Jodie Picoult - Songs of the Humpback Whale - A Novel in Five Voices

I don’t know if it is mercy or fate that makes the woman let us in for five dollars each, but soon we are standing at the edge of heaven. The cement burns the balls of my feet. There is a lesson going on in the shallow end. The lifeguard keeps calling the kids her guppies. They are doing rhythmic breathing, and only half are following instructions.

“Aren’t you going to go in?” I ask my mother. She is standing next to me, fully clothed, and she hasn’t even taken her bathing suit in from the car.

“Oh, you know me,” she says.

I don’t care; I don’t care. I don’t have time to argue with her. As the lifeguard yells and tells me not to, I dive into the deep end, into the heartbeat of ten feet.

I hold my breath for as long as I can. For a moment, drowning seems better than having to face the heat above. When I burst to the surface, the air wraps around my face, as solid as a towel. My mother has disappeared.

She is not at the car. She is not under one of the umbrellas, with large ladies in flowered bathing suits. I drip my way into the YMCA building.

I pass a Tai Chi class. This amazes me: why would anyone be doing exercise on a day like today? Down the hall I see a blue door marked LADIES LOCKER. It is steamy and humid inside. A gaggle of women are crowded into the showers. Some are behind the showers with curtains but most choose the open showers with no privacy. Three women are shaving their legs and two are shampooing.

The woman farthest on the right is young and has a tattoo over her left breast. It is a tiny red rose. “What do you have going for this weekend?” she says. I jump but she is not talking to me.

The woman under the nozzle behind her reaches for her towel to wipe her eyes. She is tremendous, with patches of cellulite waffling across her arms and her thighs. Her stomach forms a furrowed V that hangs over her private parts. She has painted toenails. “Oh, Tommy’s coming out with Kathy and the baby.”

“Tommy is the youngest?” the tattoo woman asks.

“Yeah.” The other woman is older than I thought at first; without-the shampoo her hair is speckled, gray and black. She sounds Italian. “Tommy is the one who got messed up with this girl who’s been divorced. I keep telling him, You do what you do, but you don’t marry her. You know what I mean?”

The other three women in the shower nod vigorously. One is shaped like a pear and has bleached hair. The next one is very old, and wrinkled all over like a giant raisin. She kneels on the floor of the shower, letting the spray hit her back, as if she is praying. The last woman has long white hair and is round all over: round shoulders, round hips, round belly. Her nipples are pushed-in, and stay that way. “Why do you let him come to the house, Peg?” she says. “Why don’t you tell him he comes alone or he don’t come at all?”

The enormous woman shrugs. “How do you tell that to a kid?”

One by one the women leave the showers until the only person-left is the old woman. I begin to wonder if she is a permanent fixture. Maybe she needs help. This is what I am thinking when the curtain opens from the shower across the way and my mother steps out. “Well, hi honey,” she says. She acts like it is perfectly normal to find me standing there.

“How come you didn’t tell me you were coming inside? I was worried about you.”

All the ladies are watching us. When we turn towards them, they pretend to be doing other things.

“I did tell you,” my mother says. “You were underwater, though.” She unwraps the towel from her body; she is wearing her bathing suit. “I just wanted to cool off.”

I’m not going to fight her. I walk through the twisted lines of lockers. My mother stops in front of Peg, who is hoisting up her underwear. “Give Tommy time,” she says. “He’ll come around.”

Outside my mother sits on the edge of the shallow end, dangling her feet. When she really gets hot she sits on the first step of the pool and lets her butt get wet. When I see her there I swim up underwater and grab her ankles. She screams. “You shouldn’t sit here,” I tell her. “All the little kids pee in the shallow end.”

“Think about it, Rebecca. Won’t it make its way to the deep end, then?”

I try to remind her that this is a concrete pool; that she will be able to grab the edge of it the entire way around if she chooses to get wet above her waist. “It’s less deep than the Salt Lake, and you were doing the backfloat there.”

“I did that against my will. You tricked me.”

She exasperates me. I breaststroke away from her, diving over the blue and white bubble-string that separates the shallow from the deep end. I slide my belly down the concrete ramp and touch the drain of the pool. I run out of air and push off the bottom, roll onto my back. The clouds are stuck in the sky. I can make out all kinds of shapes: beagles and circus acts, lobsters, umbrellas. With my ears tucked under the surface of the water, I listen to my pulse.

I backfloat until I crash into a woman wearing a bathing cap with plastic flowers. Then I tread water. My mother isn’t on the steps anymore, and she isn’t sitting on the edge of the pool. I glance around wildly, wondering where the hell she’s gone this time. And then I see her, chest-high in the water. With one hand she’s grabbing onto the ledge of the pool, and with the other hand she’s grabbing the blue and white string of buoys. When she gets to the other side she lifts the heavy line and ducks under it. I’ll bet she doesn’t hear the kids squealing, or the slap of thongs on puddles. I’ll bet she isn’t thinking of the heat. She grabs onto the edge of the pool again and slides one foot down the ramp of the deep end, testing her limits.

“So these two guys open a bar together,” Hadley says, and then he stops to take a drink of his beer. “They go through this whole big deal cleaning up the place and stocking it and then comes the big opening day. They’re waiting together for a customer, and in walks this grasshopper that’s six feet tall.”

“Here we go,” says Joley.

Hadley laughs and sprays beer all over my shirt.

“Jesus, Hadley,” I say, but I’m laughing too.

“Okay, okay. So there’s this grasshopper-”

“Six feet tall-” Joley and I yell out at the same time.

Hadley grins. “And it sits down at the bar and orders a vodka tonic. So the guy who’s waiting on him goes up to his buddy and says, ‘I don’t believe this. Our first customer is a grasshopper.’ And they have a few laughs and then he goes back to the grasshopper with his vodka tonic. And he says, ‘I can’t believe it. You’re our first customer and you’re a grasshopper.’ And the grasshopper says, ‘Yeah, well.’ So the bartender goes, ‘You know, there’s a drink named after you.’ “

Joley turned to me. “This is going to be a disappointment. I can feel it.”

“Shut up, shut up!” Hadley says. “So the bartender goes, ‘You know-’”

“There’s a drink named after you,” I say, prompting him.

“And the grasshopper says, ‘That’s ridiculous. I’ve never heard of a drink called an Irving.’ “ Hadley finishes the joke and then hoots so loud the whole place is looking at our table.

“That’s the dumbest joke I’ve ever heard,” Joley says.

“I have to agree,” I tell Hadley. “That was pretty stupid.”

“Stupid,” Hadley says, “but real fucking funny .”

Of course anything’s funny when you’ve had about ten beers apiece and it’s after midnight. We are onto our stupid joke contest: the one to come up with the stupidest joke gets out of paying the tab. We’ve been here for a while. When we first got here, around nine-ish, there was next to no one in the bar, and now it’s packed. We’ve been keeping tabs on the women that come in-no real lookers, yet, but it’s been getting darker, and everyone’s getting prettier. It will probably keep up like this for another hour: we’ll tell dumb jokes and talk about the women behind their backs and none of us will do a damn thing about it, so we’ll leave just the three of us and wake up alone with hangovers.