Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Sand in my bathing suit

While I was setting up my profile here (which I hate doing) the last text box was a random question, something like "tell us about the time you had the most sand in your bathing suit" and so I wrote it, but it's longer than 400 words. So here it is.

When I was young I would spend summers at my father's house, swimming in his new wife’s above ground pool. My father and I spent those summers pretending to have a relationship and pretending to enjoy each others company, both knowing I was only there for the pool and the best friend who lived next door. I spent 6 or 7 summers doing this until the summer they sold the house with the pool and bought a townhouse in a new development out of town, it did not have a pool, I didn't visit after that.

While swimming those blissful summers away I wore a semi-adult bathing suit, a bond-girl-esque two piece thing that was attached in the front with a bamboo ring, ran up the sides and was bare in the back. This kind of suit was perfect for a pre-teen in the suburbs in her father’s back yard.

After my allotted time at my father’s house he would pack me up and drive me to my maternal grandparent’s house. He’d only pull halfway into their drive, and through the front window I would see my Nana, frowning slightly at the man who knocked up my mother forcing them to marry, and then years and three kids, left. He’d take my suitcase from the trunk and place it on the sun warmed tar topped drive. He’d kiss me goodbye and would wave to Nana, who only scowled more but also waved being too British to be out and out rude. Only after he’d backed out and driven off would Nana come out to greet me with hugs tinged with distain for my father, while John came out and got my suitcase.

Summers at Nana and John’s (John was our grandfather but we never called him that, we always just called him John) were idyllic afternoons of crickets chirping, berry picking, bike riding, penny candy, and catching crayfish in the creek for me and my cousins. Apart from the odd outcropping of neurosis too deep and complex for me or my cousins to understand (little girls were never allowed to sleep in the same room as little boys, and certainly not allowed to camp out in the backyard with them) our summers were every movie cliché of sun kissed childish nostalgia come to life, and always included at least a week of camping in a national park, complete with songs round the fire, sleeping bags, pup tents, and all our family together for a loud chaotic mess of egos and sneaked beers.

The bond girl-esque bathing suit that had been so perfect for swimming in a suburban backyard swimming pool proved a little too provocative at the public beach in the park. Boys, older boys, would talk to me. Young men would approach me. I was not yet twelve, and I did not look older than I was. It was a year, perhaps two, before I realized that I was pretty in a way that boys my own age did not find attractive but that older boys and men did find attractive, the attention was confusing, unwanted, and embarrassing.

But I hadn’t brought another bathing suit, and it was hot, and I was a water child who despite getting ear infections from swimming every year would not stay out of the water, and being too embarrassed to explain why I didn’t want to go in swimming I resolved to just sit in the water, in the shallows on the sand bar, cross legged, submerged to my chest, letting the gentle waves of the lake rock me back and forth slowly massaging a hole in the sand that I sunk butt first into. When I was just past neck deep I would pop out of the hole and move over a foot onto a fresh patch of sand and let the process happen again.
When it was time to go back to the camp site for lunch I stood and ran back to get to my towel as quickly as possible not immediately feeling the difference in my bathing suit. My mother and aunt noticed immediately. The entire bottom of my sexy pre-teen bond-girl bathing suit was filled with sand. So full of sand it was like a diaper sticking out and round and full of wet sticky sand. My mother, laughing, walked me back to the water and helped me empty out my diaper of sand back into the water. The sand had worked it way into the lining of the suit and would not be dislodged until the suit was taken off completely and washed by hand, by my mother, back at the campsite and they all laughingly told the story round the fire.