Hobble Creek Review
| Tamara Madison |
How Yuma Got Its Name
I lived in Washington, D.C. for three years. I loved it, mostly. But every
summer I would promise myself this would be my last one there – all that
heavy heat you had to part like curtains just to take a step, not to mention the
self-important politicians and diplomats. But it was chiefly the heat that made
me take off the whole month of August every year to visit my parents in San
Diego.
My new husband was also a native of California, and we planned to leave D.C.
the August after our wedding, drive back to San Diego, get jobs and save up our
money to go teach English in Brazil (a plan he later told me he had no
intention of carrying out, but that’s another story).
That particular summer, though, was unusually temperate in Washington.
There was almost none of that wool-blanket heat; in fact, on the day we left, the
sky was a clear and cloudless blue, the temperature around 80, humidity barely
noticeable. I actually felt misgivings about leaving but…there it was. We
piled our luggage into my shrieking-yellow Subaru with the black vinyl seats
and headed south.
The Subaru had some electrical issues, but they were manageable. The main
problem was that if you turned the air conditioner on, the fuel pump fuse would
blow after about a minute, and the engine would die. I had always kept a store
of fuses for this kind of event. And it was such a lovely summer; with any luck,
we wouldn’t even need the air conditioning.
Things got hot in Virginia, and by the time we got to Georgia it had begun to
look pretty grim. We were cramped in this tiny car, the black vinyl upholstery
retained the heat marvelously, and the trip was beginning to lose its cheer. I
was behind the wheel as we left Atlanta, and I decided I just couldn’t take it
anymore. The air conditioner felt like a gift from heaven as I cranked it. We
spent the next few miles feeling human again, before the fuse blew and the
engine died. We coasted in silence (a dead engine does have a nice sound to it)
to the side of the road. I changed the fuse, sighed, and got back in the car with
all the windows rolled back down.
Now, my husband and I were soul mates. We never ran out of things to say.
We fed one another’s wit, and kept ourselves buoyed by our shared mirth. Most
of the time. But now that the heat had become a reality in this tiny, cramped
car, we began to bicker. We would bicker from the moment we closed the car
doors in the morning to the moment we opened them to have lunch. We’d have
a lovely time at whatever stop we’d found, and then the moment we’d buckled
ourselves into our seats, we’d be at each other’s throats again. But whatever
inn we’d stop at for the night became a Shangri-la until the next day when we’d
fold ourselves back into the Subaru and begin a new day of bickering.
Thus the miles passed, through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas (we
took a detour to Hot Springs), Texas – bickering by day locked in a hot car,
laughing and loving like newlyweds by night. I don’t remember much about the
scenery, we could have been driving anywhere in the country for all I cared, the
bickering was that distracting.
When we got to El Paso and stepped out of the car, I was flooded with sensual
memories. I grew up in the desert of Southern California, and knew well this
searing-dry heat. But I’d been away from it for almost ten years, in places like
France, Russia, and of course Washington D.C. Stepping out of the car I felt
like I’d been transported back in time to an August afternoon on the citrus farm
in Mecca where I’d spent so many dreadfully boring summers sheltered in an
air-conditioned living room, memorizing the stucco ceiling. I used to walk
outside now and then just to thaw out, and then the cicadas screaming and the
gnats swarming around my ears would send me back inside. But this dry heat
felt so pleasantly familiar, compared to the humidity we’d been driving through
for days – it was like Proust’s madeleine to me. And then I passed out.
The next morning we set off through New Mexico, where it was hot but not
unbearably so. I don’t remember where we stayed, but before long we were
driving through the Arizona desert and boy, did it feel like home. Now, anyone
accustomed to driving in the desert knows to keep water in the car. But I was a
little kid when I’d last been in a car driving across the desert in August. My
husband and I hadn’t brought along even the smallest bit of water (this was in
the days before we all had plastic water bottles constantly within reach). We
made our weary, bickering way along the shimmering highway, windows down,
limping in the heat. I had never been so thirsty. We stopped at every rest stop
we passed, but the most we could coax out of the fountain would be a rusty
trickle. There were no gas stations. There were no restaurants. There were no
houses. There weren’t even mud huts where some kind person might
condescend to sell us a mouthful of water, because of course there was no mud.
