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" We are here to learn how to swim. By we, I am referring to the two dozen or so men and women between the ages of 20 and 60 who are huddled at the edge of the Y pool on East 14th Street in New York City. Though we haven&amp;#039;t yet dipped a toe in, we&amp;#039;re all wet because a large sign in the locker room ordered us to shower before entering the pool area. Many of us are wearing impractical bathing suits that have never seen water. Because we are also required to wear swim caps, we look very strange\u2014the neat contours of our bodies and protruding goggles give us the appearance of wary extraterrestrials visiting an unknown planet. Our nearly naked state reveals that we have a surprising amount of body hair, nice breasts, dimpled thighs, tattoos, moles that maybe should be checked out, mystery scars, and at least 15 different shades of skin tone, due to our various nationalities. We are cold, and many of us are scared. We have paid $275 for 12 weeks of lessons, and some of us, I know, are already regretting the purchase the way one regrets ordering a high-tech vegetable chopper from a late-night infomercial. To ease our anxiety, we ask questions. What&amp;#039;s your name? Do you really not know how to swim, or do you kind of know? So, like, you can&amp;#039;t even float, right? Two athletic-looking men and one woman stand before us. They welcome us to &amp;quot;adult beginner swim,&amp;quot; and I laugh at the class&amp;#039;s title\u2014suggesting as it does that we are beginners not only at swimming, but also at adulthood. The female instructor glares at me and sternly informs us that if we miss a class, there will be absolutely &amp;quot;no makeups!&amp;quot; Today we will be separated into smaller groups based on ability. As a quick test, Tony, an instructor wearing a full-body wet suit, stands in the middle of the pool and asks us to swim to him one at a time in any way we know how. Very quickly it becomes clear that some of us have lied; some of us can in fact kind of swim and float. I am one of the liars. I can usually doggy-paddle for about seven seconds before my nerves take over and I sink. I walk down the steps into the pool, swim halfway to Tony, and stop. &amp;quot;What happened?&amp;quot; he asks. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m afraid to go deeper,&amp;quot; I say. The water, which is a pale blue and reeks of chlorine, is up to my waist. Tony assigns me to the lowest level. I&amp;#039;m afraid to go deeper. Once, sometimes twice a year I mumble this as I enter oceans and friends&amp;#039; pools. My mother never learned to swim, and so I never did either. The last time someone tried to teach me, I was 11 and my uncle had decided that enough was enough. On an overcast Sunday at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, I was playing with my cousins near the shore when he picked me up and tossed me into the ocean. By the time I inhaled to scream, I was underwater. The idea, I think, was that nature would take over\u2014that I&amp;#039;d kick, battle the water, and eventually rise to the surface. Instead I lay down on the bottom of the ocean and allowed the water to enter my lungs. That I seemed to possess no survival instinct, as it&amp;#039;s called\u2014no innate part of me that knew what to do in the face of danger\u2014became apparent again the next year when I encountered a snake in the woods. As the other kids ran screaming, I just stood there frozen, tears streaming down my face. I have no idea what personality traits bring a child to so passively greet ominous circumstances, but these episodes do reveal a fatalistic predisposition that has followed me into my &amp;quot;adult beginner&amp;quot; life. As I sank to the bottom of the ocean, it simply did not occur to me that there was anything I could do about it. I couldn&amp;#039;t have been in the water \u2028longer than seconds, but in my memory the moment stretches like a film reel, each frame full of distinct sights and sensations. I remember the pillowy sand beneath my thighs, the light filtering through the deep green water above me, the human shadow eclipsing the light, and my uncle&amp;#039;s arms reaching in and yanking me out. I remember coughing and coughing, and then the reel cuts off and there are no more images, only the feelings of inadequacy and shame for having disappointed, and the certainty that I never wanted to see that particular movie again.  &amp;quot;Just blow out slowly,&amp;quot; Tony is telling me. There are seven of us in Tony&amp;#039;s group, and we are learning to blow bubbles. While my classmates keep their heads submerged for five, even 10 seconds, I lower only my face\u2014the tip of my nylon-capped head sticking out\u2014push all of my air out in one forceful exhale, and bop up immediately. A couple of times I try holding my nose on the way down, but Tony says it&amp;#039;s not allowed. He tells me to just try holding my breath, but again I dip, blow, bop up like a buoy. Tony looks confused. We move on to an exercise that requires us to push off the side of the pool and glide with our faces down in the water. The glide itself is not bad, but I keep raising my head as soon as I start, and Tony&amp;#039;s patience is fading. &amp;quot;Just hold your breath!