Brown Barrette in My Hair
Maybe I imagined it, that in-ground pool beside the red dirt ball field. The pool, painted Carolina blue with a big yellow smiley face at the bottom, was visible only if you knew how to find it, as there was no signage, no parking lot. I don’t even think it had a name, perched there on an elevated rectangular plot of land surrounded by the backyards of suburban houses facing away, as though pretending not to notice the water.
I went there, my elementary-aged self, in a bathing suit with a towel around my neck, by walking through other peoples’ yards, as kids do. I don’t remember wearing shoes; I remember the cushion of pine straw and the rough prickly pinecones from my back door to the paved Poplar Avenue, then the soft grass and hard Fuller driveway, then silky soil before stepping onto the hot concrete foundation around the pool, the clang of the hinged door closing behind me, the squeals and splashing in front of me. Vending machine coins clutched in my sweaty fist.
Although I don’t remember Mama walking there with me, I do remember her shade-sitting in the little canteen area. She couldn’t swim but might have yelled for help if there was trouble. There was no lifeguard. Mama says the Fuller girl saved my brother, John, when he fell in, that one time.
I liked to hover in the shallow end, cross-legged, just below the surface, pretending to drink tea with my pinky sticking out. I could stand on my hands and walk them down the pool floor from the baby side to the deep end. I could pause at the edge of the diving board, hold my arms up stiff and straight, curve forward in a C and fall fingers-first into the water. When it was time to go home, I’d lift my bathing suit strap and check my tan line.
I didn’t know that sun rays can cause skin cancer.
But I knew not to sit on the pool floor filter because it could suck out your insides. I knew to wait thirty minutes after eating Nabs before getting back in the water so I wouldn’t get sick. I knew not to dive into the shallow end because a local teenaged boy did just that and was paralyzed.
It’s been at least fifty years since my pool summers. On visits back home, I’ve walked around the block and stood at the base of what-was-the-Fullers’ driveway and considered ringing the doorbell and asking—whoever lives there now—if it’s okay if I walk through to see, is there a pool back there?
I want to find it myself, though, or it doesn’t count, right? I want to climb through the brambles at the back of our yard and find my 1970’s self with one of those Charms lollipops in my mouth and a brown barrette in my hair, striding across the yards, coming out on Poplar Avenue again. I’ll walk up a stranger’s familiar driveway to the back tree line where I’ll part the branches and there it will be.
An island of concrete around a cool pool of water. A transistor radio playing an AM station and my young mother, in sunglasses, will turn her head to see who’s arrived. A little girl in pigtails will be dripping water in front of the vending machine. A boy in blue swim trunks will chase another to the diving board and someone will call out, “don’t run!” and they will slow to a fast-walk and shove one another to be first, then cannonball into the deep end, spraying a woman reading a magazine, who’ll put down her cigarette and laugh. Someone will call “Marco” and someone else will answer “Polo,” and a man with a red face and round belly will step carefully down the ladder into the shallow end and lean back, elbows on the side, and sigh. My little brother will be in the shallow end; he’ll have that grin on his face and will be flinging water onto someone else by dipping his hand into the pool and then splaying his fingers out, again, and again.
From my parents’ back patio, I can conjure that feeling of being sun drunk, water drunk, in the white, hot light of midday, where images moved slowly, and all the sounds merged and folded into one another, a summer symphony. So tired, when I finally pulled myself out of the wet, that my arms felt boneless and I would sink onto my soggy towel, one edge still in the water, unable to move.
No need to trespass, after all. I can see the whole thing from here.
