Return Trips by Alice Adams Page A

around the pool very slowly, probably just to break his own monotony, but trying to look like a person on patrol.
    One afternoon I watched one of those guys stop at Shallow, and stare down for a long time at a little red-haired girl who was swimming there. She was a beautiful child, with narrow blue eyes and long wet red hair, a white little body, as lithe as a fish, as she laughed and slipped around. The lifeguard stared and stared, and I knew—I could tell that sex was on his mind. Could he be a potential child molester?
    I myself think of sex more often, in spite of swimming, since the day Blond Beard spoke to me, the day I’d had all that garlic for lunch. I hate to admit this.
The Shrink
    An interesting fact that I have gradually noticed as I come to Rossi, to swim my laps, is that actually there is more variety among the men’s trunks than among the bathing suits the women wear. The men’s range from cheap, too-tight Lastex to the khaki shorts with thin blue side stripes that they advertise at Brooks, or Robert Kirk. Whereas, as I noted early on, all the women wear quite similar-looking dark suits. Do the men who are rich, or at least getting along okay in the world, not bother to hide it when they come to a cheap public pool, while the women do? A puzzle. I cannot quite work it out. Blond Beard wears new navy Lastex trunks, which might mean anything at all.
    Most people, including a lot of the men, but not Blond Beard, wear bathing caps, which makes it even harder to tell people apart, and would make it almost impossible, even,to recognize someone you knew. It is not surprising that from time to time I see someone I think I know, or have just met somewhere or other. At first, remembering the peace march kids, I imagined that I saw one or all of them, but that could have been just hope, a wishful thought. I thought I saw my old gym teacher, also from junior-high days. And one day I saw a man who looked like my father, which was a little crazy, since he split for Seattle when I was about five years old; I probably wouldn’t know him if I did see him somewhere, much less in a pool with a bathing cap on.
    But one day I saw an old woman with short white hair, swimming very fast, whom I really thought was the shrink I went to once in high school, as a joke.
    Or, going to the shrink started out to be a joke. The school had a list of ones that you could go to, if you had really “serious problems,” and to me and my girlfriend, then, Betty, who was black, it seemed such a ludicrous idea, paying another person just to listen, telling them about your sex life, all like that, that we dreamed up the idea of inventing some really serious problems, and going off to some fool doctor and really putting him on, and at the same time finding out what it was like, seeing shrinks.
    Betty, who was in most ways a lot smarter than me, much faster to catch on to things, chickened out early on; but she kept saying that I should go; Betty would just help me make up some stuff to say. And we did; we spent some hilarious afternoons at Betty’s place in the project, making up lists of “serious problems”: heavy drugs, of course, and dealers. And stepfathers or even fathers doing bad sex things to you, and boys trying to get you to trick. All those things were all around Betty’s life, and I think they scared her, really, but she laughed along with me, turning it into one big joke between us.
    I made the appointment through the guidance office, witha Dr. Sheinbaum, and I went to the address, on Steiner Street. And that is where the joke stopped being a joke.
    A nice-looking white-haired lady (a surprise right there; I had expected some man) led me into a really nice-looking living room, all books and pictures and big soft comfortable leather furniture. And the lady, the doctor, asked me to sit down, to try to tell her about some of the things that upset me.
    I sat down in a soft pale-colored chair, and all of the funny made-up stuff went