The Pool
Santa Monica Review, Fall 1999
Honorable mention, Atlantic Monthly student fiction contest
The pool is not the place to look for a husband. Everyone has insect eyes behind goggles and skulls like hard little marbles under swim caps.
But when I looked up at Sandor I saw skin, and a band of brilliant blue where he wore his briefs. Though I knew they were there, I chose not to see insect eyes and a marble skull.
Swimmers, I was thinking, can be attractive, in that physical way that makes you notice their flesh when the water slides around it, the length of their limbs when pool foam stutters over an arm, a wrist, an ankle breaking through film and into air. I would have liked to see Sandor in the water.
Sandor was watching me swim. He stood at the pool edge while I labored through one lap and then another. When I got tired, I pulled myself out of the water far enough to fold my arms on the concrete ledge, just below his feet, so that when I looked up at him the first thing I saw, after his skin, were his briefs. “So?” I asked him.
“When you swim you’re supposed to look where you’re going,” he said. “You get there faster that way. You’re looking at the bottom of the pool. I don’t know what you expect to find there—except maybe a dead body.”
“Oh,” I said.
Then Sandor was churning his arms in the air like a kid at the fair wearing a whirligig. “See?”
“Of course.”
“Push the water away on the downstroke, like you want to get it away from you.”
I actually liked the feeling of water around my body, but I thought I got the idea. I gasped all the air my lungs could hold and dropped underwater, kicking the pool wall to begin my stroke and craning my neck forward to look through the water at the opposite wall. It was very, very far away.
*
My son was at soccer practice. He’d just ordered a pair of high socks with red bands at the tops from an expensive soccer catalogue. He thought they might make him look like Paulo Moldini. Paulo Moldini, the Italian soccer idol, is gorgeous, as gorgeous as my son, who is a black Adonis.
*
The thing a young man like Sandor would never understand is that I don’t swim so I can get to the other side of the pool faster. I am in this for the experience of being wombed in the water. The water, when the empty air noise of outside stopps, reduces my body to its senses. I swim to get the alive feeling on the skin of my underarms and inner thighs, to taste the fishiness of salty water as it slides through the inside of my mouth.
I was back to watching the black T underneath me. I liked the way I could line myself up along it, how I could become a two-dimensional black ribbon gliding in tandem with the black line, twisting over it, the little fringes at my edges grazing it, interlocking with it like cilia and then pulling away. Why should I aim for the other side when all I’d do when I got there was turn around and push off for the side I started out on to begin with?
*
I like to imagine that when I gave birth to Paul I experienced a pain so great it became transcendent, my body flooding itself with endorphins that my blood stream carried to the baby inside me. In childbirth, my baby would have experienced nothing but the nowhere sensation of not being born yet. I floated someplace above the hospital bed while my body writhed in natural-childbirth agony.
Or maybe I did feel the sensations, could feel each cell of my inner flesh as if each was a brain with a nerve center all its own. My cervix: five million pink capsules turning to fire red, each calling out for me to notice them. Five million cells, cells I knew so intimately I could register the distinguishing features of each, count each one from memory and name it.
Only it didn’t happen like that. I didn’t give birth to Paul. I adopted him when he was six, which accounts for the fact that he neither looks like me nor talks like me nor thinks like me. He loves me, though, and I guess he thinks I’m a good enough mother because he’s been asking why I can’t give him a brother. I don’t think that’s such a bad idea, and I even started researching adoption pages on the web. But I also wonder if maybe I’m old enough now to face the process of mothering the way most women do. Maybe I’m mature enough to have a man, to create something real in the moment when a body loses the boundaries that separate it from another, to feel something churning inside me, water trans-substantiating into matter.
*
I reached up to the concrete on Sandor’s side of the pool and rested my arms on the ledge again, wondering if this exaggerated my cleavage. I didn’t tell Sandor that for me swimming was about being in the timeless nowhere inside the water, not about the then when you finished the lap. I asked him how I was doing.
“You’re not getting it,” he answered.
Busted.
“Imitate my stroke,” he said. He secured his goggles to his eyes so he looked like the same kid at the fair, only now the one making whiz noises inside the cockpit of the B52.
Sandor plunged into the pool. When he popped up he was grinning. He lifted his index finger and made an exaggerated gulping gesture with big eyes that suggested I was to do the same. I dropped underwater after him. I kicked the edge of the pool, my body serpenting into a ribbon of flesh. I looked down. Sandor was swimming face-up along the bottom of the pool. In an aquarium once, I’d seen a fossil of a halibut. It was perfectly preserved, from primordial times. Something zapped it mid-stroke as it swam, on its side, along the ocean bottom, both eyes pointing upward. Sandor looked like a moving fossil, a half-human half-halibut mer-mister.
