Feature

Water Babies
By Nina Shengold. Photos by Roy Gumpe

When my mother's wallet was stolen on a New York City bus, the thing she missed most was a dog-eared black-and-white snapshot of her only daughter, age two and a half, charging into the waves on a Cape Cod beach. I gazed at that photo so often that its image feels like a memory: uncued, I can conjure the gush of salt surf through my toes and the shrill shrieks of terns swooping over those black and white wavetips.

Water was always our element. Ungainly on land, with frames that are often described as "sturdy", my mother and I enter water like emperor penguins, our waddling gait turning fluent and sleek underwater.

The happiest scenes from my childhood all feature water: the summer-long hissing of sprinklers and hoses in tiny backyards, giddy afternoons yelping "Marco!", "Polo!" in the turquoise shallows of a municipal pool. Day camp: bobbing white floats strung on ropes over muddy pond bottoms, sun-crackled Buddy Boards, faded orange life vests shedding kapok like milkweed pods, Grumman canoes. I remember my progress from Minnow to Guppy to Junior Life Saver, and one golden swim meet, the first time my body had ever excelled, winning me a blue ribbon in backstroke.

Sometimes on sweltering Sundays my friend Ellen's mother would drive us down to the Jersey shore, kids packed like sardines in the rear-facing seat of a Rambler station wagon. Shrieking with sunburnt, salty-haired glee, we body-surfed over and over, tumbling out of high waves amid sugary, rancid aromas that drifted down from the boardwalk: saltwater taffy and corndogs on sticks, bloated zeppoli frying. Once I miscalculated and came down face first in the undertow, smashing my nose bloody and swallowing lungfuls of seawater. A lifeguard dabbed salve on my bruises and said I was brave. I was eight and in love.

Best of all was the lake. For six summers running, my family rented the same lakefront cabin in upstate New York. I cannot hear the word "August" without picturing my mother's white rubber bathing cap and long, skirted swimsuit, my father's distinctive polar bear crawl as he plowed through that clear, spring-fed water, so cold it brought goose bumps. Every August my brothers and I lived in swimsuits and flip-flops, soaking rump-shaped puddles on picnic benches as we gobbled fistfuls of sandwich and sweet corn before bounding back to the lake. (Our parents pooh-poohed the traditional notion of waiting an hour to prevent stomach cramps.) We dug sanctuaries for red efts and crayfish along the shore, buried dime-store treasures we never recovered, searched for fossils in pieces of shale that my older brother could skim in astonishing arcs, leaving patterns of widening rings.

From our bracing before-breakfast dip to the sunset-gilded last swim of the day, we were creatures of water. We even went swimming in rain. "It takes all the rottenness out," my father would sigh as he floated alongside the dock. When Labor Day came, we lit sparklers and hurled them into dark waves.

Sometimes I think I can chart my life's milestones in bodies of water. As my childhood summers ebbed into the past, there were new currents surging: moonlit idylls in the shimmering, body-warm river behind the summer stock theatre where I was an eager apprentice; a post-college jaunt to Alaska on somebody's fishing boat. The deadwater creek in West Texas where my long-term boyfriend and I dropped our plans to get married like so many stones. My first trip to Russia: the traditional bathhouse outside our host's dacha where we sweated in herb-scented steam, our glistening skin whipped with birch twigs before we dove into an icy, round lake under pale midnight sun.

Then there was the July afternoon during which, nine months pregnant, I lolled in a neighbor's pool, awed by my body's new buoyancy. I was able to float in any position, adrift in a warm, liquid world like the baby inside me. Twelve hours later, my waters broke, drenching my sheets with the fluids of birth.

Water heals. It soothes and transforms us. One of my friends calls the pool in her yard her significant other. I know what she means. In the water I move like a trout: a secret, more sexual self of effortless grace and impossible confidence. I am porpoise-bold, lithe as an otter, my skin phosphorescent. I would like other people to know her, this deep-water self, but mermaid-like, she refuses to leave her own element.

Still, she is there every time I dive through the surface, closing my eyes for that first stunning immersion, that shedding of skins. Even when I am plodding repetitive laps in the pool of a gym, there is some breathless nymph in my veins. I can never keep count of my laps. I go dreamy in water; my mind floats away from the rhythm of numbers and into a flow of soft image, of instinct and memory.

Several summers ago, I brought my then-two-year-old daughter to play at the beach. Veteran of a YMCA Water Babies course, she nevertheless showed no interest in testing the water. For hours she puttered and sculpted wet sand, shaping castles and pools with a trowel. And then, in one heart-stopping instant, she lifted her arms in a sky-wide embrace and went barreling into the surf, the living, exuberant image of that long-lost snapshot. My camera was nowhere in sight, but no matter: I couldn't have moved. Tears stung at my eyes, tiny oceans. "Some pictures, you take with your memory," my grandmother told me, and she was right. This one, I know, will be with me forever.

Stone Ridge-based writer Nina Shengold won the Writers Guild Award for her teleplay “Labor of Love” and the ABC Playwright Award for “Homesteaders”. She has just completed her first novel, Clearcut.