Horse Girl

N e a r D e at h E x p e r i e n c e N u m b e r T w o I was probably seven or eight and Leslie ten or eleven when this happened. Maybe she wasn’t old enough to know what damage she could have caused. I know how smart she was. I believe she knew what she was doing. Leslie was told by the lifeguard that she couldn’t teach anyone else to dive by using the method he had shown her. We’ll never know because she says, as an adult, she can’t remember what happened to her as a child, unless it is a recent memory that someone else has told her. This is very common with people who were molested or had some sort of trauma in childhood. You don’t want to remember, so you put it far, far away. Like absolutely gone. At the time this near-death experience happened, I already knew how to swim. I could jump off the diving board at the Altadena Town and Country Club pool. I could swim the length of the Olympic sized pool. I could hold my breath and swim underwater the width of the pool. I could play “Marco Polo” with my eyes shut, although I probably peeked. But I didn’t know how to dive. The life guard taught Leslie how to dive by holding her ankles while she stood on the side of the pool. I watched the two of them from across the pool as she leaped in, sort of head first, he would lift her ankles and she would get the feeling of arching her back and going in head first. She learned to dive that afternoon. He told Leslie, “Don’t ever do this with anyone else. It’s very dangerous. Promise?” The life guard said he made Leslie promise. Promises didn’t mean anything to Leslie. The life guard walked back to the deep end of the pool. “Do you want to learn to dive?” Leslie asked me. I would never have asked her for the privilege. “I know how to do it. It’s easy. The lifeguard showed me. Then you’ll be able to dive. I’ll show you.” I said, “No,” but Leslie told me how stupid I was and I would never learn to dive. Everyone would know how dumb I was. I was afraid to say, “No”, again. I did what Leslie said. I didn’t question her. I never did for probably seventy years. She was smarter than I was. She was prettier than I was. She was more successful than I was. She was older. She was the sister that my teachers would say on the first day of school, “Oh, you’re Leslie Averill’s sister. Boys and girls, Leslie Averill was…” followed by some brilliant thing Leslie had done while she was in that teacher’s class. “Stupid Wendy won’t learn to dive, everyone. I was going to show her but she wouldn’t do it because she’s so dumb. She’s just a little twerp!” I knew that’s what would happen. Leslie clasped her hands around my ankles and told me to dive in the water. I leaped into the pool, trying to make the arched, head-first dives she had done. Only Leslie never let go of my ankles. I can’t remember much, but I can remember my body’s impetus thrust me forward in the air, my head sliced through the water and I could see the pool wall coming at me. I still can. I was unconscious for forty-eight hours. I still have a big lump on my forehead.