Housekeeping

Every morning my mother leaves to meet the other women she swims with. It makes her feel alive, she says, to brave the cold like that, to dive under water while the rest of us are still sleeping. She arrives home as I’m getting up, sand through her clothes and hair, already in her day’s rhythm— breakfast and whatever else comes next. We often say that she’s in her own world when we talk about the parts of her we can’t reach. When she loses herself in her thoughts, objects start to move of their own accord, finding themselves in unexpected places. There was a photo of her once, wedged inside a cookbook, captured by a lover while they were on holiday in the eighties. I don’t remember, she tells me whenever I ask about her life before she had us, as if by keeping it secret she can hold it more closely. I try to imagine what it was like, as I do when she wades out towards her friends, their towels cast off on the beach behind them.