The Half Mile I Swam Beside Grandma

Into the Water

It was a little past noon. Bright, hazy summer afternoon, not a cloud, the kind of day that makes northern Wisconsin look like a postcard of itself. The water at the dock was cool, maybe seventy-two, and clear enough to see the sand ripples six feet down.

I slid in off the end of the dock in my navy one-piece, my blond hair already wet from a dunk, with the belt snug around my waist. The kayak came along behind me on its line, light as a leaf. I swam to Grandma’s left side and stopped there, treading water.

“Ready?”

She pushed off the ladder.

Grandma swims breaststroke. She always has. Not the racing kind, with the big lunge forward. The old kind, the kind they taught at the Red Cross lessons in the fifties, with her head up and her chin just above the water like a swan.

Pull, breathe, kick, glide. Pull, breathe, kick, glide. Slow as a hymn.

I matched it. That was harder than it sounds. When you are trained to swim fast, swimming slow takes all your attention. I did a lazy breaststroke of my own, half a beat behind her, so I could see her face every time it came up.

Up on the lawn, the family had come down to the shore. I heard my cousin’s little girl yell, “Go, Great-Grandma!” and then a few more voices, and then the lake swallowed the sound behind us.

The First Quarter Mile

We had a system. Every fifty strokes, I said, “Okay?” Every fifty strokes, she said, “Swim.” That was all. She did not want to talk, and I did not want to make her.

At a hundred and fifty strokes, a fishing boat came across our line from the north, a white bass boat with two men in it. I lifted one arm straight up and waved it slow. They saw the red kayak first, then Grandma’s white cap, and the driver cut his motor right down to an idle.

As we passed them, the older man in the back stood up and took off his cap and held it against his chest. He did not say anything. He did not have to.

“Who was that?” Grandma said, between strokes.

“Don’t know.”

“Nice man,” she said, and kept going.

At two hundred strokes, I started watching the little things. Her breath. The color of her lips. How high her chin rode. Whether her kick stayed even or started to drag on one side. A tired swimmer tells you everything if you know where to look.

She was fine. Better than fine. Her rhythm was so steady I could have set a metronome by it. I let myself look up at the far shore for a moment, at the pines and the strip of sand and the little flags somebody had set along the swim dock for the holiday.

It looked very far away.