Afternoon Practice

WARNING: This story depicts the actions of a sexual predator.

 

After lunch, I walked the half mile to the beach, staying close to the shoreline in the shade of the maples and weeping willows. The July sun scorched my bare back and shoulders. I draped my fleur-de-lis bath towel like a cape over my navy-blue swim team bathing suit, my second skin that summer. Barefoot, I scanned the weedy grass for broken glass and rusty nails while chewing the end of one braid, still wet from the morning’s swim team practice.

Coach Andy had offered to help me with flip turns at our afternoon practice. I competed in backstroke because breathing was easier, but I kept knocking my head on the dock when I came in hard for the turns. Coach had shown me how to throw my knees over one shoulder, twist, and push off the boards with the soles of my feet. Easy peasy, he said. If I could only get past my fear of being underwater and upside-down, I could start winning races.

A car slowed down on the road, the driver was watching me. “Hey, missy!” he said.

I looked at him, one eye shut against the sun’s glare. The rust-colored car was headed in the opposite direction, counter clockwise around the lake. At first, I mistook the driver for a teenager and felt a gust of excitement, but after taking in his double chin, wild eyebrows, and sparse blond hair, I placed him closer to my father’s age. He drove shirtless — not unusual in July — but this man was sickly pale, as if he spent all his days indoors. He propped one elbow on the open window.

“Come here, beautiful,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and continued walking. Beautiful. My best friend Hilary would laugh when I told her, but she’d be jealous; no one, apart from our mothers, ever called us beautiful. I was 13 years old, two months away from starting high school.

“Aw, baby, don’t go. I got something to show you.”

I recognized the oily, ingratiating tone the older neighborhood boys used before they’d swipe my pogo stick or drop a daddy long legs spider down my shirt. I wasn’t that dumb little kid anymore. I felt more grown up than my five-foot-two and 90-pound frame might suggest. A late bloomer, my mother called me whenever I complained about my delayed period and belated breasts.

“Nice try. Dream on,” I called over my shoulder, flipping my braids, convinced he’d take the hint. This was 1977, decades before Safe Havens, a year before the first missing child’s face appeared on a milk carton. The line between children and adults was fuzzier. No one called foul when a coach patted your butt. No one reported a nun’s slap to Child Protective Services. When Uncle Cliff, my father’s divorced college roommate, greeted me and my ten-year-old sister with a backward dip before diving in for a Hollywood-style smooch, the adults in the room always laughed. Complaining to our mother had changed nothing. Years later, though, she admitted to having qualms.

When I glanced back, the rust-colored car was turning up Barlow Road.

Afternoon practice. Another chance to see my crush, Teddy Dixon. At the morning workout, lacy green algae covered the swim lanes. Coach Andy ordered the boys to cut through the muck like lawnmowers. They climbed the ladder, dripping with the slimy green stuff. All the girls ran screaming, inviting the boys to chase us around the bleachers. Teddy and Gary went after Victoria Knox and Debbie Sanchez. High school seniors, their swimming talents had kept them on the team long after other girls their age had moved on. They’d stood their ground. “Don’t be such a spaz,” Debbie said, trapping Gary in a headlock. Victoria ruffled Teddy’s bushy blond hair.

Teddy Dixon was 14, a year older than me, but he had a man’s deep voice and hairy legs. In our mixed medley relay team, I started us off with backstroke; Teddy followed with his masterful butterfly; Hilary came next with an efficient breaststroke; and Gary, our anchor, swam a flailing, thrashing freestyle that usually saved us from coming in dead last.

In the water, waiting for the starting gun, grasping the dock handles with my feet planted on the boards, I’d look up at Teddy’s muscular legs, silky with golden hair. “Give me a good lead, Irene,” he’d say, and I’d go all squishy inside.

The rust-colored car cruised alongside me, headed in the same direction now. “Miss me, sweetie?” the driver said through the open window. He managed to steer with his left hand while leaning his right elbow on the passenger seat.

I picked up the pace. Hard to know how to say no to boys, and apparently men, without offending or emboldening them.

“Going for a swim in your cute little swimsuit?” he said. I slowed down so he couldn’t see my butt cheeks as I walked. Bubble butt, the boys at my school called me. “Too hot for walking, isn’t it?” he said. “Come on, get in. I’ll give you a lift to the beach.”

I moved closer to the shoreline. Two mallards, floating among the rocks and willow roots, squawked and flapped their wings.

“Hey, I’m tryin’ to be a nice guy,” he shouted. “Why you acting like such a bitch?”

No one, not even the boys on my street, had ever called me a bitch. I looked around for help. All the nearby houses were sealed up against the afternoon heat, shades drawn, doors closed. The beach was 200 yards in the distance, barricaded behind a six-foot chain link fence. I took off running — knees lifted, arms pumping — stumbling over roots and rocks and clumps of weeds. The driver kept pace for 20 yards, shouting something I couldn’t make out. Then the car veered onto the grass and jerked to a stop beside me. I froze. The door flung open, exposing the driver’s fat naked body: his drooping hairy breasts, his penis resting in a nest of pale hair like a snail plucked from its shell. A scream rose up in my throat. The car peeled off, flying down the road, the door swinging back and forth on its hinges.

