Why We Never Leave Seventh Grade
Shortly before turning 50, I had an epiphany. It wasn’t one of those full-blown, Network-style, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” moments. I didn’t wake up one day and suddenly decide that I needed to leave my husband or quit my job or move my family across the ocean. I’d already done two of those before turning 40, anyway.
My revelation was physical in nature. After spending more than 30 years as a casual runner, my body was telling me to stop. I’d spent years benefiting from a simple, cheap, and enjoyable means of staying in shape. Now I found myself in near constant pain, taking more medicine than I felt comfortable with, and feeling schlumpy and depressed.
I tried physical therapy. I saw a podiatrist. Nothing helped. It rapidly became clear that if I wanted to lead a healthy lifestyle—one that wouldn’t leave me writhing on the floor at the end of the day—I’d need to make a profound change to my workout regime.
“Why don’t you take up swimming?” My doctor suggested. “It’s much lower impact on your knees and it won’t strain your hips.”
Swimming wasn’t an obvious choice. Sure, I’d taken lessons at the local YMCA as a kid, where I learned enough of the basics to stay afloat. That was 40-odd years ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Nor did I think I’d pick it up easily. As someone whose father once told her—at the tender age of eight—that her tennis game ‘would make a great ad for polio,’ I didn’t exactly think of myself as a natural athlete. The only sports I’d ever excelled at were bowling, ping pong and pool. These were all indoor activities, ideally executed with a beer in hand.
What the heck? I thought, Why not give it a try?
In resuming swimming after several decades, I fully expected to re-learn the basic strokes. What I didn’t expect to relearn was how hard it is to make friends, even as an adult. Turns out, joining a swimming pool is a bit like going back to Junior High; There are leaders and followers…nicknames and bullying…crushes and unrequited love. You’re never entirely sure where you stand—which lane you belong in, as it were—and you’re always jockeying for status and acceptance.
In short, swimming brought home one of the dirty secrets of adulthood: we never really leave seventh grade. You can acquire as many “grown-up” trappings as you like: the big house…the steady job…the discounted bus pass… the comfy, sensible shoes. But as I quickly discovered, the primal insecurities of youth remain with us forever.
I’d been living in London for 12 years when I took up swimming. I was lucky to have a public pool within a 10-minute walk of my home, part of a so-called “leisure centre” (one of my favorite British oxymorons) that was both convenient and affordable.
Upon entering the pool that very first day, the first thing that struck me was the portentous symbolism of the lanes. When you’re 13, the lunch tables in the school cafeteria often convey a social hierarchy: who sits where tells you about who’s in the ingroup and who’s on the outs. In a similar vein, lane ropes—those bobbing double-helixes of multi-colored plastic—also confer a tacit power structure.
The fast lane was for the cool kids. Not a single person was over 30, and the ratio of tattoos to body surface was five times higher than it was in the other two lanes. One guy sported inkings of an elderly lady with spectacles (his grandmother?), sections of a Banksy mural, and an image of the British rapper Stormzy—and that was only his back. I once got so distracted trying to work out the semiotics of his torso that I feared he might think of me as the Mrs. Robinson to his Benjamin.
The slow lane was for the misfits: The beginners, the elderly, and the hyper-cautious. A lot of them never submerged their faces underwater. Instead, when executing a distant cousin of the front crawl, they’d lightly brush their cheeks across the surface of the water, and then slap their arms down as if extinguishing a fire. One lady—a dead ringer for Steve Coogan were he female—liked to float face-down, her long grey hair unfurling across the water like the drawing on the cover of Godspell. This was also the only lane where you ever encountered sidestroke.
A vast cross-section of middling swimmers muddled along in the medium lane. These folks were too shy and under-confident to feel comfortable in the fast lane, but too proud to be identified with the slow pokes.
Just as in seventh grade, these self-assigned lane choices reified into fixed identities, policed by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. If you tried to move into a different lane, you’d find yourself on the receiving end of a raised eyebrow that said: What the hell are you doing here, sister? You’re a middle lane person! Or a faster swimmer might execute an abrupt U-turn just to the left of your shoulder, returning to the beginning of the lane to start over. The subtext of this passive-aggressive maneuver was: Get outta here, snailface. Go back where you belong.
