Pacific Standard Time
by Laurie Taylor
Every child in southern California grew up in a swimming pool. Or so it seemed during my childhood in the fifties. The pools belonged to the neighbor across the street, or to the YMCA, or the city, or the country club, but all the kids I knew were amphibious. And we who were blonde suffered the green hair syndrome, the result of being pickled in chlorine on a daily basis. Our parents were lax about safety in general. It was the era of heavy smoking and drinking, so shocking now in retrospect. The grownups loved lounging by the pool clinking ice cubes, oblivious of us, their progeny, sitting on the bottom playing tea party, imaginary cups held with our pinkies crooked while we talked open-eyed through the blurry aqua, our hearing hilariously impaired.
My pool lay across a crunchy pebble path that separated our more modest home from our rich and generous neighbors. I can't ever remember having formal swimming lessons. My mother liked to say, with an airy wave of her hand, that my brother who was only four years older had “taught" me to swim. I do remember him standing behind me on the diving board when I was about six, instructing me cheerfully, "It's now or never!" meaning he would push me if I didn't jump off myself.
By the time I was seven, I was surfing on my brother's board, and I wasn't much older when I was initiated into the secret power of the ocean, my face ground into the sandy bottom over and over again, trapped in what surfers call 'the washing machine'. When I meet people who don't know how to swim, it never fails to sadden me that they don't know the reincarnation of getting caught in a wave and coming out the other side.
When I became an adult and left California for the first time, I found out that many people in the world in Africa, or India or South America never learn how to swim, even those that live on the water. They stand cautiously in the foam, holding hands, laughing nervously, in their long shorts, or saris, or sometimes even in fashionable swimsuits that never get wet. There are fishermen who earn their livelihood up to their waist in water, pulling in nets at dawn, who don't know how to swim.
In Mexico, they shouted after me, "Peligrosa, peligrosa," when they saw me swimming out by myself, diving through the wave break so I could swim long laps parallel to shore. In Bangladesh, a country almost submerged in water, I discovered the number one cause of death for children is drowning.
I grew up thinking swimming pools were a fact of life, like trees and rain and the sky and school. I didn't understand they were a privilege, and that their abundance in California was due to Hollywood and how they'd been promoted as a status symbol after the Second World War.
Later in life, when I moved to Berlin for a second marriage, I joined an expensive spa and gym to somehow combat the gray urban cold in which, due to my commitment to love, I now had to live. I found the place by accident one day as I was taking one of my endless walks, marveling at the fact that for the first time in my life I was living in a place where I was completely disconnected, without expectations or responsibilities pushing me back and forth like daily tides. I had a type of freedom I had always dreamed of, and yet it seemed less like a gift than a curse. Finding the pool gave me a point of reference, a familiar destination to which I could assign myself some shred of meaning.
The pool was elegant and intricately tiled with a mosaic like a relic from the Minoan civilization. The water, artfully lit, was a lovely shade of celadon, continually refreshed and cleaned through a new technique that does not require chlorine or any obnoxious chemicals. It was on the lowest level of the enormous wellness complex, and adjacent to the pool area, through doors that opened and closed automatically, was a hive of sauna rooms, Turkish steam baths, cold pools, showers, an Italian Tepidarium, and an elevator that drew you up three floors to a rooftop terrace garden and sunroom.
The pool was surprisingly underused except in the mornings when they held water aerobics class. I found that if I waited until noon I would most likely have the entire pool area to myself until around two in the afternoon. Occasionally, one elderly man came out from the hive, shuffling in his rubber shoes and towel robe. He would stroke in a leisurely way, maybe three laps, and then lie down for a while longer on a lounger with his eyes closed. After about twenty minutes, he would disappear back into the hive and I would be alone again.
One day, I was practicing my underwater swimming, surfacing for only one breath midway in my lap. I popped my head up in the direction of the door and thought I saw my swimming companion carefully negotiating his way down the wide stone stairs leading to the pool room. At his end I touched the pool wall, made a tumble turn to push back off in streamline without breaking water. Reaching the opposite end, I surfaced again to make sure where the old man was in the water, so I wouldn't plow into him. But he was still standing on the stairs in the shallow end, watching me.
Suddenly I realized this was not the man I had expected. This was a smaller man. He had less hair on top, was slightly stooped, and leaned forward from his waist as if he were walking into a headwind. He looked like someone I knew. I recognized that unique stance. He looked exactly like I remembered my Jewish father-in-law, Winnie. There was just one problem:
My ex-husband's father has been dead from a heart attack almost twenty years now.
Winnie had been raised in an orphanage in New York City, and this hard beginning to life had given him a determined, steady personality combined with a sweet tentativeness that was telegraphed in his posture. As I moved through the water slowly, walking on my toes toward the man, I felt goose bumps on my arms. I could hardly breathe. I felt a stab of grief realizing how much I missed my father-in-law, and I was thinking madly, how was it possible someone else could look identical to him? Right down to the navy and white pinstriped swim trunks that he wore the summer my daughter was two.
