Authors: Betsy Byars
Night Swimmers
Betsy Byars
H
AVE YOU EVER HAD
a special place you could escape to from time to time? Maybe you went there alone. Maybe you and a few friends met there. Retta has found a special place for her and her brothers to visit. She is used to looking out for her brothers, something she has done since their mother died two years before.
As you read the story, you will discover more about their special place and how Retta deals with her brothers’—and her own problems growing up.
W
HEN THE SWIMMING POOL
lights were turned out and Colonel and Mrs. Roberts had gone to bed, the Anderson kids came out of the bushes in their underwear. They moved silently over the moss-smooth lawn, across the Moroccan tiled terrace.
At the edge of the pool they stopped. Retta, the girl, said, “See, I told you it was beautiful.” She stared at the shimmering water as proudly as if she had made the pool instead of just discovered it one day.
“But what if somebody sees us?” Roy asked. He hiked up his underwear uneasily. The elastic was sprung, and he wasn’t sure the safety pin was going to hold.
“No one’s going to see us. It’s too dark.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter anyway. “The shallow end’s down here. Come on.”
She led them to the end of the pool, and together the three of them started down the steps.
“It’s cold,” Roy said. He clutched his underwear tighter, pulling it toward his chest.
“You’ll get used to it.”
Abruptly Johnny pulled away. “I want to go down the ladder,” he said. He started around the pool.
Retta frowned slightly. Lately Johnny had started doing things his own way. “All right,” she called after him, belatedly giving permission, “but then you swim right over to the shallow end, you hear me? I don’t want to have to come in and save you.”
“You won’t.” As Johnny took hold of the smooth metal ladder, an adult feeling came over him. He entered the water slowly—it was cold—and then pushed off. He dog-paddled to Retta and Roy, turning his head from side to side in a motion he thought made his dog paddle look more powerful.
“Now you two play here in the shallow end while I do some swimming,” Retta said when Johnny joined them.
“I don’t see why
I
have to stay in the shallow end,” Johnny said.
“Because only one can go in the deep water at a time. That’s a rule, and you already had your turn.”
Beside them Roy was pretending to swim. He had one hand on the bottom of the pool and was lifting the other arm in an elaborate swimming stroke. Then he put that hand on the bottom and lifted the other. “Want to see me swim, Retta?”
“That’s nice, Roy,” she said. She moved toward the deep end and began to swim silently. She was aware that Johnny was watching her, hoping to find fault, so she moved with deliberate grace. She copied the movements she had seen the Aquamaids do on television. She turned on her back. Then she swirled and dived under the water. Her bare feet rose, toes pointed, and shone in the moonlight.
Johnny was both impressed and irritated. Since he could find no fault with Retta, he looked down at Roy and said meanly, “You aren’t really swimming.”
“I am too!” Roy paused in the middle of the stroke to look back at Johnny.
“Your hand is on the bottom.”
“It is not,” Roy said. “Here’s my hand right here.”
“The other one is on the bottom.”
Roy made a quick switch. “It is not. See, here’s the other one.”
“You aren’t fooling anybody.”
Johnny turned back to watch Retta. She was under the diving board now. She reached up and grabbed the board with both hands. She glanced around to see if Johnny and Roy were watching. When she was sure they were, she skinned the cat and dropped into the water without a sound.
She swam to the side and pulled herself out of the water without bothering to use the ladder. Then she got the inflated mattress that Mrs. Roberts always used. She carried it to her brothers at the shallow end of the pool. “Want a ride?”
Roy paused in the middle of a swimming stroke; one arm was raised as high as if he wanted to be called on. “Is it all right if we use that?” he asked, peering at Retta from under his arm.
“Sure, get on.”
The boys crawled onto the mattress and stretched out self-consciously. Their arms were stiff at their sides.
“I’ll push you around the pool.” Retta began to move the float into deeper water. “Doesn’t it make you feel elegant?”
Johnny nodded. He was shivering in his wet underwear, chilled with the excitement and the evening air. He tried to relax, to feel the elegance Retta mentioned. He tried to imagine that he was a movie star in his own swimming pool. It began to work. He relaxed. He pantomimed smoking with a long cigarette holder.
“Aren’t you glad you came?” Retta asked, spitting water out of her mouth. She was now in the deep water, kicking silently, moving the mattress under the diving board.
Roy reached up and touched the diving board. Retta smiled. She had a wonderful feeling of belonging tonight, as if it really were her pool.
“Want to go around again?”
Without waiting for an answer, she turned the corner. Retta considered herself a sort of social director for her brothers. She often told them, “We’re going to do all the things rich people do.” Then she usually added, “Only we have to do them at night, that’s the only difference.”
Both of the boys were relaxing now. In the brief time they had been at the pool, they had come to associate the smell of chlorine with elegance. They breathed deeply as their sister pushed them through the water. Johnny had his hands folded behind his head, a pose he associated with famous people. Roy was waiting, arm lifted, to grab the diving board again.
Suddenly a light went on in the upstairs of the Roberts’s house. The Anderson kids froze. All three faces turned to the window. Retta stopped kicking and waited, froglike, in the shimmering water.