There was sand, sand, sand, cactus, cactus, cactus, and air so hot it would
bruise you if you stuck your arm out of the car window. We were too hot and
stressed by thirst even to bicker. We really thought we might die.
Then we saw a sign for Yuma. There was an end in sight. We knew we could
make it those ten more miles to the first gas station or diner or 7-11 we saw.
It was a diner. We practically leaped out of the car and rushed through the
glass doors. It was cool as heaven inside. We flung ourselves onto bar stools
and ordered waters and root beer floats. And then my clever husband reached
into the bag of fabricated lore that was his mind and came up with this
explanation for how Yuma, our new heaven, got its name:
A prospector had become separated from his crew and found himself stumbling
alone across the Arizona desert one particularly hot week in August. He had
lost his shoes and much of his clothing as he crawled across the sand. Without
food or water, he was close to his moment of expiration when he saw, alas, a
distant town. As he dragged his burned and blistered body within sight of the
first saloon, he turned to the desert that had treated him so cruelly, raised his
fist to it and, with his last breath, gasped: “You mo….” but died before he could
utter the last three syllables of the curse.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you ever find yourself wedged into a small
car with no air conditioning driving across the desert in August, make sure you
have a companion with a sense of humor.
Swimming in Italy
I am a swimmer; I have found that swimming several times a week keeps my
back pain and mental health in check. Whenever I travel anywhere, I always
make sure I know of a lap pool where I can swim. You might think this would
get in the way of tourism, but in fact it adds an interesting dimension to travel.
I can remember swimming in Byelorussia back when it was part of the USSR –
the middle of winter, snow all around, a public pool that was really two pools,
Olympic-sized, one indoor and the other out, connected by a swim-through
channel. I remember seeing big white Soviet limbs appearing like too-close
ships in the fog, and snow piled thick on the deck. As we were a team of young
Americans, the KGB was not pleased with our conversations with Russian
swimmers in the locker rooms, so they found us a private pool, probably
reserved for high-up party members, that we could have to ourselves. It was a
nice-sized pool in an echoing, birch-paneled room somewhere in Minsk, where
we would not be able to engage in possibly subversive conversations with
impressionable Russian teens breathlessly wanting to try out their English.
On several trips to London, I have found that a clerk in just about any shop will
know where the nearest pool is, and the English (unlike the French, Italians or
even the Dutch) maintain order in their pools. You never have to navigate
around an errant swimmer, as everyone keeps to his or her own lane, up one
way and down the other as on a roadway, just like they do in any civilized pool
in the States.
Nowadays, before embarking on any trip, be it in the U.S. or abroad, I always
consult the online Swimmer’s Guide at swimmersguide.com. Their listings
begin – I swear – with Andorra and end with Zimbabwe. So before going to
Italy with my daughter’s dance company one summer, I did my homework.
The first place we stayed in was a little seaside Adriatic village named Zadina.
During the first three of the five days that we were there, while the dancers
rehearsed for an international competition, I rejoiced that the sea was just
meters from our hotel. I enjoy ocean swimming – it’s wonderful not to have to
turn around, to just swim along the shore five hundred yards or so and then
back and so on – but I am used to doing it in Southern California, where I live.
The Adriatic in summer was much warmer – I’d say about 75 degrees farenheit
which, in salt water, feels much warmer than the same temperature in a pool.
On my first swim, I waded out to where the water deepened and the bathers
stopped bobbing, where the handsome young lifeguards (as well as the paunchy,
older ones) stood around smoking in their red gondolas. I swam what felt like
600 meters north and 600 meters south back to my starting place. I noticed
there was not much sea life – an occasional albino crab might creep along the
bottom, or a couple of pale fish. Now and then there would be a crowd of dead
winged ants. Hmm. But all in all, I enjoyed my swim and took the bald
scrutiny of the gossiping older lifeguards onshore in stride.
