The best time to go to the pool is midmorning. Then, there is a space at the end of the lanes where sunlight pours into the water from the glass side of the natatorium. You can swim back and forth through that space as you do laps, flip-turning your way back into the brilliant square of light, passing through it methodically, with your swimmer's poise turned up full.
If you get to Saturday morning water aerobics class early enough, you can stake out a spot directly in the square of light. That way, you can pass the class watching your still-tanned summer legs and arms create sparkled bursts of liquid light, millions of times more powerful than any engagement ring you've ever laid eyes on.
The pool is not fancy, just five lanes in need of resurfacing. Being members of a hospital's health club, the clientele aren't very fancy either. A lot of efficient swimming doctors and their small children on the weekends.
The water aerobics class is more comfort than work. Some days it feels like a gathering of Italian widows, two lanes filled with plump women in supposedly slenderizing black swim suits, all earnestly churning away with the fleshy parts of their arms resting near the surface of the water. The blind lady and her companion walk their way back and forth simultaneously, rhythmically, in the next lane.
The best time to visit the club, if you can make it, is midmorning during the week. There are no kids screaming in the showers then, with mothers way too busy to speak to you. The chlorine-smelling locker room is filled instead with the arthritis class ladies.
The arthritis class ladies are not quiet. Sometimes there are many of them, all slowly, slowly dressing together after their exercise class, calling out to each other in their distinct Southern accents. Their high, sweet voices echo against the tiled walls, not really matching the aged skin you sometimes glance, then glance away from. Their skin can be as wrinkled as a load of laundry you've left in the dryer for over a day.
The arthritis ladies have an innate deference to the young women who pass strongly by them as they slowly, slowly make their way from the showers to the dressing space. They don't give me that same look. I guess I'm not fit enough nor young enough anymore.
Instead, they all smile at me, every single one of them. Never fail. I wonder if they know they break my heart every time they do that. Every time they smile at me with their perfectly applied lipstick, their stooped backs and their waved and colored hair, I see my grandmother standing there with me in that locker room, giving me that same kind of telling smile.
Not that my grandmother ever once went into a health club in her life. She'd have said it wasn't her sort of thing. But had she lived into her 80s, the age I suspect most of the arthritis ladies are, I could have argued and pleaded and eventually convinced her that an arthritis class was just the thing for her. I'd have told her how much the ladies in the class were just her kind of ladies -- she'd like them. I'd have made her admit, finally, that her doctor had told her she needed to get more exercise.
My grandmother loved the water anyway, I'd remind her. "You know how you would float way out in the ocean every summer when we were little, and you'd let us climb up on you like you were a raft?" She'd throw back her very red head and laugh at the memory, I'm sure, remarking about what great floaters big, round Irishwomen were.
My grandmother could take her arthritis class while I swam my laps or did aerobics -- well into my 30s now and determined to keep those round genetic tendencies at bay. I would wait patiently for her to shower and dress with the other ladies. Then I would drive her powder blue Mercedes for her to wherever we had picked to go to lunch that day -- likely a tearoom. She liked tearooms best for lunch. I'd go along willingly, because I enjoyed the delicate kind of food they served, even though I always felt ungainly sitting at one of her fancy tearoom tables. Mother, as she was called by her grandchildren, would tease me through lunch that maybe, just maybe she would want to stop by the mall on the way home. She knew I loved to shop almost as much as she loved to tease, and she wasn't too slack when it came to purchasing things herself -- when she was able to find anything "feminine enough" for her tastes. She would chatter away at the salespeople, letting them know that she wasn't at all pleased with their current dress selection, meaning not enough floral arrangements on every inch of available fabric.
After the mall, I'd drop her and the Mercedes off at the front door of her huge, dark house. Her house by night could still make me a little scared -- even when I was 24, the year Mother died in a car wreck, driving the same little blue Mercedes. The house loomed at the end of a long driveway, embellished by what seemed like hundreds of very live oak trees. I'd load the new pair of silly shoes or jeans she had bought for me -- over much protest -- quickly into my car, and then follow her inside as she turned on several ornate lamps.
We'd put down whatever packages she had by the door, go get bottled Cokes from the refrigerator and then trudge up her dramatic, curving staircase and down a long hallway to her library to watch the evening news, which she still called "Walter Cronkite," even though he'd been gone from the air for several years.
And my grandmother has been too long gone from my life, over a decade now. I doubt there's a day that's gone by that I haven't thought about her.
Everyone thinks it must be hard to be old, like the arthritis ladies, who dutifully take their classes despite the pain of their old bones. I hope the water and the exercise does them some good.
I'd like to say seeing them does me some good. But sometimes, just seeing the arthritis ladies is painful for me, like it must be for them when they are reminded so vividly, at a fitness club of all places, of what youth is all about. Do they, too, have to turn their heads away, sometimes, for all the memories?
