Ladies’ Pond

Lisa Simone Kingstone

Act One

My neighbor Julian ambled down our block shirtless, curly white wet hair clinging to his neck. A gangly six-foot-one psychiatrist who did seminal work on schizophrenia, he was the one who told me about the ponds, fed by natural springs on Hampstead Heath in London.

“It’s very restorative,” he told me, a blissed-out expression on his face.

I’ll have what he’s having.

I headed out the day after and got lost on the way. The Men’s Pond is exposed and hangs obviously off a main path. But the Ladies’ Pond has a secret gate hidden by bushes that no one can find on their own.

After wandering aimlessly, I followed a pack of women. The plaque on the gate read, 

“No men, children, radios, dogs.” The entry resembled something out of a French movie where a gamin-like character rides her bike with a basket of flowers and a baguette, then opens the gate and goes inside to deliver a letter. I pulled it open and returned the twine rope to the post, disappearing myself into the folds of wildflowers. Women, some topless, some wearing sundresses, were having picnics.

I was new to London. My first adjustment was to turn down my American volume. At the Ladies’ Pond, soft murmurs greeted me, then closer to the grass, I heard chatter. None of it got in the way of the birdsong.

On my left was the pond, brown and completely opaque. Mallards landed sliding over the top like skaters; coots with their orange feet, black faces, and white beaks knocked around on the deck. Baby ducks trailed their moms, zigzagging between the swimmers. A kingfisher observed it all from his exclusive seat on a sturdy branch.

Already wearing my suit, I dropped my bag by a tree and contemplated taking the ladder or jumping off the deck. Reader, I jumped. The water was so cold that I couldn’t breathe. The lifeguard watched me. She had seen this before; sometimes she had to pull women out who went into shock. But I kept moving and found my breath again. Looking around me from my perspective inside, I had joined the creatures of the water. I felt beautiful.

Some swimmers were focusing on their strokes; a group of three were leaning on one of the many life buoys resting, a circle of elbows touching. The silky water had made me euphoric, and I laughed as I swam to the end and back. When I passed women with my huge grin, they smiled back. They knew why I was beaming.

My fingers were becoming numb, so I paddled my way to the stairs and climbed out. The air was warm in contrast. One woman dripping on the deck said,

“First time? Quite nice, isn’t it.”

“There are no words,” I said, tearing up.

The cool had lit up my body, and my skin vibrated with energy.

I went to my towel and lay on the grass with the others and looked up at the underbelly of the trees, feeling my tiny self and my enormous self.

I was converted.

After that, I went as often as I could, sometimes a few times per week. I knew now that putting a warm sweatshirt on after a cold swim, walking home and taking a hot shower, was like foreplay for the rest of the day.

Once when taking a walk on a foggy day, a lone lifeguard was there, so I asked if I could skinny dip even though there was a sign forbidding it. “No one else is here,” I reasoned. The English are rule followers (subjects, not citizens, as an English neighbor once told me), so the answer was an unapologetic no. She allowed me to borrow a suit from the lost and found. But I was American, so I jumped in, and while swimming circles through the mist, I pulled off the oversized one piece and felt like a mermaid. Before I got out, I wiggled back into the suit and slipped out onto the deck.

Act Two

A little over a year after arriving in London, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and stopped swimming. The doctors gave me the first available surgery appointment in October, one month after diagnosis. I went at high speed toward getting through it, like leaping over a ditch and not looking down. I didn’t research online or drop in on chat groups. I avoided telling people as much as possible. I didn’t join support groups or wear any cancer swag: the pink ribbons and tote bags and baseball caps. I felt the terror, then went into stone determination. Run over the hot coals and arrive on the shores of safety, I thought. Do not join this club.

When I arrived with my husband at University College Hospital for the surgery that would remove my breasts and expand the casing for the new ones, a nurse handed me a set of clothes in a plastic bag. Compression stockings, plastic slip-on shoes, and the peek-a-boo gown with ties. Disappearing into another plastic bag went my cozy familiars: sweatpants, my husband’s thick hiking socks, my sweatshirt with the llama that I wore to the Ladies’ Pond. Off went my wedding ring as well. I thought, this is the bag they’ll give him if I don’t wake up.