He had been her constant guardian in the baby pool at our suburban community pool. I had bought those trunks for him because he needed an extra pair; he was in the pool so often, keeping her happy, giving me a much-needed rest. It should also be said that he was delighted to have a legitimate reason to keep to the baby pool. Along with all the other millions of unfortunate people in the world, my father-in-law had never learned to swim.
The old man looked right into my eyes and smiled. "Hello Laurie," he said in that Bronx accent I knew so well. It was as if I had just seen him yesterday.
I stopped about a foot away. He looked flesh and blood, but the lighting in the pool area came from bronze wall torches: spotlighting, not aggressive revealing overhead lighting. I surprised us both by bursting out crying.
"Winnie, are you a ghost?" I finally managed, sniveling and wiping my nose with my fingers.
He smiled again and I remembered he had good teeth, which always puzzled me considering his childhood. But then again, if he had been given a toothbrush, Winnie would be one to use it faithfully, no break in the routine.
"Well," he paused and tipped his head to the side in that Talmudic way he had, as if he was considering an extremely judicious matter, "I never believed in ghosts."
"Winnie, that doesn't answer my question." My voice was a bit shaky but I heard how adult and reasonable I sounded, and I realized in that moment how different I was from the shy young woman he had known more than thirty years earlier. "What are you doing here? Are you haunting me? Why are you here?"
I looked down at his feet covered by the water on the stairs. "Do you feel the water? Do you feel how warm it is?" I asked, curious.
"Yes," he said, "it's just like I remember the pool at the Bahia."
The Bahia was a resort in San Diego where we regularly spent Christmas together. My husband's parents had saved carefully most of their lives, and they were happy to spend it then on their only son's family, their beloved grandchildren.
"This is Germany, Winnie, Berlin, Germany. Why have you come back here, into this part of the world?"
"I want you to teach me how to swim. I want to learn how to swim," he said simply.
I was at a loss for words. Winnie held on to the metal rail in the middle of the pool stairs with his left hand and pulled nervously on the elastic waist of his swim trunks with his right. He had that hesitant but eager look I remembered from when, as a family, we started out together on an expedition to Sea World or the San Diego Zoo.
"I don't understand. You're dead, Winnie, why do you want to swim now?" I looked past his head to the door into the hive, hoping, praying no one would come out and discover me having a conversation with myself.
"Look," I said, "let's just go sit in the whirlpool and talk this over. I'm getting cold just standing here like this."
"Okay," he cheerfully agreed.
I held his elbow to help him climb up the stairs to the raised pool in the corner of the room. I wondered to myself if he slipped and fell if he could break his hip. The fact that he felt the water as comfortably warm was not a good sign.
When we had settled in and turned on the jets, I asked him again, "Now what's this really about, Winston?"
Before dying of TB shortly after he was born, his single mother had named him after Winston Churchill. We normally called him Winnie but I was trying to establish my authority, as I felt the situation was so out of control. Frankly, I was worried that I was suffering a hallucination. I had a girlfriend once who was so obsessed with a guy who had broken her heart that she actually saw him over and over again in place of the male strangers who were passing by on the street. A psychiatrist she consulted told her that our vision is so interconnected to brain activity, it's entirely possible to substitute long term memories for the 'real' optic stimuli.
"I want to swim, Laurie. It is the one thing I really regret about my life. I was always so afraid of water. I don't know why."
"But how did you find me? Here in this pool in Berlin?"
"Well, eternity is like that, you know. It's not linear like life appears to be." He tacked on as an afterthought, "You don't have to go looking for something to locate it."
That sort of made sense to me. I rubbed my arms with my hands, thinking about it.
"What do I look like to you?" I eventually asked. "I look a lot older and heavier, don't I?"
“Gee, no! You look just like I remembered you. My best recollection of you, that first summer we met, and Ethel and I had our fiftieth wedding anniversary—the silver anniversary party. You were already pregnant with Lila then, just a few weeks as I recall. You were so fresh and pretty and Ethel and I were so happy and relieved that David was finally getting married and we would have grandchildren!"
"Oh my God, Ethel, where is she, Winnie? I miss her so much, you can't imagine. Are you together wherever you are?
He smiled somewhat sadly, "Sometimes, but not always like we were in life. It's difficult to explain, but it's a little like dreaming. You travel about a lot and sometimes the people you love are nearby and sometimes not. I spend a good deal of time reading and learning new things." This didn't surprise me much as Winnie had always had his nose in The New York Times or a good book.
"Okay," I finally agreed. "I will try and teach you to swim, even though I can't imagine really what the point of it is now. But you can't come here until noon because that's when it's empty, and you can't come if someone else is in here with me, promise? How do you know what time it is here? Oh, forget it, I don't even want to know. Just don't show up here if someone is around. Got it?"
"Wonderful," he said. Then he just disappeared and I was sitting in the whirlpool alone. I looked over to where he had left his terrycloth bathrobe on the lounger. It was gone along with the rubber flip-flops he'd left by the edge of the pool.
That evening I had to resist the urge to call my ex-husband, who I rarely communicated with, to tell him about Winnie's visit. I felt such a wave of nostalgia for the past that I came very close to overriding my common sense, which told me that my ex-husband's opinion of me would only be tarnished further by, as he would see it, such comic proof of my purported instability.