“Retta!” Roy wailed. He turned to her. In the moonlight his twisted face revealed his fear. He was the youngest and the most sensitive to being caught.
“It’s all right,” Retta assured him. She reached forward and put her hand on his trembling shoulder. “That’s just the bathroom light.”
“How do you know?”
“I
know.
If you’d shut up, you could probably hear the toilet flush.”
“I’m getting off this thing,” Johnny said. He felt exposed. If somebody looked out the window, he thought, the first thing they would see would be him. The water was safer. He rolled off the mattress with a splash.
“Be quiet or they
will
hear us,” Retta warned.
“Don’t topple me!” Roy cried. He struggled to get in the middle, but the mattress tipped. With his arms clutching Retta’s neck, he plopped into the water.
His head went under, and he came up sputtering. “Don’t let me drown!”
“Shut
up!”
Retta said.
The three of them were at the side of the pool now. Johnny was holding on to the mattress; Retta was holding Roy. Their faces were turned up to the square of light above them.
“I’m scared,” Johnny said. He was shivering hard now. His teeth began to chatter.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Let’s go home.”
“Not yet.”
“I
hate
it when people run us off,” Johnny said.
“Me
too,”
Roy said. He always spoke in a loud, positive voice when he was agreeing with his brother. “And I want to go home too!”
“Look, the reason people run you off is to
make
you feel bad,” Retta explained. “They figure they’ll run you off and you’ll feel so bad that you won’t come back. Only that is not going to work with us. We are going to swim here every night this summer.”
While she was saying this, the light in the upstairs of the Roberts’s house went out.
“See, I told you,” Retta said. “It was the bathroom.”
“I’m cold. I want to go.” Johnny was the thinnest of the three and felt the cold most.
“We’ll make one more lap of the pool and then we’ll go. Come on, we’ll all hang on to the mattress. Kick, everybody.”
“I want to go. I’m cooooold,” Roy wailed.
“Not yet,” Retta said firmly. It was her policy never to leave at once. Even if the colonel had appeared in person and had yelled at them in a military voice, she felt she would still insist they make this one extra lap.
They kicked their way around the pool without speaking. Johnny was kicking with all his strength in order to get the swim over with. The only sound was the chatter of his teeth.
When they were back in the shallow end of the pool, Retta straightened.
“Now
we’ll go home,” she said.
She pulled the mattress out of the pool and set it where she had found it. “Come on,” she told her brothers.
Together they ran across the lawn and got their clothes from the bushes. They pulled on their jeans as they walked under the trees. Retta had come to like the feel of dry clothes pulled over chilled wet skin.
“Didn’t that make you feel good?” she asked.
Roy nodded. He was hopping on one foot, trying to get the other foot into his pants leg. His wet underwear sagged, and he yanked it up. Retta held on to his elbow to steady him.
Then they moved together across the lawn, past the rose garden, past the orchid greenhouse, past the lemon trees from Florida, over the wall made from stone from Mexico.
As she walked, Retta wore a faint, proud smile, as if she were being cheered by an invisible crowd.
T
HE ANDERSON KIDS ENTERED
their house noisily. They called to each other. They snapped lights on and off as they moved to their bedrooms. Roy paused in the living room and turned on the television, but as soon as Retta heard
The Tonight Show
she came back and turned it off.
“Why not?” Roy whined.
“Because it’s late. Now get to bed.” She pointed with one hand to his bedroom. Her other hand was on her hip. When she stood like that, like a real mother, Roy knew there was no point in arguing.
“I never get to do anything!” he yelled. He stomped out of the room.
There was no reason for them to be quiet because the house was empty. Shorty Anderson, their father, was a country-western singer who worked at night. Their mother had been dead for two years, and Retta was raising the three of them.
“Want me to get you something to eat?” Retta asked. The success of the evening had made her feel more maternal than usual.
In the hall the sound of Roy’s stamping feet stopped. “Peanut butter sandwich,” he said quickly.
“Okay.”
“With
bananas.”
“You want anything, Johnny?”
Johnny mumbled, “No,” sleepily. He was already in his pajamas. He got in bed, rolled over, face to the wall, and fell asleep.
Beside him Roy was getting ready for his sandwich. He smoothed the sheet over his body as carefully as if it were a tablecloth. He wiped his hands, front and back, on his T-shirt. He loved to eat. The thought of the unexpected sandwich—Retta usually did not allow them to have bedtime snacks—made his face glow with pleasure.
“Kool-Aid too, please, Retta,” he called out in a polite voice.
In the kitchen, in the bright light over the sink, Retta was humming under her breath. She was slicing the banana, placing the slices in neat rows on the peanut butter. In the window she could see her reflection, her long wet hair swinging about her face. She smiled at herself.
Retta was happier tonight than she had been in months. She had been taking care of her brothers all her life, but this summer, since they had moved to this neighborhood, it had become a lonely task. Tonight, however, they had had fun. She and her brothers were like friends now, she decided, doing things together. The summer vacation stretched ahead as one companionable, fun-filled day after another.