&amp;quot; he instructs. I want to please Tony, so the next time I try to remain under and somehow manage to inhale water. &amp;quot;Why can&amp;#039;t you just hold it?&amp;quot; Tony asks as I come up coughing. He moves on to his more promising pupils, but it is too late, I can&amp;#039;t stop\u2014I am crying in the pool. Then I realize something that will bring me great comfort over the next three months: No one can tell when you&amp;#039;re crying in the water. The first time I saw the ocean, I was 10 years old, and it was wintertime, and my mother and I had walked four blocks from our high-rise in Coney Island, Brooklyn, to the shore in our heavy coats and stood staring at the Atlantic as if it were a gorgeous mirage. The previous night we&amp;#039;d emigrated from Russia. Our first year in Brooklyn, I attended a day camp at Brighton Beach, where, observing a sprightly girl named Katya in the water, I began teaching myself the doggy paddle, but my visit to Manhattan Beach later that summer put an end to my aquatic interests. It would be unfair, however, to suggest that my ambivalence about water began on that day. Even as a young child I&amp;#039;d had a consuming fascination with seas and oceans, which, growing up in Moscow, seemed about as faraway and exotic to me as the moon. My favorite book was about a young girl who gets swept away by a storm and lands on an island made entirely of candy. My favorite TV show was The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, dubbed in Russian. By the time I&amp;#039;d read Gulliver&amp;#039;s Travels, I was convinced that large bodies of water were portals to fantastical, possibly frightening worlds\u2014a theory that proved true after we crossed the Atlantic by plane and landed in Coney Island. But children&amp;#039;s books are made of the very real terrors suffered by adults, and after I&amp;#039;d actually met the ocean, I began to see it for what it is: a sprawling, menacing body with its own heartbeats, temperamental whims, and immeasurable strength. By high school, I&amp;#039;d refused to read Moby-Dick and still haven&amp;#039;t. Even now, I memorize drowning data in New York the way others note crime statistics. Though I have lived here for more than a decade, I&amp;#039;ve never taken a ferry, because I know that the waters surrounding Manhattan have currents powerful enough to carry even competent swimmers out to sea, and that in 1904, for instance, the General Slocum, a steamship traveling along the East River, caught fire and sank, killing an estimated 1,021 people\u2014the deadliest day in New York City&amp;#039;s history until September 11, 2001. When I get home, I call my mother. She has no memory of that day at Manhattan Beach, but after I describe it to her\u2014we&amp;#039;ve somehow never talked about it\u2014she tells me that something similar happened to her. When she was five, she slipped from my grandmother&amp;#039;s grasp as they were crossing a shallow lake and fell in. Her reel is eerily similar to mine: the soft sand, the filtering light, the human shadow coming to rescue her. She hasn&amp;#039;t entered a body of water since. Fear of water can be a hereditary condition, suffered by a surprising number of people. A quick Google search reveals that Eva Mendes and Snoop Dogg can&amp;#039;t swim, and neither can former Baywatch babe Carmen Electra. According to the USA Swimming Foundation, if a parent doesn&amp;#039;t know how to swim, there is only a 13 percent chance that his or her child will learn. Up to half of Americans can&amp;#039;t swim, and an average of 10 people drown in the country every day. The week my classes begin, I happen to be reading Renata Adler&amp;#039;s 1976 novel Speedboat, in which she writes, &amp;quot;Every child, naturally, who was not a sissy, swam. In lakes, and seas, and heavily chlorinated pools, they earned their certificates\u2026. People who missed their proper year often remained afraid of swimming, driving, hunting or whatever, all their lives.