As I repeated this swim on the second day, I noticed that the cloudy eddies of
dead winged ants appeared with an unsettling regularity. Still, I enjoyed my
swim and then reading on the beach while vacationing Italians of all ages did
aerobic exercises on the shore led by one of the abovementioned middle aged
lifeguards with a boom box that blasted out fun and zany songs in Spanish and
Italian. Old and young alike would stand ankle-deep in the quiet tide, hands
on swiveling hips, singing along. “Sexy!” was the refrain of one of the songs. I
have never seen such endearing, organized silliness on a beach in California,
and I liked being in a place where there were no other Americans.
On the third day, I noticed there was a man swimming ahead of me at roughly
my pace. At one point as he was resting, I caught up to him and we had a brief
conversation – I don’t speak Italian, but I tried my pathetic best and we
managed to understand each other. I commented on how warm the water was,
and he replied, “E impuro!” I now realized that what I had been trying to
ignore was probably the case: this part of the Adriatic is horribly polluted. I
imagined the pipes that channeled those dead ants into the sea and tried not to
think about what else they might carry. When I got back to my room I took a
good look at my swimsuit. Yup. The white stripes were now a light, ruddy
brown, as were the formerly white gaskets of my goggles. Furthermore, the
swimsuit had an unpleasant smell – I couldn’t say what of exactly, but it sure
didn’t smell clean. I decided not to swim anymore until we got to Rome.
In Rome there was a lot to do. I didn’t even think about swimming much – I
was too busy admiring the Vatican, the Forum, the Coliseum, and the Romans
bending to drink from the spouts of a Bernini fountain. As in Zadina, it was
terribly hot and humid, but at least our hotel room here was air conditioned.
After three days of sightseeing, I decided it was time for a swim. I asked the
concierge to look up the pool I had in mind, which was only two subway stops
away. He reported that I had to have a doctor’s note in order to swim there --
Italian law. That seemed absurd, so I chose to ignore his warning and went for
my first subway ride in Rome. I saw that, as with the buses, most people didn’t
bother to pay to ride. Along with the row of ordinary turnstiles at the subway
entrance, there was one open turnstile and nearly everybody was walking
through it, so I followed suit. At my stop, I began asking in my ape-like Italian
where the address was. I was led this way and that. I wandered up and down
the leafy street in the shadow of Circus Maximus, but couldn’t find it. I must
have asked at least ten people. Meanwhile, I was getting terribly hot and my
dress was clinging to me in a way I found extremely uncomfortable and
immodest. At length, I found a shop that sold fishing and boating supplies and
thought they might know where the pool was.
“Oh, the pool!” the man exclaimed when I showed him the slip of paper stating
the address. “It’s right there.” He pointed across the street where I saw a bus
stop and a brick wall. “Where?” I asked. He pointed in a semi-circle. “You
have to go around,” he said in English. “But it’s right there.” He pointed to a
brick wall across the street. So I wove my way through the traffic and walked
along the wall, looking for an opening. Soon, I saw that there was a hotel of
some kind on a hill, with a gravel driveway. I walked up the gravel path and
found some buildings built partly underground. One of them turned out to be a
gym, with little kids sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, singing. Another one
was full of gym equipment but no people. I walked into the next building, up
some stairs. The smell of chlorine confirmed that I had found the pool at last.
A young woman at one of the desks informed me in English that I could not
swim without a doctor’s note – Italian law. In spite of my protestations to her
and her fellow employee that I was in excellent health and swam all the time,
they were firm on the matter: I could not set toe in the pool. “Why don’t you
call this afternoon; the doctor will be here later and he can maybe do the exam
for you.” Well, I was there now. I had plans for the afternoon. I had stuff to
do. I had struggled through the uncomfortable heat and humidity to swim, and
I knew from the information the concierge had given me that there were only
35 minutes left of lap swim – not swimming at this point was unthinkable. I
needed to swim. I was going to swim. I stepped over to the window that
overlooked the pool of swimming Italians. None of them looked particularly
fast or athletic, although they were, for the most part, circling in the lanes. If I
had to swim around them, I would. But the officious young blonde had told me
I couldn’t. Lap swim would be over soon. Still, even if I swam for only 20
minutes it would be so lovely to get in the water.