Once I realized that it would be no good to share this miracle with anyone, including my new German husband, or my now grown children, I stayed awake half the night wondering how one could teach a very old man to swim, even if he did have all the time in the world to learn.
I mulled over, as I have many times, the idea that life was mysterious enough without probing into the possibility of an afterlife. Death defined life, gave it shape and intensity, if not exactly any sort of meaning that we all could agree upon. But the idea that some aspects of one's mental life could possibly continue on without the physical body was a terrifying prospect.
My in-laws came to me as a set of three. Ethel had a younger sister who had never married. Winnie had included her in the nucleus of his family without question. Winnie had devoted his entire life to being careful, an ethical person devoted to his family and friends. But it seemed in this case, goodness was not enough to ensure a peaceful eternity. It seemed that we carried unfinished business into the next invisible round, and Winnie was still trying to overcome his mortal fear of water.
What if goodness just gives you a second chance? A second chance to turn something around, to do it better, to be a little more than you could manage the first time.
Strong swimmer that I am, I had never taught anyone to swim—other than my own two children. They were babies when I first took them into a pool, and carried them around in my arms until they were so relaxed I could leave them clinging on to the narrow lip of the pool's gutter, their small hands fiercely gripping. I would play with their feet, giving them the rhythm of kicking while I sang to them. I could hardly do this with Winnie, but I thought maybe the first step would be something similar: putting him at ease in the water while I distracted him. The logic that drowning could have no effect on him—as he was already dead—was not operable here. Winnie's eternal spirit would have to relax in the same way that a baby has to learn to trust and navigate the new world around him or her.
The next day while I sat in the whirlpool waiting for him to appear, I thought about my favorite ghost story of all time, A Christmas Carol. I remembered how Scrooge had dismissed his first visitation as an indigestion problem disturbing his sleep. But for some reason, I had little doubt that Winnie's visit had been a phenomenon separate from some malfunction of my senses. However, I did wonder if Winnie's reason for contacting me was somehow more for my benefit than for his. Was I clueless that my soul, like that of the embittered Scrooge, was in some existential jeopardy?
I had gone earlier to the water aerobics trainer and asked for a kickboard that Winnie could use while I taught him to tread water and kick his legs in a relaxed rhythm. My first goal was to get Winnie to believe that his body—or his imagined body—could exist in water as well as in air. It seemed to me that the difference between someone who can swim and someone who can't is more a state of mind than actual technique. Which isn't really true for other sports: I can't hit or catch a ball just because I think I can.
How Winnie told time in eternity I don't know, but he did just suddenly appear in his robe and flip-flops next to the whirlpool at high noon. "Okay," I said, as though we were just hanging out together like we did thirty years ago, "let’s get this show on the road!" and I motioned to him to disrobe and follow me into the shallow end of the big pool.
I put the kickboard on the edge of the pool and placed his hands in front of him on the cement lip.
"Bend your knees, put your face in the water and hum a tune and let me guess what it is," I instructed him.
We played this game for around fifteen minutes and Winnie hummed "Happy Birthday" and then "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and other favorites I remembered from the old days when the children were little. Soon, we were laughing like kids ourselves and I could see he was loosening up, willing to stay with his face submerged for longer and longer periods of time. The idea was he could come up for air, so I would have a chance to hear a snatch of the tune without underwater distortion, then re-submerge his face. The whole time he was holding fast to the edge of the pool, his long, pale and translucent, square-tipped fingers in a tight grip. Every once in a while, I remembered he was only ether or a hallucination, but most moments he seemed three-dimensional skin and bones.
When we both tired of the game, I gave him the kickboard to hold instead of the pool's rim. I clasped the sides of his arms, facing him, and pulled him out to where the bottom of the pool began sloping under into the deep. "Just move your legs like scissors. I've got you!" I reassured him. We moved around like this between the shallows and the mid-pool area, eye-to-eye, until I tired, not Winnie. "Okay, the hour's up," I concluded.
Poof! He was gone without a farewell, and the buoyant kickboard popped up a few inches, then landed gently on the surface of the water. I looked over to the whirlpool corner and saw that his robe and flip-flops were no longer there.
My German husband had plenty of income, so there was nothing driving me to find a job immediately. I was spending my first year here in Berlin going to language classes, meeting new people, and keeping fit at the gym. I was homesick and seriously doubting I could make this new life work. After my husband left for his job in the morning, I wrote emails, and then logged on to GrindTV and watched endless footage of the world's best surfers mastering, or wiping out, in the giant swells of the Pacific ocean. I personally knew a few of the big names, having worked my way through UC Santa Cruz as a salesclerk at O'Neills, the famous surf wear company. It was kind of pathetic, this reliving of my glory days before I got married, had children and got ground down by the washing machine of adult life. Now, trying to adapt to a completely foreign world, I needed to somehow reassure myself with these videos of grace and daring and perfect risk taking.
