Swim to Me Read Online Free PDF

Otto up on the peeling chest of drawers; his head fell against the mirror. Even he looked sallow in the low-wattage light overhead. She waited to hear his quacky, reassuringvoice, but he had nothing to say. She put her return ticket next to her on the nightstand.
    The last time she had been in this motel was right after she and her parents had seen “Mermaids Go to the Moon.” She remembered how, when the show was over, the men in the audience had been the first to jump to their feet and cheer while the women and children sat in their seats and clapped. Someone whistled. The mermaids took mock curtsies and blew kisses. They were so beautiful and teasing, safe behind their Plexiglas wall.
    Delores longed for the time when the Walkers were a whole family, for the safe feeling of having her parents on the other side of this motel wall. The sulfurous taste of fear caught in her throat. She unpacked only her pajamas and toothbrush, since she had no intention of spending another night in this place. Then she pulled back the poinsettia spread and got into bed. “So this is how it is,” she said to no one in particular. Grateful to be sprawled out on a mattress instead of scrunched up in her seat on the bus, she pictured Westie lying in his crib and how she would wiggle her fingers across the fat of his belly like some creepy crawly thing, and how he would try to swat her away with his spongy fist. She tossed and turned and knocked the poinsettia bedspread to the floor. Exhausted, she finally fell asleep hugging her pillow.
    Sunlight jutted through the window shades the next morning. Delores jolted awake as if one of them had rapped her on the head. Where was she? Why was her heart flip-flopping so? In daylight, the room seemed even smaller than it had the night before. Best to get up and out of here as soon as possible. She took a quick shower and dropped the tiny bar of Camay soap a half-dozen times. Remembering the laughter of the men from the night before, she wrapped herself in her towel as she rummaged through her suitcase for thebathing suit that her mother had brought home from her cleaning job at the office of a fashion magazine. It was a bright, iguana green, nylon Speedo, cut high on the thigh and low in the back. Her mother said it must have been the latest thing. She’d found it in a bag marked “Photo shoot” that was way in the back of a closet. “No one will want it now,” she had reasoned. “It’s already been used.” Delores put on the suit and spun around in front of the small mirror in the bathroom.
    â€œKiddo, you look stunning . . .”—Otto was back—“. . . like the princess of the sand castle. You’re going to be the most popular girl in the place.” Delores slipped on a pair of cutoffs and a men’s white T-shirt (also from the “Photo shoot” bag) over her suit. She stepped into a pair of platform shoes and clopped off to the reception area, where she ate a complimentary corn muffin and drank a glass of orange juice. Then she crossed the highway to Weeki Wachee. At the ticket counter, she told the woman with a nest of teased platinum hair that she was there for her tryout. “Oh, you must be the New York girl, Delores Taurus,” the woman said, pulling a pencil from some cranny inside her hair. “Thelma is expecting you.”
    Delores walked behind the parking lot to a wooden bungalow that was the administration building. Thelma Foote, she thought, would be beautiful, like Pocahontas or Marlo Thomas. But the woman sitting at the desk in Thelma Foote’s office was well into her fifties. Her skin wobbled like marshmallows, and she had short, mannish helmet-hair. She wore thick, black-framed eyeglasses, which made her eyes seem to protrude more than they already did, a white windbreaker, baggy khaki pants, and a pair of spotless white Keds. She looked to Delores like one of the old women who lugged their shopping