Old Vic

My brother Tom taught me to swim at White Beeches Country Club, Haworth, NJ, in the summer of 1966. After he finally improved my style from a sort of bastardized doggie-paddle to a fairly respectable face-down Australian crawl, he told me I looked like a record player. Evidently, as I flailed my arms around, face planted resolutely in the pool, my black hair with the little Dutchboy cut would splay out flatly on the water around my head. In Tom's eyes, my halo of wet hair looked like a record on a turntable. And if I was a record player, then, the record I was spinning would have been the Happenings' "See You in September."

The song still brings that image to mind: an eight-year-old with record-player-head swimming the width of the country club pool. I loved that song, especially its message: See you when the summer's through?when school would start again. I couldn't wait for school to start again. "Danger in the summer moon above" and losing someone "to a summer love" were lost on me.

Well, "lost on me" may be overstating things somewhat, because at the side of the pool, where my newfound swims would end, stood the big lifeguard chair, and on that chair sat Vic. I had a thing for Vic that summer. I don't know how old he was?thinking back, he was probably just a high-schooler?but I do know that he was cute, with thick reddish-brown hair and faint freckles. My friend Patty liked the other lifeguard. I don't recall his name, but it might have been Dave. Patty didn't go to the same school as I did, but we hung out every summer at the pool. We'd run around, swim, buy hotdogs. (Sometimes we stripped the natural casing off and held them at our crotches like boys' "thingies," as we called them; didn't know what they did with them, just knew they had them.)

Late that summer, after Patty and I had been mooning over Vic and Dave for two months, we decided to make our move. We would ask them out for dinner?it'd be a double date. Actually, we would ask them to take us out for dinner, since girls didn't ask boys out back then. It's possible that Patty was kidding around, but I was quite serious, and after elaborate plotting of what to wear, I went over to Vic's lifeguard chair. I squinted up at him in the sun, and very matter-of-factly asked, "Vic, would you take me out to dinner at the country club? Patty's asking Dave."

Vic laughed, but not condescendingly. In retrospect, he must have thought I was cute as a button. When I persisted in my querying squint, he finally said, "Sure!" Good, I told him, I'll have my mother bring me some nice clothes.

I called my mother on the payphone and told her that Dave and Vic were taking Patty and me out to dinner, and would she please bring me a dress and some shoes. I wanted my favorite dress, the maroon one with white polka dots and bell sleeves, with lace trim on the collar, sleeves and hem. (My grandmother said it was magenta, but she was blind and I must have described it to her wrong. It was maroon.) And I wanted my black patent-leather shoes, the dressy ones.

In the snap of a finger my mother was at that pool. With neither dress nor shoes. Before she hauled me off, I told Vic that, as it turned out, I wouldn't be able to go to dinner after all. He laughed again?I'm sure he hadn't given our date a second thought. I don't remember the ride home, what my mother possibly said or yelled at me, or even if she said anything about it at all.

I now blush when I think of that incident. Not at how earnest I was, or that my mom hauled me away in front of my "date," but that I was at least 35 before I realized why my mother got to the pool so fast. I still smack my forehead when I think of it. And "See You in September" still calls up in my mind the picture of an eight-year-old girl, swimming the width of that pool?arms splashing, with record-player head?landing at the foot of the lifeguard chair to squint up at Vic, his tinny radio tuned to WABC, with my summer song in heavy rotation.