Unsure of where I belonged on my first day, I elected the slow lane. I quickly fell in behind a South Asian fellow of medium height and build I’ll call Froggy. Froggy had two problems. The first was that he had absolutely no concept of the pool as a shared space. Once he finished a lap, he immediately commenced the next one, even if a queue of two or three people were waiting to swim. Worse, when Froggy bumped into another swimmer—as he did with me on two occasions that very first morning—he neither acknowledged my presence nor apologized. He just kept going. He reminded me of one of those wind-up bath toys, where you turn the crank, and the thing just buzzes around haphazardly.
The other problem with Froggy was far graver and served as the inspiration for his nickname. Froggy wore a pair of white swim trunks that were entirely see-through when wet. While it was sort of OK to be behind him when he was doing the front crawl, the breaststroke was another matter entirely. Each time he opened his legs to execute the frog-like kick, I was treated to a shot of the Full Monty.
Had I not been the new kid on the block, I probably would have gone into the locker room afterwards to snigger with my friends about Froggy’s over-exposure. But I didn’t have any friends. The only person with whom I’d even made eye contact was an old, toothless white guy with a sallow complexion who looked like an extra from the 1970’s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. (I silently bestowed the sobriquet “Jed” upon him.)
Exiting the pool, I wandered past small clusters of twos and threes huddled at the end of each lane, laughing, gossiping, and talking about the news. I was reminded of the time I attended a going-away party for a friend in junior high. As it happened, some wires had crossed, and I’d not been invited to the party. I showed up, gift in hand, only to have everyone study me curiously. What’s she doing here?
“You know this lane system, it’s really all about social class,” a cockney voice remarked one morning during my second week at the pool. When I looked up, a man with curly, blonde, shoulder-length tresses was staring at me from underneath a bright purple swim cap. His neon-blue swim goggles were shaped like blowfish. “You should swim wherever you want. It’s your right.”
I’d lived in England long enough to know that Brits could read social class into something as mundane as a paper clip, so the remark didn’t faze me. “Umm, thanks,” I said, turning away.
“YOU’VE GOTTA FIGHT…FOR YOUR RIGHT…TO PAAAAAR-TY” he belted out, launching into the chorus of The Beastie Boys’ eponymous 1986 hit. He then swam under the lane rope and joined the medium lane, where he repeated the chorus before commencing another lap. “YOU’VE GOTTA FIGHT …. FOR YOUR RIGHT…” echoed across the swimming pool.
I was sure this guy would be reprimanded. Or at least ogled. But no one else seemed to take much notice, even the lifeguards. They all kept on going about their business as if this were perfectly normal behavior. Which, as it happens, it was.
That was my first encounter with the Ringletted Revolutionary.
The next day when I arrived, he was huddled in conversation with a Black woman of about 40. I only caught snippets of their conversation, but she was clearly hacked off about something. I paused to adjust my goggles so that I could lean in and listen.
“Don’t fucking tell me that I should be proud that Barack Obama was the first Black president…,” she was saying. “He wasn’t able to do a fucking thing. Just because we share the same skin pigmentation, don’t fucking say that he ‘represents’ me.” (Note to self: Do not wear Obama: Yes, We Can tee shirt to the swimming pool.)
The Ringletted Revolutionary and #ImnotObama were joined by an older male with the cool, detached demeanor of someone who’d spent a lifetime in the intelligence services. We’re not talking Smiley’s People; This guy was definitely more Mossad than MI5.
The Ringletted Revolutionary noticed me studying the three of them and grinned. “Hey Toots!” he called out, as if we were old friends. “Do you know what electile dysfunction means?” He paused dramatically. “It’s when you can’t get a hard on for any of the candidates!” Chuckling, he swam off.
I smiled awkwardly. No one smiled back.
