Unmasked

James Baldwin in Letters From a Region of the Mind makes the observation that “Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within,” which, on the surface, strikes one as sentiment bordering on the sentimental, as something pat and easily contained on a bumper sticker. Yet, as sentiment, the statement is emotionally accurate. James Baldwin knew the human heart.

Consider this: How much safer were you before love? And then: How much did you wish to cast off the hockey mask and enter the frays of romance, or of childbearing, or, even, of loving a pet that you knew would die before you? We walk around, before love, safe behind the armors of loneliness, and we ask those we deem worthy to strip it all away so that we stand there, a throbbing heart, exposed, the cages of our safety masks and curved ribs as good as gone.

Thus here I stand before you— world, fates, family— all of my masks gone, stripped down to the skin, and I ask, meekly, that you let me be in my nakedness or that you wrap me in the blankets of goodwill. Spare me the excoriation. My husband, late forties, the man I hand-picked and pursued, has just competed in a triathlon, and he is vital, a force, more alive than anyone I know. I see him pushing past all probabilities in terms of mortality, so when he rides his motorcycle home from the hospital at four in the morning after a long night of work, steer the drunk drivers the other way. 

And my son, my one and only child, the one who has already scared me, scarred me, with health concerns and mortal danger, let him outlive me, let him mourn and miss his long-dead mother. He is everyday getting farther away from that proverbial well that wishes to suck him down into darkness. Abnormal MRI, seizures, autism: He’s shrugging them off like a coat he has outgrown. In Mexico, when he fell into the deep-end of the pool, his father watched him plunge below the surface only to paddle up to where he was able to hoist himself over the side of the pool, away from tragedy and back into the waning sunlight. World, fates, family: Be safe and let me be safe.

And my two dogs? The smaller brown one has many years ahead of her. My old, white dog turned twelve last month, and I can see her eyes going milky. Her back legs slip out from underneath her, and I have to hoist her up. All ninety pounds of her. She has gotten more nervous with old age, and she can no longer hold her bowels very well. She doesn’t mean to shit on the floor, and I can feel her shame. She knows something is wrong. I clean it up with no admonishment. I just stroke her until I see her tail wag. In truth, I think she has another two years in her. When I picked her out from the homeless man’s litter twelve years ago, she could fit in a cat carrier. I was not projecting this far into the future; I did not think of her death. I just wanted to let a little love in.

Learning to Swim

The swim school is located in a questionable neighborhood of Burbank where safety notices are left on our car by the Burbank police department, and the neighborhood is populated with apartment buildings noted for their dilapidated tan stucco and names such as “The Sea Breeze” or the “Paradise Palms,” but the only part of the names that are accurate are the palms rising up from the parking medians, which serve to remind us that this is, after all, southern California. Yet you’ll find no sign of sea, breeze, or paradise here as summer tries to suffocate Burbank in its smoldering grip.

But once you walk in through the gate of the Lucile Cowle Swim School, all the oppression melts away. Fountains burble, and Canna Lilies bloom from planters. The smell of sun screen permeates the air. Phil Collins drifts out from speakers dotting the stone walls, and parents with cameras sit under large canvas umbrellas as instructors coax children of all ages to become just a little bit less human and a little bit more aquatic. We come every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the aquariums— a small pool for the babies and a larger pool for the big kids— are teeming with everything from the tiniest minnows to nearly full-grown fish. Some instructors have four-year-olds floating on their backs like otters. Other instructors are cheering on five-year-olds learning to tuck into a dive like penguins in goggles. I watch my son, just four-years-old, leap unafraid off the white diving board into the eight-foot deep water. It is a great and terrifying moment.

According to an article on Slate, Drowning is the number two cause of death in children under the age of fifteen, and the Instinctive Drowning Response doesn't look like drowning. It looks like a person pushing down against the surface of the water, unable to speak, and struggling to breathe. I have a close friend who knows a woman who lost a child to drowning. My brother was on a field trip in high school, and one of his classmates drowned in a pool they were all swimming in when it happened. I read a poem once about drowned twins: five-year-olds clasping hands at the bottom of a neighbor's pool. It's no wonder that some of us parents coach from the sides of the pool. 

My memories of swimming begin in my grandparent’s pool on Fremont Street, when all the neighborhood kids would come over on the hot days to play. I floated around in the kind of orange life-vest you wear on boats, but floating around wasn’t enough for my mother. My swimming lessons were held in the mornings, before summer camp, when the air was still cold. The pools were never heated, and my strongest memories of learning to swim are visceral: gripping a kick board, legs churning, teeth chattering. When the lessons were done, and I was dressed for the day and finally warmed up, I felt a little wrung out and rubbed down by the cold water.

Now I watch my son as he tries to learn how to push off the wall of the pool and glide to his instructor, who offers him the appropriate high-fives when he follows instructions. I watch him kick his legs wildly as his arms flail at the water when he forgets about “big arms and scooping hands.” Every time we visit the pools, he does a little bit better. But sometimes he pushes off the wall, and instead of gliding to his instructor, he goes under. His head is gone, just like that. But then he sputters, laughs, and once again tries to execute the glide, scoop, and kick that constitutes swimming. 

In the rippling oasis of Lucile Cowle’s swim school, I watch some kids sink as their instructors lift them back up to the surface. I watch tiny, blond girls in frilly swimsuits whose spastic movements look like ecstatic drowning, but really it's swimming without coordination, and it's a delightful thing to see. When my son is done with his lesson, I change him into dry clothes and he picks out a red lollipop, which glows in the sun on the way back to our car where a notice about carjacking is pinned under the wiper.