Free Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford

called us naiads. But then, we called ourselves girls. I don’t remember anybody much being a “woman” then, Teddy. Unless maybe if you were a cleaning woman. You were a girl unless you were a young lady, until you became a lady. And then you finally became an old lady.
    That lexicon being squared away, I asked Mother how she did in the meet down in Washington.
    Well, as a matter of fact, I did very well. I was moving up in competition here, Teddy. I finished second in both the one-hundred-yard and the two-hundred-yard backstrokes, which amazed everybody because nobody’d ever heard of me. Here I was swimming in the seniors, and I wasn’t even in a club. I swam what was called “unattached.” Almost everybody else was associated with some club, but I was just “Sydney Stringfellow, unattached,” and there was only this one girl who beat me in both races—and barely that—but she was really grown-up, maybe twenty-five or something, so, as Mr. Foster told me, at that advanced age, she wasn’t gonna get any better. In fact, driving back home, when we were on the ferry goin’ across the Bay and we went to the lunch counter, he told me that someone from the Shoreham Hotel AC had asked him if maybe I wanted to come down and swim for them when I finished high school.
    He told me, “Trixie—I mean, Sydney.” (See, when he had met me, I was Trixie, but then I asked him to change that after Eleanor Holm advised me against being Trixie, so he would forget sometimes.) “Sydney, you might make it to the Olympics in Berlin. You’ve got a chance, I would imagine, if you keep improving, but it’s gonna be tough. Nobody’s gonna beat Eleanor, and there’s two or three other gals who’re pretty good. You couldn’t beat ’em now, but maybe by next year. I will say you should be at the height of your powers for the next Olympics, in ’40. But if you’re gonna do that, you have to go somewhere and swim with a club. I just can’t help you that much anymore.”
    So that’s why I told Carter I had to leave Chestertown and go out into the big, wide world. Her first reaction was, “That’s great, Trix, you can join a club in Baltimore, and we can get a place together.”
    I said, “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?” At that point Carter started to take her straps down, and she said, “Come on, let’s get the sun on our backs like the boys do.” And just like that, she yanked the top of her suit all the way down to her waist. It was absolutely scandalous, even if it was just the two of us girls alone in my yard. But, as I told you, Carter was always out in front of the rest of us. Today, I suppose, you’d say that she’d be ahead of the curve. Anyway, she just pulled her suit down and lay on the towel.
    “Did you do it too, Mom?”
    Well, for a moment I worried that Gentry Trappe might be around, but he certainly wasn’t the sort to be a peeping Tom, and it was an absolutely gorgeous day, so yes indeed, I pulled my top down, too, and laid on my stomach with the sun on my back. Teddy, I felt absolutely debauched, but the funny thing was, I think it made it easier for me to think about goin’ out in the world. I mean, if a girl could take her top down outdoors, even if no one was around, it made you feel grown-up.
    So I explained to Carter, “Well, there isn’t any swimming club I know of in Baltimore.”
    “So where else?”
    “Well, there’s a lotta choices. There’s that Shoreham Hotel AC in Washington and the Carnegie Library Club in Pittsburgh and the Broadwood AC in Philadelphia and . . .” I know I paused here, Teddy, because even as absolutely wicked and grown-up as I was with my top down, it was still hard to imagine it: “. . . the Women’s Swimming Association of New York.”
    It struck Carter the same way. “New York!” she said.
    “That’s what I want: the Women’s Swimming Association.” I got so excited I raised up on my elbow without even thinking, exposing my one side there for