The pool held onto the memory of her children’s’ supple limbs. She entered the water with a gasp. Life, a viscous medium, clung to her skin, entered her body, washed over her, and continued on to break against the wall of its container, finding her again on the way back. Though the water was green and turbid with algae, it still stank of chlorine as it divided itself in ripples to accommodate her body’s grave solidity.
It had always been she who was immobile.
The pool recalled a little girl who undulated in the water in imitation of a dolphin; how more than once she’d wept in her bedroom because she would always be only that: a little girl, and never a rabbit or a cat for whom the azalea bushes represented a vaulted hall, dappled with light, strung with decorations of pink and white crepe. And how later (by some dark magic no longer a little girl), she’d moved her feet dreamily back and forth in the water and tapped the ash from a clandestine cigarette into a plastic cup as she dreamed of escape into a different life where people read poems or even wrote them, and did things more interesting than driving around in their cars all night, or drinking alcohol in the woods, or sitting for hours on end in the creek playing MASH and Would You Rather while loose hairs and bits of skin detached themselves in the current and mixed in suspension with pieces of plants and animals who were born of this land and would die on it. But not her.
It recalled, too, a little boy who capsized in the water with an inflatable donut so tight around his waist that he couldn’t right himself again. He stayed upside down, feet waving in the air like a little duck diving for a beakful of weeds. Then, once he finally turned over, the boy marched all red-faced and gasping for air to where she sat on the pool deck and said in a voice heavy with accusation, “You weren’t watching me!” so that she stared her failure in the face, horrified, because the truth was that she had been watching him, the whole time. She simply hadn’t realized anything needed to be done. The boy, the pool knew, also had no choice but to leave, though his reasons were different from those of the girl. It recalled a time when, life pulsing all red and painful behind his cheeks, he had turned back to face his friend who’d followed him down the fiberglass steps into the water, and touched his hip, and kissed his lips, and then the two stood looking at each other in the slippery light that shone from under the water, surprised at themselves and mournful, too, because their lives were too solid here, packed too tightly in this town: there was no room for this.
Life had extruded itself into the world through their bodies, painfully, gorgeously, and quick. It took her breath away. But unfortunately it also made use of the algae she’d never been able to eradicate from the pool no matter what mixture of poisons she tried; it made use of the grasses that grew higher and higher in the yard; and the fur of white and green mold that coated lemons in the refrigerator or forgotten loaves in the bread basket; and the rodents that bred away in the walls, knocking and scurrying about in the evenings. Life was ruthlessly efficient, and she was shamefully delinquent.
Which was why the town decided she had to leave too, or at least move to a location less central, where visitors wouldn’t see her peeling paint or the rot setting in under her eaves as they drove into town for football games. She had too little “pride in ownership”; that was what the insurance agent they sent told her son before terminating her policy. She had watched them in the backyard, a squat, toad-like woman frowning and leering in a pants-suit, and her beautiful son who was back from college and radiating such excesses of energy and confidence that he’d answered the door nearly naked, in only the pants he wore to sleep and to lounge around the house for blissful hours, doing nothing. And then, for some reason, he had let the insurance agent into the back yard to look around. Really it was her fault; she had forgotten to warn him not to answer the door. And now, from behind the drawn curtain of her bedroom window, she could see him wilting under the woman’s disapproving glare. She could see him thinking that he should have put on a shirt.
So she would move; what did she care? She chuckled about it now, thinking of that phrase. Pride in ownership. It seemed like such a strange misinterpretation of what was going on here. As if she could own any of this. If anything, it owned her.
But maybe the next person would be able to own it to the town’s satisfaction. Within a year there would be a woman sitting on the edge of the water, her legs shaven as smooth as plastic. She would worry about what the chlorine would do to her blonde hair, and absently type salt water pool into the search engine on her phone, not really bothering to read the results. She would know how to mobilize money to appease the insurance lady, and those who had sent her.
And why couldn’t she do that? Why had she never been able to? Sometimes when she was feeling guilty about it, she found it comforting to think that, for a bunch of God-fearing Southern People, who claimed that their Reward was in Heaven, they could be awfully particular about how things looked here on earth. But it didn’t matter: life wasn’t structured that way, to allow for excuses or exemptions based on hypocrisy—no matter how blatant.
Sometimes when she was especially bitter, or especially guilty—or when she had just spoken to her daughter on the phone—she even thought that maybe she was here for a reason different from all the rest of them; that if they saw what she was really about, none of them would know what to do. They would cry out in terror.
But no: they would never look at her long enough to see it.
Let them move her; she didn’t mind. She would stay right here, alone; let them roll the globe beneath her until they had her just where they wanted her.
It had always been she who was immobile.
As she reflected, the water finally grew still around her in the fading light. A lucent table, pulled evenly at every point toward the Earth.