I reached the beach, sweaty and panting. Mrs. Armstrong, the old badge checker, parked in a beach chair outside the gate, stuck out her bony, grim reaper’s hand to stop me from entering.

“A man,” I said, gasping. “Chasing me — ”

“Take it easy, honey. You’re okay.” She gripped my arm, holding me still, while she recorded my badge number in her spiral notebook. I was sick of grownups telling me to calm down, to stop overreacting, as if my emotions were a problem. Before I could explain, Mrs. Armstrong was asking the boy behind me for his badge number. I passed through the gate and took off down the crowded beach, weaving in and out of strollers and beach chairs and playpens. At the swim lanes, I dodged the kids leaving the Tadpole Clinic. Coach Andy, his curly dark hair glistening, was gathering their blue kickboards, stacking them on the bleachers. “Hey, Irene McLean, girl of my dreams,” he said. “Just in time to give me a hand.”

When I told him my story, I stuck to the facts, feeling oddly detached, as though I were relaying the plot for a TV show. He dropped the kickboards and gave me his full attention. An alarm switched on inside me. I’d expected the badge checker’s blasé reaction or the phony concern most grownups showed when you reported a nightmare or a close call with the neighbor’s vicious dog, but Andy was a college senior, not really a grownup.

“Okay, okay,” he kept saying, as though girding himself for a fight. He hustled me down the beach to the pavilion. Before he left to get the lifeguard, he removed the damp gold towel from around his waist and spread it on the hot wooden bench for me. I sat on my hands, swinging my feet back and forth, my soles brushing the smooth concrete. In the narrow gravel parking lot, a Mister Softee truck idled, the tinny jingle playing on an endless loop. I shook my head back and forth, slapping my cheeks with my short, wet braids. A few kids came through the gate with ice cream, including my younger sister, Janey. Her cherry ice pop left a trail of pink spots, like blood, on the gray concrete. Cars passed on the road. Two station wagons, a yellow VW Beetle, and a red pickup truck. A backfiring motorcycle made me jump. No rust-colored cars.

Andy returned with Derick. Tall and wiry, the lifeguard had a halo of fine blond hair like a dandelion gone to seed. “Tell Derick what you told me,” Andy said.

“Do you think he’s still driving around?” I asked them. Hilary would be walking to the beach, late as usual for afternoon practice. What if the man pulled her into his car? Only now did I consider what he would’ve done if he’d caught me. Kill me, or the perverted stuff I’d read about in the issues of Cosmo I’d found among the Good Housekeeping magazines at my Thursday night babysitting job. A divorcee, as my mother called her, Lexie Davis, went to a Parents without Partners meeting in the Methodist Church basement. When I was 16, my mother would share that Lexie Davis had contracted incurable genital herpes from one of her many dates with those divorced dads. It was so unlike my mother to gossip about the neighbors that I understood her words as a cautionary tale.

“Tell Derick what he did, Irene,” Andy said.

I shifted on the bench. “I told you already.”

“Tell Derick.”

“He drove his car close to me and then opened his door.”

“Go on,” Andy said. “What else?”

Derick and Andy stood over me, their pelvises at eye level. It came to me that they both had penises concealed like hand grenades under their red Speedos. “He was naked,” I said, my face growing hot.

“I know this is hard,” Derick said, “but you’re doing great.” Twenty-six and single, Derick taught American history at Dayton Hills High, where all the girls probably loved him. At the lake, they were definitely in love with him. His placid smile and jaunty walk suggested he knew this. Though I couldn’t have explained why, I didn’t trust him. “How old would you say this guy was, Irene?” he said.

“Not sure,” I said, fixing my gaze on the silver whistle dangling from Derick’s neck. “My father’s age, maybe, but shorter.”

Derick sent Andy a look I couldn’t interpret. “Thank you, Irene,” he said. “You’re a very brave girl.”

I felt mortified, not brave. The men’s attention was as distressing as the attempted abduction, Derick’s description for what had happened to me when he talked to the police on the payphone a few feet away. Next, he called my house. I imagined my mother answering with a curt hello, the paste brush gripped in her left hand, impatient to resume wallpapering. I imagined her alert, concerned expression as she assessed the need for her full-on involvement. After she learned I was safe, annoyance would flood back in. During the academic year, she was a part-time nurse at my parochial school. Summers she caught up on household projects like painting and wallpapering and light carpentry. She’d sing along to the radio with a happy, dreamy look on her face. Now with this interruption, she’d have to wake Rosie from her nap and lose her “one moment of precious peace.”

As we waited for the police, Derick and Andy fussed over me. Did I want some water? Andy’s peanut butter sandwich? A towel for my shoulders? I’d lost my fleur-de-lis bath towel somewhere along the way; my mother would be angry. I kept shaking my head no, imagining how scrawny and babyish I must look to them, like someone who needed protection. Only when Victoria and Debbie entered the pavilion did I get some relief.

