No Firstborn in Our Family Is Ever Allowed to Learn to Swim

I am a firstborn, and I cannot swim. This was not an accident of a busy childhood or an aversion to cold pools. It was a rule, laid down by my grandmother and enforced by my mother with a seriousness that no other rule in our house ever had.

You could stay out late. You could curse a little if your father was not around. But you did not go in the water past your knees, not if you were the oldest, and my brother, who was second, was allowed to swim like a fish while I sat on the towel, and nobody thought this was strange except me.

Grandma called it the promise. She never called it a curse, though that is plainly what she meant. When I asked her, as a child, why, she would set her jaw and say, because a firstborn of this family was owed to the water once, and we did not pay, and so we do not tempt it. That was all. She said it the way you would state a fact about the weather.

Every family has its little rules. Do not put shoes on the table. Do not open an umbrella indoors. I filed the water thing under the same heading and mostly forgot about it, except for the summers, which were long and dry-footed and lonely.

When I was thirty-four my grandmother died and left me, specifically me, a wooden box. Inside were papers. Birth records, a christening gown gone yellow, and a page torn -- actually torn, roughly -- from what I now know was a parish register from a village that does not appear on modern maps under that name.

I had it translated. The entry recorded a baptism in the spring of 1888. And beside it, in a different, later hand, someone had written a line that the translator rendered as: taken by the river, the eldest, as was foretold by the woman on the hill, and the family gave nothing, and so the river will come again for the eldest, in each turning of the house, until the debt is met.

The eldest. In each turning of the house. Generation after generation.

I laughed, at first. Then I stopped laughing and I did the thing you are not supposed to do. I looked into it.

My great-great-grandfather was a firstborn. He drowned in a millpond at nineteen. I had known he died young; I had never been told how. His son, also a firstborn, my great-grandfather, survived to old age -- because, my mother finally admitted when I pressed her, he was never once allowed near deep water. His whole life. The rule started with him. His mother, terrified, made it and it came down to me through the women, each one guarding the eldest child like a hostage.