Pool Party

I invited my dance friends over last weekend for the first pool party of the summer. Since Nick and I had just returned from North Carolina in mid-June, I was way behind on my entertaining schedule. So after one of Hama’s difficult and sweaty Saturday dance classes, a bunch of us gathered at my house for a potluck lunch and a swim. The day was gorgeous and warm, the food delicious and the pool the perfect temperature. As the afternoon sun sank below the line of hedges to the west, one group sat at the patio table chatting while another group bobbed around on rafts in the pool, drinking wine.

Lately I’d been pretty grumpy about the bother of maintaining the pool and the cost of the new maintenance company. It just seemed like another annoyance added to my long To-Do list. The pool was mainly Nick’s idea, but he refused to even use the skimmer when debris floated on the surface. So if I wanted something done…you know the story.  But at times like this, having the extra open space and the pool make me feel grateful and blessed. I mean, whenever I pause to reflect, it feels like the height of luxury to have a big hole in the ground filled with heated water, especially to a gal from Kentucky who spent her childhood longing desperately for a swimming pool. 

“How deep is your pool?” Sue asked.

“Eight and a half feet,” I said.

“Nice,” Sue said. “No diving board, huh?”

“No!” I answered. “See how everything around the pool is at ground level? We did that purposely since we put the pool in when Omar was ten years old. We wanted to discourage crazy boys from jumping off high places into the pool.” I didn’t tell her about the time Omar’s friend, Carson, then about 14 years old, stood on the only raised item in sight, the plastic basketball goal weighed down with fifty pounds of water, and jumped through the hoop, pulling the whole thing into the pool on top of him. He was okay, but I yelled a lot and told him I thought he was supposed to be the smart one of the group. It made me wonder how much insurance we had.

“I miss diving boards,” Sue said. Being a former professional gymnast, diving boards were most assuredly Sue’s playground. 

“Oh, me too,” I agreed. “I loved diving boards. My sisters and I would spend hours trying to perfect a backflip off the diving board or to see how high we could bounce someone off into the air. In fact, I loved jumping off of things in general.”

“Oh, really, did you?” Melissa asked.

“Oh, yeah. If there was a high dive, I’d head straight towards it. I used to jump off the roof of the house for kicks. We had one of those old fashioned antennas at my Grandmom’s house and it was a perfect ladder. I loved the feeling of falling.”

“I remember those,” Melissa said.

“Right? We had to entertain ourselves in any way we could in the sixties. One time my friend was having some construction done at her house and the crew had set up scaffolding right next to her trampoline. Oh man, perfect! It’s amazing we survived childhood.”

“You should write a blog about that,” Melissa said. I loved that. It brought me such joy when friends suggested material for my blog and Melissa’s idea sparked some memories that I had been wanting to write about, not so much about my love of free-falling, but that time in my life when I longed to have a diving board with which to launch myself into the sky.

My sisters, Stacy and Heather and I were crazy about swimming pools. We desperately wanted one of our own. Our neighbors down the street had one that we were sometimes invited to. Our cousins had one that we could use occasionally. We lived with our Grandmom in those days and we begged her to build us one at her house and she eventually broke down and bought us a four-foot-tall above-ground pool, which didn’t really satisfy our longing because you couldn’t even jump into it.

Then finally, the year I turned thirteen, my sisters and I got a diving board to call our very own. Well, it wasn’t our very own, it was attached to the pool that belonged to a motel. 

The summer of 1974 was looking pretty bleak for me. My mom had moved my sisters and me out of the safety of our Grandmom and Grandad’s house into a crummy little house in a crummy little neighborhood in the country and had then started making plans to get married. I was less than thrilled about that turn of events. We were looking at a whole summer stuck out in the country all day with nothing to do while Mom was at work. Then Labor Day weekend would culminate with the addition of an unwelcome step-father.

Lucky for us, our Grandmom decided to buy a small motel nearby called the Quality Inn. She would run her real estate business, Clark Realty from the lobby/office of the motel and keep the staff on to run the 20-room motel. The brick building housing the lobby and Grandmom’s office sat in the middle of the property, surrounded by a concrete parking lot and an L-shaped bank of rooms, eight on one wing, eight on the other with the laundry room in the corner. Best of all, to the right of the lobby lay the beautiful blue built-in swimming pool complete with an old and very springy diving board. Stacy, Heather and I spent every day in that pool. Every day was identical, we’d run to the little convenience store across the street to buy Hostess donuts, swim until noon, beg Grandmom to give us money so we could walk down to the Burger Queen to get lunch, swim some more, get into arguments that Grandmom had to referee, play some shuffle board, ask Grandmom for more money for Blow Pops and Reece’s Cups, then Mom would pick us up and drive us back to our crummy new house. Our days at the pool softened the edges of our home life.