&amp;quot;  That passage isn&amp;#039;t about swimming exactly. It&amp;#039;s about something far more important\u2014it&amp;#039;s about how we come to think of ourselves. To know the self as a &amp;quot;sissy&amp;quot; is to avoid skis, bicycles, mountains, and tennis courts because of the strong suspicion that you will not, necessarily, know to raise a racket to block the ball from hitting your face. If we don&amp;#039;t learn to swim, we lose a certain faith in our ability to meet physical challenges, but the impact may be greater yet, if sneakingly pernicious. Realizing that not only does your body fail to stay afloat but that it doesn&amp;#039;t even bother to kick when faced with its own demise begins to feel like a repulsive evolutionary defect that must be concealed at all costs\u2014an Achilles heel so fundamental that it threatens all our other accomplishments. (Is there anything more humiliating than lacking a basic instinct for self-preservation?) That I want to learn to swim now, at the age of 28, has less to do with my being afraid of drowning than it does with my growing increasingly tired with myself for being afraid of &amp;quot;whatever.&amp;quot; When I return to the Y, Tony delivers strange news. I, along with three others from the lowest beginner group, have been reassigned to an even lower beginner group. Weeks later, after I get to know my new classmates, I can only assume that the good people at the Y created a special level for us\u2014let&amp;#039;s call it &amp;quot;traumatized adult beginner swim&amp;quot;\u2014and called in special forces. My classmates are all from India. Upal and Ujjal are fraternal twins in their late twenties who live together in Stuyvesant Town. The brothers took a swim class when they were kids but didn&amp;#039;t like their teacher. &amp;quot;So we never went back,&amp;quot; Upal told me. Ujjal has a rather large tattoo of two dolphins on his back, and I&amp;#039;m not sure he&amp;#039;s aware of the irony. Our fourth is Anustee, a doe-eyed young woman who wears a bathing suit with a skirt attached. Whenever Anustee enters the water, her eyebrows travel upward on her forehead in an expression that communicates pure terror. Several times I wanted to ask her why she never learned to swim, but she always seemed too distressed to engage in small talk. Since none of us had learned to blow bubbles, we start there. &amp;quot;Show me what you do,&amp;quot; says Will, our new teacher. I show him and brace for criticism. Instead, Will comes up close to me and begins speaking in a calm, measured tone. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s okay,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;This is totally normal. You&amp;#039;re just a little nervous in the water. I want you to try something for me: Just hum.&amp;quot; Hum? &amp;quot;Yes, hum. Start humming before you go under and that will pace your breathing.&amp;quot; My hum is more like a yogi&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;om&amp;quot; as I lower my head into the pool. I focus on humming slowly but steadily so that no water enters my nose\u2014Oooooommm\u2014and as I realize that I&amp;#039;ve now been under for several seconds, I become irrationally angry at Tony for not having mentioned this neat trick last week. As I come up, Will is smiling. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;See? Easy.&amp;quot; By the end of the class, I not only learn to glide but I&amp;#039;m the only one who masters floating, which Will asks me to demonstrate for the rest of the class. A few important words about Will: He is beautiful. Tall, tan, and muscular, he is like a Puerto Rican Michael Phelps. When Will isn&amp;#039;t in the pool, he walks around shirtless in ragged sweatpants and beige Crocs. My favorite things about him include a small swirl of hair that forms a rat tail at the back of his neck, and the tongue ring that he tried to be discreet about until it fell out in week five and he had to go fishing for it in the pool. Whenever I panic in the water\u2014which is often\u2014he will grab my shoulders or my waist and say, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s okay. You&amp;#039;re okay. I got you. I&amp;#039;m right here,&amp;quot; and I will at times forget that I have a boyfriend and look at Will with affection and gratitude so pure that I will simultaneously wish that he were my father and my husband. And if that sounds twisted, well, then you have not had the terrifying pleasure of being rescued by Will from the depths of the Y pool. After the first lesson, Will teaches us to use kickboards and flippers, which is a little bit like learning to walk horizontally on water using a precarious floating device for balance and giant webbed feet for a manual propeller. (Flippers, I learn later, were the invention of Benjamin Franklin, an avid swimmer who helped popularize aquatics for the masses.)  \u2028 It takes a few weeks to get the hang of these contraptions, but eventually we&amp;#039;re zooming from one end of the pool to the other like toddlers on training wheels, and though I know I&amp;#039;m not swimming, exactly, I think I am starting to understand the concept. When I move across the water, the parts of my life that exist on land seem unimportant. It&amp;#039;s impossible for me to think about what e-mail I didn&amp;#039;t send, or which friend I may have offended. My only priority is not to drown, and so I focus on my kicks, my breath, my muscles, which grow heavy whenever I get nervous. I start to fall in love with the sounds, which\u2014except for the times when I hear Will&amp;#039;s muffled voice say, &amp;quot;Relax your neck, Irina!