On Pools

Who took this photo? My sisters and I were at school, and Dad presumably was at work, which leaves Mom. I don’t often think of Mom taking pictures, not when we were younger, anyway. It wasn’t taken with a disposable camera, as I first thought, because they weren’t yet available to buy. When they were, their eyes met Mom’s … and Mom at least would never look back. No, she must have had some other inexpensive little camera handy.

The actual photo measures 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.. The back confirms that it was developed at Thrifty Drug, Mom’s favorite store, and it even has a date - January 19, 1979.

The photo shows two workmen standing lower down in a large rubbly pit, while a third, in the foreground, is on higher ground. In front of him is the curved wire armature of what would become a jacuzzi.

The workman lower down in the pit on the right is holding the nozzle end of a long hose from which spouts a mud-colored material that he points towards the ground. We can be sure that none of the men have cell phones on them. What looks like a rectangular shape in one of the back pockets of the other two workmen might be their wallets. It seems a funny coincidence then that the foregrounded workman has the exact posture of someone holding and looking down between their hands at a phone. The posture of the workman on the left with his back to us suggests that Mom, or whoever the photographer was, has caught him in mid-dance. The jaunty angle maintained by his hard hat reinforces the suggestion. Maybe a nearby radio played music, occasionally drowned out by the sound of a machine.

Discretely the three workmen go about their tasks, but together they are building a swimming pool. The one that went into our side yard in 1979. Here it is in its embryonic stage, before it has become what it is destined to be.

Wow, you are possibly thinking. All those years of being afraid of pools, and then you get one of your own! Wild!

Yes, that is exactly what I thought at the time, too. Wild! The good news is, by then I wasn’t scared of pools any more, or not as scared as I used to be.

It was entirely uncharacteristic of Dad to spend a large amount of money on anything big. Or anything small. I don’t know how the idea came into his head. He didn’t even like to swim. And Mom never learned how to swim at all.

So what the heck were those two thinking?

Beats me.

Dad, like a smiling King Midas throwing fistfuls of new hundred dollar bills in the air, gave Mom a choice: a tennis court, or a swimming pool? Which one did she want? By then of course we were all involved. And you can bet that none of the three of us wanted a tennis court. Mom was the only real tennis player in the family. We wanted a pool!

She took some time to think about it. She kept us in a little bit of suspense. We knew it was her decision and we had to wait to see what she would say.

I don’t know if she debated within herself or if she always knew which one she would choose. My guess is she did a little bit of debating. She did really love to play tennis.

January, 1979. The ground looks dry in the photo, but I remember after they first dug the pit, it became a slippery mud hole holding many inches worth of rainwater the color of chocolate milk. We had to wait for the rain to stop for the work on the pool to continue.

I’d come home from school and the first thing I’d do was check the progress on the pool. I was a little upset about one thing. A mulberry tree had to sacrifice its life for the pool. The pool was going right where it had grown. I’d spent a lot of time with that tree, playing in it and under it. I asked Dad if he couldn’t save it by moving it to another spot, but he said it had to go.

For a long time it didn’t seem real. And then one day the water finally went in, and we had a pool. A real one. With a jacuzzi, a diving board, and a slide.

A slide?

I don’t know whose idea that was. Probably Mom’s.

Not that she would ever have gone down the slide herself. No more than she would ever have stood on the diving board and jumped from it into the deep end.

The only place Mom ever went in the pool was the shallow end. She didn’t put her head under the water, she bent her knees until the water came up to her shoulders and then she did exercises, which mostly consisted of waving her arms around under the water. Sometimes she’d lean back, and you’d think, maybe this time she’s going to try to float, and maybe this time she really will float, but her feet never left the bottom, not both of them together.

I would have to think hard about whether I ever actually saw Dad in the pool. Maybe once.

One way to describe it is to say that I adopted the pool, and it adopted me. It became mine, and I became the pool’s. Summer mornings I’d wake up and walk directly outside, through the glass sliding door and across the brick patio, to the pool, pick up the long-handled net, and start sweeping it across the surface of the water, clearing it of the leaves and pine needles and bugs that had fallen into it in the night and early hours of the morning. Along with a dead bee or two.