I thought of the cheerful lawlessness I had witnessed on the buses and the
subway, where almost everyone seemed to be getting a free ride. I asked
myself, what would an Italian do in this situation? I decided that an Italian
would swim anyway. I went down the stairs as if to leave, but instead walked
into what seemed to be the women’s locker room. I was right – there were a few
women in the showers and among the benches, in various stages of undress. I
quickly changed into my swimsuit, got my goggles and, leaving my clothes in a
neat pile on one of the benches, I walked out onto the pool deck. I slipped into
the lane that seemed to have the most serious swimmers. An elderly Italian
man looked me over severely. I adjusted my cap and began to swim.
The water was a little warm and the swimmers a little slow, but it felt very
good to stretch and pull through the water. Sometimes when I stopped to adjust
my cap at the end of the lane, I would see that elderly Italian man appraising
me with suspicion, but I ignored him and kept swimming. At 2:00 the
swimmers began to get out and another group to get in. It looked like a swim
team. The coach was a friendly looking man and I began asking him questions
about the program. He spoke a little English and told me that I could work out
with them next time, if I wanted. I didn’t mention that I didn’t have a doctor’s
note, but thanked him as I got out.
In the locker room women were chattering, singing, showering, dressing. As I
showered, I bathed also in the music of their speech. No one talked to me, but
they were polite. I dressed and made my way back up the stairs to the
entrance. As I stepped back out onto the gravel entry way, the officious blonde
stalked out behind me, looked me up and down accusingly, and asked me, in
Italian (which I understood this time) if I had swum. There, holding my damp
towel and swim bag, hair still wet, I managed to look at her as though she were
crazy. “No!” I exclaimed as though insulted, and scurried off toward the street.
I didn’t mess with the subway this time. I got into the first cab that drove by
and was back at the hotel in minutes, feeling triumphant and somehow
vindicated. I felt like I had prevailed in some odd kind of battle. It was a
delicious feeling. But next time I’m in Italy, I think I will get that doctor’s
note.
I lived in Washington, D.C. for three years. I loved it, mostly. But every
summer I would promise myself this would be my last one there – all that
heavy heat you had to part like curtains just to take a step, not to mention the
self-important politicians and diplomats. But it was chiefly the heat that made
me take off the whole month of August every year to visit my parents in San
Diego.
My new husband was also a native of California, and we planned to leave D.C.
the August after our wedding, drive back to San Diego, get jobs and save up our
money to go teach English in Brazil (a plan he later told me he had no
intention of carrying out, but that’s another story).
That particular summer, though, was unusually temperate in Washington.
There was almost none of that wool-blanket heat; in fact, on the day we left, the
sky was a clear and cloudless blue, the temperature around 80, humidity barely
noticeable. I actually felt misgivings about leaving but…there it was. We
piled our luggage into my shrieking-yellow Subaru with the black vinyl seats
and headed south.
The Subaru had some electrical issues, but they were manageable. The main
problem was that if you turned the air conditioner on, the fuel pump fuse would
blow after about a minute, and the engine would die. I had always kept a store
of fuses for this kind of event. And it was such a lovely summer; with any luck,
we wouldn’t even need the air conditioning.
Things got hot in Virginia, and by the time we got to Georgia it had begun to
look pretty grim. We were cramped in this tiny car, the black vinyl upholstery
retained the heat marvelously, and the trip was beginning to lose its cheer. I
was behind the wheel as we left Atlanta, and I decided I just couldn’t take it
anymore. The air conditioner felt like a gift from heaven as I cranked it. We
spent the next few miles feeling human again, before the fuse blew and the
engine died. We coasted in silence (a dead engine does have a nice sound to it)
to the side of the road. I changed the fuse, sighed, and got back in the car with
all the windows rolled back down.
Now, my husband and I were soul mates. We never ran out of things to say.
We fed one another’s wit, and kept ourselves buoyed by our shared mirth. Most
of the time. But now that the heat had become a reality in this tiny, cramped
car, we began to bicker. We would bicker from the moment we closed the car
doors in the morning to the moment we opened them to have lunch. We’d have
a lovely time at whatever stop we’d found, and then the moment we’d buckled
ourselves into our seats, we’d be at each other’s throats again. But whatever
inn we’d stop at for the night became a Shangri-la until the next day when we’d
fold ourselves back into the Subaru and begin a new day of bickering.
