They all swim naked
I’ve been thinking a lot about the second time I went to Idaho. And I’ve been thinking in a different way than the ways I’ve reminisced or remembered a time and longed to return. I’ve been thinking about the emotions that consumed me and by this I only mean the ones that were not excitement. Rather the insecurities and apprehensions that held my hands on that small charter plane as we flew through the mountains. I’ve often wondered if most girls have felt the same; not the same in the times we’ve all felt on our first or second trip to Idaho, because how many of us have actually been to Idaho? Instead, the dread and unease in imagining the first time others, maybe many at once, would see us naked.
I didn’t know what waited for us at a winter vacation spot in Idaho besides a trip to meet his father and his father’s friends. He told me I’d see hundreds of stars in ways I never had before. We were going to a place so remote where silence was only challenged by the exhales of the Salmon River. We’d hike, ride horses, do yoga, read, have stimulating conversations, etc. What scared me most wasn’t meeting his parents or the charter plane we’d have to take once we had landed in Boise. It was that he mentioned a pool and a hot tub that were situated around the snow and I realized he had never seen me in a bathing suit. I was eighteen, in my second semester at school in San Francisco, dating someone two years older who had seen me without clothes plenty of times and still asked me every day if I loved myself. I tried on a few bathing suits one afternoon, focused on the way I wanted to see myself and bought a blue one even though I didn’t like the way it looked because I probably didn’t like the way any of them looked. I told myself I still had time to fix the things I saw and didn’t like.
The fantasies set up residency in my head for weeks leading up to it. I pretended an untrue version of myself existed. The kind that wasn’t a broke college freshman and instead someone that could belong to a winter home. One to wake up at and swim under the mountains before eating breakfast by the river. I saw a version of myself that still craved what others had, hoping one day homes in Idaho could be my winter ones too.
Days before our trip, on a night that I had gone out and bought shoes for the snow, he told me not to bother bringing a bathing suit. He didn’t know the blue one I had bought was sitting back upstairs in my dorm room on the back of my chair next to the mirror. He didn’t know it existed, let alone that I tried it on in front of that mirror most days.
Don’t bother bringing a bathing suit. This was to mean romance; this was to mean intimacy. If I know my past, he probably put his hands around my waist and looked down at me and said something like It’s not like you’ll be wearing it when we’re there. If I know my past even more he probably said something cliche about making love under the stars too. A nervous me must have said, I’ll still bring it of course. An unaware me must have said, Just for the daytime. A reassuring me would have said, I know I won’t need it when your family is asleep. When I looked up, hoping I didn’t seem like too much of a prude, he stared at me and said, “You’ll be the only one.”
This didn’t become a fight. This became me sitting quietly on my bed or his because all the dorms looked the same when I was eighteen, while he sat and used his charm to convince me. There were sentences thrown around like Everyone is out in nature. If they’re going to swim in the middle of nowhere, they’re going to be naked. You’ll see.
Suddenly the issue stopped being how tight I would have to tie my bikini top so that my chest looked its perkiest. How loosely I could tie the sides of my bottoms so they wouldn’t press too much into my hips. It didn’t matter then that I had bought the high waisted bottoms thinking they accentuated my hips. It didn’t matter that I had chosen the two-piece over the one-piece. There were no tattoos on my body then. There was nothing about my body that I wanted someone to stare at. Nothing that I hoped would draw attention in diversion from the things I cared most about hiding. Be that places where I saw fat, be that places where only I knew the scars that were present. I suddenly felt the need to have longer hair; maybe then it would have covered me in some natural aesthetic or hidden the way they didn’t point straight.
The fantasies I had adopted turned to anxieties and refused to vacate. The words, “You’ll be the only one,” replayed in my head. I started imagining scenarios where a colony of nudists who practice yoga and ate elk also penciled in time each night to gather naked under the stars. Scenarios where someone might catch a glimpse of me alone one morning and form a single opinion about the body I wasn’t comfortable with. I should have said I’ll bring a bathing suit, if I want to bring a bathing suit. It should have been that easy. It should have been, if you don’t want to swim naked, don’t swim naked. But in my mind, girls who took weekend trips to Idaho in March must have looked a certain way. Women who shared stories of the delightful ways water heated by hot springs felt on their skin weren’t supposed to be scared of their bodies.