I shut down GrindTV and gathered my gym bag and headed out every morning by 11:00 so that I would be sure to be in place in the whirlpool, waiting for Winnie's punctual appearance at the daytime bewitching hour.
Slowly but surely, Winnie became more relaxed in the pool water and I was able to steer him farther and farther into the deep end. He began to understand how to coordinate a functional rhythm between his arms and his legs. We modified his first dog paddles into a fairly respectable breaststroke and as he loosened up, his stiff-leg scissor kicks opened up into a springy frog kick.
A very few times, another club member emerged from the hive while we were working in the middle of the pool, and Winnie just poofed into thin air leaving me treading water with a silly smile on my face. But let me tell you something about the average German: for all their backbreaking social correctness, they are perfectly happy to pretend you don't exist. No spontaneous interactions for them. My husband has been working for years in a firm where everyone still calls each other by their last name.
Winnie and I talked quite a bit during our lessons. After I had caught him up to date on all the details about the lives of his grandchildren, he became bolder in questioning me about my personal development. He was of course puzzled as to how I had managed to marry a German.
"Well," I found myself replying, "they are like everyone else, a mixture of good and bad character traits, Winnie, and as a culture they have certainly done their penance. They are constantly reexamining the war years, y' know, in television documentaries and books, and each generation keeps questioning it in different ways. I mean, I haven't been here that long, but it seems to me that the scars are palpable everywhere."
"No chance of forgetting?" he interjected.
I paused to think over his question. "It might interest you to know that the European Union is in a huge fiscal mess because they have one currency but completely differing productivity and tax systems. Well, it’s almost like a depression or something, and it's the German people that are bailing out everyone else, keeping the Union afloat."
Winnie's eyes were bright with alertness and his head was shaking up and down. "I know, I know, I read the financial pages of The Times." I tried to imagine the mechanics of eternity, how a daily paper might still be available to an inquiring spirit. I thought I should warn Winnie that printed newspapers were fast disappearing, and that he might have to learn how to use the Internet after he completed his swim lessons, but then I thought better of it.
Not long after that, the day came when Winnie asked me what I suspect he really came to find out. We were hanging on the wall, side-by-side, mid-pool. He was recovering from some strenuous paddling across the width of the pool, the longest he had managed so far without me following right beside him. He was still breathing hard or kind of panting. I was feeling really proud of him, how he was so dogged in overcoming his lifelong fear of water. All of a sudden, he looked me straight in the eye and said, "So why did you leave David? Ethel and I could never understand. It almost killed us."
The last time I had seen Winnie was at my youngest daughter’s fourth birthday party. We were at an Italian pizza parlor where the tables were covered in white paper and they gave you crayons in the water glasses. The next day, my divorce lawyer served the papers, and shortly after, my father-in-law died of a massive heart attack. My husband remarried quickly, and Ethel took an apartment in a retirement home. Her sister had died several years before. I used to visit my mother-in-law in her pastel cocoon, where everyone moved so listlessly, and we would walk together on the stepping stone paths through the sprinklers and palm trees and bright green California lawns.
She didn't say it outright, but I gathered she still preferred me to the new wife. Yet, she never asked me why I had shattered our wonderful little family and I never offered it up unbidden. I couldn't bring myself to say anything negative about her only son, to reveal his not so apparent craziness, even if my reticence made me look bad, as if I were the broken one.
All these years later, I was no better at revealing secrets or examining my wounds. I looked down at my small sun-spotted hands, my fingers spread out in front of me on the wet tiles. A thick gold band on my ring finger. Finally, Winnie broke the silence. "Ethel and me, we always believed marriage is forever."
I lifted my head and turned my face into his. "Nothing is forever, Winston. That's the First Law of Thermodynamics. Energy is conserved, but matter is always changing. It's just a function of time. We can't hold on to anything."
Winnie's brow furrowed in anxiety and his bony shoulders rose out of the water in a defensive posture. I remembered suddenly an annoying habit he had of nervously closing the refrigerator behind me, when I was only trying to quickly pour some milk into my coffee. As if the two minutes I had the door open would imperil the food being preserved inside.
"It nearly killed me too," I said trying to keep my voice steady. "The kids were fine, they are fine. Okay, it hurt them for a long time but they are great people getting on with their lives. David turned around and married again in about five minutes. But me, I was alone forever. I never understood how there could be things you can't see. Things that trip you up and make the decisions you have made impossible to bear. I was afraid of my own judgment, I was afraid to let go, and then I met Dirk and I knew . . . . somehow I had to try."
Winnie nodded his head gently up and down, patted my right hand on the edge of the pool. Then he sunk slowly down, pulling his head under water, and in horror I saw him sitting on the bottom—like a child playing tea party. I was looking down on his bald pate. I was about to dive down after him when he sprang off the pool floor, his arms pressed tightly against his sides and only his feet kicking furiously. He bombed away from me in the direction of the deep, like a seal swimming under water. A few seconds later, he surfaced at the end of the pool and called out something to me. His voice echoed in the big cavernous room and I was so stunned that I wasn't really certain if I had heard him correctly, and then he poofed and was gone. I knew I'd never see him again.
