IN MY EASTER BONNET

It was April, the month for Easter, and Mother was deep into sewing. She was hands down the best seamstress in Azalea Heights, and she got excited every Easter because she could pretty much make me dress up without having to worry about me talking her out of it. Easter was good leverage for her and Julie’s determined efforts to turn me into a girl. This year she had made me a white shirtwaist dress with puffy sleeves and ten rows of different pastel colors of wide lace all around. If you had to wear things like that, this dress wasn’t so bad except for the four petticoats I had to wear underneath it. It wasn’t just the way they felt that was bad; it was also the way a person looked wearing all that stiff stuff underneath that made your dress stick out like a teepee. Why did girls want to walk around disguised as a tent? Did they really think that was pretty, or what? But my mother worked really hard on this one, and so when Easter morning came, I put it on complete with lacy socks and white gloves and went to Easter services at church.

After church we went to the brand new Azalea Heights Country Club for lunch. This place was out near Flat Fork and had a golf course, a big clubhouse with a dining room, a pro shop where golfers could buy balls and tees and rent carts, and, the thing that mattered most — a big ten-foot deep swimming pool with a diving board. The luxurious new dining room had opened just in time for Easter, and Mother and Daddy wanted us to be among the first to eat there.

You might think just having a good dose of Easter morning religion at church — the highest holy day of the whole year — that I would be more sober-minded and prudent, drawing more heavily on the spiritual nourishment that only a time like Easter can manufacture in a kid whose life is otherwise more like a runaway mine train on a collision course with disaster — but this was sadly not the case. Maybe it was because we had to drive that five miles way out in the country to get there, but the fact that this was the anniversary of Jesus, our Savior, rising up out of His three day-old tomb having just kicked the teeth out of death did not hang on with me like it should have.

The whole time my mouth was in the dining room chewing on prime rib and green beans, my mind was taking three perfectly-measured steps toward the end of the diving board, then leaping straight up with pointed toes and coming down with the exact position and spring needed to catapult me high into the perfect arch that would take me through my intricately-engineered swan dive and into the water with precise perpendicularity and only a teaspoon full of splash. And this was no ill-conceived delusion of grandeur, either. I could do this. I knew it because I had executed just such a work of art many times at the city pool on both the low and the high diving boards. But the city pool had cracks everywhere, the water was yellow and grungy and smelled funny and was always packed with little kids who wouldn’t stay out from under the diving boards, so I had eagerly awaited this new venue and was exited beyond words that Daddy loved golf as much as I did diving because if he hadn’t, I doubt very seriously that we would have joined the country club.

So there I was in a trance. Yes, I was completely finished eating, and no, I did not want any dessert. All I wanted was to get out of there and go look at the pool and salivate about the diving board and the ten feet of water just beneath it that would most likely, because of the price of membership, not be overrun with misplaced little kids I would have to dodge and thus throw off my balance.

Diving was not like most everything else I did. If I missed a squirrel or a light bulb or an egg with my b-b gun, I didn’t take it personally or stay up late doing target practice to improve my average. If I missed twelve questions on my arithmetic homework or couldn’t remember any of the state capitals, that was okay; I wouldn’t need to worry about the ramifications of those things until my report card came home, which wasn’t but six times a year.

But diving was another whole matter. About diving I was a perfectionist. I had for two summers studied with great attention the sixteen-year-old boys at the city pool as they did their front and back dives, their death-defying cutaways, their jack-knives and one-and-a-halfers. I was enthralled with the way their toes gripped tightly to the board while the rest of their feet extended out backwards into thin air and how they would purse their lips, hold their muscled arms stiffly in front of them for balance, look determinedly straight ahead, and then blindly and courageously hurl themselves upwards into a graceful back flip which ended with their bodies cutting a path, ever so lovely and narrow, into the deep yellow water causing hardly a ripple. I knew in only two months I would be out there commanding the attention of golfers coming up on the ninth and cutting through the pool area to go back and tee off for the back nine. I had proved that you didn’t have to be sixteen, and you didn’t have to be a boy to be a diving daredevil with the grace of a gazelle.

I guess my parents overheard my loud dreaming because they suggested that I go have a look at the pool while they finished up and paid the bill. I nearly tore the door off its hinges getting out there, and when I arrived, there were Frankie Potts and Billy Jack Samford shuffling around in their Easter best with their hands in their pockets all cool and talking trash about what they would be able to do off a board with that kind of spring. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but there was another Whisperer breathing down my neck telling me to climb up on that board and take a couple of trial bounces right there in their faces just so they would know that there would be a little competition this year from a most unlikely source: a ten year-old girl named Jen Crocker.

