“Okay. Find a bathing suit. I’m getting up. Let’s go.”

We went over to the indoor pool and put on our bathing suits and began to swim. There were only two or three different kinds of bathing suits back then. I had a pretty blue Jantzen for swimming in meets or outdoors in the summer where people could see me and a two piece baby blue Catalina for when I was feeling especially thin. But the suit I liked to practice in was made of dark gray wool. It was very old and my mother had worn it the first time she swam in the Atlantic Ocean. When I was small I had used it to make Catwoman outfits. I had swum a million laps in it but it was still as thick and good as new. No one now would swim in such a heavy wool suit, but I had been wearing it for different things since I was ten years old and it was my lucky suit. I was wearing it the day I broke 1:06 in the hundred-yard butterfly and the day I swam the five-hundred-meter freestyle in 6:52.

“Where’d you get that suit?” Lilly asked. “It’s so fuzzy looking. It looks so professional. Is that what real swimmers wear?”

“No, it’s what I wear, for luck. It’s my lucky suit. I don’t race in it. I practice in it. It’s real heavy so when I take it off I think I’m a lot lighter. It’s like taking off a starched dress. Did your mother used to make you wear starched dresses?”

“Yes. I hated them. I used to cry if I thought about it.”

“I wouldn’t wear them. I tore them off. I tore one right down the middle one day when my uncle was visiting from medical school. It’s a good thing he was there. My dad might have beat me to death.”

“Did they beat you?”

“They hit me with a belt if I was bad. They beat the boys. Daddy beat them anytime he wanted to. He still beats Dudley. Dudley lets him do it. Dudley does anything my daddy wants him to.”

“My daddy just talks to me.” Lilly leaned against the ladder going down into the hot chlorinated water of the pool. The water rose up in clouds and curled her light blonde hair, which was cut off as short as mine, but not as well, since she did it herself and couldn’t do a good job in the back. “He’s a baby doctor. He doesn’t believe in beating children or even spanking them.”