My daughter wears tight clothes too, but they do not contain her. She has not learned yet how they can. Does she already feel the discomfort of her thighs spreading in her sausage jeans? Doesn’t she already know it’s wrong to have legs that look like this?
I lift mine and cross them.
They look better. But, still, I look neat.
Among other middle-aged women I don’t look too neat, and this pleases me.
I am dressed for, what? For anything that might happen to me: keep it coming! I’ve learned that it does. I am dressed for things that are not. I am not too sexy, not too casual, not too unassumingly unassuming. I do not look like I have made an effort, but I do look like I might have made an effort to look like I have not made an effort, which is only polite. And I will not fall over if required to run in my shoes.
My daughter is dressed for one of the many occasions she imagines could happen to her in tight jeans, bangles, a lace scarf, and a t-shirt with a picture of a fashion model that says, WE GOT THE LOOK. I dressed like that once: hoop earrings, off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, leggings.
I cannot drive so we must take the bus between cities. The bus takes us through the outsides of cities, through yellow new estates of family-shaped houses. The people there have jobs you could put in a children’s book. I’d always hoped to end up in one of these places where no one has ever been old.
The bus takes us through the market towns where the old people live, and where the property is prettier and less expensive than in the city we have left, or the city we are traveling to. Once I would have wanted to explore each shop on each high street, to discover local features even in the chain stores. I’d have wanted especially to investigate the charity shops, knowing that, among the second-hand pleated skirts and polyester blouses I would find … what? I would have visited once a week, twice, perhaps every lunch break from my children’s book job, before I went home to my house on the new estate on the frayed outskirts of town. I would have visited the shops inconspicuously. I would not have talked to the women behind the tills. They would not have known where I came from. Each time I arrived, they would have beamed at a fresh customer.
I would buy nothing, but I would not lose hope.
As it is I have packed wrongly. I know that now. I should have brought tights (it’s cold). I should not have brought the new trousers that don’t fit. I didn’t bring anything else.
The bus enters a large town (or a small city) scattered with sponge-on-stick model trees. Sunset: the trees blur at the edges, change color. From a distance they are solid, square: from close up, a net of branches.
The driver pulls up the shade with the plastic window revealing the whole road ahead, the game of framing gone. And my daughter, who has been sleeping on my shoulder, wakes up. She shifts and — vast, monumental in sleep — becomes tiny in movement.
I can see my mother and father waiting at the bus stop. They are very small. My mother is wearing a pastel blouse and pastel slacks and pastel canvas shoes. Her shades are mint, peach, lemon, blueberry, cream. She is dressed as she would like to see her granddaughter dressed: edibly. Still she looks formal, arranged, neat. She cannot shake it.
I cannot hear what she says to my father. She says, “Forty-five, and she still has to take the bus.”
The bus stops and out get the sort of people who travel by bus between cities: students, old people — mainly women — and the middle-aged who cannot afford the train and who have never grown old enough to drive. Out we get, and away we go, the young, the old, and the failed girls.
DROWNING
There is now very little in my mind.
On the beach in front of the village, which is no more than a stony strip, there are some adults but no children, who are all on the sandy beach opposite, and a graveled path on a sliproad that leads to the hotel. I am wearing only a bikini, but I want to see the hotel. I had not considered that I would have to wear a bikini while walking from the beach to the hotel. I am too old to look good in a bikini and I have not, across the years, paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini for me to look good in a bikini. But, even when young, I never paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini so age is perhaps not the most important factor. I must walk through the streets as though neither age nor attention paid are factors, as this is a holiday village and it is quite normal for women who do not look good in bikinis to walk through its streets. Why should I be any exception?
I also have no shoes. The tarmac is a warm body beneath my feet.
The hotel is beautiful, even more beautiful up close than it was from far away. It is white and on its facade its name, which is the name of the village, is a dusty blue. There are three rows of windows on the front, on each, shutters, the same faded blue as the sign I could read from the beach across the estuary, within each, white lace curtains, and along each storey a blue ironwork balcony that spans all three windows.
The menu of the hotel restaurant is exactly what it should be: not cheap enough to be disappointing, not expensive enough to be intimidating. And there are ways round: menu du jour, prix fixe. I cannot see the food or smell the food but, reading the menu, I know that the food will be good.
There is no one on the streets. It’s like lunchtime, except it isn’t lunchtime. I’m not sure what time it is or how long it took me to swim the channel. It is colder than it was on the other side of the estuary. In the harbor in front of the hotel, boats blink white: a défi—a challenge — to the ocean, which is dark. It is beginning to get dark — no, it’s not getting dark yet, it just feels like it might soon.
From the jetty I can see the beach on the other side of the bay, which the sun still hits, but I cannot see what you are doing. I cannot see what the children are doing. On your beach, sometimes you choose to pay attention to the children, and feel worthy, and sometimes you choose to read a book, and feel interested, or engaged, or intelligent, or whatever, but, whichever you are doing, I know you will be having fun, because you do not worry that the children might be neglected. You never have to make the choice to neglect the children. For you to read your book is not to neglect the children because you know that if you do not pay attention to the children I will. I have the choice to pay attention to the children, which I may or may not find — but must give the pretence of finding — fun, or else the whole concept of fun, and the holiday itself, tips over. Or I have the choice to read a book. But I know that if I do not play with the children, you will not play with them, not unless you really find it fun. My choice to read my book necessarily involves the worry of the possibility of neglecting the children. While you read your book with the attention your lack of worry affords, information enters your brain making you more interested, or interesting, engaged or engaging, and intelligent, and so you become less like me, who, not lacking the worry about neglecting the children, does not become any of these. I can no longer see, from across the bay, which of these two things you have chosen to do. And this is why I swam the estuary.
The children are, in any case, now getting too old to receive the kind of attention you are not willing to give them. They are losing their last childish things, their shoes and clothes have become bigger until they are barely distinguishable from ours. We had more children — more than one I mean — to preserve this childishness, and also so as not to have to spend so much time together. Had we liked each other less we’d have had four, five. There’s nothing like love’s dilution to keep things in proportion.
At the end of the jetty, on my side of the estuary, a band is playing. Only children are dancing. The adults stare at the band as though music is something they had forgotten. It must be dispiriting to perform like this, afternoon after afternoon. One man nods the tune to his partner. She fails to pick it up. There are stalls selling snacks, and other things, but no urgency in the queue for anything. Everyone has enough money, more than enough money for food, and no one is hungry.