There is a roar in my head and then a kind of stillness, and I thrash about in terror and confusion wondering where up is. I am 16, and a boy named Bobby has thrown me into Lake Ronkonkoma as a primitive way of displaying both his strength and his interest. He is a boy who mistakes fear for flirtation, and despite my cries and pleas, I find myself beneath the surface with my eyes shut tight and my breath gone, clawing my way toward what I pray is the sky, and finally Bobby gets a clue and pulls me back up.

I can't swim. I really mean it. This doesn't mean I can't swim well. It means I can't swim. Period. It's funny the reactions this elicits, particularly in California, where people seem to be amphibious - a kind of geographic mutation.

"You can't swim?" they will repeat, with pity and incredulity.

"I can't dance, either. Or ski. Or knit. Or speak Italian."

"But swimming isn't optional," they say.

I have often thought it ironic that I was born under the water sign of Pisces and have lived for may years by the sea. I like to look at water. I enjoy a hot bath. Other than that, my relationship with the element has been an uneasy one. We have never achieved the kind of intimacy and trust needed to form a real bond.

Not that I haven't tried. I attempted swimming lessons on at least four occasions. Granted, the first time I cheated. It was a cold YMCA swimming pool in a suburb of Chicago. The instructor, a robust young woman named Gretchen, stood at the edge of the pool dispatching orders. I held onto the clammy wall, kicking my legs absurdly and knowing this could not possibly work. It was my husband's idea, and I kept going so as not to disappoint him, heading straight for the locker room each time, where I would take a warm shower and come home with my hair righteously wet.

Years later, in a heated pool, I made a more conscientious attempt. I learned then that it has a lot to do with relaxing, which I have always found hard to do when I am scared. "Trust me," said the teacher, "and trust the water to hold you up. You don't think the laws of physics are suddenly going to fail - do you?" Perhaps I do. Mine is a dense peasant body, of reliable all-terrain heft, built for land, earthbound. Floating just doesn't come easily for me. I truly fear that I will sink like a stone.

Once I did manage to get a sort of float thing going. I knew, fleetingly, the feel of angel hands holding me up. I could imagine being weightless in a sparkling turquoise world. I even learned to push off from the side and propel myself a few feet through the water with my arms extended in front. If only we could have left it at that. But new complexities were introduced. I was to move my arms a certain way, cutting through the water just so, and worst of all, I had to turn my head and get a breath at just the right moment and somehow coordinate all of this without really thinking about it. I honestly don't know how people manage to do it.

In my invulnerable youth, I sometimes flirted with aquatic catastrophe. In 1973, I took a canoe trip on the Minnesota-Canada boundary waters, most of them placid, some of them decidedly not. Winds and currents took us in circles - and canoes, I later learned, are known to capsize. But I did not contemplate the dangers then. On the night of the summer solstice, in the pale white light of 10 p.m., a loon called across the lake, and I was glad to be there.

Another time, in the madness of a moment, I went to sea on a sailboat with a man I barely knew. I had not realized that waves hit so hard, that land can seem so frighteningly remote. As my companion adjusted sails and booms, cursing and muttering and telling me to take the helm, the tiny boat leaned nearly on its side, and I sat in white-knuckled terror, making promises to God.

I have since been on a ferry or two, and these are okay as long as I don't think about it too much. I have seen secrets from such vantage points - dolphins spinning and soaring, a breaching whale. I have felt the rush of sea air, and come to islands, and walked on different beaches. I do not feel deprived.

Nowadays good friends still tell me what I'm missing, offering me wet suits and instruction, wanting only that I might know the pleasures of immersion. "Maybe next summer," I say, but in my heart I don't believe it. It's been too long. How do you change when there's all that fear? How do you become what you cannot even imagine becoming? I used to believe I could do anything, and now I believe I am essentially this. I remain precariously afloat in my own frail vessel, beginning to sense only lately how cold the water really is, how near, how deep.

Cynthia Carbone