‘That sounds good,’ I said.
‘I could teach your dad the backstroke again,’ she said. My mother had taught me to swim, and she was good at that. She had tried to teach my father the backstroke when we lived in Lewiston, but he had tried and failed at it, and she had made a joke about it afterward. ‘The lady said people want to swim in Montana. Why do you think that is? These things always signify a meaning.’
‘What does it mean?’ I said, holding my school books.
She hugged her arms and turned herself a little back and forth as she stood in the window frame watching out. ‘Oh, that we’re all going to be washed away in a big flood. Though I don’t believe that. So. Some of us will not be washed away and will float to the top. That’s better, isn’t it?’ She took a drink of coffee.
‘It should have a happy ending for the right people,’ I said.
‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘Everyone doesn’t do it that way, though.’ She turned and walked back into the kitchen then to start my breakfast before school.
In the days after that, my mother went to work at the YWCA in Great Falls, at the brick building on Second Street North, near the courthouse. She walked to work from our house and carried her swimming suit in a vanity case, with a lunch to eat and some makeup articles for when she came home in the afternoon. My father said he was glad if she wanted to work there, and that I should find a job, too, which I had not done. But he didn’t mention himself working or how he was spending his days or what he thought about our future or any plans he had made for things. He seemed out of reach to me, as if he had discovered a secret he didn’t want to tell. Once, when I walked home from football practice, I saw him inside the Jack ’n Jill cafe, sitting at the counter drinking coffee and eating a piece of pie. He was wearing a red plaid shirt and a knitted cap, and he hadn’t shaved. A man I didn’t know was sitting on a stool beside him, reading the Tribune. They seemed to be together. Another time, on a day when the wind was blowing hard, I saw him walking away from the courthouse wearing a woolen jacket and carrying a book. He turned the corner at the library and disappeared, and I did not follow him. And one other time I saw him go into a bar called the Pheasant Lounge where I thought Great Falls city policemen went. This was at noon, and I was on my lunch hour and couldn’t stay to see more.
When I told my mother that I had seen him these times she said, ‘He just hasn’t had a chance to get established yet. This will be all right finally. There’s no lack in him.’
But I did not think things were all right. I don’t believe my mother knew more than I did then. She was simply surprised, and she trusted him and thought she could wait longer. But I wondered if my parents had had troubles that I didn’t know about, or if they had always had their heads turned slightly away from each other and I hadn’t noticed. I know that when they shut the door to their bedroom at night and I was in my bed waiting for sleep, listening to the wind come up, I would hear their door open and close quietly, and my mother come out and make a bed for herself on the couch in the living room. Once I heard my father say, as she was leaving, ‘You’ve changed your thinking now, haven’t you, Jean?’ And my mother say, ‘No.’ But then the door closed and she did not say anything else. I do not think I was supposed to know about this, and I don’t know what they could’ve said to each other or done during that time. There was never yelling or arguing involved in it. They simply did not stay together at night, although during the day when I was present and life needed to go on normally there was nothing to notice between them. Coming and going was all. Nothing to make you think there was trouble or misunderstanding. I simply know there was, and that my mother for her own reasons began to move away from my father then.
After a time I quit playing football. I wanted to find a job, though I thought that when spring came, if we were still in Great Falls, I would try to throw the javelin as my father had said. I had taken the book, Track and Field for Young Champions, out of the library, and had found the equipment cage in the school basement and inspected the two wooden javelins there, where they were stored against the concrete wall in the shadows. They were slick and polished and thicker than I thought they’d be. Though when I picked one up, it was light and seemed to me perfect for the use it had. And I thought that I would be able to throw it, and that it might be a skill — even if it was a peculiar one — that I might someday excel at in a way my father would like.
I had not made friends in Great Falls. The boys on the football team lived farther downtown and across the river in Black Eagle. I had had friends in Lewiston, in particular a girlfriend named Iris, who went to the Catholic school and who I had exchanged letters with for several weeks when we had come to Great Falls in the spring. But she had gone to Seattle for the summer and had not written to me. Her father was an Army officer, and it could be her family had moved. I had not thought about her in a while, did not care about her really. It should’ve been a time when I cared about more things — a new girlfriend, or books — or when I had an idea of some kind. But I only cared about my mother and my father then, and in the time since then I have realized that we were not a family who ever cared about much more than that.
The job I found was in the photographer’s studio on Third Avenue. It was a place that took airmen’s photographs, and engagement and class pictures, and what I did was clean up when school was over, replace bulbs in the photographer’s lamps, and rearrange the backdrops and posing furniture for the next day.
I finished with that work by five o’clock, and sometimes I would walk home past the YWCA and slip through the back door and down into the long tiled pool room where my mother taught her classes of adults until five, and from five to six was free to teach privately and be paid for it. I would stand at the far end behind the tiers of empty bleachers and watch her, hear her voice, which seemed happy and lively, encouraging and giving instruction. She would stand on the side in her black bathing suit, her skin pale, and make swimming motions with her arms for her students standing in the shallow water. Mostly they were old women, and old men with speckled bald heads. From time to time they ducked their faces into the water and made the swimming motions my mother made — slow, jerky grasps — without really swimming or ever moving, just staying still, standing and pretending. ‘It’s so easy,’ I would hear my mother say in her bright voice, her arms working the thick air as she talked. ‘Don’t be afraid of it. It’s all fun. Think about all you’ve missed.’ She’d smile at them when their faces were up, dripping and blinking, some of them coughing. And she would say, ‘Watch me now.’ Then she’d pull down her bathing cap, point her hands over her head to a peak, bend her knees and dive straight in, coasting for a moment, then breaking the surface and swimming with her arms bent and her fingers together, cutting the water in easy reaching motions to the far side and back again. The old people — ranchers, I thought, and the divorced wives of farmers — watched her in envy and silence. And I watched, thinking as I did that someone else who saw my mother, not me or my father, but someone who had never seen her before, would think something different. They would think: ‘Here is a woman whose life is happy’; or ‘Here is a woman with a nice figure to her credit’; or ‘Here is a woman I wish I could know better, though I never will.’ And I thought to myself that my father was not a stupid man, and that love was permanent, even though sometimes it seemed to recede and leave no trace at all.