&amp;quot;\u2014are a pleasing symphony of low whirls and gargles as the water is pushed around and parted by my own body.  As the weeks go on, I begin to think of water as a different mode of existence and of swimming as a practice of essentially adapting my body to alien conditions. I start to see the world divided into people who can survive in dual realities, and more primitive creatures like myself who&amp;#039;ve been sequestered on the small patches of land that occupy our mostly blue planet. It occurs to me that, with the exception of space, this is the only place where humans get to defy gravity and escape the weight of their tired bodies. Between classes, everyone who hears that I&amp;#039;m learning to swim is eager to tell me their own water stories, and I start to feel like the protagonist in John Cheever&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;The Swimmer,&amp;quot; swimming across the backyard pools of people&amp;#039;s childhoods: the old wounds, the competitions, the beach towns where they grew up, that time the baby fell in, the brothers who took them surfing, the freedoms water afforded them and the insecurities they still feel from early failures in it. In class, too, we all have our blocks. Upal and Ujjal, who are the only ones who can swim well without flippers, still cannot float. When they try, they sort of hover somewhere between the bottom of the pool and its surface as if frozen in the center of an ice cube. Anustee consistently comes undone in the deep end and thrashes around until Will rushes to her rescue, which always makes me a little jealous. For me, jumping into the water is the hardest. Every week as the others line up and hop in like a row of ducklings, I stand whimpering at the pool&amp;#039;s edge and categorically refuse to do it no matter how long Will pleads with me. Even when we do this at the shallow end, I cannot seem to get myself to step forward, and I tell Will with full conviction that I will drown if I do. A few times I start to cry. When I finally do jump in\u2014and this takes all of the 12 weeks\u2014it&amp;#039;s not until Will stands in the pool beneath me, offers me his hand, and promises that he will not let go. On our final day, Will brings in a camera and films us so that we can see our progress. I climb out of the pool and stand next to him as he shows me the video in which I attempt to swim without the safety of flippers or a kickboard. I watch my scrawny body making movements I&amp;#039;ve never seen it make before, and the shocking part is that I&amp;#039;m moving through the pool\u2014slowly and sloppily, but I&amp;#039;m doing it. &amp;quot;See, you have a great kick,&amp;quot; Will says. Before I leave, he writes down his e-mail address and tells me to get in touch if I want more swimming lessons, if I have questions, or &amp;quot;whatever.&amp;quot; I graduate from the Y in June, and in mid-July I fly to Biarritz, where world champion surfer Lisa Andersen has generously agreed to give me a swimming lesson in open water. Andersen is an athlete for Roxy, the apparel brand with a heart-shape logo that is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014. The beach in Biarritz is known for its waves, but when I arrive to observe the annual Roxy Pro competition, all the female surfers seem depressed. &amp;quot;The ocean&amp;#039;s as still as a lake,&amp;quot; Andersen tells me. The competition has been canceled, but for me, calm waters means I have no excuse. Unlike the ritzier parts of southern France along the Mediterranean, Biarritz, on the Atlantic, has the raw, unself-conscious feel of a small seaside town. Andersen and I meet at the beach in the afternoon. I&amp;#039;m hesitant to go in the ocean, so she suggests we just sit and talk for a bit where the water is shallow and allow the lapping waves to wash over us. &amp;quot;I want you to just feel the ocean and its rhythms,&amp;quot; she says. With her flaxen blond hair and fit figure, Andersen, who is 44, has a soulful quality about her and bears a striking resemblance to the actress Robin Wright. When she was a kid, her family moved around a lot, finally settling in Ormond Beach, Florida. Her father was an alcoholic who was abusive to Andersen and her brothers. Her mother, like mine, never learned to swim and was always afraid of the ocean. After Andersen learned to surf, the ocean, where she wanted to spend all of her time, formed a rift between her and her family. At 16, after her father became angry and cracked her surfboard, she ran away from home and moved to Huntington Beach, California. She left a note on her pillow informing her parents that she was leaving to become the number-one female surfer in the world; nine years later she did so. As we&amp;#039;re talking, I&amp;#039;m so focused on Andersen that I&amp;#039;m startled when a small wave lashes me in the face. