The Swimming Pool

by Holly LeCraw

  It was at a hotel in the suburbs that Cecil spotted the bathing suit in her suitcase. He pulled it out. “What’s this for?”

  She shrugged, blushing. “I thought if there was a pool. Or a hot tub.”

  “You thought you’d have some time to kill?”

  She looked up at him through her lashes. “No.” Then she looked at him more carefully. “What do you want?” He didn’t answer and she studied his face some more. “You want me to put it on,” she said finally. She furrowed her brow. “And—?”

  He began to smile. “And I want you to wear it for a while. For a little while. So it smells like you. And then I want you to take it off,” he said. “And give it to me. To keep.”

  It was when she thought of such moments, always at the most mundane times—standing in line at the grocery store or driving down their street to begin the carpool or picking up Anthony’s shirts—that Marcella felt how loosely she was bound to her life. One day Anthony suggested they plan a trip to Europe and she burst into tears; it seemed she would miss Cecil even more if she was not in her familiar surroundings, where she had learned to negotiate her longing, fit it into the cracks and crannies of her days. She was able to convince Anthony that she was just her usual overemotional self, although at the height of her tears she thought, I should just tell him. For a moment she even fancied it would be a relief. But then she remembered it was Cecil who was real, almost painfully so, not this other life, it was Cecil with whom she felt alive.

  What she couldn’t believe was the energy she got from her love for him. He needed to be present only in her mind and she felt radiant, focused; and he was almost always in her mind. The only way to scare herself away from him was to think of Toni, of being separated from her beautiful little face and young body, that body she had held and nursed in its earlier, smaller incarnation. But even then she was not frightened completely. She did not want to think of logistics but she was sure it could all be worked out, if such a time ever came. She tried not to imagine an alternate life too fully. When her thoughts became concrete, she heard the voices of her mother and grandmother scolding the loudest. But in spite of herself she was rapt whenever Cecil let slip a comment about Betsy, his boredom, their lack of passion, and let the vague and general notion of a life with Cecil and the completion she would feel grow brighter and brighter. At her most feverish moments, moments she secreted in a corner of her mind, she even let herself imagine having a baby with him. It was easy to dream that her body’s recalcitrance would dissipate along with her old wooden life, that rebirth would be complete in every sense.

  So all winter and spring her thoughts and their time together were private, hidden from the world. They saw each other once or twice a month. They spoke of how it would be that summer in Mashantum, when they would see each other more often. Anthony would be in Boston much of the week and Toni would be in camp. Cecil did not say exactly how he would arrange things—she appreciated that in him, he would not gloat, would not plot and plan out loud, he was a man of honor, as strange as it might sound; she knew that. But if she stopped to consider, she knew he could say he was playing golf, and be safely gone for hours. The thought of being in the same state, the same little town, of having Cecil sleeping only a few streets away, made her nearly delirious.

  They had planned their first meeting that summer carefully. He was going to come to her house, and probably ride his bike; if anyone saw him he would just smile and wave, keep going. The bike would be easier to hide, of course, although neither of them said that. For the occasion Marcella had cleaned the guest room, a room that she had never slept in, let alone she and Anthony together. She had stood in the low-ceilinged room with a rag in her hand and the dust motes sparkling in a beam of light, and in a shiver of anticipation that bordered on revulsion thought of herself and Cecil together in the unfamiliar bed. She was intoxicated at the thought of her and Cecil’s life together becoming more daily, but as his arrival in Massachusetts crept closer she also felt panic that the fairy-tale hotel-room affair was ending, that something more real, less deniable, would take its place. It was not that she did not want it. It was that she wanted it so badly. She had gone over it and over it in her mind: the sound of the bike on the driveway, Cecil standing there in the flesh, in life, her life. He would have that open, honest look of delight on his face, as if he had just discovered her. And the whole summer, an ocean of time, would stretch before them.

  But then she saw him before she was prepared. That very afternoon, she was dropping Toni off at Nobscusset for her first tennis lesson and there he was, two courts away, in his whites, playing Fred Sprague. She knew she shouldn’t stare but she sat down on the nearest bench anyway. Her heart was racing. There was something wrong, so many people around, she was not so naturally daring, she would give it all away. For a dismayed moment she thought, I am not meant for this after all.

  He and Fred finished their set and Cecil walked to the fence, drank from a water bottle. His back was to her but she knew, from some stiffness there, that he had been aware of her all along. When he finally turned and looked at her it was with a hunger that slammed into her with bodily force, and she knew, all at once, that what they had was not going to fit into their life here at all. Even if they were not discovered, she knew this thing would somehow burst the bounds they had carefully made for it. In spite of all her daydreams, this was not something she had considered, that her life might be completely transformed.

