “Lazy River” and the parts just a half inch deep weren’t out of school or daycare yet. Even the deepest part was too shallow for me to strap on my turquoise Aqua-Jogger and pump back and forth, which is what I do now since I developed the cell clumping mystery disease of Pulmonary Sarcoidosis. Aqua-Jogging, to a serious lap swimmer, is the equivalent of chair yoga, (not that there’s anything wrong with that, goodness knows that seated Kundalini chanting helped bust open some of those clumps and kept me sane.) It’s just that my face, if submerged, suffocates, and my joints are too tight for any downward dogs. So I remain upright in the old person section of the big pool and some days I gaze lustfully at the lap swimmers clocking their miles and I project they are glancing over at me in pity. Like I used to do. Once, at a pool where I started out decades ago, a young man told me I swam like a butterfly. Another asked me out, and after a while broke my heart. Thankfully he had the decency to switch to another pool. We were both trying out recovery and I guess he forgot to prepare for his ninth step.
Forty-five years later the smell of chlorine still intoxicates me. I want to get through this part quick: I drank my way through Europe and parts of the Middle East for about a year. I’d been drinking heavily since I was thirteen. Suffice to say it was fun, even exhilarating–my family legacy. It was dangerous and stupid, it was who I was. There was no dopamine or GABA without booze and one day, shortly after I returned to the States, I just stopped drinking. Walking around in protracted withdrawal without neurotransmitters was like walking around without skin. Acute withdrawal was bad enough, spare the details, but this? So my best friend suggested I come with her to her athletic club and maybe go in the whirlpool or the sauna, anything was better than me on her porch hugging my arms around my body, staring at the sidewalk.
I slipped into the water in the basement pool of the downtown club, darkened, silent, I was completely alone. You could swim at your own risk back then. A coolness enveloped me, a buoyancy I can still feel when I squint and think of shimmering aqua. I dove under, remembering how to do the front crawl, which is so appropriate, isn’t it, to crawl? I made it to the other end but just barely. Hung on to the tiled lip till I could breathe again, and crawled back. “This is pathetic,” I recall saying aloud. I was hard enough on myself that I went back the next day to do another length. I was bloated, fatigued, suicidal, and I was thinking about going back to the rotten relationship that drove me out of the country on my own just a year before, a relationship as toxic as the alcohol that fueled it. But.
Instead I thought: “Well I can’t drink tonight because I’ll get a hangover and a migraine and I won’t be able to do three lengths tomorrow…” and so it went until one day I counted 72 lengths of that pool, a mile, and my third month of sobriety. I hugged myself in a completely different way, looking down at my naked body with an admiration and a daily swimming practice that carried me for a good long time.
At least until I grew ashamed of my chronic disease because that Sarcoid wasn’t me, I couldn’t climb a hill or swim a lap or rush along a city street. Other people get sick, other bodies betrayed. Not me.
It took a long while for me to realize, “Why not me?” A long while for the “one length at a time” philosophy to resurface. I’d spent too long whining the “Not fair” mantra. All those biopsies and Pulmonary Function Tests and MRI’s and cardiac PET scans and then there was the big old needle to the skull, because, yes, the cell clumps were showing up there as well, they were me, and why not? I strap on the Aqua Jogger back on, back and forth, back and forth, one length at a time. NPR on my ear buds.
By this time we are living in a different state, the college pool is seven miles away, and one day I decide to try to really swim. I slowly make my way through two lengths and but a screaming kid next to me throws up, the pool is evacuated and closes for a week. I told the mother as she yanks the kid into the shower, if someone had let me scream that much I’d have puked too, thanks a bunch.
Nonetheless, powered by this brief success, the two lengths, I planned how long it would take me to make it to swim a half a mile and be myself again. Myself!
Before I can make it to eight lengths Covid hits and the world shut down.
Four years later, we are back in our hometown. I’m standing in the Family Pool, in my baggy Land’s End swim skirt, where toddlers in their baggy swim diapers have spent the morning. Words like “cess pool” and “petri dish” coming to mind, but I say “fuck it” and I dive under. I swim from side to side. At first my limbs won’t sync and I can’t breathe. It’s just a short distance and my feet can touch the floor of the pool easily, so I don’t panic. Then, like the proverbial “riding a bike,” it all comes back. Nice and smooth. A couple others join me but then the toddlers, once again unleashed, get in our way, and I walk the Lazy River for a while. By noon the next day I’m coughing, sore throat, a pounding behind my eyes, and ribbons of snot dripping from my nose. “Toddlers’ Revenge” I call it and I’m sick for ten days.
I’m finally back at the pool and I ask the kindly lifeguard, not any of the young lifeguards who eye roll when I ask them to please turn down the Taylor Swift (or whatever it is they listen to) “just a smidge so I can hear my program,” when she thinks what time of day might be best for me to get a lane to myself–because “lung thing” and “trying to learn all over again” and “really nervous, if not a little panicky actually.” She asks me if I know about gender-specific swim after the facility closes early on Sundays. It’s a Jewish Community Center, so I’m thinking it’s only for women and girls who usually have to cover up neck to ankle and maybe this is their night to wear a bikini or something, and well, I ask, would it be weird? “Not at all,” she says. “You’d get your own lane, for sure.” Week after next, she tells me. “This week is for the men.” I almost tell her my whole recovery story but realize she is busy.
She’s here, the Sunday I show up, despite a snowstorm, despite not being able to find my ancient and probably desiccated goggles, and she smiles. “You came!”
No music. No one else at all in the pool. I’m grateful for the big yellow steps on the opposite side of the pool, the lane along the wall, and a lip I can grab if this doesn’t go well. But it does. Breaststroke up, back crawl down. Two. Not ready for the front-face-under-crawl. Not ready for “freestyle.” But that’s OK. Breaststroke. Pause. Backstroke. I look up, the lifeguard smiling. Like a kid I call out “Four down!” Thumbs up. It takes a half hour and one moment of panic as I tilted my head too far back and got dizzy, snorting water up my nose. But it’s the quarter mile I lost out on four years ago, plus two extra lengths in case I counted wrong.
“Thank you, thank you,” I tell her and then one of the young ones comes over and says, “You did great!”
I tell my husband and my sister and my friend down the street and they act like I just got a gold in the Olympics.
The next day, which was today, I go to Chair Yoga and the theme is water and we make swooshing river sounds as we exhale and stretch our shoulders like butterfly wings to capture some chi “as if you are doing the breaststroke,” the teacher says. I close my eyes to aqua.
Nina is a writer, visual artist and psychiatric nurse practitioner who spent the pandemic hunkered down across from the longest floating bridge east of the Mississippi with her dog, two cats, husband. Please visit www.ninagaby.com for a complete list of publications and images of Gaby’s mixed-media artwork.
