"Poolside" by Duncan Bosk (ed) (Melcher Media, 2007)

A waterproof book!

• Raft in water, floating (A.M. Homes) - "Every day when she comes home from school, she put on her bikini and lies in the pool". People come and go. She feels insubstantial - "She climbs out of the pool, wet feet padding across the flagstone ... In school, when she was little, she was given a can of water and a paintbrush - she remembers painting the playground fence, watching it turn dark and then light again as the water evaporated. She watches her footprints disappear". At the end, "Her father hands her a towel. "It's a wonder you don't just shrivel up and disappear.""
• Paradise (Edna O'Brien) - Her rich, much older boyfriend has invited her to a villa with other rich guests. Most of them have yachts. Some have kids. She's insecure, new. She's not impressed by all the guests. "In the night she heard a guest sob. In the morning the same guest wore a flame dressing gown and praised the marmalade which she ate sparingly". She befriends kitchen staff. A grey-haired coach has been flown in from England to teach her to swim. One the big day in front of the other guests she lets herself go and swims a width at the shallow end. But then later, alone, she gets into trouble and has to be saved. She doesn't expect the relationship to last. I liked the story.
• The Swimmers (Joyce Carol Oates) - Sylvie, 13 y.o., a regular swimmer, is befriended by another swimmer, Joan Lund, mid-thirties - pretty, a shop assistant who mysteriously arrived in town, living out of suitcases in a musty bedsit. The first-person narrator (Sylvie, though it's not always clear - she's fiercely introspective) match-makes Joan with Sylvie's uncle Clyde, a good swimmer, mid-thirties, a builder. They quickly become a couple. "Making love, they were like two swimmers deep in each other, plunging hard. Wherever they were when they made love, it wasn't the place they found themselves in when they returned, and whatever the time, it wasn't the same time". But she disappears for the odd weekend. A chance meeting reveals that she was divorced 15 months before from 40-ish Rob Waxman. Clyde and Rob fight. Rob shoots Clyde in the shoulder. Joan can't handle seeing men fight, even if it's to protect her. She leaves forever.
• Summer people (Ernest Hemingway) - The narrator, Nick, gets to sleep with another guy's girl. At times, almost self-parody - "You couldn't ever tell anybody about anything. Especially Odgar. No not especially Odgar. Anybody, anywhere". In the space of a page there's "It was strange coming up from underwater ... It was funny about reactions like this ... It was funny how much fun it was ... It was fun to swim".
• The sight of you (Amy Bloom) - In the first paragraph there's no "show-not-tell" messing around - we're told all who the characters are and that the narrator, Galen, was Henry's lover. The main character has kids, is a concert pianist, an orphan at 16, and had married early to her psychiatrist. Henry promises to leave his wife. The narrator's less sure - "David needed to marry someone crazy, Henry had mistaken me for someone interesting". I didn't see much in the story.
• Forever overhead (David Foster Wallace) - The narrator's hitting puberty. It's his 13th birthday. He goes to a pool with parents, climbs the long ladder to the top diving board, looking at the people below, young and old. He dislikes the human stain of footprints at the end of the board.
• A public pool (Alice Adams) - The young, unemployed, fat narrator hopes that swimming will improve her body, mind, and self-image. A blond young man and a fat woman talk to her there. The man meets her by chance on the street and offers to buy her a coffee. She declines, drifting away as if swimming.
• Learning to swim (Graham Swift) - Mrs Singleton sunbathes while watching Mr Singleton teaching their son, Paul (6), to swim in the sea. They're on holiday in Cornwall. She thinks about her unhappy marriage. Three times she's thought of leaving her husband because he's a boring engineer. They have sex monthly. The PoV switches to Mr Singleton - we're less close to him than we were to her. He's thought of leaving her because of her artistic pretentions. He was a good swimmer at 17, but his boring father told him to stop because training was getting in the way of exams. "He was distrustful of happiness as some people fear heights or open spaces."
