I began writing Night Swim soon after my son was born. Becoming a parent – a mother – for the first time sparked a new creative seed in me. I wanted to delve back into a series of childhood events that haunted me for decades – events that included the suicide of my best friend’s mother, the loss of my father’s business, my family’s sudden plummet in financial status, and the slippery nature of material wealth and how it fails to protect families from emotional uncertainty and darkness. I wanted to go back to 1970 and create a fictional family to see how the parents and their children would deal with personal and social challenges of the time. How would my protagonist, Sarah, struggle through complex, emotional stuff, even if some of this “stuff” was unsolvable?

In Night Swim, Sarah Kunitz, begins her story by recalling an earlier time:

…and in the darkness [I] move down the hall to bed, returning to the past for answers, skipping as it is easy to do in my older mind from one year to the next, to a place this is no longer there. It’s as if I’m swimming toward forever, only backwards.

What are memories made of? How do we capture what can’t be held? How do these memories move and shift inside us, directing choices we make or don’t make, choices that determine the journey we take in our lifetimes? A younger Sarah touches on this when she observes her quirky, hermetic next door neighbor.

The only evidence that Mrs. Brenwald once had an existence outside her house sat in her driveway. An antique Ford covered in a sheet was anchored to tires profoundly out of breath, squashed by endless seasons passing. More than once, Father called the police to take the car away. “A pile of crap,” he called it, but the car remained impervious even to him. This proved to me that Mrs. Brenwald made a pivotal decision many years ago, and that she had willed her life into its present shape. To form one’s destiny seemed monumental…mystifying and attractive.

Where we live, and how we’re raised also shapes our destiny. We may inherit those two things, but then what? The town of Soquaset in Night Swim is not unlike those wealthy suburbs that John Cheever wrote about, and the town where I grew up. Soquaset fostered high expectations for financial, academic, and social success.

In the fifties and sixties the town flourished and became known for its excellent school system and lush neighborhoods…Neighbors admired our house for its stained glass windows in the turn of the stairs and in the dining room windows.

From the outside, things looked good. But what the neighbors couldn’t see were the disruptions at the Kunitz family’s dinner table, the far less pretty picture of an unhappy marriage, and four children struggling to find their way through a maze of family discontent. Sarah’s father pounds his fist on the table when angry. He speaks disrespectfully to the family maid and calls her “Girl.” Sarah’s mother doesn’t speak up. Instead she “pressed her lips until they whitened,” or “stiffened into plaster of Paris.” Her mother also took pills. Once a promising violinist, arthritis forever changed the course of Sarah’s mother’s fate.

Now her violin lay in a cool corner of her bedroom closet like a dated history book. Once a year, she picked it up and tapped the strings, stroking the bridge with one finger. She’d place the chin rest under my chin and for a moment I’d see her face change, soften, open up to a world beyond the one she found herself in, and that included me. She held the bow for me, then sawed my arm back and forth across the bridge and together we listened to the breathy, sleepy strings.

“All dried out. They sound terrible.”

She stopped sawing and her mood changed.

“You could buy new ones.”

“What’s the point?”

When people asked why she no longer played violin, she said, “Arthritis and children,” and gave a quick smile, as if having children was some kind of ailment. I know she didn’t mean to hurt me when she said that, but she did.

How does Sarah’s mother choose to deal with this loss? Her struggling marriage? Rather than speak, she takes pills to mute her physical and emotional pain and the consequence of her withdrawal shudders through her husband and four children’s lives. It becomes an unmentionable topic. Here’s how the youngest, Elliot, manages:

From birth Elliot rode the emotional currents that stirred up our household. He did this instinctively and innocently, as if each swell in the familial sea were a natural occurrence. He didn’t know any other way. I guess none of us did. But he was more accepting.

His entrance into life deepened Mother’s reticence. If I was used to her retreats, whether in the garden, or on the phone, or at the club, after Elliot, her absence became customary. We were entities whose biological threads connected to something amorphous, which we called Mother. So, instead, Elliot tied himself to his dreams and imaginary friends.

Love was something distant that retired to a room on the second floor.

Mother was beautifully ethereal and because of that Elliot sought that which he could hold in his hands — tactile things, touch. So it was that he first came to love miniature toy animals. He embraced them. He entrusted them with his emotional survival.

Sarah and her older brother, Peter, manage by embracing music, a gift they inherit from their mother. Singing becomes their voice, a way to speak and learn “new chords” of self-expression. 

Peter and I mounted two more sets of stairs to his room. We shut ourselves in his closet, sitting on the floor under a forest of shirts dangling on hangers. “What’s wrong with them?” I didn’t understand my parents’ talk. It tangled like knotted strings.

It’s not your problem. Listen to this.” He sat crossed-legged and positioned his guitar over his knees, making sure the neck didn’t bang against the wall. His confidence, tinged with disgust, galvanized me. If he could dismiss them, so could I.

“I’ll teach you some new chords.”

I nudged closer to his knees and let him arrange my fingers on the frets. Cramped in this narrow space, the sweat under his arms smelled like wet cotton and rubber. But nothing was sweeter and safer. If I had a hammer –

The metal strings thrummed a beautiful, round sound of The Weavers’ folk song. Peter strummed harder and our harmonies gelled “I’d hammer out love – ” until our voices and Peter’s guitar formed a nest high in the trees, untouchable as I sang and my lungs vibrated with deep breaths and melodies and invisible wings. Whatever existed below me, in the lower floors, became inconsequential. No one interrupted. No one came up to tell me to stop.

The middle brother, Robert, escapes into his world of science fiction books.

Robert, of course, plunged in his book series on time travel. He was on book eleven now. According to the series, eleven was a mystical number with vibrations that opened the soul to yet another dimension, a parallel universe where people like us lived, only differently, without the noise and disturbances.

What’s happening in our culture and society also shapes us. In 1970, family roles were shifting. Voices of protest, changes in sexual mores were ringing the air. Women were pursuing men-dominated careers. These things filtered into the Kunitz family.

Every family carries painful memories and conflicts that, unreleased or misunderstood, can turn poisonous. The Kunitz family was struggling behind close doors; yet it wasn’t until I was older that I realized how common these hidden, private struggles were and are for all families. So, what’s an antidote to this insidious, quiet poison? Connecting to someone in a real, sincere way.  Sarah’s music teacher reaches out to her. His honest intention is felt, so Sarah responds.

I could hear the sincerity in his voice – not urgent, not cloying.

“My father died when I was a little bit older than you – your brother, Peter’s age. So, you and I know about losing the most important person in our lives.”

I nodded again but I didn’t feel like escaping, as I usually did.

“He died of cancer. Big family secret. Not good to have those kinds of secrets.” He tapped his chest with two fingers… “So if you want to get anything off your chest, Come see me. Anytime is a good time. Just knock on my piano.” He smiled. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You sound terrific. Now memorize those words and you’re there.”

I collected my books and headed out more or less dazed. First, that he had spoken personally to me, and second, because of what he said about his father. I walked home in a dream that lasted all the way past the stores and trees, our driveway – a feeling that I was not alone.

I created a fictional family – the Kunitz family – so that I could swim freely into these murky undercurrents of emotions that most of us find difficult to face – emotions of discontent, disappointment, grief, loss and failure that burden our past. I also created the Kunitz family as a means to search and recover what buoys us all in our most difficult times – music, talent, faith, friendship, understanding, love, romance – to rediscover what keeps us afloat.