Thus the miles passed, through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas (we
took a detour to Hot Springs), Texas – bickering by day locked in a hot car,
laughing and loving like newlyweds by night. I don’t remember much about the
scenery, we could have been driving anywhere in the country for all I cared, the
bickering was that distracting.
When we got to El Paso and stepped out of the car, I was flooded with sensual
memories. I grew up in the desert of Southern California, and knew well this
searing-dry heat. But I’d been away from it for almost ten years, in places like
France, Russia, and of course Washington D.C. Stepping out of the car I felt
like I’d been transported back in time to an August afternoon on the citrus farm
in Mecca where I’d spent so many dreadfully boring summers sheltered in an
air-conditioned living room, memorizing the stucco ceiling. I used to walk
outside now and then just to thaw out, and then the cicadas screaming and the
gnats swarming around my ears would send me back inside. But this dry heat
felt so pleasantly familiar, compared to the humidity we’d been driving through
for days – it was like Proust’s madeleine to me. And then I passed out.
The next morning we set off through New Mexico, where it was hot but not
unbearably so. I don’t remember where we stayed, but before long we were
driving through the Arizona desert and boy, did it feel like home. Now, anyone
accustomed to driving in the desert knows to keep water in the car. But I was a
little kid when I’d last been in a car driving across the desert in August. My
husband and I hadn’t brought along even the smallest bit of water (this was in
the days before we all had plastic water bottles constantly within reach). We
made our weary, bickering way along the shimmering highway, windows down,
limping in the heat. I had never been so thirsty. We stopped at every rest stop
we passed, but the most we could coax out of the fountain would be a rusty
trickle. There were no gas stations. There were no restaurants. There were no
houses. There weren’t even mud huts where some kind person might
condescend to sell us a mouthful of water, because of course there was no mud.
There was sand, sand, sand, cactus, cactus, cactus, and air so hot it would
bruise you if you stuck your arm out of the car window. We were too hot and
stressed by thirst even to bicker. We really thought we might die.
Then we saw a sign for Yuma. There was an end in sight. We knew we could
make it those ten more miles to the first gas station or diner or 7-11 we saw.
It was a diner. We practically leaped out of the car and rushed through the
glass doors. It was cool as heaven inside. We flung ourselves onto bar stools
and ordered waters and root beer floats. And then my clever husband reached
into the bag of fabricated lore that was his mind and came up with this
explanation for how Yuma, our new heaven, got its name:
A prospector had become separated from his crew and found himself stumbling
alone across the Arizona desert one particularly hot week in August. He had
lost his shoes and much of his clothing as he crawled across the sand. Without
food or water, he was close to his moment of expiration when he saw, alas, a
distant town. As he dragged his burned and blistered body within sight of the
first saloon, he turned to the desert that had treated him so cruelly, raised his
fist to it and, with his last breath, gasped: “You mo….” but died before he could
utter the last three syllables of the curse.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you ever find yourself wedged into a small
car with no air conditioning driving across the desert in August, make sure you
have a companion with a sense of humor.
Swimming in Italy
I am a swimmer; I have found that swimming several times a week keeps my
back pain and mental health in check. Whenever I travel anywhere, I always
make sure I know of a lap pool where I can swim. You might think this would
get in the way of tourism, but in fact it adds an interesting dimension to travel.
I can remember swimming in Byelorussia back when it was part of the USSR –
the middle of winter, snow all around, a public pool that was really two pools,
Olympic-sized, one indoor and the other out, connected by a swim-through
channel. I remember seeing big white Soviet limbs appearing like too-close
ships in the fog, and snow piled thick on the deck. As we were a team of young
Americans, the KGB was not pleased with our conversations with Russian
swimmers in the locker rooms, so they found us a private pool, probably
reserved for high-up party members, that we could have to ourselves. It was a
nice-sized pool in an echoing, birch-paneled room somewhere in Minsk, where
we would not be able to engage in possibly subversive conversations with
impressionable Russian teens breathlessly wanting to try out their English.
On several trips to London, I have found that a clerk in just about any shop will
know where the nearest pool is, and the English (unlike the French, Italians or
even the Dutch) maintain order in their pools. You never have to navigate
around an errant swimmer, as everyone keeps to his or her own lane, up one
way and down the other as on a roadway, just like they do in any civilized pool
in the States.
