Never Smile

 

“Carol!”  I’m rushing down the hallway to the pool, already clad in my cap, googles, earplugs and, of course, swimsuit. I have 55 minutes to swim. It takes me 53 minutes to do 2500 yards. I have no time to stop and chit chat.

            What the hell does Frank want?

            I stop and turn around. He’s ambling back down the hall since we’ve already passed each other. I think I said ‘hello’ to him. He is a friend of LS so I try to be nice. But today, I just want to get in the pool.

            He’s already swam. His weird long anchor patterned swim trunks hang limply over his white mole ridden legs. A striped towel is draped over his neck, and his beady eyes stare into me.

            “You never smile. Is it something I said?”

            I stare at him for a moment, dumbstruck. What the hell is he talking about? Is it just another old white guy telling me to smile? Or did he really say something to offend me?

            This is unlikely since I never have had a conversation with him. Well, this isn’t absolutely true. The other day we were both in the shallow pool here at Kennedy High and I’d been doing my 50-yard sprints on the minute, resting at the wall for 10 seconds between each set and he’d been staring at me. “How you doing?” he’d asked.

            “Tired,” I said. Duh!

            “I bet,” he nodded, before I took off again.

            Nothing in this conversation that would have been offensive, right?

            So, he must just be another man telling a woman to smile because, you know, women are always supposed to be smiling at men to make them feel good.

            Fuck that.

            “That’s a really sexist thing to say,” I told him now.

            Shocked for a moment, he stands rooted to the cement floor, staring at me. Starts to mutter some sort of explanation, “No... No, I…”
            “Women are just supposed to go around smiling at men no matter how they’re feeling? Is that what you’re asking? Have you ever asked a man to smile?”

            “Well, no…but…I…I...

            I turned around and stomped off to the pool, leaving him there sputtering some lame explanations that I didn’t want to hear.

            In the pool, I just couldn’t get the exchange out of my head. I kept going over and over how men are always expecting women to be ‘cute’ and submissive and happy. Men? They’re not expected to do this, right? I couldn’t stop thinking about the exchange and was berating myself for this. “He’s ruining my swim!” I thought to myself as I turned at the wall and stroked down the lane.

           It’s interesting timing since Ian and I had just watched a movie the night before called Ladies First, where a male chauvinist asshole CEO bonks his head and when he wakes up the whole world is upside-down gender-wise. Women are running the world and men are the second-class citizens. The CEO gets a real awakening, living as a subservient, lesser than human in this world.

            I wish that this would happen to Frank. He could shuffle out of the facility (as all old men do. Shuffle shuffle shuffle) and trip and fall and bang his head on the concrete in the parking lot and wake up and find out that all the women are in charge. And, that we were going around telling him to smile, interrupting him when he spoke, admonishing him for his stretched-out suit.

            When you think about it, women really are getting the short end of the stick in this world.

            But hell if I’m gonna smile about it.

            From now on, when I see Frank, I’m just going scowl scowl scowl or better yet, ignore him completely. And if he ever asks me again why I never smile and if it’s something he said, I’ll say, “No, but now it is!”