In shock, I hauled myself up out of the water onto the side of the pool and stumbled over towards the whirlpool. His robe was gone of course, but there was one, only one, of his flip-flops left behind on the stairs. I picked it up and turned it around in my hand. The rubber sole said "Made in China" stamped on the heel.
I thought his last words to me had been, "Start to forgive yourself."
But then again, it just as well could have been, "Shut the refrigerator door."
My pool lay across a crunchy pebble path that separated our more modest home from our rich and generous neighbors. I can't ever remember having formal swimming lessons. My mother liked to say, with an airy wave of her hand, that my brother who was only four years older had “taught" me to swim. I do remember him standing behind me on the diving board when I was about six, instructing me cheerfully, "It's now or never!" meaning he would push me if I didn't jump off myself.
By the time I was seven, I was surfing on my brother's board, and I wasn't much older when I was initiated into the secret power of the ocean, my face ground into the sandy bottom over and over again, trapped in what surfers call 'the washing machine'. When I meet people who don't know how to swim, it never fails to sadden me that they don't know the reincarnation of getting caught in a wave and coming out the other side.
When I became an adult and left California for the first time, I found out that many people in the world in Africa, or India or South America never learn how to swim, even those that live on the water. They stand cautiously in the foam, holding hands, laughing nervously, in their long shorts, or saris, or sometimes even in fashionable swimsuits that never get wet. There are fishermen who earn their livelihood up to their waist in water, pulling in nets at dawn, who don't know how to swim.
In Mexico, they shouted after me, "Peligrosa, peligrosa," when they saw me swimming out by myself, diving through the wave break so I could swim long laps parallel to shore. In Bangladesh, a country almost submerged in water, I discovered the number one cause of death for children is drowning.
I grew up thinking swimming pools were a fact of life, like trees and rain and the sky and school. I didn't understand they were a privilege, and that their abundance in California was due to Hollywood and how they'd been promoted as a status symbol after the Second World War.
Later in life, when I moved to Berlin for a second marriage, I joined an expensive spa and gym to somehow combat the gray urban cold in which, due to my commitment to love, I now had to live. I found the place by accident one day as I was taking one of my endless walks, marveling at the fact that for the first time in my life I was living in a place where I was completely disconnected, without expectations or responsibilities pushing me back and forth like daily tides. I had a type of freedom I had always dreamed of, and yet it seemed less like a gift than a curse. Finding the pool gave me a point of reference, a familiar destination to which I could assign myself some shred of meaning.
The pool was elegant and intricately tiled with a mosaic like a relic from the Minoan civilization. The water, artfully lit, was a lovely shade of celadon, continually refreshed and cleaned through a new technique that does not require chlorine or any obnoxious chemicals. It was on the lowest level of the enormous wellness complex, and adjacent to the pool area, through doors that opened and closed automatically, was a hive of sauna rooms, Turkish steam baths, cold pools, showers, an Italian Tepidarium, and an elevator that drew you up three floors to a rooftop terrace garden and sunroom.
The pool was surprisingly underused except in the mornings when they held water aerobics class. I found that if I waited until noon I would most likely have the entire pool area to myself until around two in the afternoon. Occasionally, one elderly man came out from the hive, shuffling in his rubber shoes and towel robe. He would stroke in a leisurely way, maybe three laps, and then lie down for a while longer on a lounger with his eyes closed. After about twenty minutes, he would disappear back into the hive and I would be alone again.
One day, I was practicing my underwater swimming, surfacing for only one breath midway in my lap. I popped my head up in the direction of the door and thought I saw my swimming companion carefully negotiating his way down the wide stone stairs leading to the pool room. At his end I touched the pool wall, made a tumble turn to push back off in streamline without breaking water. Reaching the opposite end, I surfaced again to make sure where the old man was in the water, so I wouldn't plow into him. But he was still standing on the stairs in the shallow end, watching me.
Suddenly I realized this was not the man I had expected. This was a smaller man. He had less hair on top, was slightly stooped, and leaned forward from his waist as if he were walking into a headwind. He looked like someone I knew. I recognized that unique stance. He looked exactly like I remembered my Jewish father-in-law, Winnie. There was just one problem:
My ex-husband's father has been dead from a heart attack almost twenty years now.
Winnie had been raised in an orphanage in New York City, and this hard beginning to life had given him a determined, steady personality combined with a sweet tentativeness that was telegraphed in his posture. As I moved through the water slowly, walking on my toes toward the man, I felt goose bumps on my arms. I could hardly breathe. I felt a stab of grief realizing how much I missed my father-in-law, and I was thinking madly, how was it possible someone else could look identical to him? Right down to the navy and white pinstriped swim trunks that he wore the summer my daughter was two.
He had been her constant guardian in the baby pool at our suburban community pool. I had bought those trunks for him because he needed an extra pair; he was in the pool so often, keeping her happy, giving me a much-needed rest. It should also be said that he was delighted to have a legitimate reason to keep to the baby pool. Along with all the other millions of unfortunate people in the world, my father-in-law had never learned to swim.
The old man looked right into my eyes and smiled. "Hello Laurie," he said in that Bronx accent I knew so well. It was as if I had just seen him yesterday.