Whenever our shenanigans would get out of hand, when we’d be squealing so loudly we were disturbing the motel guests or our acrobatics on the diving board would get too dangerous, the very stern motel manager, Grace would come out to yell at us and tell us to pipe down. 

Summer ended, Mom got married, Grandmom closed down the pool for the winter and I somehow made it through eighth grade. The next summer began much like the previous, but a month into our resort-like pool vacation, Grace decided that, if the three of us hooligans were going to be under foot all summer, Grandmom should put us to work. They offered us fifty cents an hour, which we immediately agreed to. Heather got trash pick-up duty. Stacy’s first assignment was weeding the flowerbeds, while I was in charge of the weeds in the massive parking lot. My job came with a power tool. (In fact, it may have inspired my life-long love of power tools.) I got to burn the weeds from the numerous cracks in the concrete with a high-powered blow torch. I wandered around the parking lot in my bathing suit and bare feet, carrying the heavy silver propane tank in my left hand and the long wand in my right, pointing it at any sign of green I spotted in the sea of concrete. Then I’d  incinerate it with an 18-inch column of vaporized flame. I loved the guttural sound of the whoosh and even the cool old-fashioned spark lighter that ignited the fire.

So that summer, our days were slightly different. Get Hostess Donuts, practice our dives on the diving board, do some weeding, swim when we got hot, beg Grandmom for money for burgers, swim some more, play shuffleboard, do some more weeding, ask for a raise because the convenience store raised their prices on Rocket Pops and Push-ups. The perfume of chlorine on our skin at night made it all worthwhile. Heather’s hair stayed a mellow chartreuse color into the fall.

The next summer, Stacy and I were promoted to higher-skilled labor, the cleaning of rooms. We were put under the tutelage of an immediate supervisor, Edith, a mean little woman who looked like one of those dried up apple dolls. She stood at four feet eleven inches and must have weighed about 85 pounds. She kept a lit cigarette in the corner of her wrinkled mouth, even while flopping a load of heavy cotton sheets into the industrial dryer with her stick-like arms. The hot and humid laundry room was Edith’s kingdom and she its monarch. You could barely see her head over the top of her wheeled cleaning cart, but somehow she was scary.

That summer was, yet again, different. Get Hostess donuts, take a quick dip in the pool before morning room cleaning, reluctantly clean the rooms that were ready, beg Grandmom for lunch money, lay out in the sun in a cute new bikini, handstands in the pool, throw some shorts on for afternoon room cleaning, knock on doors yelling, “Housekeeping!” (People would open the door and ask, “You’re the maid?”) Practice backflips, burn some weeds, cool off in the pool. I couldn’t get the smell of Lysol or cigarette butts out of my nostrils. Grandad drained the pool and made us paint the inside. I’m sure we were terrible employees, but it bought us pool time and that’s what mattered.

We hosted birthday parties at the pool, invited friends over, worked on our tans, worked on our dives and flips and tandem tricks, learned a tiny bit about work ethic and stayed away from our crummy neighborhood. The pool was our escape, our fun and probably kept us out of a lot of the trouble that the other kids in our neighborhood found while home alone, bored. Under the watchful eyes of Grandmom, Grace and Edith, my sisters and I spent summers in and out of the water, growing up. 

Grandmom kept the motel for several more years. I started driving and spent less time swimming. But the summers at the Quality Inn had shaped me in an undeniable way. The freedom of my body in motion under the water. The high from holding my breath while swimming four pool lengths. The pride of landing one and a half flips. The excitement of being walked out to the end of the diving board by my sister, her hands on my waist, both of us bouncing, one, two, three times and then the exhilaration of having my body launched high into the air. Heaven.

“This pool is so great, Leslie,” Sue says, coming up beside me in the pool smiling, breathless from swimming laps. I’m held up by two noodles, yellow and green. My wine is warming beside the basketball hoop at the edge.

“It really is,” Melissa says, taking a sip of her Peroni while swishing her hand back and forth in the warm, clear water. 

“It is, isn’t it?” I say. I look around at my dance friends enjoying the late afternoon sunshine, floating lazily in the pool and I vow to stop focusing on the irritation of maintenance, upkeep, my To-Do list. I make contact with the 13-year-old inside me who was thrilled at the prospect of having a big hole in the ground filled with warm water. “I have to remember to be grateful for it, you guys. I mean, it’s really the height of luxury. Now all we need is some Hostess Donuts.”