A large fire in London caused my surgery to be delayed by seven hours since hospitals were being swamped with the injured. After the first two hours, we ceased talking. My husband was watching a show called Scandal on his iPad. Olivia Pope leading a band of recruits, lots of violence and sex. At one point she makes out with the president of the United States, who is married.

I kept reminding myself I wasn’t going to have to go through surgery, since I’d be in a twilight sleep. My only job was to count backwards and then wake up. With those two events right next to each other, from my horizontal perspective, I would be a time traveler. My husband would be stuck in the grim waiting zone that was like an airport lounge. Florescent lighting made it impossible to sleep; hard chairs; stale air; grim, bored strangers waiting to take off to unknown destinations. Announcements repeatedly tasered us over the speakers when I was trying to zone out. Your flight has been delayed. Your surgery has been bumped back. One receptionist told us we might be pushed until tomorrow morning. I had never been so disappointed in having something I didn’t want taken away.

Then it was time.

On the gurney, they covered me with a blanket so thin it was really a sheet. Warm when they put it on, it dropped to the same cold temperature of the passageway within a minute. As I lay in the hall on my moveable bed, voices conferred with urgency. They wheeled me down the hallway so fast, I thought “Wheee!” like going down a hill in my red wagon when I was little. We bumped through swinging doors, then into a colder room with no windows: meat locker. The team was designated just for me: one pushing the gurney, one waiting by the monitor, another checking a chart. Wires were attached with cold gel to my skin; a monitor pinched onto my index finger. Oxygen tubes snaked around my neck. I was tethered to machines. “Don’t move,” I was told.

I felt baby-like. Heads were leaning over my operating table like parents over a crib, wanting me to understand something. The only language I remember is the language of hands. A nurse who stood nearby had warm fleshy hands that squeezed back. The anesthesiologist had clutched mine with cold skinny hands and longer nails. Another nurse gripped my fingers with temporary efficient hands before leaving. In my later surgeries, some hands spoke to me in strokes on the top of my hand or embraced a few fingers reassuringly; or the best, two warm hands together cupping mine.

Before I went under, one nurse said, “Now, darling, picture your happy place.”

I counted backwards and plunged into the Ladies’ Pond.

I woke up to a tube being pulled out of my throat, so jarring that my brain didn’t have time to make me gag. But, I thought, “It is out, I am out. I made it through.” The nurse was extra gentle with me. She started talking about what was happening and what would happen. I would recover and get dressed and go to spend a few nights in the hospital. I felt a certain pleasure in my helplessness. Everyone would do everything for me, wheel me, feed me, even catch my urine in a bag.

After three nights of insomnia perpetually in a morphine cloud, I was released home. In the cab, I tugged on the hospital paper bracelet. Get that hospital off me. But I couldn’t pull or bite it off. Finally, at home in my kitchen, my husband snipped it. That evening, the drugs started to lose their strength. I felt tingling which morphed into itching, then pain. I looked for the first time at my body. My chest was a war zone of purple, green, and yellow patches; black stitches made tracks like crows’ feet. Flat. As Gertrude Stein said, “No there there.”

While recovering, I researched the pond like a fangirl. All the bodies of water on the Heath were originally reservoirs for London, but then at the turn of the nineteenth century, one was offered to men for swimming (women only allowed on Wednesdays). Three decades later, women were gifted a pond of their own.

Eels, crawfish, and swan mussels mixed into the depths like a ceviche. And tall reeds grew below, the hair of a drowned giant. Esther Freud had written that this pond made her feel “exquisitely lucky to be female.” Articles were written about women in their seventies and eighties who were part of a year-round cold swimmers’ group, the prestigious crones of the pond. They wore sensible one pieces and brightly colored wool hats, swimming even when the pond was iced over, and lifeguards had to break it up to create one swimmable alley. I hoped to be one of them someday.