And there was the pool man, my helper, my accomplice. A very tanned, very bleached-blond guy who drove a little white pick-up and who entered the pool area through the front gate facing the road. He could have been twenty or he could have been forty. I was a teenager by then, and teenagers very crucially never know how old people are. Shy, or at least not prone to conversation, he moved with Zen ardor along the circumference of the pool, kneeling to check the pH levels and I forget what else. Pouring chemicals from the white plastic bottles he’d brought in his truck.

He knew the water, and I knew he knew the water. Later I tried to write a story about him, or rather, about the pool, or rather, about … anyway, in real life we did, one afternoon, stand side by side, watching the dragon flies as they skimmed cheekily over the water, and he said something about them, or I did, but I don’t remember what, only that we agreed about it.

The pool had lights in it for night swimming, but it was sometimes better not to turn them on. Especially if you were alone. Swimming in the dark, lying on your back and looking up now and then at the sky filled with impossible stars, in cloudy clusters, distinct and far-away.

The pool, a little piece of impossible romance dropped into my life by chance and surprise.

And I remember one night, coming home late, really late, more like early, and instead of going to my room I went to the pool and started swimming. Doing the crawl, though I’d never learned how to do it for real. I thought I was being quiet, but after a while Mom’s voice came floating over the cool morning air at me, through the dark window in their bedroom.

“Amanda? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m swimming.”

“What?”

“Swimming.”

She turns her head and speaks over her shoulder to Dad, who mumbles something from under the covers.

“Don’t stay out long,” Mom says finally.

It seems that Mom chose the pool because she knew that it would give us, my sisters and me, the most pleasure. Don’t get me wrong - she loved the pool. Besides cooling off in it, she loved sitting beside it, she loved looking at it, she loved that it was there. Dad’s idea might have been to improve the property or some such thing, but Mom knew what a pool was for: Having fun.

The last time I saw the pool … I hadn’t been back in many years, and I drove one day to see the old house. I turned down our road, driving slowly, like creeping up on someone who doesn’t know you’re coming … what I found was a construction site. Or rather, a destruction site. Part of the house was still standing - the oldest part. The rest, the part that Dad had built himself, was gone. Workmen were pushing wheelbarrows across what used to be the front yard. One of them dumped the contents of a wheelbarrow in a loose pile and turned back … I got out of my car and crossed the road, bent down to look at the dirt he’d just left… bits of blue and green tile were in it, with a familiar pattern … I stood up fast, realizing.

I saw a gaping hole in the fence where the gate used to be, the gate the pool man had used, as if someone had torn it away. When I tried to look through it I could see a mess of dirt and rubble, no more pool, no more even hole in the ground. From what I could tell, they’d already filled in the hole and were now clearing the ground.

Some of the workmen had noticed me standing there, and I felt suddenly out of place. Unwelcome. Technically I was trespassing. And then, imagine some foolish person saying, I grew up here, my parents put in that pool. You see, I used to be afraid of pools and swimming, but I got over it, pretty much, and then this kind of miracle happened …

Besides feeling self-conscious, I was not going to be sentimental about it. I didn’t walk over and pick up a piece of tile from the pile of dirt lying on the ground. I thought about it, but I didn’t do it. I thought how I would have to keep the piece of tile forever, carrying it with me wherever I went … I got in my car and drove away.

Of all the days to decide to drive past the old house … You sure can pick them! I said to myself, or something like that. What else are you going to say when life decides to slap you upside the head? Tickle you where you have no funny bone? Remind you not to get too cute?

It was just a pool, and we were just three girls, and Mom was just Mom and Dad was just Dad. And the house was just a house, with ugly carpets and too many cats. (I haven’t even told you about the cats.)

And who can make a story out of that?

Susan and friend Tricia jumping into the deep end.

P.S. This Common Reader, as some may already be aware, operates on a shoestring (potato) budget and does not employ a fact checking department. That said, it has recently come to the Editor’s attention that Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls do not have triangle eyes, as was stated in a previous post, but triangle noses. Their eyes are round. This error has been corrected, or will be. It remains the Editor’s unchanged opinion, they are still very creepy dolls.