Poolside

by Matthew Capodicasa

If Sally was swimming, she was searching. There seemed to be no exception to the rule, unless perhaps she wasn’t actually swimming, but just lounging by the steps in the shallow end. But her mother, a sunbathing enthusiast, usually objected to this, because of Sally’s proximity to her. She told Sally as much.

“Go away,” she said, turning the page of her magazine.

Sally went, pivoting and dolphin-diving toward the deep end.

Maskless, Sally wasn’t much of a presence in the pool. Blind, she couldn’t navigate very well, and tended to swim slowly. But masked, or even goggled, she owned the water, every cubic centimeter. She barrel-rolled, dived, submerged, surfaced, and skimmed the concrete bottom, exulting in the sheer near-weightless joy, but always remaining focused on the task at hand: looking for lost, sunken things. Sometimes she abandoned the feeling of laminar flow for the feeling of stillness, and just hung in the water, feeling the currents of senior-citizen-paddling in the shallow end. (Sally, at seven, was usually the only one in the pool under forty. Discounting her mother, who rarely got in, she was the only one under sixty.) Stillness afforded her the chance to survey the briny deep of the regulation-sized pool without actually interfering with it. She stayed underwater so long the skin of her fingers wrinkled and were pruny enough to hurt. Sally lived underwater. Every now and then her mother noted this.

“Don’t stay underwater so long. You make the lifeguards nervous. And I don’t want to talk to them,” she would say.

But Sally and the lifeguards had an understanding. They let her stay underwater as long as she wanted, so long as she flashed them a signal every now and then to let them know she hadn’t drowned: a simple thumbs up.

It had been Hal’s idea. Hal suggested that they establish some sort of communication with him and the other lifeguards so that they didn’t have to worry about her. They decided, after much debate, that a single thumb in the air would be acceptable, but only if Sally was too busy searching to devote an entire hand to relaying the message. The thumbs up was overused, sure, Hal said, but its purpose and message were clear.

“I need to know you’re okay, Sal,” Hal said. He called her “Sal” and she called him “Hal.” It was their thing. Everyone else knew him as Harold. But this way they could be pals. Hal and Sal. Sal and Hal.

“I’m fine, Hal. Always,” she protested.

“So just tell me that,” he said, “What’s wrong with letting me know that my girl’s okay?” Then he grabbed her and tossed her back into the pool.

It occurred to Sally, mid-flight, that their deal probably worked out better for Hal and the lifeguards, because it allowed them to avoid her mother. She hit the water and sank and stayed there for a while.

Her mother had little regard for most of the lifeguards, probably for no other reason than that they were there, or so Sally reasoned. But the disdain she sometimes displayed toward Hal came from somewhere else. Perhaps her mother targeted him because he inserted himself into Sally’s life, and, by extension, hers. She pretended not to know his name. She usually called him “William” first, and depending on how tired or irritable she was, she sometimes turned to monikers like “Tiny” and “Spike” and, once, on a particularly hot day, “Fang.”

Sally didn’t quite know what to make of these substitute names her mother conjured. They bore little resemblance to the actual Hal, a smiley, clean-cut blonde with no body piercings or snaggle teeth to speak of, at least that she could see. But Hal was Hal, her mother was her mother, and there were things on the bottom of the pool that needed to be found.

Golf balls constituted the bulk of Sally’s collection of found objects, the spoils of the driving range across the road. Skewed drives bombed the pool like artillery, much to the senior citizens’ annoyance and Sally’s delight. She was, after all, usually safe from the depth charges, as she pointed out to Hal.

“What if one lands on your head when you’re swimming and you get knocked out?” Hal said from the lifeguard chair, tipping his sunglasses down on his nose. Hal’s lowly chair was plastic. “Then you’ll just float away and get stuck in the skimmer.”

“I’m too deep to get hit,” Sally countered. Her arms emerged from the water and clutched the side of the pool, and she hauled herself out and onto the deck. She stood and dripped on him. “If anyone’s going to get hit, it’s you.”

Hal laughed. He started to say something, but instead sprung from his chair, picked her up like a baby, spun her around and discus-tossed her into the pool. This was, by far, Sally’s favorite way to go back into the water.

