I am standing at the top of the high dive. I�ve climbed up here in the middle of a pack of all my friends. I waited shivering in my navy blue suit. It is finally my turn. I walk up to the edge of the platform and look over the edge. The pool zooms away, miles away and I am thinking about jumping.

* * * * *

My mother will tell you that I learned to swim from watching Esther Williams movies. Like many things my mother might tell you about me, it is only partly true.

But before I had ever heard of Esther Williams, before I was allowed to watch movies that weren�t Disney or anything on television that wasn�t Sesame Street or The Electric Company or Mr. Rogers or Captain Kangaroo, before all of that there were years and years of lessons.

At age 5, a kindergarten transfer student to a town with not one but two public beaches, I was burying my toes in the coarse brown sand that flanked our corner of Long Island Sound. I was supposed to be listening to the high school student in the red bathing suit, but she wasn�t saying anything that interested me much. I watched the sailboats moving in and out of the marina and the seagulls perched on the diving board of the raft as it bobbed up and down in the water. The red bathing suit told me to get in the water. I complied, shaking the sand from my toes and wading gingerly in until the water came just below my bellybutton. I began to shake with cold. The red bathing suit told me to get all the way in. I refused. She told me again. I started to cry. She came over to help me. I started to scream.

That was my first lesson.

I came back the following week to try again. I was learning that water was always going to make me cold. Fortunately for me, my skin had an alarming way of turning a vibrant, cartoon-like blue when I was cold, which usually got me out of unpleasant early morning dunkings. But this morning, I was determined to go in.

I dunked myself in the water and held my breath. The girl in the red suit was still talking, I think. I�m not sure how long I stayed there, trying to memorize the pattern of the stones in the sand. I came up sputtering when the red suit shook me. �Don�t do that again.� By the end of the morning I could dogpaddle to the raft where the teenagers lay in their bikinis. I wasn�t sure if I could dogpaddle back.

* * * * *

By the time I was eight, I was still floundering. It was my first year at sleep-away camp. We melted beads and copper for jewelry, learned songs about sinking ships and shot arrows at distant targets. Every night someone played an out of tune rendition of taps on a bugle as the flag descended and we went to our cabins for lights out, where I wrote letters home under my covers with a flashlight. In the morning was swim class.

I turned blue every day in the lake where we fought for space with water lilies. My teacher always felt sorry for me and would let me ride in her rowboat back to the dock where I would stand shivering in my towel until everyone else was done.

I didn�t discover Esther Williams until I was nine. New city, new country, new continent. At school, they bussed us to the local public pool for swim class. It had a high ceiling of glass tiles, which in November were usually broken. Birds and winter air crept in. The pool was, of course, cold. I caught a cold on the first day. My mother fed me soup and let me lie in her bed so I could watch TV. Esther Williams was wearing a flowered bathing cap. I drank my soup and watched.

The following week, I finally learned the crawl. I raced up and down the lanes like I�d been doing it all my life. �Wow,� commented the teacher. �You should get sick more often.� I reveled in my newfound coordination. I swam every chance I got, feeling comfortable in my own skin at last. I read of mermaids and selkies and dreamed of falling into endless oceans.

* * * * *
Lately I prefer the breast stroke. It is more rhythmic than the crawl and I there is a moment with each stroke where you are stretched out like Superman and you feel like you could fly. I don�t remember how to dive, though. I learned that when I was sixteen at the home of the wealthy grandparents of a friend who had been in my class at the public pool. We�d both moved back to the U.S. by this time. I was living back in the town where I�d had my first lesson. My friend dared me and I tried going in headfirst and was surprised to find that it was not so hard. But I�ve since lost my nerve.

* * * * *

I love to swim for the joy of it. For the feeling of coordination of generally awkward limbs, of lightness where there is usually heaviness, the exhilharation of the unification of breath and motion. But I don�t think I�ll ever forget the feeling of standing at the top of the high dive and watching the pool recede from view. In the end, despite the cajoling of my friends in the water below, I couldn�t do it. I suffered the ultimate humiliation of making everyone behind me climb down the ladder so I could get off. I never went back to that pool. I still prefer the ocean. The salt is real.

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