  V

  On Saturday morning, at Marcella’s house, Toni acknowledged that going to the beach was nothing new. “But at least I won’t be there with little kids,” she said.

  “Believe me, there will be plenty of little kids.”

  “But if they cry or take a shit, it won’t be my problem.”

  “Basta. You love those babies. I can hear it in your voice, cara.” Toni bit her lip and Marcella had to restrain herself from going on: What do they look like, what do they feel like, what is Jed’s face like when he holds them?

  They arranged their towels on one of the few empty patches of beach, down near the water. The day was clear and dry, and every now and then the breeze was shot through with coolness. Marcella noticed boys, and men, noticing them, many more than would have noticed if she had been alone, and she smiled to herself, feeling proud of her daughter’s ability to attract even though she knew it was not the proper feminist thing to do. Toni was abundant, she was overflowing that bikini of hers. Marcella herself had never looked like that but she imagined that Toni would slim down one of these days, lose her college-girl puppy fat—she knew perfectly well it came from beer, she was not stupid. She also noticed, though, as usual, that even if she were thinner Toni would not have had exactly her build but instead a figure Marcella recognized from her own mother. Broader shoulders, a thicker waist. A powerful girl.

  Marcella supposed she should feel old, but she didn’t. She had had friends back in Wellesley, slightly older, whose daughters had been full and lush like Toni was now, and she had seen how quietly frantic they were to regain something they thought they had lost, how they truly thought their daughters were at the peak and they themselves dwindling. But Marcella had never felt young like that—felt that the world was open before her, that she was invincible. She stretched and thought of Jed’s hands on her with an unfamiliar smugness. No, she did not feel old.

  Toni had been propped on her elbows pretending not to eye the boys eyeing her but then she sat up, all pretense at subtlety gone. She stared for a minute from behind her sunglasses. Then she took them off, squinting. Marcella knew she was not supposed to ask. She waited. Toni put them back on. “That guy over there,” Toni finally said, reluctantly. “He looks like Jed McClatchey.” Marcella felt her chest go ice-cold. “I mean, not exactly. But there’s this thing about him. I don’t know.”

  Marcella swallowed hard and tried to keep her breathing very even. She followed Toni’s gaze and saw a man she immediately knew was not Jed. His hair was lighter, he was a litt
le taller. And yet. Toni was right, there was something. His body was slight but muscled, with a tautness around his shoulders. There was something watchful about his face; he had the same straight nose. She looked again at Toni. As her daughter watched the man, Marcella saw wistfulness break through her disdain.

  She reminded herself that Toni worked at Jed’s house, that of course she knew what he looked like, had, in fact, probably spent more hours with him than Marcella herself had. And also that she was with Callie and with Jed’s nephew and niece, and it would be like Toni to notice the resemblances, to see the shared genes manifesting themselves. That she had happened to notice a person who looked nothing like Jed and yet did—that she had caught Jed’s essence, something that one might say could be detected only after concentrated, deliberate observation—it meant nothing. Nothing.

  “I don’t remember Jed very well,” Marcella said, and prayed she would be better than usual at pretending.

  “He’s definitely not my type,” Toni said, too quickly. “He’s too short. Way too intense. It would give me a headache to be with him.”

  Marcella felt like a butterfly skittering along the surface of a vast sea, with nowhere to land. Stay aloft, aloft. “Well,” she said, “he’s had tragedy in his life.”

  Toni shrugged dismissively. “Yeah,” she said, and her face softened, and Marcella saw that she found Jed romantic, for the very reason of his losses. She wanted to shake her and shout, Silly girl! But of course she wouldn’t. Toni was confiding in her.

  “He’s cute, though,” Toni was saying. “Right now he’s going out with some girl he met in a bar.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “I don’t think it will last. Callie said with him nothing ever lasts.”

  “Well, then.” Marcella lay back down and closed her eyes. Her thumping heart seemed to slide into her stomach, and she thought she might be sick. Trying not to clench her teeth she said, “I would listen to his sister, Antonia. He is too old for you anyway.”

  “Not really. Eight years.”

  “Eight years! And not your type. You say.”

  “No.” Marcella heard Toni’s voice moving, heard her turning over, arranging herself. “Definitely not. Can you untie this for me?” Marcella opened her eyes and saw Toni’s arm crooked around to her back, holding the straps of her bikini.

  “Darling, it’s indecent.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my mother.”

  “Exactly,” Marcella said, marveling at how easy this conversation was. She hesitated for good measure, and then leaned over and untied the strings, and sneaked in a quick stroke down the smooth skin between Toni’s shoulder blades.

  “Mom.”

  “There was sand.”

  “Mo-om.”