He reached ahead with one arm as the opposite foot kicked back, and then paused as his body moved several feet forward in the water. It was true: Sandor was an exemplary swimmer, and I could see why they’d hired him as a swim instructor. He thrust the opposite arm ahead and kicked with the other foot, his torso tensing and then stilling, his swim trunks the one spot free of motion, powering his strokes.
He pointed to his chin, and I remembered his instruction to look ahead at the pool wall, but it was hard to look away from his briefs, and his goggle eyes on my body. Our strokes fell in sync. We swam that way the entire length of the pool, without breathing, because Sandor was at the bottom of the pool, and I forgot that I had to.
*
For an adopted child being raised by a single mother, Paul has remarkably few eccentricities. When I find him strange, it is only in the ways that make him so wonderful. That he loves babies is a mark of his sensitivity. That he is the boy on the soccer field who walks away when the losing players jab cleats to skulls is a sign that, well, that I’ve had a chance to raise him, at least for these few years.
*
I would have liked to make love with Sandor in the water, but that could not be done given the constraints of a public pool. Instead, we closed ourselves in a cement-and-cinder block storage anteroom whose more mundane function was the storage of flippers. I imagined that we were floating in a celluloid medium of a temperature and consistency so neutral it felt like nothing, a substance that seeped though my skin in slow waves, creating openings on the surface of my body large enough for me to slip outside of it. I was an aqueous entity made of the sensations on the flesh of my cervix, each cell registering a unit of pleasure and then casting it out in the ether—a mass of small disconnected dots: fragments of me, and Sandor, and us.
*
That night after dinner I told Paul we could make meringues. I showed him how to crack an egg so that the sharp edge of the shell wouldn’t rip into the yolk and rip its membrane, and how to hold one half of the shell in the air so the yolk peeled away from the white and then sluiced through the air to the other half of the shell. I left him a bowl and the carton with five eggs, and on the other counter I separated the other half-dozen, watching the sharp tearing motion at the outer membranes of the yolks in the moment they broke free from the whites, thinking about the advice in my fertility book: You are fertile when your discharge is the consistency of an eggwhite.
I must have been watching the eggwhites a long time, because when I remembered that Paul was separating eggs too I turned around to check on him and saw that, though his carton still held four eggs, he was mesmerized before the cracked halves of his first egg. He jiggled the liquid first in one half of the egg and then the other, swirling the yolk in the cup of the shell.
“Paulie?”
“Mom,” he said, not looking up. “I think I’d like to find my real mom.”
*
I put the adoption file on Paul’s bureau that night after he went to bed, and then I heard him click on his light and walk across the rug. It was the promise I’d made when I adopted him. He could see the file. I was strong. I heard his soccer ball bouncing against the ceiling above his loft bed. My son had plenty of love, for me, for Paulo Moldini, for the woman who bore him.
*
When I went back to the pool Sandor was there, but he was doing the kids’ swim lesson and didn’t see me. I watched Sandor with the kids for a while before I got in the pool, the kids’ spiny little spider bodies cartwheeling off the diving board and then storming Sandor, who leaped though the water playing the lead role in a game of Dolphin. Kid bodies converged in the whirlpool emanating from its Sandor locus. A boy did a back flip, ending in a belly flop.
I began practicing the stroke that Sandor had shown me, a better crawl, one that had my palm pushing against the water at the outer limit of each pass. I couldn’t quite imagine wanting to shrink from anything so elemental as pool water, but I pushed the water away from me just the same, the cupfulls in my palms like handholds, my torso lifting away in more of a climb than a crawl. Focusing on the length of lane ahead of me, I discovered for the first time that the black strip at the bottom did not reach all the way to the far wall, but came to a T several feet ahead of it. I imagined grasping on to the T’s crossbar and chinning myself forward. Grab. Pull. I focused on the far wall. There was a black cross painted on it that moved closer as I pulled forward. I reached the far wall with only a few efficient strokes. This was swimming Sandor style. Functional swimming. I felt strong. Healthy body, healthy baby.
*
Before I was Paul’s mother, I visited him at the foster home. He seemed polite but removed. When I brought him home the first day, he wouldn’t speak to me. I asked him about how he’d like to paper the walls of his room and what sports he’d like to take at his new school. I offered him fudge cookies I’d made which it turned out he didn’t like. A kid who didn’t like chocolate. We drove home without speaking while I ate the cookies, the only sound the crunching in my mouth, hard teeth against biscuit and fudge chunks.
*
I hoisted myself out of the pool—lift, swing, stand. Three movements. Usually it took me four—lift, swing to knee, shift to foot, lift again. Sandor was still occupied with the kids, so I only smiled at him, and he smiled a little too before he dolphined again beneath the surface.