Aside from golf balls, Sally’s collection counted amongst its number hairpins, bottle caps (Orangina, mostly, a favorite of pool members), rocks, coins, a thimble, several Matchbox cars, the nosepad from a pair of glasses, a pair of nail clippers, and an old skeleton key. There were also various pieces of glass and plastic, but Sally didn’t keep inventory of them, mainly because they didn’t have names. But she kept them just the same. She didn’t know where they came from. She just assumed they were lost. Lost things that needed to be found. Hunting and searching never struck her as complex activities. She was the rescue person, the rescue girl. She didn’t show her mother the blue shoebox Hal had furnished to store these treasures. Her mother would find it tacky. Sally chose instead to indulge her mother’s indifference towards her, and left the shoebox in its hiding place: behind a rock on a patch of grass beyond the diving board.

Sally didn’t understand her mother. She always chose to be away from Sally, and Sally never saw her interact with anyone else at the pool club. That she ranked lower on her mother’s scale of swim club social strata was not lost on Sally, but she chose not to be offended. Her mother preferred avoiding the senior citizens alone, without the bother of her seven-year-old companion. But that didn’t stop Sally from questioning her.

“Why do we even come, if you don’t talk to people? You hate everyone there. Why do we go?” Sally demanded one day as she and mother crossed the parking lot to the pool.

“Because there’s a pool, you’re a child, and I like sun,” her mother said, increasing her pace to a light speedwalk. Sally kept up. “Sunbathing isn’t something you do with others.”

“But you don’t like being here at all. Isn’t there sun in the backyard?”

“I’d have to deal with you in the backyard. And I like the pool. I like to sit by pools. I like the feeling of the sun on my skin, and the option to go in the water if I want. I’ve been doing it since I was a little girl. Satisfied? Now, go bother William.”

“Hal. Or Harold.”

“Whatever. He’s a nurse. Like he’s worth my time.”

“He’s an E.N.T., not a nurse.”

“It’s E.M.T., Sally.”

Sally frowned. “No, I think it’s E.N.T. Hal told me.”

“You misheard. What does E.N.T. stand for? Emergency Navel Tonguer?”

“What?”

Her mother froze. “Nothing.”

“What’s a navel?”

“A type of orange. Now go inside.”

Her mother stopped walking. Sally realized this after a few steps and turned around.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

“Not until you get in there,” her mother said, holding her ground.

Sally turned and trudged through the open fence into the pool area. She looked for Hal to confirm that it was E.N.T., but she could not find him. She asked Joe, one of the other lifeguards, about him. Harold was cleaning the locker rooms, he told her. Sally retreated to her blue shoebox and re-catalogued its contents. When Hal emerged from the locker room, covered in sweat, Sally confronted him by the deep end and told him about what her mother said.

“Your mom’s probably just letting you have fun. You love the pool, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but . . . ”

Hal put a hand on her shoulder. She let him.

“Then leave her alone. Now. Go find some more treasure.” With that he grabbed her under her arms to heave her into the pool. Not his best toss, but a decent contender. As he grabbed her, his hand had brushed against her chest. She felt nothing more than the contact, a simple touch, the same as when we had touched her shoulder, nothing more. But Sally knew that this, her chest, was a source of something for her mother, and for other women. It seemed to be a protected area, an area of perhaps great volatility contained. She knew this region of her body to be a taboo zone, but why, she did not know. She knew it had something to do with womanhood, and adulthood, but not childhood. But she had occasionally seen her mother let her hand slip down to her breast and trace a circle on it, as if walking the path of something else before it, keeping the footprints fresh. Though Sally felt nothing beyond the pressure of his hand against her bathing suit against her chest, she knew that this should mean more. So she treasured it as well, for it was something her mother didn’t have that she did, and she was only seven.

There wasn’t much in the pool that day, but her mother seemed particularly irritated, and Sally didn’t want to speak to Hal since he had sided with her mother, so she kept her mask on and swam around. She saw, from the shallow end, her mother dive into the pool sometime around noon (the sun almost directly overhead from underwater). Eventually, Sally reasoned it had to be at least near time to go, so she sculled over to the steps and walked out of the water.

Her mother was walking by the steps towards the locker rooms, and was surprised to see Sally’s dripping form before her. The two stopped short of one another and said nothing. It was her mother who broke the silence.

“I’ve lost an earring,” she said.

“An earring?” said Sally.

“Yes. When I was in the pool.”

“Oh. Which earring?”

“The diamond stud.”

“Oh.”

Her mother seemed to force herself to speak.

“Put your snorkel on. Will you look for it for me?”

