Swim

you something?” I felt my shoulders stiffen. After all this time, I’d developed a pretty good sense as to when strangers were going to pop the question.
    “Sure.”
    She swung one long leg over the other. “When you asked about volunteer work? I take care of my little brother sometimes? But it’s not, like, an official thing.”
    “Well, that’s nice of you, but I don’t think babysitting’s going to impress the admissions committee too much,” I said, as gently as I could.
    A pink flush crept up from her neck to her jawline. “Oh. Okay.”
    “But we could put it in there anyhow. It couldn’t hurt.” She nodded, once, a princess dismissing a serf. Then she tucked her little purse under her arm and loped through the coffee shop, out to her fancy car with the Berkeley logo wrapped around the license plate. I wondered whether her parents paid her for the inordinate hardship of tending to her sibling. I bet myself that they did.
    “So?” called my grandmother from her bedroom that night. “How was your day?”
    “Fine,” I said, setting down my laptop and piling my folders next to the bowl of wax fruit on our kitchen table, a heavy clawfooted mahogany thing that had looked muchmore at home in our four-bedroom colonial in Massachusetts than it did in our two-bedroom apartment in Hancock Park. I’d made it through five applicants that day, including an hour-long session with a boy who believed fervently—and, in my opinion, mistakenly— that he was going to get into Tufts, even though he had a B-minus average and had been suspended his sophomore year for selling oregano to his gullible classmates at a school dance. I rolled my shoulders, trying to work out some of the tension, as my grandmother shuffled into view, wearing her customary after-six attire: a lace-trimmed peach satin negligee, leopardprint mules, and Queen Helene’s Mint Julep Mud Masque, which, she swore, kept her looking not a day over sixty. She looked like Miss Havisham in blackface. Greenface.
    She teetered across the linoleum over to the stove. “Flanken?”
    “I’ll grab something on my way back from the pool,” I said. We’d been in Los Angeles for years now, but my grandmother still persisted in cooking like it was Christmas in New England and we were expecting a hockey team or two to show up for dinner. She’d regularly prepare flanken with kasha and bow ties, or clam chowder and peppery cheddar-cheese biscuits. At least once a month, she’d stuff an entire leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary and wrestle it on the little hibachi on our tiny tiled porch.
    I went to my bedroom for my gym bag. Grandma followed me in, a plate in her hands, concern on her face.
    “Ruthie, when do you think you’ll start writing again?” “I’m writing,” I protested, folding a pair of jeans and a black sleeveless turtleneck into my bag.
    “Fixing college applications for spoiled rich kids is not writing, Ruth Anne.” First and middle name. She wasn’t messing around. When she set the plate down beside my bed,the minty scent of her mud mask mixed with the smell of buckwheat, onion gravy, and roasted meat.
    “It pays the bills,” I said.
    “It’s not what you want,” she said.
    “And where is it written that I get what I want?”
    She grabbed my shoulders with her skinny hands and kissed my cheek, smearing me with green minty slime. “I wrote that,” she said, and kissed me again, and shooed me out the door.
    I belong to one of Los Angeles’s super-trendy fitness hot spots, a club on Wilshire Boulevard with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on the cardio floor overlooking the bumper-to-bumper backup of luxury automobiles. It’s expensive, especially because I don’t take any of the fancy classes, or use the tanning booths or the sauna or the steamroom, or drop off my dry cleaning at their in-house facility, or hang out and surf the Internet in the juice bar. I was there only for the pool, and the pool was almost always empty, and probably would continue to be until an enterprising Angeleno invented some underwater regimen guaranteed to lengthen, strengthen, and eradicate cellulite.
    I pulled off my clothes, pulled on my black tank suit, and tugged on my cap and my goggles while I stood under the running water. In Massachusetts, we’d belonged to the JCC. Over their Olympic-size pool was a quote from the Talmud, rendered in blue and green tile: Some say a parent should teach a child to swim. Here, all the tiles were blinding