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s another thing: Never turn your back on the ocean,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Do you want to walk in a little?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; I say, and we go in up to our knees. I believe Andersen when she says that the ocean is unusually calm, but for me, the small waves might as well be tsunamis. I am standing waist-deep now, and each time I see a wave approaching, I shudder and sometimes also shriek. The first time this happens, I sort of leap into Andersen&amp;#039;s arms like a baby chimp and wrap my arms around her neck. The sense that this is an unacceptable thing for an adult to do is superseded entirely by my fear that a wave will swallow me and that I&amp;#039;ll drown. Andersen is kind enough not to laugh. She instructs me to hop up against the wave&amp;#039;s force and, as we tread deeper, plant my feet as each swell passes. She also allows me to hold her hand whenever I need to. &amp;quot;That rocking back and forth can be so peaceful\u2014I really want you to have that,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I go to the ocean wherever I am, whenever I want to get away from all the worries and stresses. Sometimes I&amp;#039;m drowning on land, and I need to get in the water to breathe. &amp;quot;This is where my confidence lies,&amp;quot; Andersen adds. &amp;quot;In the rest of my life, I have all these insecurities, but here I feel confident.&amp;quot; When I ask why, Andersen pauses for a moment. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know. I guess the ocean has never broken my heart.&amp;quot; It seems unlikely I&amp;#039;ll ever have that much trust in the ocean, I say. How could I when we are standing in the same body of water that once pinned me to its floor? &amp;quot;But you have to remember,&amp;quot; Andersen says, &amp;quot;the ocean didn&amp;#039;t do that to you.&amp;quot; I haven&amp;#039;t noticed, but I am now standing chin-deep\u2014the farthest out I&amp;#039;ve ever gone. Though we are more than an hour into my lesson, Andersen hasn&amp;#039;t asked me to do any actual swimming. Instead, she&amp;#039;s conducted a sort of immersion therapy, distracting me from my anxiety and allowing me to control the pace as we waded deeper. Somewhere along the way, it&amp;#039;s almost as if I&amp;#039;ve forgotten that we&amp;#039;re not on land and adjusted to my new environment, standing on tippy-toes and instinctually rising and rocking with the current. When I look back and see how far we are from shore, it feels strange not to feel afraid. I wouldn&amp;#039;t describe standing here as peaceful, exactly, but it is not unpleasant. &amp;quot;Do you want to see me actually swim?&amp;quot; I ask. Andersen nods, so I hop up and try to remember what Will taught me: kicking from the hip, pulling the water, head not too high. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s all it is,&amp;quot; Andersen says. &amp;quot;The rest is just technique. But having a feel for it and doing what feels natural\u2014that&amp;#039;s swimming.&amp;quot; I envy Anderson, for whom the ocean has served as a vast well of courage. Those of us who stopped trusting ourselves early on tend to approach new things with paralyzing trepidation. But to encounter that &amp;quot;sissy&amp;quot; as an adult\u2014to watch her cry in the shallow end of the pool\u2014may be a necessary step, it seems to me now, to building a kind of mental fortitude, a willingness to try what&amp;#039;s daunting. Because each time you&amp;#039;re able to remain afloat, even for a little bit, you add a droplet to that well, a reserve to tap the next time you lose nerve. After I leave Andersen, my boyfriend meets me in Biarritz and we drive down the coast, stopping at the beautiful beaches along the way. At each one, I clutch his arm as I wade into the ocean. When I get comfortable enough, I swim to him where the water is almost my height, asking him to stand farther and farther away from me so that I can test myself. Other times I like to just lie down underwater\u2014a rewriting of an old scene\u2014and look around. I still have to hum to pace my breathing, but instead of the long om, my underwater anthem has become Loudon Wainwright III&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;The Swimming Song,&amp;quot; which a friend sent me during my studies at the Y. It goes like this: This summer I went swimming, This summer I might have drowned But I held my breath and I kicked my feet And I moved my arms around, I moved my arms around This summer I swam in the ocean, And I swam in a swimming pool, Salt my wounds, chlorine my eyes I&amp;#039;m a self-destructive fool, a self-destructive fool. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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