All of this sounded like such a good idea that I wouldn’t doubt that I was finishing the enemy whisperer’s sentences for him. With all the commotion of both the Enemy Whisperer’s and my own inner voice prattling on at the same time, I wouldn’t have been able to hear the Great Whisperer at all, even if He was trying to get my attention, and I don’t know that He was. He might have just decided to sit back and see if I really had learned anything that was sticking from all the waywardness I had fallen into this year. But then the Enemy Whisperer must have decided I was doing a good enough job on myself, so he slunk over and began working on Frankie and Billy Jack. About the time I kicked off my shoes, climbed up on the board and began my small bounces that I had planned to work up into big ones, Frankie yelled, “Bet you wouldn’t dive in!”

Billy Jack one-upped him, “I dare you to just dive in right now dressed just like you are.”

Everybody knows you can’t just ignore something like this. When you get the opportunity of a lifetime to shock some smart-alec kid who thinks he already knows all there is to know, you don’t sit around deliberating. You must act without hesitation; strike while the iron is hot.

And that is exactly what I did at that moment on Easter at the new country club pool dressed in my Easter dress with four petticoats and ten yards of pastel lace. I did the deed. In carefully measured and confident strides, I approached the end of that diving board — one, two, three perfect steps, one hop with my right leg, left toe up and pointed, down with both, high spring, arch, arms extended and then together just before piercing the water as sharp pointed as the needle full of penicillin Dr. Wheat’s nurse would slide into my arm.

This was no softly sung lullaby, no haunting flute melody or muted bluesy trumpet. This was the heartrending throb of full-bodied French horns and the reverberating passion of the tympani climaxed by the clash of cymbals. It was the rhapsody of a lifetime. I was in the water in my Easter dress, and it was cold. It dawned on me as I swam to the ladder to get out that I had not once thought of the fact that it was still April when I approached the end of the board. All I could think about was how it would feel to look up and see the surprise on the faces of those big, cool, teenage boys who thought they were messing with some wimpy little girl. As I clambered out to face them, neither the yards and yards of crinoline and lace nor the piercing scream of my tortured, chill-bump laden body could drown out this symphony.

Something I never thought about until the boys left and I was standing there alone dripping like a sieve was what my parents would say and do when they saw me this way. I didn’t have long to wonder, though, because about that time, they appeared. Daddy was more fascinated than mad; Julie was shocked and threw both hands over her mouth and started shaking her head; but, Mother quickly scanned all that meticulously stitched, starched lace sagging from what once was a snow white dress, now tinted greenish from the chlorine, and then she cast her eyes downward and let her shoulders slump so low, she seemed to lose about ten inches of height. She didn’t start crying and carrying on; she just stood there all short and quiet.

Right then, a type of amnesia came over me that I was not familiar with. I forgot all about how it felt to execute the perfect swan dive; I even forgot how it felt to intimidate those boys. All I could think about as I stood there being my stupid, thoughtless self was what I looked like through my mother’s eyes. I didn’t just see myself as my mother saw me; I saw things way down deep inside my mother that made me feel like I had just dissolved right there down into that newly poured cement and become her.

I saw my daughter who cared only about what might be fun to her at that particular moment; my daughter who never one time thought about anybody but herself and how she might show off effectively enough to get as many people as possible to look at her and swoon in amazement; my daughter, whom I had brought into this world in no easy fashion, who was growing better and better the older she got at completely ignoring all instruction about gratitude and thoughtfulness.

I wondered if this might be a little of what Mr. Pete meant in Sunday school when he talked about a word called “compunction.” We all just thought it was a funny sounding old-fashioned word that we would certainly never use and therefore could pretty much just let go in one ear and out the other like 99% of everything else he said. And yet, here it was right here with me at the country club. It had climbed in our car and followed me all these miles out here in the country and had jumped out to bite me on the rear end. I guess there is something to be said for just going ahead and teaching kids stuff that they don’t understand or care about. Maybe sometimes a lot of it burrows down inside us and grows into something we will recognize someday. Right then, I’ll bet the Great Whisperer was all excited and clapping His big hands up there in Heaven because I had found out about compunction in spite of my inclinations to shake it off my shoulder when it came rolling out of my second ear, but I was miserable about this new information. My swollen rhapsody had quickly shrunk into a direful dirge.

And this was a kind of misery that I knew nothing about. It had nothing to do with fear of punishment; in fact, I would have felt a lot better if Daddy had just snatched off his belt and beat me black and blue right there at the Azalea Heights Country Club swimming pool. But he didn’t. I saw Mother nudge him and shake her head a little like she didn’t want me to see her, and we just climbed in the Pontiac and drove home. Mother tried to undo the damage to my beautiful Easter dress, but somehow, it never really looked the same to me after that day.