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Changing Lanes Mimi Schwartz "??t??? don't they fix the window?" I almost asked when I started W coming to this pool, part of Princeton University. It was 6:30 A.M., right after NewYear's Day, and the place was packed with the beforework crowd. The window, fifteen feet above my head, was wide open and snow was faUing on the locker room floor. (No Berber carpet like at the YMCA, no sauna or built-in hair dryers either). But the two coeds who were changing clothes on either side ofme—young, flat-beUied, and highbosomed —seemed unconcerned, so I kept my mouth shut, changed quickly. If that's what it takes, post-forty, to get in shape at a high-powered pool, so be it. Ten years later the window is stiU open and it's stiU freezing; but today, at mid-morning, no one is here. I hurry to get my suit on before someone from the lunch-time crowd comes. That's sflly the poet Audre Lorde would say, there's nothing to hide. She wouldn't wear a prosthesis after her mastectomy , she says in Cancer Journals, even when the nurse in her doctor's office complained that it set a bad example. But I was never one to parade around. Even without this scar across my chest—it's stiU so red—I was never like those fleshy, German women at the pool in Barcelona last summer, cavorting around with bare breasts and bellies bulging out of G-strings. No American woman around here over size 10 would dare. (Not that I'm not size 10 anymore.) Lanes 4 and 5, which in early morning share a dozen Speedo suits moving like torpedoes, now have two sprinters; Lane 3, my old lane, has no one. I stay away, still remembering that guy—was it two years ago?—who passed me and snarled, "Why don't you swim Lane 2, lady?" He was doing the breast stroke and I was doing the crawl, my fastest stroke. True, a few people had already passed me, but after him everyone went by, and a week later some158 Mimi Schwartz159 one kicked me in the head. So I switched to Lane 2, crushed. Wasn't I the fastest swimmer in Bunk 10 of Camp Inawood, with trophies somewhere in the basement to prove it? Now I'll overtake everyone, I thought, swimming leisurely—until a guy who didn't look like much, stroke-wise, overtook me in Lane 2. An old, heavy-set woman almost did, but I speeded up. This morning I'm swimming in Lane 1—just temporarily, ofcourse, until I get my left arm back in shape. My surgeon said three weeks at most, if I keep doing walk-the-waU exercises and start to swim again. And the oncologist called to say no lymph nodes were involved, so no chemo is needed. Just a pul, tamoxifen, once a day which I started this morning. No problem. I sit on the rim for a while, dangling my feet, my towel around my neck to cover the slight cave-in where my bathing suit begins. I sit straighter, looking at the cold water. Even before, I hated getting in; it was getting out I liked—doing 36 laps in 30 minutes, 40 laps on good days. But not today. I'U try for 6 laps, maybe. In the water before me a huge, bald-headed old man, he must weigh over 300 pounds, is moving like a dead whale. How can someone be so relaxed with a butt rising every few strokes Uke Moby Dick? In front ofhim a thinhaired woman in giant goggles is doing the doggie paddle. She is working so hard trying to keep her head above water. A young woman at the far end is floating on her back. I wonder why she's here at this hour; she must be my daughter's age. No one in this lane seems to care about the clock. How can they go back and forth so aimlessly? Annoyed, I sfip in to join them. I start slow, concentrating on my arm, and feel it...

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