I had four more surgeries. After I woke up from the reconstruction surgery, I tried to get up to use the bathroom. The slight use of my arm muscles created internal bleeding. I had had two bites of stale toast and was looking forward to floating in a morphine stupor when the surgeon dashed in and told me I had to go under again for an emergency surgery. “I don’t want to,” I said like a toddler. “You don’t have a choice,” she answered. My third surgery was to flip one of the pumps they had put in backwards. (When I saw the surgeon in the elevator, I kept expecting an apology for her mistake, but she just looked at the door). My fifth surgery removed a sampling of lymph nodes in my right armpit to clarify if the cancer had metastasized. Five surgeries in four months. October, November, December, January went by in a blur, all with the help of exhaustion and my new best benzo friend, Ativan.

I had gotten a pill from my doctor to get me through the claustrophobia of an MRI. But then he gave me a few more for good measure. When I felt panic rising like vomit, I popped half of one and drifted into dullness. My adult daughter who saw me in that stoned haze cried, not recognizing me.

When all five surgeries were over, only then could my body begin to climb out of the ditch I thought I could leap over. Only then could I begin to wean myself off that beguiling pill. (Later I found out they stopped prescribing it because it was highly addictive and “changed the brain.”)

A few weeks after the last surgery, I could lift my arms again. Putting a glass on a shelf, warm out of the dishwasher, felt significant. After a few months, the scars had turned shimmery white. When changing, I stopped instinctively crossing my arms over my chest when my husband walked by, afraid I’d traumatize or repel him.

I kept a picture of myself in a two-piece bathing suit pre-surgery, like a photo of someone who had died. In it, my breasts swell out of the cups of my red top, and I remember the feeling of being an earth goddess, fertile and fecund. I also recall the sensation of nipples against fabric. I can still get a ghost sensation of nipples, just a brain memory.

The new breasts were hard, with no nipple embellishing the center. I chose not to add the fake nipples since they reminded me of silly putty. I called the reconstructed breasts “knee knobs” for several months. They didn’t move or feel like body parts. My old breasts would float up in the tub, weightless. I used to imagine them saying “aah.” But these appendages were not affected by water, like clay mounds that had dried. They were in a Wi-Fi dead zone on my body, no sensation, and their temperature, always the same. My old breasts kindly adjusted, warmer when I was too cold and colder when I was too warm.

One of the male therapists given to me by the NHS said, “You must feel like less of a woman now.” I think he viewed that as empathy, reading the mind of a recently mutated breast cancer patient. But I didn’t. I looked like a different kind of woman, less earthy, more adventurer. These new breasts didn’t swing, overflow, jiggle, or bounce and reminded me of being a girl when I ran around topless and flat chested, keeping up with the boys on bikes with my scooter.

The breasts eventually softened, and I adapted to the new body quickly. I delighted in going braless, getting to be part of the exclusive club of women who can wear spaghetti-strap silk tops as light as air with no ugly beige underwire bra like a harness distorting the fabric. The lost sensation in my breasts created a new sensitivity on the skin of my back and my neck as if the nerve endings had migrated. I no longer had the annoyance of men gaping at my large breasts; I could go incognito through the crowds, feeling the light fabric slipping against my back.

In May, the doctor had said, “carry on with your life.”

I felt relieved, but not happy. The post-cancer me was a mess of insomnia, side effects from immunotherapy, and my own fear of cancer’s return every time I had a doctor’s appointment. I was no longer a patient trying to survive, which gives sick people a razor-sharp focus reduced to the perimeter of their body. Now I was like everyone else having to make my plans and decisions in the greater world outside the cancer cloud. The old me, galloping through London, hadn’t returned. People kept congratulating me as if I had something to do with surviving. I hated the term survivor, so my daughter coined the term “sur-thriver.” But I wasn’t thriving.