“Afternoon, ladies,” Derick said.

The girls stopped near the entrance. Victoria stroked the end of her long dark ponytail. Debbie, smiling tensely, thrust her hands into the pockets of her cut-off jeans. Andy called them over. The girls floated closer, eyes cast downward, arms crossed over their breasts. Derek and Andy spoke to them at a low volume. They turned to look at me with pity in their eyes.

“Welcome to our world,” Debbie said.

“Poor child,” Victoria added.

The men laughed as though they’d made a joke.

The squad car arrived, giving two short siren blasts. Next came my mother’s beige Dodge Dart. When I’d left the house, she had on a paint-splattered oxford shirt and madras shorts, her hair tucked under a blue kerchief. Now she wore a pressed white blouse, yellow skirt, and frosted pink lipstick. I caught a whiff of her Estée Lauder perfume as she trailed the police officer through the gate with sleepy, three-year-old Rosie straddling her hip. I leaped up from the bench and ran to her. She pulled me to her side, her rigid, erect posture softening at contact. She wasn’t a cold mother, but she never coddled me.

“What happened, officer?” she said.

The young cop shrugged and turned to Derick and Andy, who proceeded to do all the talking for me. Everyone seemed fine with that, including me. Two boys arrived, dripping and shivering, to ogle the cop’s holstered gun. A few of my teammates wandered over from the swim lanes, looking for Coach Andy to start the afternoon practice. When Coach got to the naked penis part of my story, I glanced at Teddy and Glen passing a Superball back and forth over the pavilion’s rafters. Had they heard? Would they think I was gross?

Hilary, late as usual, elbowed her way through the crowd blocking the entrance; she stopped short inside the gate and gaped at the cop. I smiled and waved, relieved to see her. She huddled with Debbie and Victoria, sending me worried looks as the cop grilled me about the man’s appearance, his car’s make and color, the direction of travel — all questions I couldn’t answer with any certainty. The young police officer, sweat beading his pimpled face, kept glancing at the water like he’d rather be swimming. Although the grownups spoke in gentle, concerned tones, I sensed their impatience and disappointment.

“Did the car have New Jersey plates?” the cop asked me.

I hesitated, and my mother’s arm tightened around my shoulders. “I’m so sorry, officer,” she said. “She’s young. We can’t expect — ”

“Yes, definitely New Jersey,” I said, offended.

Derek nodded at me before returning to the lifeguard’s bench. Coach Andy shook hands with the cop and then picked up his gold towel from the bench. He patted my head before marching my friends off to the swim lanes. Hilary turned cartwheels down the stretch of sand. Teddy walked backwards tossing the Superball in the air, talking to Victoria and Debbie. How I wished I could follow them. More than anything, I wanted to practice my backstroke flip turns. Water up my nose? No big deal. Feeling dizzy underwater? So much easier than talking to the police. What a lot of trouble I’d made for myself. My mother drove me home, and I spent the rest of the afternoon watching Rosie play with her Fisher-Price dollhouse, while my mother finished wallpapering the bathroom.

A week later, the police arrested a man who fit my description after he’d stalked an 11-year-old girl outside the public library. I don’t remember how I learned about this, maybe from Coach Andy or from Derek. My parents never talked about the man again that summer. Years later, when I was the mother of an infant girl, I’d learn that my parents had declined a request for my testimony in the court case against the man. “Why put you through all that,” my mother said.

And perhaps that was for the best. I had returned to my regularly scheduled summer program, walking to the beach twice a day in my navy-blue swim team bathing suit, sometimes with Hilary, but more often alone. No one restricted my movements or suggested I cover up. The naked creep, the world’s only molester, was locked away. I resisted associating him — his pale hairy breasts, his bushy pubic hair, his eager, reedy voice — with sex. Nothing to do with the delicious tingly feelings I’d get whenever Teddy Dixon chose me for his water polo team, because, as he told his friends, I didn’t play like a girl.

By August, I’d perfected my flip turn and our relay team placed first in most of our races. Standing over me at the start with his muscled golden legs, Teddy would look down at me in the water and say, “You got this Irene.”

In the last days of summer, when the grass along the shoreline faded to yellow and the Canada geese returned to float on the silvery waves, Hilary and I took twilight strolls around the lake, wearing our shortest shorts — hot pants, they were called — and the halter tops we’d made on our mothers’ Singer sewing machines. Mine had a red bandana pattern and Hilary’s was yellow gingham. High school started in a few days, but the athletic teams had been practicing for weeks. Hilary made the JV field hockey team, and I’d qualified for the school’s first ever girls’ cross-country team. At the high school, we were puny, insignificant freshmen, but at the lake we were hot stuff. We giggled and rolled our eyes whenever boys, and sometimes men, honked their horns or shouted at us from their cars: Shake it, baby. Give us a smile. Foxy mamas! We linked arms, best friends, teammates, and strutted along Lakeshore Drive. The rippling water, the soft summer air, the whooshing cars! We were on our way.