Bornfamous

As molesting scenes go, it was fairly innocuous.

I was eleven, with barely budding bosoms, swimming at Crystal Lake with some girls I had found there, while Mom napped in the car not far away. This had gotten to be an almost-daily routine for us in the summer, a way for me to get out of the house and away from Gramma (who probably enjoyed having her house to herself for a couple of hours) while Mom caught up on her sleep. It was win/win–until that day.

Mom always went to work early in the morning–first as a cook, then as a small restaurant owner–and came home in mid-afternoon, so she was always tired. The beach seemed a perfect solution to her single-mom, “quality time” dilemma with me. What she didn’t know–never knew, in fact, since I never told her–was that traumatic events were happening while she slept only yards away.

That day, as I played some made-up game with my new friends, I didn’t notice a stranger approaching behind me until the other girls stopped and stood silent in the water. I turned and saw a tan, grey-haired man smiling at us. Even with his bare chest, he looked like a businessman. I’ll never forget his distinguished, smiling face, his white teeth.

“Anybody want to learn to swim?” he asked.

The other girls muttered, “No, thanks,” and drifted away, leaving me there alone, looking up at him. I felt pinned, like a bug on display. I couldn’t move.

“How about you?” he said. “Want me to teach you to swim?”

I already knew how to swim, but I had an inexplicable fear of hurting the man’s feelings.

“Okay,” I murmured. Thus began a very strange few minutes that still replay in my mind like a perfectly preserved movie nearly fifty years later.

“Great,” said the man, holding out his arms in the water. “Lay across my arms like this.”

I followed his instructions, wishing I could just go back to my friends, who had by now resumed playing their game without me. Why were they so far away?

“Now, kick your legs,” he said.

I kicked half-heartedly.

“Harder,” he said. “Really make them splash.”

I kicked harder.

“Excellent.”

After a while, the beach lifeguard rowed up to us in a dinghy. He looked like a young hero in sunglasses and baseball cap.

“Is this man bothering you?” he asked.

Yes, I wanted to say. Yes! Please tell him to go away! But I didn’t.

“No,” I said, reluctant.

The man spoke up.

“I’m teaching her to swim,” he said, and the lifeguard rowed away.

Wait! Don’t go! I thought but didn’t say. I didn’t know what this man wanted with me, but I didn’t like him and I wanted to play with my friends. Pretending to learn how to swim from him, just to be polite, was awkward and more important in my mind, unbelievably boring. He was treating me like a five-year-old.

“Okay,” he said. “Now try doing a dog paddle.”

So I dog-paddled, stuck on the man’s held-out arms, unable to actually swim away from him.

Then I noticed that his hands had slipped inside my swimsuit. The fingers of his left hand were exactly on my right nipple, while I felt his left hand sliding toward my vagina.

Suddenly, even in 1957, I understood why this man was behaving so oddly, and what he really wanted. I jerked away from him, standing in the water.

“My mom’s calling me,” I said, and waded away as fast as I could, back to the safety of the beach and the car and my mother. I grabbed my towel off the sand and walked to car, heart pounding in my ears.

Mom was fast asleep. I wasn’t angry with her for not seeing him, not protecting me, but I felt different about her, about everything. I plopped sullenly in the front seat. She woke with a start.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Mom didn’t seem to notice that something was wrong. Why couldn’t she tell? She started the engine and backed out of her parking space. I didn’t look up to see if the man was watching us.

I could have told her then, and he would have been arrested. Who knows how many kids he molested after that? Maybe if I’d told my mother, he would have been stopped, maybe not. I wish I’d told her then, but I didn’t.

After that, I didn’t want to go swimming any more. That was the year that I began to gain weight, after discovering that molesters were suddenly everywhere I went. Flashers, fondlers, public masturbators–grown men who seemed to be fixated on young girls. Why had no one warned me? Why did no one else seem to notice these people?

If he’s still alive, my molester would be in his mid-90’s now. I wonder how many others he taught to swim.