With Emma at the Ladies-Only Swimming Pond on Hampstead Heath
by Linda Gregerson
(published in her 1996 book, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep,
Houghton Mifflin Company)
In payment for those mornings at the mirror while,
at her
expense, I’d started my late learning in Applied
French Braids, for all
the mornings afterward of Hush
and Just stand still,
to make some small amends for every reg-
iment-
ed bathtime and short-shrifted goodnight kiss,
I did as I was told for once,
gave up
my map, let Emma lead us through the woods
“by instinct,” as the drunkard knew
the natural
prince. We had no towels, we had
no “bathing costumes,” as the children’s novels
call them here, and I
am summer’s dullest hand at un-
premeditated moves. But when
the coppice of sheltering boxwood
disclosed its path and posted
rules, our wonted bows to seemliness seemed
poor excuse.
The ladies in their lumpy variety lay
on their public half-acre of lawn,
the water
lay in dappled shade, while Emma
in her underwear and I
in an ill-
fitting borrowed suit availed us of
the breast stroke and a modified
crawl.
She’s eight now. She will rather
die than do this in a year or two
and lobbies,
even as we swim, to be allowed to cut
her hair. I do, dear girl, I will
give up
this honey-colored metric of augmented
thirds, but not (shall we climb
on the raft
for a while?) not yet.