Before my diagnosis, I had seen myself as someone who got away with things in a puckish way. Growing up almost always unsupervised and barefoot and outdoors in Northern California, eating fruits off trees, hiking under the eucalyptus with friends, I had gone wherever I wanted to go and never broke any bones despite leaping between giant boulders at Indian Rock. I had hitchhiked solo all over Europe in my twenties, stealing on to trains, sleeping on beaches, but never had irreversible consequences. I got lost in the Sierras with a boyfriend, perching on a cliff and slipping, but we clutched our way to safety. The Merced River flipped over my raft and twisted me in the ropes, drowning me, but a hand snatched me up. When washing our camping dishes in a lake in Yosemite, my arm brushed against what I thought were the scratchy needles of a pine tree, but it was a bear. I lived in New York in the eighties and was never mugged or assaulted despite returning to my apartment late into the night on a subway that reeked of urine. Once when exiting the subway, two men followed me making vulgar comments. When I got to the exit gate, it was locked. I had to turn around and get past them in the narrow space between the track and the wall, and I did. In a taxi in a small town in Brazil, a mob started trying to tip over the car, but we inched our way out. Our first child had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and almost died, but then untangled in time to be born. I had many close calls, but always skittered away from trouble. It never caught me.

Even though I’m Jewish, I had heard of, but never quite believed in the Evil Eye, but I was familiar with some of my relatives’ tradition of imitating spitting when you delivered good news. Otherwise, the Evil Eye would cast pain, tragedy, disaster your way—you had ignited its jealousy. The baby is beautiful, ptu ptu. I got a strong performance review, ptu ptu. The strategy with the Evil Eye is not to say good news out loud or call attention to yourself. Even before I knew about the Evil Eye, I was good at making myself invisible and took pride in my ability to sneak into concerts and sneak out of trouble. Then cancer. A black mark on me with no warning. I lost what I thought was my invincibility and my invisibility. The Evil Eye had seen me.

I thought I would run back to the pond as soon as I got clearance, but I had a new timidity. I kept putting it off till late summer. I worried the new contaminated me wouldn’t feel the same in the pond. I didn’t want to ruin my memories of the pond. I hunkered down and hid out. But then when mid-July arrived, I decided to go back.

Act Three

The day I return to the pond, I wear sandals and a blue sundress, too short for my middle age. My bag holds a towel, grapes, figs, a thermos of tea and a piece of chocolate.

I march down the hill feeling triumphant. When I get there, I marvel at the waterlilies in bloom and the dragonflies with their electric blue wings dotting the landscape with zigs and zags. Since it is summer, the pond overflows with tourist swimmers who have entered through the other public gate where there is a fee to enter. When the crowds inside overwhelm me, I lie in the field outside in the tall reeds, tucked-in to the privacy of the earth. I doze till my body gets sunbaked. By late afternoon, it has quieted down inside the gate, and I head in.

Dropping my bag in the changing room, I stroll to the deck. I’m surprised to find I am afraid to jump in. I lean in, bend my knees, but then keep stepping back. Not the cold, but the unknown depth suddenly seems treacherous, and I panic. What if something goes wrong? Women pass me and swim off. How did I ever do this? Who was that woman who jumped in the frigid cold and laughed? I can’t find her. I watch from the deck. A woman goes down the ladder and exclaims a delicate, “Oh my.” And then I hear a hush of pleasure. More and more women descend the ladder or spring off the deck. One by one, they return up the ladder and retreat to the grassy field. I am a ghost, silently standing by the water and watching the scene before me. This is what heaven looks like. Maybe I died, and I ascended to this firmament of women and birds and wildflowers.

But I have lived past all our nightmares that I wouldn’t survive. I am fine.

It is late afternoon. The crowd has thinned out. The lifeguard who maybe recognizes me from a year ago says, “Ok, love, off you go.” I count out loud one, two, three and jump, my arms reaching up to the sky. I enter the water and return to myself.

Lisa Simone Kingstone is the author of Fading Out Black and White (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) which was featured on BBC Radio 4. Her work has appeared in national and international publications such as The Hartford Courant, Shooter Magazine, PW, Hadassah Magazine, Patterns of Prejudice, Lilith, and Months to Years among others. Much of her career has been spent in academia, most happily at King’s College London as an Assistant Professor. She holds a BA from Barnard College, an MA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in English Literature. She is currently completing an essay collection entitled Exit, Stage Left: Lessons in the Art of Dying from which this piece was taken.