Taking some comfort in my newfound connection with the Ringletted Revolutionary, I decided that this might be a good day to see if I could hack it in the medium lane. I’d been taking swim lessons for more than a month by then, so I knew I wasn’t entirely hopeless.
Mossad wasn’t having any of it. As I slithered under the lane rope, he tapped me on the shoulder and nodded, barely imperceptibly, over to where Froggy was doing the breaststroke in the slow lane. Mossad could hardly have been clearer had he peed to demarcate his territory. He was telling me to scat — to leave the cool kids’ lunch table. And, as in the famous scene in The Godfather where the man wakes up with a horse’s head in his bed, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
There was one upside to my failed attempt to subvert the sacred pecking order of the swim lanes. When I returned to the slow lane, I found myself behind a thin, Scandinavian-looking woman with white-blonde hair and cherry-red lipstick. She was considerably less gruff than the rest of the crowd, and I held out hope that I might possibly befriend her. I dubbed her “Skinny Scandi.”
Before the Ringletted Revolutionary left that day, he looked at me pointedly and sang “Toot, Toot, Tootsie Goodbye…Toot, Toot, Tootsie Don’t Cry.” Some of the others giggled.
It wasn’t until I arrived at the pool right at opening time, however, that I appreciated the depths of my outsider status. When I walked into the waiting area, a cabal had already assembled, including Mossad, #ImnotObama, and the Ringletted Revolutionary. He was holding court in the center of the group. They were all greeting each other with the colloquial British expression “All right?” which is akin to asking someone “How’s it goin’?” No one even glanced my way.
Although there were plenty of chairs nearby, I took a seat on the other side of the room. I pretended to be engrossed in my mobile phone, rather than to try and join their conversation. At one point, Jed walked in. “Hi Pete!” they all cried out in unison. I decided there and then that I disliked Jed, if for no other reason than they were all so glad to see him.
For the next several weeks, the Ringletted Revolutionary was the only person who ever spoke to me. My American accent notwithstanding, he had evidently decided that I somehow conjured up the British aristocracy. Early on, he began addressing me with a series of noble-sounding nicknames. Lady Astor was a particular favorite. Appropriating a faux, upper crust English accent, he’d say things like, “Lady Astor! What shall you wear to the masquerade this evening?” or: “Why, hello, Lady Astor! Where have you been? Parliament has been waiting expectantly.”
The nickname that really stuck, however, was Maude. One morning, a few weeks into my swimming foray, the Ringletted Revolutionary deliberately sought me out as I was getting into the pool. “You look exactly like Maude!” he exclaimed.
“Maude who?”
“Maude Gonne! She was W.B. Yeats’ girlfriend!” Apparently, he’d seen a BBC documentary the night before, and now knew everything there was to know about the Irish poet. Henceforth, whenever I arrived at the pool, he’d shout out something like: “Oh Maude you sly old thing! Slipping in here like that!”
After a couple of weeks of his banter, I decided it was time to engage in a proper conversation. “If you don’t mind my asking,” I remarked one day. “Why do I remind you of Maude Gonne? Is it my face? My build? My aura?”
Big mistake. Never use a big word when a little one will suffice, as my Great Aunt Rose used to say. At the sound of the word “aura,” the Ringletted Revolutionary’s face lit up. “It’s your aura! It’s your aura!” he shrieked delightedly. “I just want to…Kiss it!” Then he began shouting at full volume: “Kiss my aura! Kiss my aura!”
At which point #ImnotObama, who’d been adjusting her swim cap nearby, leaned over and observed: “Well! I’ve heard *it* called many things, but never that!”
It took me a while to realize that with all his teasing, the Ringletted Revolutionary wasn’t trying to alienate me; he was trying to befriend me. Like many boys in Junior High, he wasn’t comfortable just coming out and talking to a “girl” directly. Being silly and outré was his way of saying “Hi.”
I won’t pretend I wasn’t flattered. Back when my daughter was in Junior High, she always got excited when one of the popular girls invited her to a party or asked her to walk to the bus stop. I reassured her that she was a wonderful person and shouldn’t need someone else’s approbation to feel good about herself. But, of course, she did.