By the time we were set to leave, I cared so much about how people would look at me, naked or not and was so nervous of potentially being naked around perfect strangers, I didn’t stop and really consider that is what they all were. Strangers. I didn’t stop and think how odd it was to meet your boyfriend’s father and his friends and have them see you naked in the same weekend because I thought overcoming insecurity might mean putting up with being a little uncomfortable.
The cabin we stayed in was right off the river. I remember silence the way I had imagined it to be and found another silence of my own amongst people I felt were a lot of the time too smart for me to talk with. I realized on that trip insecurities go a much longer way than what we see in the mirror sometimes. The group of people we spent those nights with are foggy in memory. His dad was older, smart and didn’t speak to me much.There was a family whose last name might have started with a G with a husband who on both nights turned out to be the only person to suggest having a hot tub where hot tub was a verb and not a noun. There was the masseuse whose name I do truly wish I remembered. My hour with her was scheduled on our last night there. As I ate breakfast she suggested I go for a swim before I met her in her cabin. She suggested it as a way of loosening me up before and I looked at him as I told her I hadn’t brought a bathing suit. I wondered if I would sound dumb asking if I could just shower, would that be the same?
Just go naked, she said and I can still see him there next to me saying,
“That’s what I’ve been telling her.”
I don’t remember what I said when she was still in the room, if I was honest about how I felt or if I shied away from the suggestion. If he spoke for me like he had been doing, without understanding how I felt. In the end she told me she had a bathing suit stashed away somewhere in her cabin that I could borrow and in the end I didn’t take it. I want to say during our hour together she made me feel better. She held my legs and told me they were muscular and said something about understanding why I felt the way I did. How weird it might be if the old man came out and saw me naked in the pool. I agreed, told her that would be weird, but omitted that I was unable to relax wondering how I looked under a sheet as she pressed down on my shoulder blades.
There’s no exciting end to this story when it comes to that weekend. There wasn’t some uplifting moment where the version of me that died seven years ago swam naked and didn’t worry what people would think of her body if they happen to see it. I’ve never quite pinpointed either if I was crazy, if he was crazy, if the scenarios I envisioned might have even happened. Maybe with the man who used hot tub as a verb. But I do know the scenarios I fretted over would not have mattered, regardless of whether they were real or not, if I had had confidence not only in my body, but in my voice and opinions.
We went back to that spot in Idaho on the Salmon River two years later when I was 20 and had a mandala tattooed on my upper back. This time I wanted to do it because this time I was a lot less insecure, yet a lot less happy. The crowd that time was different; another group that does not necessarily glow in my memory. This time the father spoke more, shared his weed with me, showed me books on Native Americans and when I returned home there were the same books in the mailbox for me to continue reading.
Maybe I just wanted a picture of the tattoo. The snow, the steam coming up around me, the mountains in the distance. When I finally did it, it was true, there was something different about taking your clothes off and floating in the middle of nowhere surrounded by silence. Silence until it was disrupted by splashes from a man somewhere between three and four times your age appearing naked down the pool from you. But this isn’t an essay about the confidence old men have.
There are still times when I wonder what it means to be happy with my body when I’ve compared myself to others. I can trace a storyline of my past even further than seven years and remember the moments I let confidence become a part of me. The times I stopped sitting with a towel between my thighs and my stomach when eating at the beach. The times I stopped worrying what I looked like working out in yoga pants and a sports bra even when the pants weren’t high waisted. Truthfully I didn’t learn real confidence until the days came that I didn’t have someone to depend on to validate me. I wonder why we become dependent on others; why we need others to remind us to love ourselves each day. And sure, there are still times when I wonder what it means to be happy with my body when I find myself comparing my body to others. I wonder if we could all get out of our heads, would we see more and stop focusing on how we are seen. Confidence comes with challenges and if one day a group of friends suggest skinny dipping, I might shy away from the confidence I say I have in my body, but I tell myself I’m proud of the confidence I have in my voice.
Victoria Crowe is a writer and editor of You Might Need To Hear This. Originally from Queens, NY, she studied creative writing in San Francisco and has since moved to Los Angeles. She writes both fiction and nonfiction and finds her poetry is usually decent after a bottle of wine. Her work has been published in Harness Magazine, Herstry Blog, and District Lit. She is currently finishing up her second novel and afterwards plans to start her first.