  Their relation is full of tactics - "She knew he only did it to hurt her, and so to feel guilty, and so to feel the remorse which would release his own affection for her, his vulnerability, his own need to be loved ...". "When Mrs Singleton became pregnant she felt she had outmanoeuvred her husband"
  She had erotic thoughts about her son ("He would become an artist, a sculptor. She would pose for him naked ... Mrs Singleton thought: All the best statues they had seen in Greece seemed to have been dredged up from the sea"). When she thinks Paul has got the hang of swimming she rushes to the water (flirtily to irritate her husband) and offers Paul an ice-cream. At the end it's Paul's PoV. Water frightens him - "If you do not swim you sank like a statue" (n.b. not like a stone). At the end "he kicked and struck, half in panic, half in pride, away from his father, away from the shore, away, in this strange new element that seemed all his own""
  I like the ingredients but it's heavy-handed in too many places.
• Leda and the swan (Fay Weldon) - Gosling meets Eileen when swimming and nicknames her Leda. Eileen, slightly cranky, normalised herself for engineer Gosling. He already had a daughter, Nadine. They had another child together, Europa. He told her he was unfaithful when on business trips. He liked swimming but didn't think one should swim competitively. She was county level, at least. He tried to make her feel guilty about that. She made sacrifices. He OD'd. She flew to Moscow next day and won Olympic gold.
• Interesting women (Andrea Lee) - She's holidaying in Thailand with her daughter Basia (12, daughter with her 2nd husband) when she meets a wandering traveller in her early 50s maybe, 10 years older that the narrator and "still in the game". They chat - "then I drop the word ex-husband - that password that functions as a secret handshake in the freemasonry of interesting women". Basia overhears some of their conversation, which irritates the narrator, as does the stranger's name - "Silver". Basia defends Silver, Her mother says "She's the classic kind of woman who is very beautiful and lives for that, and then the beauty fades, and she goes and gets spiritual". Basia's embarrassed when her mother stares at men. Her mother wonders about herself, whether she's "maddened at the sight of romantic couples, and driven into serial episodes of pathetic self-revelation as my daughter flowers into maidenhood". She's torn between being a role-model and enjoying herself. She's curious about Silver, and isn't surprised when a shopping trip ends up as a search for the best enema. At the end, having drifted from Silver, she meets another woman - "In the woman's surly blue eyes I can see skeins of experience poised to unwind, and the password trembles on my lips." I like the story. It makes a change to have a literate, self-aware narrator.
• The orphaned swimming pool (John Updike) - When a couple divorce, they both leave the house. Friends and many others continue to use the pool. At the end, the wife briefly returns. She "saw that the pool in truth has no bottom, it held bottomless loss, it was one huge blue tear"
• The lesson (James Purdy) - A male swimming instructor, about to give a private lesson to the son of an important person, is told by a little girl that a woman wants to swim straight away. He uses reason, history, family, authority, etc., but she pushes him and herself into the pool. She swallows so much water that he has to help.
• The swimmer (John Cheever) - I've read it more than once before. The first time, over-simplistically, I just assumed he was drunk, that it was realism.
• The Isabel fish (Julie Orringer) - Maddy, 14, the narrator, has an older brother Sage, 16, whose girlfriend Isobel died in a car accident a few months before, drowning when the car she was driving went into a pool. Maddy nearly died in the same accident. Sage blame her for not saving Isobel, bit Isobel was trapped. Maddy keeps fish as pets and test subjects. Her psychologist mother and dentist father think she and Sage should do Scuba lessons prior to a holiday involving reef-diving. At her first lesson she panicked when going in.
  On the night of the accident, Sage had made fun of Maddy, which angered Isobel enough for her to drive off with Maddy, leaving Sage behind. Isobel treated Sage like one of her grown-up friends.
  Maddy finds that some of her fish have died. She disposes of them in the nearby pond of the accident. She confronts Sage about it on the way to her 2nd scuba lesson. He admits he killed them and that he's not a nice person. She conquers her fear of water. Finally in the pool - "I cannot see his eyes through the glass but I can see, reflected small and blue, a girl wearing swim fins and a metal tank, self-contained and breathing underwater.". I think it's a good story.