Nowadays, before embarking on any trip, be it in the U.S. or abroad, I always
consult the online Swimmer’s Guide at swimmersguide.com. Their listings
begin – I swear – with Andorra and end with Zimbabwe. So before going to
Italy with my daughter’s dance company one summer, I did my homework.
The first place we stayed in was a little seaside Adriatic village named Zadina.
During the first three of the five days that we were there, while the dancers
rehearsed for an international competition, I rejoiced that the sea was just
meters from our hotel. I enjoy ocean swimming – it’s wonderful not to have to
turn around, to just swim along the shore five hundred yards or so and then
back and so on – but I am used to doing it in Southern California, where I live.
The Adriatic in summer was much warmer – I’d say about 75 degrees farenheit
which, in salt water, feels much warmer than the same temperature in a pool.
On my first swim, I waded out to where the water deepened and the bathers
stopped bobbing, where the handsome young lifeguards (as well as the paunchy,
older ones) stood around smoking in their red gondolas. I swam what felt like
600 meters north and 600 meters south back to my starting place. I noticed
there was not much sea life – an occasional albino crab might creep along the
bottom, or a couple of pale fish. Now and then there would be a crowd of dead
winged ants. Hmm. But all in all, I enjoyed my swim and took the bald
scrutiny of the gossiping older lifeguards onshore in stride.
As I repeated this swim on the second day, I noticed that the cloudy eddies of
dead winged ants appeared with an unsettling regularity. Still, I enjoyed my
swim and then reading on the beach while vacationing Italians of all ages did
aerobic exercises on the shore led by one of the abovementioned middle aged
lifeguards with a boom box that blasted out fun and zany songs in Spanish and
Italian. Old and young alike would stand ankle-deep in the quiet tide, hands
on swiveling hips, singing along. “Sexy!” was the refrain of one of the songs. I
have never seen such endearing, organized silliness on a beach in California,
and I liked being in a place where there were no other Americans.
On the third day, I noticed there was a man swimming ahead of me at roughly
my pace. At one point as he was resting, I caught up to him and we had a brief
conversation – I don’t speak Italian, but I tried my pathetic best and we
managed to understand each other. I commented on how warm the water was,
and he replied, “E impuro!” I now realized that what I had been trying to
ignore was probably the case: this part of the Adriatic is horribly polluted. I
imagined the pipes that channeled those dead ants into the sea and tried not to
think about what else they might carry. When I got back to my room I took a
good look at my swimsuit. Yup. The white stripes were now a light, ruddy
brown, as were the formerly white gaskets of my goggles. Furthermore, the
swimsuit had an unpleasant smell – I couldn’t say what of exactly, but it sure
didn’t smell clean. I decided not to swim anymore until we got to Rome.
In Rome there was a lot to do. I didn’t even think about swimming much – I
was too busy admiring the Vatican, the Forum, the Coliseum, and the Romans
bending to drink from the spouts of a Bernini fountain. As in Zadina, it was
terribly hot and humid, but at least our hotel room here was air conditioned.
After three days of sightseeing, I decided it was time for a swim. I asked the
concierge to look up the pool I had in mind, which was only two subway stops
away. He reported that I had to have a doctor’s note in order to swim there --
Italian law. That seemed absurd, so I chose to ignore his warning and went for
my first subway ride in Rome. I saw that, as with the buses, most people didn’t
bother to pay to ride. Along with the row of ordinary turnstiles at the subway
entrance, there was one open turnstile and nearly everybody was walking
through it, so I followed suit. At my stop, I began asking in my ape-like Italian
where the address was. I was led this way and that. I wandered up and down
the leafy street in the shadow of Circus Maximus, but couldn’t find it. I must
have asked at least ten people. Meanwhile, I was getting terribly hot and my
dress was clinging to me in a way I found extremely uncomfortable and
immodest. At length, I found a shop that sold fishing and boating supplies and
thought they might know where the pool was.
