The Goldfish Summer

Margaret stood at the chain-link fence, the same one that had surrounded the community **pool** since 1952. Her white **hair**—still thick, though now the color of morning frost—caught the sunlight as she watched children splash and shout, their joyful chaos echoing through the decades.

Sixty-five years ago, she had stood right here with Eleanor. They were fourteen, their hair in identical ponytails, promising to be **friend**s forever no matter where life took them. They'd practiced their synchronized swimming routine for hours, Eleanor graceful as a swan, Margaret determined as a bulldog, until they could move as one entity across the turquoise water.

"You gonna stand there all day, or come in?" Eleanor's voice had carried across the water, her hand already reaching for Margaret's.

Now, Margaret's fingers traced the small ceramic **goldfish** pendant around her neck—a gift from Eleanor on her eightieth birthday last month. It had become their tradition, these yearly reunions, after forty years of separate lives. Margaret had married young, raised three children in Ohio. Eleanor had become a librarian, never marrying but becoming honorary aunt to half the neighborhood's children.

The summer they were sixteen, they'd both won goldfish at the county fair—the cheap kind that usually died within a week. But Margaret and Eleanor had sworn to keep theirs alive. They'd researched pond care, saved allowance money for proper food, and named their fish Comet and Stardust. Comet lived three years. Stardust made it to five.

"They exceeded expectations," Eleanor had said at Stardust's little backyard funeral. "Like us."

Margaret smiled at the memory. They had exceeded expectations, hadn't they? Both widowed now. Both still living independently, Eleanor in Chicago, Margaret here in what had been her mother's house. Eleanor still drove—that stubborn determination of a girl who'd refused to let Margaret quit the swim team. Margaret still baked the chocolate chip cookies they'd perfected together.

The pool manager, a young man with kind eyes, approached her. "Lunch break starts in ten minutes, if you'd like to come in and sit."

"Thank you," Margaret said. "But I'm just remembering. My **friend** and I, we used to come here every summer. She's visiting next week. We're going to swim one lap together, just like old times."

"That's lovely," he said, and she could tell he meant it.

Margaret's hand found the goldfish pendant again. The water glittered beyond the fence, the same turquoise it had been in 1952, the same it would be long after she and Eleanor were gone. But that was all right. They'd had their turn. They'd had their summers, their synchronized swims, their improbable goldfish, their friendship that had stretched across seventy years and counting.

Some things, she decided, watching a young girl attempt a dive, only got better with age.