Free Close to Spider Man by Ivan E. Coyote Page B

moment, and then brought it down on the back of mine.
    â€œWhat a nasty thing to do to your poor old gran! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Now, run and fetch us both a rumball, and for the love of Mary, don’t get it all over the front of you.”
    I looked over to my other grandmother, at the shadow of an evil smile which pulled at the corners of her mouth. She winked at me, and motioned for me to be off.
    â€œSee what I mean about her, Pat? I’m worried sick she’ll turn out to be an old maid. What happens when she starts school? Look, now . . . she even walks like a little boy. . . .”
    â€œYou’re far too hard on her, Flo,” came the voice of the mother of my father from behind me, laced with just a hint of annoyance. “She will be just fine. She just walks like that. That’s just how she walks.”

NO BIKINI
    I HAD A SEX CHANGE ONCE, WHEN I WAS six years old.
    The Lions pool where I grew up smelled like every other swimming pool everywhere. That’s the thing about pools. Same smell. Doesn’t matter where you are.
    It was summer swimming lessons, it was a little red badge with white trim we were all after: beginners, age five to seven. My mom had bought me a bikini.
    It was one of those little girl bikinis, a two-piece, I guess you would call it. The top part fit like a tight cut-off t-shirt, red with blue squares on it, the bottoms were longer than panties but shorter than shorts, blue with red squares. I had tried it on the night before when my mom got home from work and found that if I raised both my arms completely above my head too quickly, the top would slide up over my flat chest and people could see my . . . you-know-whats.
    You’ll have to watch out for that
, my mother had stated, her concern making lines in her forehead,
maybe I shouldhave got the one-piece, but all they had was yellow and pink left. You don’t like yellow either, do you?
    Pink was out of the question. We had already established this.
    So the blue and red two-piece it was going to have to be. I was an accomplished tomboy by this time, so I was used to hating my clothes.
    It was so easy, the first time, that it didn’t even feel like a crime. I just didn’t wear the top part. There were lots of little boys still getting changed with their mothers, and nobody noticed me slipping out of my brown cords and striped t-shirt, and padding, bare-chested, out to the poolside alone.
    Our swimming instructor was broad-shouldered and walked with her toes pointing out. She was a human bullhorn, bellowing all instructions to us and puntuating each sentence with sharp blasts on a silver whistle which hung about her bulging neck on a leather bootlace.
    â€œAlright, beginners, everyone line up at the shallow end, boys here, girls here, come on come on come on, boys on the left, girls on the right.”
    It was that simple, and it only got easier after that.
    I wore my trunks under my pants and changed in the boys’ room after that first day. The short form of the birth name my parents bestowed me with was androgynous enough to allow my charade to proceed through the entire six weeks of swimming lessons, six weeks of boyhood, six weeks of bliss.

    It was easier not to be afraid of things, like diving boards and cannonballs and backstrokes, when nobody expected you to be afraid.
    It was easier to jump into the deep end when you didn’t have to worry about your top sliding up over your ears. I didn’t have to be ashamed of my naked nipples, because I had not covered them up in the first place.
    The water running over my shoulders and back felt simple, and natural, and good.
    Six weeks lasts a long time when you are six years old, so in the beginning I guess I thought the summer would never really end, that grade two was still an age away. I guess I thought that swimming lessons would continue far enough into the future that I didn’t need to worry about report card day.
    Or