That was precisely how I felt when I was around the Ringletted Revolutionary. He was a ringleader. You remember them from High School. They’re the ones who set the tone for the others: They decide who’s cool and who isn’t…which party is worth prioritizing on a Saturday night… whether the look of the moment is one of Izod shirts and docksiders or feathered earrings and onyx rings. (I did mention that I grew up in the late 1970’s, didn’t I?)
I was acutely aware that by mocking me, the Ringletted Revolutionary was singling me out as special. Winning his favor paid other dividends. as well. He was friendly with absolutely anybody and everybody who came to the pool on a regular basis, even the lifeguards. His friendships crossed race, class, and gender. He was sort of like the pool’s unofficial mayor. And like all frontmen, where they go, others follow. After an initially chilly reception, even Mossad began warming up to me. One day when I was struggling to keep up with the other swimmers in the medium lane, Mossad invited me into the fast lane where he was swimming alone. “You can have this lane, it’s entirely free,” he said, beckoning me over. For the rest of that swim, whenever we both arrived at the end of the lane simultaneously, he gestured gallantly for me to go first on the next lap.
Not long afterwards, #ImnotObama had free tickets to a show at the theatre where she worked as a receptionist. I was deeply flattered when she offered them to me in the locker room one day: “Here, you take these; I can’t use them.”
I knew I’d really arrived the day Mr. Bean showed up. It was one morning about two months after I started swimming. A tall and sinewy man with a shock of black hair entered the pool area. Instead of swimming, he did calisthenics along the perimeter of the pool: leg lunges, a few squats, followed by a “show me your guns” pose with his arms. It was almost like he was conducting a poolside fitness class…for himself.
A bunch of us paused to stare at him. “He looks like Mr. Bean!” one of them hissed in my ear. “Look, he even makes a Mr. Bean Face!” Sure enough, this guy’s mouth hung open in the shape of an “O” while he did his poses. I chuckled, aware that this was perhaps the first time that I’d ever laughed with any of the others, rather than having them laugh at my expense. I knew, of course, that this camaraderie only flowed out of my relationship with the Ringletted Revolutionary. Without him, I was still nothing. No matter. Just as in seventh grade, I was delighted to be finally fitting in.
Not everyone fit into our little pool society, of course. Take Froggy. Because of his profoundly asocial manner, I initially took him for a jerk: someone who didn’t observe social norms and needed to be taught a lesson. Over time, however, I noticed that for someone who swam so religiously—almost obsessively—every day, Froggy didn’t swim particularly well. One day, he sent me ricocheting across the lane. When he tried to apologize (a first!), he did so without looking me in the eye. His speech was a bit garbled. I realized, suddenly, that Froggy had some sort of disability.
In that instant, my whole attitude towards him changed. Rather than derision and annoyance, I felt compassion. Others didn’t share my sympathy. Many of my newfound friends would roll their eyes when he arrived at the pool, as if to say, “Not him again!” On occasion, they’d laugh behind his back, reminding me that people can be just as catty in their 50s as they can be at 14. (My nickname for him reveals my own snarkiness.)
While no one was ever outrightly cruel, I felt badly about their ridicule. I never spoke up, though. I, too, had reverted to my seventh-grade self. When you’re new to a crowd, you don’t want to seem like a high-minded, holier-than-thou prick. You congratulate yourself for being nicer than your friends, even while failing to call them out for their malice. It was a pointed reminder that the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of adolescence really does stay with us well into later life.
Eventually, I had my own social comeuppance. I’d begun to develop a friend-crush on Skinny Scandi. With her pale skin and white swim cap, she emitted a sort of glow. Sometimes, instead of swimming, she’d turn sideways and walk the length of the pool, doing long, ballet-style sashés from one end to the other. It was similar to the swim-walking I’d seen women do in Finland, but at a right angle and without a partner. I admired her willingness to do something so out of keeping with the mainstream. That’s the hallmark of cool, right? Not needing to care about what others think.