*
The adoption agency considered Paul a problem child. This is the only reason I can think of that they consented to turn him over to a single woman with no plans to marry and, however hefty an inheritance, questionable maturity at the ripe young age of thirty. What with new legislation aiming to make it impossible for whites to adopt black children, it helped that my mother had been black. Only I didn’t look black or talk black or think black: I’d been raised by my father and step-mother, and both of them had been white.
Poor Paulie. Without me, I sometimes imagine, he would have languished in the foster care system until he was old enough to blaze out a misguided future in basketball because no one ever loved him enough to tell him he was short. That was his passion when I met him, though he refused basketball lessons during that first rough year when he wouldn’t do a single kid thing like eat cookies or play Nintendo until his eyes glazed into pebbles the color of igneous rock or let his limbs fold over my arms as I carried his sleeping body to bed. His eyes achieved that igneous glaze without the nefarious influence of television, and his body, taut with distrust when he was awake, coiled around a snake in the pit of his belly when he slept, never losing its vigilance long enough for me to touch him.
Paulie’s was a double jeopardy sort of adoption. His mother gave him up because she couldn’t afford to raise him. His foster parents, the kind of middle-class white family who install new chrome in the kitchen in three-year rotations, drowned in a freak accident. Nobody wanted a kid damaged once by a mother who didn’t want him and damaged again by tragedy. I read post-traumatic-stress-reaction between every two lines in the adoption file.
That Paul was reading what the file said about the accident bothered me more than what he’d find out about his mother. She sounded like a nice girl, young enough to be my little sister was all: no pillaging father-figures or neerdowell boyfriends or needle-sharing proclivities to speak of.
*
The girls busted into the lockerroom as I stepped into the shower: a dozen rubber-band-limbed six- and seven-year-olds with bellies arcing forward, staring at my body. A girl stepped under a showerhead and, peeling off her bikini, wrinkled her nose at my swimsuit and then yelled through the echo of roaring showerheads projecting hard rain onto tile. “Aren’t you going to take it off?”
I took off my swimsuit.
“What’s your name?” she asked, addressing my nipples.
“Flipper,” I teased.
“No it’s not! Do you know Sandor?”
“Sure.”
“He’s my swim teacher.”
“Mine too,” another girl shouted, this one addressing my abdomen.
“He’s our neighbor,” another girl broke in.
“Are you gonna go out with Sandor?” the first girl asked, moving toward me. The other girls moved closer, but I didn’t answer. I watched their faces, and I saw Cinderella imaginations churning out the fable of Sandor and the pretty naked swimmer, making love in a bed of velvet grass, sliding into a reflecting pool and drowning.
*
Paul came to breakfast the next morning, but he wouldn’t say anything about the file. The other promise I made when I adopted him was that we’d be a family who ate proper breakfasts, Rice Chex and bananas and toast. Only this morning I wanted meringues, viscous cells of protein gummed in their base of sugar, congealed in four-hundred-degree fire.
Paul left for school, and I came to swim at the pool.
*
The girls drifted away from me and back to their showerheads, their gazes circumspect but moving in unison. A woman walked in to the shower trailed by her young son. She was a brown the color of my fudge cookies. Her son looked like Paul when I adopted him, only younger, a boy trailing in the warmth of his mama’s steps, the boy Paulie might have been had there not been an adoption and an accident and the mystery of his existence; had I been the one who gave him life, and not just the one who repaired him.
The mother put her son under a showerhead and peeled his trunks off to expose his child testicles; the girls watched. The woman stepped out of her own swimsuit with her back to us, and then lifted her arms to lather her short dreadlocks. When she turned so she faced me and the little girls, we were all rapt and silent looking at her. She smiled at the girls, but they kept staring. My eye moved quickly away from and then back to the woman’s abdomen. The skin there was the black of the innermost core of my fudge cookies, but striated with thick white grooves moving horizontally across the width of her front. They looked like stretchmarks, but with a kind of miserable scarring I didn’t understand. Seeing my gaze on his mother’s middle, the boy turned and pointed to her belly as if seeing it the first time.
“Mommy?” he shouted over the roar of the showerheads. “What’s that?”
She glanced over to the girl audience and then back to her son. “Sweetie that’s from when you were inside me.”
The girls, who had edged forward a little when the boy pointed at her belly, hung back along the shower wall.
“That’s from when they had to cut Mommy open to take you out of her belly.”
The boy smiled, as if he’d heard the story a hundred times and wanted to keep hearing it over and over, as if each new telling made solid the myth he was building in his mind, the story of everything he couldn’t understand, the key to the very mystery that he existed.
I turned to the girls, and wondered if they still wished for Sandor to reach out of the pool for my waist and swing me down in to the water, to wrap me inside his limbs as if he was an octopus and ask if he could hold me there forever, and I wondered how anyone could wish for something so sweet and so wrenching, something that ached so much as love.
