The Swimmers

In Part 3, the narrative switches focus from the pool and the swimmers to Alice’s life, describing the course of her dementia through catalogs of what she does and does not remember. At the start, she retains most of her long-term memories. Events from her past, especially her youth, remain accessible to her, like her daughter’s birth and the man she almost married. It’s the most recent things she doesn’t remember, like going for a walk with her daughter earlier that day. She also struggles with routine self-care and hygiene, forgetting to take her medications or comb her hair. Alice doesn’t remember the crack in the pool or that the pool closed. Instead, she thinks she was “kicked out” because she couldn’t remember the rules.

As a child, Alice and her family were sent to a detention camp during World War II. She remembers the number assigned to her family by the government right after the war started. She remembers being singled out in front of her fifth-grade class before going to the camp so they could say goodbye. Her mother told her many times to never let anyone see her cry.