Mostly, I encountered her in the locker room. Our paths would intersect briefly when I was coming out of the pool, and she was headed in. Over time, I began to find excuses to linger there when she was talking to someone else. By eavesdropping, I learned that she worked from home as an editor of a magazine, and she traveled a lot to exotic places like Bratislava and Tallinn. She always seemed so at peace with herself. I imagined her going home after the pool and drinking an enormous cup of ginseng tea. Then she’d settle into an elegant office chair behind a large oak desk, a ribbon of hand-crafted papier mâché doves watching over her.
As with all crushes, I began to notice small details about her. Like that in addition to her lipstick, she also applied her perfume before she got in the pool. When she bought a new swimsuit—it was one of those turtleneck ones with a zipper down the back—it looked so great that I promptly ran out and bought one myself. I made sure to buy it in a different color, lest she notice that I was copying her. (I was again reminded of junior high, when one of the popular girls began wearing clogs. The rest of us rushed out to buy a pair of our own, but were careful to choose a slightly different design.)
Then, the magical day came when Skinny Scandi and I finally spoke. I had misplaced my round brush and was running late to work. I thought I remembered having seen her using a similar brush, so I made a cautious approach. “Umm…I know this is a really weird request. But do you think I could borrow your round brush? I lost mine. I promise to return it tomorrow.”
Her face erupted into a gigantic grin. “Why sure!” The faint traces of her Swedish accent crept into her replay, so that “sure” more like “shur.”
After we’d shared a hairbrush, the odd mini-bottle of shampoo and once—inadvertently (I swear!)—a bra, I decided it was time to invite Skinny Scandi to coffee. I wanted to hear more about her job… her travels…her life.
Just as I was screwing up my courage to ask her out, I overheard her inviting someone else to coffee. It smarted just as much as when I invited Burke Magnus to the Sadie Hawkins dance in 8th grade and he said “yes,” but then failed to show up. I was left standing alone in my living room in the dress I’d bought just for the occasion, feeling foolish and ashamed. I irrationally decided that she was now out of reach, and let the entire thing go. While we continued to speak to one another casually, I never broached the subject of coffee.
I never got to know any of my pool friends terribly well. A year or so after I started swimming at my local pool, I was laid off from my job and started swimming later in the day. This new time slot featured an entirely different cast of characters—much more introverted—and we never really clicked. Everybody just swam their laps and silently departed. There was no chit-chat.
Which only underscored another dirty secret of adulthood: The people from the pool weren’t really ever my friends; they were more like neighbors. And the bond with your neighbors lasts only as long as you can loan someone a cup of sugar or borrow their rake. Once you leave the neighborhood, as I’ve done so many times now in my life, those superficial social ties typically fade.
I still bump into the old gang from time to time. Not so long ago, I encountered Jed on the street. It was sort of like having one of the characters in a novel jump out of the pages into your life. “Get back in the pool, Jed!” I had the urge to scream. (“Umm…I mean Pete.”) I run into Skinny Scandi on occasion in my Pilates class as well. She still wears her signature red lipstick and still has a great smile, even if it doesn’t have quite the same resonance for me that it once did.
It’s probably the Ringletted Revolutionary I miss most. I was pretty sure I saw him at a bus stop one cold, winter day about six months after I stopped doing my early morning swim. I couldn’t be entirely sure. When you get to know people half-naked, it’s surprisingly difficult to identify them when they’re fully clothed. But I thought I detected some blonde curls poking out from under a Tottenham FC ski cap.
I waved at him. He waved back, though I couldn’t tell if he recognized me. There was no “Lady Astor.” No “Maude Gonne.” I felt a tinge of sadness. Clearly, he’d moved on.
Had I?
Delia Lloyd is an American writer and communications consultant based in London. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Oldster Magazine, and Writer’s Digest. She blogs about the journey of adulthood at RealDelia.com and is a featured monthly contributor to This Curious Life, the flagship publication at the UK’s National Innovation Centre for Ageing.
Featured Artwork:
The Universe at Dusk
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas. She has an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at her website.