I stopped about a foot away. He looked flesh and blood, but the lighting in the pool area came from bronze wall torches: spotlighting, not aggressive revealing overhead lighting. I surprised us both by bursting out crying.
"Winnie, are you a ghost?" I finally managed, sniveling and wiping my nose with my fingers.
He smiled again and I remembered he had good teeth, which always puzzled me considering his childhood. But then again, if he had been given a toothbrush, Winnie would be one to use it faithfully, no break in the routine.
"Well," he paused and tipped his head to the side in that Talmudic way he had, as if he was considering an extremely judicious matter, "I never believed in ghosts."
"Winnie, that doesn't answer my question." My voice was a bit shaky but I heard how adult and reasonable I sounded, and I realized in that moment how different I was from the shy young woman he had known more than thirty years earlier. "What are you doing here? Are you haunting me? Why are you here?"
I looked down at his feet covered by the water on the stairs. "Do you feel the water? Do you feel how warm it is?" I asked, curious.
"Yes," he said, "it's just like I remember the pool at the Bahia."
The Bahia was a resort in San Diego where we regularly spent Christmas together. My husband's parents had saved carefully most of their lives, and they were happy to spend it then on their only son's family, their beloved grandchildren.
"This is Germany, Winnie, Berlin, Germany. Why have you come back here, into this part of the world?"
"I want you to teach me how to swim. I want to learn how to swim," he said simply.
I was at a loss for words. Winnie held on to the metal rail in the middle of the pool stairs with his left hand and pulled nervously on the elastic waist of his swim trunks with his right. He had that hesitant but eager look I remembered from when, as a family, we started out together on an expedition to Sea World or the San Diego Zoo.
"I don't understand. You're dead, Winnie, why do you want to swim now?" I looked past his head to the door into the hive, hoping, praying no one would come out and discover me having a conversation with myself.
"Look," I said, "let's just go sit in the whirlpool and talk this over. I'm getting cold just standing here like this."
"Okay," he cheerfully agreed.
I held his elbow to help him climb up the stairs to the raised pool in the corner of the room. I wondered to myself if he slipped and fell if he could break his hip. The fact that he felt the water as comfortably warm was not a good sign.
When we had settled in and turned on the jets, I asked him again, "Now what's this really about, Winston?"
Before dying of TB shortly after he was born, his single mother had named him after Winston Churchill. We normally called him Winnie but I was trying to establish my authority, as I felt the situation was so out of control. Frankly, I was worried that I was suffering a hallucination. I had a girlfriend once who was so obsessed with a guy who had broken her heart that she actually saw him over and over again in place of the male strangers who were passing by on the street. A psychiatrist she consulted told her that our vision is so interconnected to brain activity, it's entirely possible to substitute long term memories for the 'real' optic stimuli.
"I want to swim, Laurie. It is the one thing I really regret about my life. I was always so afraid of water. I don't know why."
"But how did you find me? Here in this pool in Berlin?"
"Well, eternity is like that, you know. It's not linear like life appears to be." He tacked on as an afterthought, "You don't have to go looking for something to locate it."
That sort of made sense to me. I rubbed my arms with my hands, thinking about it.
"What do I look like to you?" I eventually asked. "I look a lot older and heavier, don't I?"
“Gee, no! You look just like I remembered you. My best recollection of you, that first summer we met, and Ethel and I had our fiftieth wedding anniversary—the silver anniversary party. You were already pregnant with Lila then, just a few weeks as I recall. You were so fresh and pretty and Ethel and I were so happy and relieved that David was finally getting married and we would have grandchildren!"
"Oh my God, Ethel, where is she, Winnie? I miss her so much, you can't imagine. Are you together wherever you are?
He smiled somewhat sadly, "Sometimes, but not always like we were in life. It's difficult to explain, but it's a little like dreaming. You travel about a lot and sometimes the people you love are nearby and sometimes not. I spend a good deal of time reading and learning new things." This didn't surprise me much as Winnie had always had his nose in The New York Times or a good book.
"Okay," I finally agreed. "I will try and teach you to swim, even though I can't imagine really what the point of it is now. But you can't come here until noon because that's when it's empty, and you can't come if someone else is in here with me, promise? How do you know what time it is here? Oh, forget it, I don't even want to know. Just don't show up here if someone is around. Got it?"
"Wonderful," he said. Then he just disappeared and I was sitting in the whirlpool alone. I looked over to where he had left his terrycloth bathrobe on the lounger. It was gone along with the rubber flip-flops he'd left by the edge of the pool.
That evening I had to resist the urge to call my ex-husband, who I rarely communicated with, to tell him about Winnie's visit. I felt such a wave of nostalgia for the past that I came very close to overriding my common sense, which told me that my ex-husband's opinion of me would only be tarnished further by, as he would see it, such comic proof of my purported instability.
Once I realized that it would be no good to share this miracle with anyone, including my new German husband, or my now grown children, I stayed awake half the night wondering how one could teach a very old man to swim, even if he did have all the time in the world to learn.
