MCAS Practice Test 4

“My Mother Learns to Swim at Forty-Six” by Gwen Ellison

¹She grew up three blocks from the ocean

²and never once went in. Her mother said

³the water took what it wanted, and she believed it

⁴the way you believe the first map you are given,

⁵folding it smaller every year

⁶until it fit inside her pocket like a stone.

⁷Now it is Tuesday, six a.m., the Y pool

⁸smelling of chlorine and old tile,

⁹and she stands at the shallow end in a borrowed cap

¹⁰while an instructor half her age

¹¹tells her, kindly, to put her face in.

¹²I watch from the bleachers, holding her glasses.

¹³The first week she only stands there.

¹⁴The second week she bends and lets the water

¹⁵touch her chin, her mouth, the tip of her nose,

¹⁶and comes up gasping as if from a great depth

¹⁷though the water is barely to her waist.

¹⁸She laughs at herself. I do not laugh.

¹⁹Because I know what it costs: a grown woman

²⁰practicing in public the thing she has feared the longest,

²¹the lane lines watching, the instructor's patient face,

²²every swimmer in the next lane gliding past

²³like a sentence she cannot yet read.

²⁴She keeps her eyes open. She goes under again.

²⁵By March she can float. She lies on her back

²⁶with her arms out, her ears full of the pool's

²⁷enormous hush, and the instructor

²⁸takes his hand away from under her shoulders

²⁹so slowly she does not know it is gone

³⁰until she is already holding herself up.

³¹Afterward, in the car, her hair still wet,

³²she tells me the water doesn't take, exactly.

³³It gives back whatever you give it—

³⁴your weight, your breath, your trust—

³⁵and I think of the old map in her pocket,

³⁶how it must be softening now, coming apart at the folds.