When Margo picked me up for our first water aerobics class, Stuart jumped out of the driver’s seat as I stepped out to meet them. I shaded my eyes as he came toward me in that hyperactive way of his, scaling the stone steps in front of the house in one long leap. “Where’s Dennis?” he said as he went past me, slowing briefly to kiss my cheek.
“Out back with the therapist,” I said, and as he entered the dark house, I heard him singing “Lola, L-O-L-A Lola . . .”
Margo put the car into reverse before I’d even shut the passenger door. “What’s the matter?” I said.
“Nothing.” Her hair was in a ponytail, which was one of the ways I loved it best. She looked like a girl who was about to ride a horse—something she hadn’t done in her lifetime, except once at summer camp when she was ten years old.
“Don’t speed,” I said as we pulled out of the driveway onto the street.
“I’m not. Do you have everything? Do you have your cap?”
I patted the bag I’d brought with me. “I’m a little nervous, I admit.”
“Don’t be. You’re very coordinated.”
At the health club, we rinsed off in the showers and changed into our swimsuits in the locker room, and when we got to the pool there was already a group formed in the shallow end. A few of the ladies—not all of them were older, as I’d suspected they would be—acknowledged Margo with a nod or a quick hello, but mostly they were busy stretching. When Margo was in the water, she pulled each knee to her chest and bounced on the balls of her feet. “You’ll want to warm up,” she said.
In tennis, when I wanted to warm up, I hit serves or rallied with myself against the backboard. Here, in a warm pool with barely four feet between me and several other women, I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. But I followed her lead and started by bouncing on the balls of my feet, then bringing each knee to my chest, one and then the other, until I did feel a bit winded. The instructor, who arrived in a flurry just as the clock struck the hour, wore a yellow Speedo and tiny mesh slippers. She was a small, compact girl with crooked teeth and thin, straight hair. “Let’s line up,” she said authoritatively, and around me, the ladies began to swish into position, forming two lines. Margo pulled my elbow and we moved deeper, toward the back of the group. Already, my arms were tiring from the constant motion of maneuvering in the water.
Margo raised her hand. “Cynthia?” she said to the instructor, who stood above us on the pool deck. “This is my mother. She’s new.”
Cynthia looked over the crowd at me and squinted. “Welcome,” she said. “Try to keep up, but if you can’t, take a breather and start again.” She clapped her hands once, then stooped at the edge of the pool and swung down into the water. “We’ll start with some quick tummy tucks,” she said, and the rest of the ninety-minute class played out like a manic version of follow the leader: Cynthia demonstrated with her strong, calculated movements, the women in the row in front of me followed with slightly less sharp motions, and I followed them, sloppily and quickly out of breath. Near the end—the class consisted of a circuit of quick exercises, each emphasizing one muscle group, none lasting more than five minutes or so—Cynthia’s tone changed, and she went to the edge of the pool to change the music. She told us to close our eyes. The music sounded Indian in flavor, a slow-running piccolo and some plucky instrument I couldn’t name, like a fiddle but more refined. “Concentrate on your breathing,” Cynthia said.
I opened my eyes shortly after closing them, realizing that I wasn’t at all prepared for whatever was starting now, whether this was another exercise or simply an ending ritual. Cynthia looked at me as she spoke. “Feel your feet against the smooth cement of the pool,” she said. “Feel your belly in the warm water. Feel your strong legs and arms being supported by the warm water as it surrounds you and lifts you up.” She glanced around the group, then her eyes settled back on me. “You’re unconcerned about the past, unconcerned about what is to come. All you feel is the warm water and the beat of your heart.”
I closed my eyes for the final moments, wherein Cynthia instructed us to breathe deeply, five counts in and five counts out. Then she told us to hold our breath and submerge, which she said would steel us for the week to come, and when we came up again we would be rejuvenated.
On the ride home, I rolled down the window and felt the sunlight on my arm. Through the canopies of the banyans along Bird Road, the light scattered into dozens of warm spires. At the house, we found Dennis and Stuart on the back deck with Lola. Dennis’s wheelchair was not with them. This was something I’d noticed about Lola’s sessions with Dennis: she discouraged him from using the chair. For moving around, she helped him stand, supported him while he shuffled forward, then helped him sit again. It made me think I was allowing him to depend too much on the chair. If he could still walk, even slowly, even gracelessly, shouldn’t he? But to me he seemed so much more comfortable in the chair, so much less helpless.
They were laughing at something as we stepped onto the deck, and Stuart stopped in mid-sentence and looked behind me at Margo. I realized from his slightly spooked expression that they’d had an argument earlier that morning. “Does anyone want to go for a swim?” I said. I was thinking, really, that I’d had enough of swimming for the day and there were half a dozen things that needed to be done: laundry to be folded, prescriptions to be filled, groceries to be bought. But the sunlight was warm on the wood of the deck and the day was bright and clear, and the morning’s exercise had given me a free, relaxed feeling.
Lola told Dennis she could show him exercises he could do in the water, and asked me if I had a spare suit she could borrow. Margo said she had one, then gestured for Lola to follow her inside. By the time I’d helped Dennis change and rolled him outside again—we came around the front, because we hadn’t yet gotten around to installing a ramp off the back deck—Stuart was doing handstands in the shallow end and the women were watching him. Lola supported Dennis while he went down the pool steps, but once the water was up to his chest, she let go and stood a few yards away. “Swim to me,” she said. It reminded me of being at Stiltsville when Margo was a little girl, when Dennis taught her to swim at low tide. He would back up, let her swim to him, then back up again, until she was red-faced and sputtering and begging to be held.
Dennis was a good student. I don’t know if it was Lola, or the humility that came with the disease, or both, but he did as he was told. “Swim to me,” she repeated, and he did. They made it all the way to the deep end, and then she let him hold on to the side for a few minutes while he caught his breath. After they crossed the pool again, Lola led Dennis to the steps and he sat in the shallow water, squinting in the sun. I sat next to him. “What did you think of that?” I said.
He nodded. “Hard,” he said. “Feels good.”
Lola asked me if we had any bottles of water. “The big kind, half gallons.”
I nodded and stood up to get them, but Stuart beat me to it. He hoisted himself over the side of the pool and went inside—without using a towel, I noticed, but I didn’t say anything—then emerged with two gallon bottles of water. Lola took them and motioned for Dennis to stand again, which he did, shakily. She put one bottle in his left hand and one in his right. The second one dropped and she dove under and fished it out, then handed it to him again. She put her small hand around his to help him grip. When he had them both tightly in hand, she led him to deeper water, then said, “Do what I do.” She raised both hands above her head, slowly, then lowered them until they were beside her ears. He mimicked her, equally slowly, and I noticed the water in the bottles shaking. This is why we have a therapist, I thought. Because if I were to help Dennis with these exercises, I would have stopped the first time his arms shook. I would not have been able to stand the sight of my husband wobbling in the water. As it was, I had to look away.