V.C Patterson

Pools

It probably doesn't matter if I describe the pool as aquamarine, turquoise, or jade. It also probably doesn’t matter if I tell you that it was a rectangle or square or if the corners were curved or not.  Whether it was indoor or outdoor, heated or not. You have your pools, and I have mine.

You will probably see the pool where you first really noticed the sculptural women in bikinis. Or the pool where you graduated from Tadpole to Guppy, but never quite achieved Orca before your mom couldn’t afford the lessons anymore. You could be imagining the pool where your dad was enraptured by a newspaper article about The Lakers Offseason Moves and nearly let you drown. Maybe it’s the pool where you emerged from the locker room only to find a girl much younger than you in the same swimsuit, the one where you cursed your mother for the hips you didn’t yet have. There’s that pool with the blue tiled floor where the lifeguard called out a code brown and everyone had to get out. The one you still laugh about. You can still picture the little boy wailing in the soiled Elmo swim trunks. It might instead be the pool where there was a code red, much less funny than the Elmo boy; you still wish you could forget the look on the face of that poor middle school girl caught like a criminal. You’ll think of backs sunburned then later tanned in the diagonal lines of a one-piece. You’ll think of your white butt and your red legs. You may think of your crispy-pale friends, and the burns you never had to worry about.

You’ll think of the pool with the rusted diving board where that one oldie came on the overhead radio. You knew it, and you saw your crush sing along. You wished he knew that you knew the song too. You wished he knew a lot about you.

Your crush may have been named Ben, mine was named Max. That doesn’t matter much.

There's the indoor pool with the twelve-foot deep end where your bikini top rode up over your breasts when you cannonballed and you’d struggle frantically to pull it back down before you rose to the surface. You may remember the first time you saw a naked person that wasn’t you. You’ll remember the horrors of gravity.

You’ll probably recall your swimsuit that was too small, you’ll remember praying that if you crossed your arms over your chest nobody would notice you were the first girl in the class sprouting breasts. You'll remember the smell of sunscreen, the taste of chlorine, the scalding concrete on your bare pruned feet. You’ll remember when you didn’t care about getting your hair wet, when you had no makeup to worry about ruining. You’ll remember the agonizing feeling of waiting for 30 minutes to pass after eating so you wouldn’t get cramps. You’ll remember the time your mom was so absorbed in her book that you only waited 10 minutes after having a hot dog.

You may remember the time you tripped and fell, you might have a scar on your knee that remembers for you. My scar is on my shin. You remember peeing in the pool, and the little thrill at getting away with it. You’ll remember the conservative swimsuits your mother wore, shy about the things that growing you inside her stomach did to her body. You’ll remember thinking it was unfair that boys didn’t have to wear shirts. You’ll remember seeing big kids kissing, thinking: I can’t wait to be a teenager. You’ll remember being a teenager wishing you were as carefree as the little kids laughing and screaming like banshees.

As I sat by the pool I need not describe, watching my boyfriend swim with the grace of a dolphin, I cried remembering all of it.

Virginia Patterson is an emerging writer from Seattle, Washington. When she’s not working on her novel, she is likely to be found cooking elaborate dinners, paddleboarding, and collaging voraciously.