Free Bliss, Remembered by Frank Deford Page B

for swimming. And there’s a smaller capital W on this side and an A on the other. I could just see myself in that.” There I was without a stitch on, and I could visualize myself in the best swimming club in America, with the likes of Eleanor Holm herself, wearin’ that suit. It’s funny, Teddy, this was before Superman—
    “With the big S on his chest.”
    Exactly. But years later, whenever I’d see him taking his shirt off in the phone booth, I’d think back to the dreams of me wearing my own big S on my chest. I don’t know, maybe whoever it was that dreamed up Superman had seen Eleanor Holm with her S, and that was his inspiration. Any man who saw Eleanor in a bathing suit, even just a picture, was gonna stop and dwell on her. I can assure you of that. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if Superman got that S on his chest that way. Because of a girl.
    And so we swam around a little longer, the sky so perfectly blue, the sun beating down on us, and it was as if I could see the future, all laid out for me. It was like Daddy had never been killed and there was no Depression, and I was gonna make the U.S. team and go to Berlin, and then I was gonna come back and leave the Shore and move to New York and join the Women’s Swimming Association, with the big S right there on my chest, and Eleanor Holm would be gone by then, off making movies or singin’ and whistlin’ along with Ted Weems, and I’d be the star of the backstroke, gettin’ ready to win a gold medal in 1940.
    It was absolutely amazing how clearly I could see all the tomorrows stretched out before me, Teddy. In fact, I don’t think I ever had another day like that—one when I’d ever been so sure of things ahead of me—until maybe right now when I know I’m going to die pretty soon, and there’s not a thing I can do about it.

We watched the swimming from Athens again that night. It was an especially important evening for Mom because the finals of her old event, the hundred-meter backstroke, were on. With grand expectation, we settled in before the TV set. “You know what they called us then?” she asked me.
    “Naiads.”
    “Well, that’s right. I told you that. But that was all the girls who swam. I meant what they called the backstrokers?”
    “Just the girls?”
    “No, the girls and the men.”
    “Mother, you know I haven’t got the foggiest idea in the world.”
    “They called us ‘dorsal swimmers.’”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Dorsal swimmers. Dorsal means the back or something like that.”
    “There’s dorsal fins on, like, sharks, aren’t there?”
    Mom nodded. “I don’t know whether it was the fin or just the back in general, but they called us dorsal swimmers. It was pretty dopey.” I nodded in agreement. “We never called ourselves dorsal swimmers, that’s for sure.”
    It was, however, evidently going to be awhile before the swimmers came on. Instead, NBC was showing the girls’ gymnastics. The floor exercises were on, and it was terribly boring. At Mom’s request, I muted the sound. “They’re so little they’re creepy,” she said, scrunching up her nose. “None of ’em have any boobs or heinies.”
    “I haven’t heard anybody say ‘heinie’ for a long time,” I noted.
    “Well, it’s better than ‘butts,’ don’t you think? You say heinie, you know exactly what you’re talking about. Butts are cigarette butts and gun butts and butt in and butt out and all that. Heinie’s a good old word that isn’t ambiguous. Anyway, those little gymnasts don’t have any, whatever you want to call ’em.”
    I let that pass. It was not a subject that had previously engaged me. Anyway, suddenly Mom clapped her hands and cried out, “Let’s get the damn swimmers out here. They look like real women.” Natalie Coughlin was the favorite in mother’s race, and since she was an American, Mom was particularly interested. “That Natalie, she could even give Eleanor a run for her money in the looks