HiSET Practice Test 6

The Deep End

¹For most of my life I had a system for swimming pools. At parties I volunteered to watch the grill. At hotels I admired the pool from the balcony, where I could hold a drink and look relaxed. When my nephew asked me, at his eighth birthday party, why I never got in, I told him I didn't like being cold. He accepted this. I was thirty-one, and I had been lying about water for twenty-five years.

²The truth was simpler and more embarrassing. When I was six, a cousin pushed me off the end of a dock as a joke, and for a few seconds I could not tell which way was up. Someone pulled me out. Nobody thought much of it. But my body kept the memory the way a coat keeps the shape of the person who wore it, and from then on any water deeper than my chest felt like a closed door with no handle.

³The adult beginner class at the community center met on Tuesday nights. There were five of us: a retired bus mechanic named Otis, two sisters who had grown up far from any pool, a nervous college student, and me. Our instructor, Danielle, was perhaps twenty-two, with the patience of someone much older.

⁴The first night, we did not swim. We stood in the shallow end and practiced putting our faces in the water and blowing bubbles, like toddlers. Otis laughed so hard at himself that he had to hold the wall. I did not laugh. I put my face in, counted to two, and came up gasping as if I had been under for a minute. Danielle only nodded. "Next week, three," she said.

⁵It went on like that. Three seconds, then five. Floating on my back while Danielle's hand rested under my shoulder blades, then floating while her hand hovered an inch away, then floating while she stood a step back and told me, truthfully, that she was not touching me at all. The lesson I kept relearning was that the water would hold me up if I let it, and that letting it was the hard part. Every instinct I had said to fight, and fighting was exactly what made me sink.

⁶In the seventh week, Danielle walked us to the deep end. The sisters held hands. I sat on the edge with my feet in the water, looked at the black line wavering twelve feet down, and felt the old door close.

⁷"You don't have to touch the bottom," Danielle said. "You just have to stay on top. You already know how."

⁸I would like to say that I slipped in gracefully. I did not. I went in like a dropped suitcase, came up sputtering, grabbed the wall, and stayed there a long time. But then I let go. I lay back, the way I had practiced, and the water did what it had done in the shallow end: it held me. I could hear Otis cheering, and someone else, and I realized after a moment that the someone else was me.

⁹I am not a strong swimmer even now. But last summer, at my nephew's tenth birthday, I got in the pool. He looked at me, puzzled. "I thought you didn't like being cold," he said. "I got over it," I told him, which was, in its way, the truest thing I had said about water in years.