An Empty Swimming Pool
There is a picture of the three of us. My younger brother and sister and me. On the empty lot, overlooking the city and with the ocean in the distance, only visible when the smog wanes. We were there with Dad sneaking a peak at the empty swimming pool. All of us under 10 years old. We had not yet said good-bye to the other swimming pool. The one full of warm, chlorinated water.
On Camden Drive. Dad took each of us in as soon as we were not so irritated with the orange, canvas life jackets he insisted we wear until we could be enrolled at Murray's Swim Gym. Dad had grown up swimming in Lake Ontario. And he was never one to squander a chance to share his love of water with us. In the new house, the one they were building in the hills with a view, there would also be a pool. Eventually to be filled with warm, chlorinated water.
Sometime after we moved into the house came the lessons. Even for Mom, who had grown up in landlocked St. Louis. She only learned to swim so drowning would never be an option. Every morning Dad would take a swim before going to his office. Sometimes we would sneak a peek. He swam naked and could move directly from the pool on the side of our one, story, mid-century house in the hills into his shower. He wasn't irritated, I am not sure he ever knew that we watched. Or maybe he did and pronounced it a normal part of our childhood. He was gentle in that way.
There were lots of birthday parties involving the pool and being told not to run on the wet cement. When Mom was called to the Rockefeller estate so many years later, I joined her there in upstate New York. I was no longer in the house on the hill. Living now in Michigan. She was writing and I was borrowing time from my graduate school life. There was a pool on the estate in Pocantico, New York. Nelson and his siblings and their parents, John and Abbey…they had all swum there. The past had been emptied from it, but the water was warm enough and it was slightly chlorinated. Enough for a visitor from Michigan.
It was a pool much bigger than the one on Camden or in the hills. Surrounded by lush lawn and rolling hills of sculpture. Like Architectural Digest had planted it there for me. After Mom died Architectural Digest did a spread on the new owner of the house on the hill where I had grown up. Luckily the new owner, a Hollywood agent of course, kept the integrity of the house. In fact, he borrowed elements of the original, like the terrazzo floors, and expanded them throughout the house. We were relieved. He only cleaned up the blue tile surrounding the pool.
I remember when Mom died. I came back to the house from the hospital. It was so quiet. I had been staying there while visiting. I had been sleeping in my old bedroom for weeks, alternating turns at Mom's bedside with my sister. My mother died on a Saturday. I was holding her hand. When I went back to the house, exhausted and spent from crying in disbelief even though I knew how sick she was, I was alone. I was in the living room, looking out to the pool which a moment before had been still. The July air warm and smog free. My emotions teetered among shock, sadness, and fear. A breeze came out of nowhere. Exorcising ripples on the surface. As if my mother was really there. She hadn't left yet. I wasn't ready to say good-bye. I went out to the pool. It was still. Hardly empty, but full of memories. Of parties and children. And the warm, chlorinated water of childhood.