Sally nodded, and darted off to their pool bag. Snorkel in mouth, she proceeded to the water, and jumped in, noticing her mother enter one of the locker rooms as she broke the surface.

Sally started in the shallow end, but it soon proved difficult, as she had to wiggle around the senior citizens, or more accurately, around the skin billowing in the water and the aqua shoes covering old-people feet. Thanking God for small miracles, Sally completed a cursory search and resolved to return to that area when they left the water to go play bocce ball. Moving beyond them, Sally laid out her grid. She started at one side of the pool and swam straight across, canvassing the pool floor. Not discovering anything, she moved over one body’s width and swam back the other direction, canvassing the next strip of pool floor, all the while keeping her eye open for the glint of something shiny.

It surprised her that her mother was in the locker room. She regularly complained of their dirtiness, and how she refused to use them until they were clean. But perhaps she had wanted a shower. And Hal had cleaned the locker room that day. So, perhaps her mother had given in. Sally kept swimming the grid, moving like a man mowing a lawn, snaking across the pool into the deep end. She ducked under the buoy conveniently demarcating the deep end for those little kids among them, and pushed her search into deeper waters.

Then she saw something. Resting just next to a small grate. It twinkled, flashing off of the rapidly setting sun. Sally efficiently redirected her body towards it, breaking the rules of her grid. She spat the snorkel from her mouth and dove, dove, down towards it, careful not to make too many waves. She knew that her interference in the water could sweep her prize into the grate. She noticed, as she approached the bottom, that her ears hurt. But she paused, allowing her ears to become accustomed to the depth, and kicked over to the grate.

The earring was gone. Sally panicked momentarily. It was one thing to never find it, but it was another to find it and lose it. She cocked her head in desperation, and the new angle refracted the light off of the earring which had rotated it to its non-shiny side. Sally extended her hand and grasped it.

She swung her feet downward and kicked off the bottom, zooming up to the surface. She broke through, earring in hand, and thrust it in the air, victorious. She scrambled over to the side and lifted herself out. Clutching the earring, she went in search of her mother.

She was not near the table, nor was she anywhere near the pool. Sally walked over to the lifeguard desk near the locker rooms. She found Joe, another lifeguard, sitting there.

“Have you seen my mother?” she asked.

“Locker room,” Joe replied, not looking up from his word search book.

Sally began walking toward the door.

“Eighteen and up, Sally,” Joe said. “Can’t go in there.”

She moved in close to him, dripping on his book.

“But my mom’s in there,” she said.

“She’ll be out soon,” he replied, sliding the book out from under her.

Sally stood there for a moment, and was about to walk away when she noticed a red shoebox underneath the desk.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

Joe twisted his head to get a look without moving any other part of his body. “Harold’s junk. He collects it. Throws it in the pool for people to find. Says there are kids who look for them.”

Sally looked at Joe. She hated him. She hated him more than her mother and Hal put together. She hated him for knowing only enough to destroy her, but not enough to know not to.

She retrieved her blue shoebox from its hiding place and came back to the lifeguard desk. Squatting under the oblivious Joe, she upended the contents of her box—her discoveries—into Hal’s cache. She stood up, still clenching the earring in her hand. Hal stepped out of the women’s locker room, covered in sweat.

“Hey, Sal,” he said.

“Hey, Hal,” she said, and walked off.

She walked as far as the water’s edge. She stood there, dripping, cold, her feet turned out like a duck’s. She considered her options. She could swim off. That could work, except that there were those that were bigger, and they could catch her. She didn’t have her mask; she would be swimming blind. Also, she could see the other shore, and it wasn’t any better. Sally imagined a more experienced swimmer might seek the safety of other shores, but in this case, she would still be fenced in. Sally spat out a gust of air from her nose. The choice lay before her. She jumped in.

Her mother appeared on the edge of the pool. “Time to go,” she said. “Get out.”

Sally turned around and looked up at her mother’s face, now about five feet above her. She noticed her mother’s cover-up was wet at the points of contact with her bathing suit, particularly her chest. Hal appeared behind her mother. He flashed her a thumbs up.

“I didn’t find it,” Sally said. She swam into the center of the pool and submerged herself, daring them to come get her. When she ascended to catch a breath, a golf ball entered the pool’s airspace and followed a parabolic path into the water between Sally and her mother. It splashed, but not as much as Sally thought it would. She had never seen a golf ball land in the pool from above the water. It plopped pathetically and disappeared beneath the surface.