I mulled over, as I have many times, the idea that life was mysterious enough without probing into the possibility of an afterlife. Death defined life, gave it shape and intensity, if not exactly any sort of meaning that we all could agree upon. But the idea that some aspects of one's mental life could possibly continue on without the physical body was a terrifying prospect.
My in-laws came to me as a set of three. Ethel had a younger sister who had never married. Winnie had included her in the nucleus of his family without question. Winnie had devoted his entire life to being careful, an ethical person devoted to his family and friends. But it seemed in this case, goodness was not enough to ensure a peaceful eternity. It seemed that we carried unfinished business into the next invisible round, and Winnie was still trying to overcome his mortal fear of water.
What if goodness just gives you a second chance? A second chance to turn something around, to do it better, to be a little more than you could manage the first time.
Strong swimmer that I am, I had never taught anyone to swim—other than my own two children. They were babies when I first took them into a pool, and carried them around in my arms until they were so relaxed I could leave them clinging on to the narrow lip of the pool's gutter, their small hands fiercely gripping. I would play with their feet, giving them the rhythm of kicking while I sang to them. I could hardly do this with Winnie, but I thought maybe the first step would be something similar: putting him at ease in the water while I distracted him. The logic that drowning could have no effect on him—as he was already dead—was not operable here. Winnie's eternal spirit would have to relax in the same way that a baby has to learn to trust and navigate the new world around him or her.
The next day while I sat in the whirlpool waiting for him to appear, I thought about my favorite ghost story of all time, A Christmas Carol. I remembered how Scrooge had dismissed his first visitation as an indigestion problem disturbing his sleep. But for some reason, I had little doubt that Winnie's visit had been a phenomenon separate from some malfunction of my senses. However, I did wonder if Winnie's reason for contacting me was somehow more for my benefit than for his. Was I clueless that my soul, like that of the embittered Scrooge, was in some existential jeopardy?
I had gone earlier to the water aerobics trainer and asked for a kickboard that Winnie could use while I taught him to tread water and kick his legs in a relaxed rhythm. My first goal was to get Winnie to believe that his body—or his imagined body—could exist in water as well as in air. It seemed to me that the difference between someone who can swim and someone who can't is more a state of mind than actual technique. Which isn't really true for other sports: I can't hit or catch a ball just because I think I can.
How Winnie told time in eternity I don't know, but he did just suddenly appear in his robe and flip-flops next to the whirlpool at high noon. "Okay," I said, as though we were just hanging out together like we did thirty years ago, "let’s get this show on the road!" and I motioned to him to disrobe and follow me into the shallow end of the big pool.
I put the kickboard on the edge of the pool and placed his hands in front of him on the cement lip.
"Bend your knees, put your face in the water and hum a tune and let me guess what it is," I instructed him.
We played this game for around fifteen minutes and Winnie hummed "Happy Birthday" and then "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and other favorites I remembered from the old days when the children were little. Soon, we were laughing like kids ourselves and I could see he was loosening up, willing to stay with his face submerged for longer and longer periods of time. The idea was he could come up for air, so I would have a chance to hear a snatch of the tune without underwater distortion, then re-submerge his face. The whole time he was holding fast to the edge of the pool, his long, pale and translucent, square-tipped fingers in a tight grip. Every once in a while, I remembered he was only ether or a hallucination, but most moments he seemed three-dimensional skin and bones.
When we both tired of the game, I gave him the kickboard to hold instead of the pool's rim. I clasped the sides of his arms, facing him, and pulled him out to where the bottom of the pool began sloping under into the deep. "Just move your legs like scissors. I've got you!" I reassured him. We moved around like this between the shallows and the mid-pool area, eye-to-eye, until I tired, not Winnie. "Okay, the hour's up," I concluded.
Poof! He was gone without a farewell, and the buoyant kickboard popped up a few inches, then landed gently on the surface of the water. I looked over to the whirlpool corner and saw that his robe and flip-flops were no longer there.
My German husband had plenty of income, so there was nothing driving me to find a job immediately. I was spending my first year here in Berlin going to language classes, meeting new people, and keeping fit at the gym. I was homesick and seriously doubting I could make this new life work. After my husband left for his job in the morning, I wrote emails, and then logged on to GrindTV and watched endless footage of the world's best surfers mastering, or wiping out, in the giant swells of the Pacific ocean. I personally knew a few of the big names, having worked my way through UC Santa Cruz as a salesclerk at O'Neills, the famous surf wear company. It was kind of pathetic, this reliving of my glory days before I got married, had children and got ground down by the washing machine of adult life. Now, trying to adapt to a completely foreign world, I needed to somehow reassure myself with these videos of grace and daring and perfect risk taking.
I shut down GrindTV and gathered my gym bag and headed out every morning by 11:00 so that I would be sure to be in place in the whirlpool, waiting for Winnie's punctual appearance at the daytime bewitching hour.
Slowly but surely, Winnie became more relaxed in the pool water and I was able to steer him farther and farther into the deep end. He began to understand how to coordinate a functional rhythm between his arms and his legs. We modified his first dog paddles into a fairly respectable breaststroke and as he loosened up, his stiff-leg scissor kicks opened up into a springy frog kick.
