Whirlpool

The cream is not the color of skin but the strange pink-orange of a bandaid, or a doll.

You all waited, silent, braced for the rest.

“There isn’t a single shot,” she added with finality, “where we don’t all look dreadful.”

And you thought, all, seeing your mothered centred there in the pictures, gripping her two girls, your father nowhere—just a peripheral shadowy shape, stretched thin.

“It’s bad enough we haven’t even got a proper in-ground one and you girls have to put up with that stupid thing that should have been thrown out years ago,” she adds. She turns to you then, extending her arm to take you in, watching you. “He’s absolutely obsessed, isn’t he?”

You feel yourself nod and smile again; a sickly, traitorous smile of concurrence.

Each morning of the school holidays, you feel a faint, smothered panic that the pool will sooner or later be the subject of attack. You try to stay casually offhand as you change into your bathers and escape out the back door. You can feel Louise doing the same, picking up her folded towel with studied nonchalance, as if the thought has just occurred to her. You slip through the house, expressionless and furtive, avoiding your mother on the way out.

You feel a surge of sly, teeth-gritted pleasure at his protests, his skinny, weak-limbed acquiescence. You watch the helpless ridge of his spine arching as he flounders, gasping, and your power is cool and blue and chemical. He has to learn. You girls eye each other, expressionless, as he staggers humbly to his feet afterwards, blinking and choking.

Your heart sinks at what’s lying ready for you on the bed. “The sundresses?”

“That’s what she said.”

Louise has hers on already. She’s thin, so it doesn’t look quite so ridiculous, but yours is tight under the arms, where it’s elasticised, then sack-like all the way down to mid-calf.

The dress is squeezed across the tingling, embarrassing swell of your chest, a nine-year-old’s dress. A few weeks ago, you’d tentatively said you wanted a training bra for Christmas.

“Oh, darling,” your mother replied, looking at you indulgently. “You’re barely twelve, you’re nowhere near old enough for that.” Her tenderness felt as treacherous and irresistible as a tide, something you leaned into, hypnotised, as it tugged you off your feet.

“Anna,” your mother smiled kindly, her voice low, “it’s normal for young girls to feel self-conscious about their weight, sweetie.”

She turns sunnily to your father. “We met them while we were on the cruise, didn’t we, darling?”

That word in your mother’s mouth, the way she looks your father in the face to say it, her touch on his arm as she goes past, makes something turn over in your stomach, cold and glassy. You shudder. You can’t help it.

“I put the hose in the pool for you,” he says in a low voice. “We’ll let it fill up a bit more, eh? So it’s all ready.”

Your mother hears. “Robert, do you think we could forget about that dinky little pool just for five short minutes?” Her voice is almost breathless with forced breeziness.

It only takes a second, but you’re stunned to see her, at the exact same moment, looking back at you. Something passes between you. It’s like the reckless moment after running hard around the pool’s perimeter, when you eye one another, savage and panting, before launching Chris or yourselves into the stirring, threshing current of the whirlpool.

You let another dead, robot smile turn up the corners of your mouth. With your eyes you will your mother’s friends to understand, [...] seeing everything encoded there. They will see how stiffly you are sitting in this humiliating dress, cross-legged like a child, how heavy and proprietorial your mother’s hand is on your shoulder. They will imagine the weight of that hand. You understand, as the camera’s indifferent shutter clicks again, that the sundresses are about your mother, that what you’d seen in her face when you’d asked for the training bra was a tremor of terror, not scorn. All this blooms in you, too fast, the flash’s nebula blinding as phosphorus.

You witness the opposing forces of charm and chill collide in your mother as she’s caught of guard. She hesitates, then says hurriedly, “Yes, yes, of course,” and there it is, you’re sure of it now; you glimpse in that moment her wire-tight thoughts running ahead, grim with the need to plot exile and allegiance, the constant undertow shift of churned, compliant water.