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her rival. I had no goggles, but I forced my eyes open despite the sting of chlorine. From above, the pool looked glassy and hard, a surface that must be broken with force, but below, it was soft and beckoning, a membrane through which light sieved like sugar. The sunlight webbed across Jenny’s skin and through her hair, giving it a reddish tint, and the bubbles of air streaming from her nose added to the impressionistic effect. Suddenly she stretched her mouth open in a ludicrous way and stuck out her tongue. My laughter forced me up for air. “I win!” Jenny announced as she triumphed from below.
    For the next two weeks, I swam at her house every day until the pool had to be closed for the season. They had a diving board, and Jenny and I took turns executing tricks and giving them ridiculous names. It wasn’t a cannonball when I folded my body into a tight tuck, it was a “popcorn kernel,” and when I did backflips—thanks to gymnastics, diving came easily to me—I dubbed them “rewinds.” Mrs. Jones was our lifeguard. She watched us from a lounge chair at the shallow end and clapped whenever either of us completed a dive.
    “It’s so nice to meet you,” said Mrs. Jones the first afternoon I was there. She had the perky delivery of a cheerleader. She made us a snack—peanut butter on celery sticks—and asked about my family. What did my dad do? she wanted to know. Her flat midwestern
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’s made it sound like “Daaad.”
    “He lives in London,” I said.
    “London, England? Gosh, that’s far away,” she said.
    “They’re divorced,” I said. And though divorce was common in our Washington circles, Mrs. Jones looked shocked. I liked her innocence: troubled thoughts rushed across her face like clouds and were gone just as quickly. She was a clear sky.
    “What a shame,” she said. “What a terrible shame.”
    “It’s okay,” I said. “Some people just aren’t meant to live together.”
    “What about your mom? What does she do?”
    “She works for nuclear disarmament,” I said.
    It was only after my father left that my mother had begun to worry about nuclear war. She learned to channel her anxiety. The good thing was that she started leaving the house to attend disarmament-movement meetings. She got over her fear of the dark so that she could turn our basement into a fallout shelter.
    My mother mapped out scenarios, calculating the reach of the radioactive fallout if the blast hit Kansas City, say, or Washington. She drew ominous red circles in our Rand-McNally to mark the circumference of destruction. At the kitchen table, the hanging lamp created a tunnel of light under which she envisioned doom. She’d press her slide rule across swaths of U.S. territory. The fifty states were rendered in pastels—yellow, orange, and green—but as I squinted at them, the crimson lines that my mother etched around their innocent metropolises gave the whole nation a fiery hue. “Look,” she’d say, pointing at the Midwest of her childhood. The corn-soaked plains where her hopscotch squares had been overshadowed by stories of Hiroshima.
    “What,” I’d say, moving into her orbit. It was not a question when I said it, because I knew the answer. She always wanted to show me the same things. Missile silos dotting the prairies. Air force bases with nuclear weapons stacked neatly underground, ready to violate the vast blue skies. She marked the location of these Russian targets with black stars. My mother wouldn’t look at me, but she took my arm, pulled me close. And then, with one cool hand, she guided my stuttering finger across the page. For a moment she was still. Unusual for a woman who was generally so high-strung. Who fretted through rooms, who would often shake her hands—as if spattering water—when she was thinking. She never realized she was doing it. Sometimes I’d call her from a friend’s house and hear the flutter in her voice. “You’re shaking your hands, aren’t you?” I’d say.