“Oh, the pool!” the man exclaimed when I showed him the slip of paper stating
the address. “It’s right there.” He pointed across the street where I saw a bus
stop and a brick wall. “Where?” I asked. He pointed in a semi-circle. “You
have to go around,” he said in English. “But it’s right there.” He pointed to a
brick wall across the street. So I wove my way through the traffic and walked
along the wall, looking for an opening. Soon, I saw that there was a hotel of
some kind on a hill, with a gravel driveway. I walked up the gravel path and
found some buildings built partly underground. One of them turned out to be a
gym, with little kids sitting in a semi-circle on the floor, singing. Another one
was full of gym equipment but no people. I walked into the next building, up
some stairs. The smell of chlorine confirmed that I had found the pool at last.
A young woman at one of the desks informed me in English that I could not
swim without a doctor’s note – Italian law. In spite of my protestations to her
and her fellow employee that I was in excellent health and swam all the time,
they were firm on the matter: I could not set toe in the pool. “Why don’t you
call this afternoon; the doctor will be here later and he can maybe do the exam
for you.” Well, I was there now. I had plans for the afternoon. I had stuff to
do. I had struggled through the uncomfortable heat and humidity to swim, and
I knew from the information the concierge had given me that there were only
35 minutes left of lap swim – not swimming at this point was unthinkable. I
needed to swim. I was going to swim. I stepped over to the window that
overlooked the pool of swimming Italians. None of them looked particularly
fast or athletic, although they were, for the most part, circling in the lanes. If I
had to swim around them, I would. But the officious young blonde had told me
I couldn’t. Lap swim would be over soon. Still, even if I swam for only 20
minutes it would be so lovely to get in the water.
I thought of the cheerful lawlessness I had witnessed on the buses and the
subway, where almost everyone seemed to be getting a free ride. I asked
myself, what would an Italian do in this situation? I decided that an Italian
would swim anyway. I went down the stairs as if to leave, but instead walked
into what seemed to be the women’s locker room. I was right – there were a few
women in the showers and among the benches, in various stages of undress. I
quickly changed into my swimsuit, got my goggles and, leaving my clothes in a
neat pile on one of the benches, I walked out onto the pool deck. I slipped into
the lane that seemed to have the most serious swimmers. An elderly Italian
man looked me over severely. I adjusted my cap and began to swim.
The water was a little warm and the swimmers a little slow, but it felt very
good to stretch and pull through the water. Sometimes when I stopped to adjust
my cap at the end of the lane, I would see that elderly Italian man appraising
me with suspicion, but I ignored him and kept swimming. At 2:00 the
swimmers began to get out and another group to get in. It looked like a swim
team. The coach was a friendly looking man and I began asking him questions
about the program. He spoke a little English and told me that I could work out
with them next time, if I wanted. I didn’t mention that I didn’t have a doctor’s
note, but thanked him as I got out.
In the locker room women were chattering, singing, showering, dressing. As I
showered, I bathed also in the music of their speech. No one talked to me, but
they were polite. I dressed and made my way back up the stairs to the
entrance. As I stepped back out onto the gravel entry way, the officious blonde
stalked out behind me, looked me up and down accusingly, and asked me, in
Italian (which I understood this time) if I had swum. There, holding my damp
towel and swim bag, hair still wet, I managed to look at her as though she were
crazy. “No!” I exclaimed as though insulted, and scurried off toward the street.
I didn’t mess with the subway this time. I got into the first cab that drove by
and was back at the hotel in minutes, feeling triumphant and somehow
vindicated. I felt like I had prevailed in some odd kind of battle. It was a
delicious feeling. But next time I’m in Italy, I think I will get that doctor’s
note.
Tamara Madison is the author of the poetry collection Wild
Domestic, which was published by Pearl in July, 2011. Her
chapbook “The Belly Remembers” won the Jane Buel Bradley
prize in 2004 and was also published by Pearl. Tamara is a
graduate of Georgetown University, with a BS in Linguistics. She
now teaches French and English in a public high school in Los
Angeles.
Domestic, which was published by Pearl in July, 2011. Her
chapbook “The Belly Remembers” won the Jane Buel Bradley
prize in 2004 and was also published by Pearl. Tamara is a
graduate of Georgetown University, with a BS in Linguistics. She
now teaches French and English in a public high school in Los
Angeles.
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