A very few times, another club member emerged from the hive while we were working in the middle of the pool, and Winnie just poofed into thin air leaving me treading water with a silly smile on my face. But let me tell you something about the average German: for all their backbreaking social correctness, they are perfectly happy to pretend you don't exist. No spontaneous interactions for them. My husband has been working for years in a firm where everyone still calls each other by their last name.
Winnie and I talked quite a bit during our lessons. After I had caught him up to date on all the details about the lives of his grandchildren, he became bolder in questioning me about my personal development. He was of course puzzled as to how I had managed to marry a German.
"Well," I found myself replying, "they are like everyone else, a mixture of good and bad character traits, Winnie, and as a culture they have certainly done their penance. They are constantly reexamining the war years, y' know, in television documentaries and books, and each generation keeps questioning it in different ways. I mean, I haven't been here that long, but it seems to me that the scars are palpable everywhere."
"No chance of forgetting?" he interjected.
I paused to think over his question. "It might interest you to know that the European Union is in a huge fiscal mess because they have one currency but completely differing productivity and tax systems. Well, it’s almost like a depression or something, and it's the German people that are bailing out everyone else, keeping the Union afloat."
Winnie's eyes were bright with alertness and his head was shaking up and down. "I know, I know, I read the financial pages of The Times." I tried to imagine the mechanics of eternity, how a daily paper might still be available to an inquiring spirit. I thought I should warn Winnie that printed newspapers were fast disappearing, and that he might have to learn how to use the Internet after he completed his swim lessons, but then I thought better of it.
Not long after that, the day came when Winnie asked me what I suspect he really came to find out. We were hanging on the wall, side-by-side, mid-pool. He was recovering from some strenuous paddling across the width of the pool, the longest he had managed so far without me following right beside him. He was still breathing hard or kind of panting. I was feeling really proud of him, how he was so dogged in overcoming his lifelong fear of water. All of a sudden, he looked me straight in the eye and said, "So why did you leave David? Ethel and I could never understand. It almost killed us."
The last time I had seen Winnie was at my youngest daughter’s fourth birthday party. We were at an Italian pizza parlor where the tables were covered in white paper and they gave you crayons in the water glasses. The next day, my divorce lawyer served the papers, and shortly after, my father-in-law died of a massive heart attack. My husband remarried quickly, and Ethel took an apartment in a retirement home. Her sister had died several years before. I used to visit my mother-in-law in her pastel cocoon, where everyone moved so listlessly, and we would walk together on the stepping stone paths through the sprinklers and palm trees and bright green California lawns.
She didn't say it outright, but I gathered she still preferred me to the new wife. Yet, she never asked me why I had shattered our wonderful little family and I never offered it up unbidden. I couldn't bring myself to say anything negative about her only son, to reveal his not so apparent craziness, even if my reticence made me look bad, as if I were the broken one.
All these years later, I was no better at revealing secrets or examining my wounds. I looked down at my small sun-spotted hands, my fingers spread out in front of me on the wet tiles. A thick gold band on my ring finger. Finally, Winnie broke the silence. "Ethel and me, we always believed marriage is forever."
I lifted my head and turned my face into his. "Nothing is forever, Winston. That's the First Law of Thermodynamics. Energy is conserved, but matter is always changing. It's just a function of time. We can't hold on to anything."
Winnie's brow furrowed in anxiety and his bony shoulders rose out of the water in a defensive posture. I remembered suddenly an annoying habit he had of nervously closing the refrigerator behind me, when I was only trying to quickly pour some milk into my coffee. As if the two minutes I had the door open would imperil the food being preserved inside.
"It nearly killed me too," I said trying to keep my voice steady. "The kids were fine, they are fine. Okay, it hurt them for a long time but they are great people getting on with their lives. David turned around and married again in about five minutes. But me, I was alone forever. I never understood how there could be things you can't see. Things that trip you up and make the decisions you have made impossible to bear. I was afraid of my own judgment, I was afraid to let go, and then I met Dirk and I knew . . . . somehow I had to try."
Winnie nodded his head gently up and down, patted my right hand on the edge of the pool. Then he sunk slowly down, pulling his head under water, and in horror I saw him sitting on the bottom—like a child playing tea party. I was looking down on his bald pate. I was about to dive down after him when he sprang off the pool floor, his arms pressed tightly against his sides and only his feet kicking furiously. He bombed away from me in the direction of the deep, like a seal swimming under water. A few seconds later, he surfaced at the end of the pool and called out something to me. His voice echoed in the big cavernous room and I was so stunned that I wasn't really certain if I had heard him correctly, and then he poofed and was gone. I knew I'd never see him again.
In shock, I hauled myself up out of the water onto the side of the pool and stumbled over towards the whirlpool. His robe was gone of course, but there was one, only one, of his flip-flops left behind on the stairs. I picked it up and turned it around in my hand. The rubber sole said "Made in China" stamped on the heel.
I thought his last words to me had been, "Start to forgive yourself."
But then again, it just as well could have been, "Shut the refrigerator door."