  Her heart was still beating too fast, her stomach swirling, but Toni was so unquestionably real, flesh of her flesh so beautiful, so bright, that Marcella could almost pretend this absent Jed was someone she—they both—had imagined. If there were any real threat, she could will it gone. Toni’s head was turned away, her eyes closed again, and so Marcella could stare to her heart’s content. At Toni’s age, Marcella had been about to lose her mother, about to meet her husband … but clearly, obviously, Toni was far too young for such things. Marcella felt as though she were sprouting roots of iron into the sand, anchoring her forever to the earth, next to her daughter. I will always be here, she thought, always with you, if you want me.

  She had never imagined she would have to remind herself of this truth.

  It was hard to know when it had started, the retreat from her own child. But she did remember one day, in particular: Howes Beach, the sun high, the tide going out. Toni had been three, and there had been something mildly celebratory about the day—perhaps it was a weekday that Anthony had taken off? Back then they had gone to Mashantum for only a few weeks each summer. It had felt like a vacation, not an exile.

  She had been sitting in a chair under a beach umbrella, her finger holding her place in the book on her lap—a lady of leisure. Her other hand lay across her stomach, which was still flat. But she was newly pregnant, again.

  Her doctor had already told her there was nothing to worry about, that there must have been something the matter with the first one she’d lost and she should be grateful. There was no reason not to believe him; Anthony did. “Of course there’s nothing wrong with you, Chella,” he’d said. “It’s just a little bad luck, that’s all.” At the time she had wondered if he was so entranced with Toni that he really didn’t care, but when she had told him she was expecting, a few days before, the exultation that had blazed across his face told her she had been wrong. He had picked her up and begun to swing her around but then thought better of it, and as he set her down, very gently, she thought, Of course we are the same. Of course we both want more children, a houseful. He stroked her cheek. “I’ve made you happy,” she had said.

  “Of course you have,” he said. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry, Chella.”

  She thought of that now and wished he would look up at her. But he and Toni had just moved a few yards farther away, looking for water for the moat of their sand castle. She could still see them clearly, though. Toni was wearing a pink ruffled bathing suit and her blond hair was in two high ponytails—she had approached Anthony that morning with her brush and elastics and said, “Ponies, Daddy?” with that exquisite pout on her face, and it had amazed Marcella yet again to see Anthony put down the newspaper and, of all things, carefully do Toni’s hair, while their daughter held so still, as though she knew she had performed magic.

  Now Marcella watched as Toni pointed to the moat, and Anthony began enlarging it. Anthony gestured to a tower, and Toni began a matching one beside it. They worked so earnestly, with an unconscious, easy rhythm that Marcella thought she and Toni rarely had. Toni looked so serious, her little pink bottom in the air, digging for the wet sand; she reached deeper with her shovel, then straightened suddenly, reached for a different shovel, and backed up right through one of the castle walls.

  She whipped her head around to survey the damage. Marcella, in her chair, held her breath, mildly worried: did this mean a tantrum? But instead Toni turned back to Anthony, her eyes wide, and clapped her hands to her mouth in an enormous oops. He looked at her in surprise and then started to laugh, just as Toni realized her hands were full of sand. Abruptly she ended her performance and began to make faces, trying to spit it out.

  Anthony wiped her face with the edge of his shirt, still laughing, and then took it off so he could really scrub. Toni’s eyes were screwed shut, her lips pursed enormously so he could wipe there too. Marcella watched the muscles shifting in Anthony’s arm, his chest, and thought, Look at what I have given her. Look at my child’s father—he is so handsome, he adores her! Marcella thought that if she had had a father she never would have known how to play the coquette as Toni did, in all her three-year-old glory. Surely now Anthony would catch her eye. The smile of camaraderie was waiting on her face: Look at our star of stage and screen! But he didn’t. When he had finished cleaning Toni’s face, she pointed imperiously at the moat and he went back to digging, but as soon as Toni was absorbed in her next task Marcella saw him sit back on his heels and watch her, as though she were the most fascinating creature he had ever known.

  It didn’t matter. It was what she had dreamed of as a child, a father not only to treasure her but somehow also to blot out her mother and grandmother—to send them firmly upstage out of the lights, to beckon Marcella herself down. Not that Marcella had dreamed of being any kind of star. She had wanted only to have the lights bright enough around her to make life clear, to make her clear to herself. In the gleam of Anthony’s love, Toni would never doubt herself.

  Yes, Toni was a genius for wanting Anthony. It was clear she wanted him more, waited for him, craved his attention. Marcella knew that in the many hours she was alone with Toni, she could have asserted herself, staked her claim, erased the look of waiting fr
om Toni’s face. But she was not sure exactly how; she refused to scold and shame as her mother had done, or wheedle and scheme and dominate like her nonna. Besides, there was so much of Marcella’s love. Toni was wise to take it for granted.

  Yes, never mind. Never mind. Marcella had laid her book in the sand and let her other hand steal over her belly. Maybe this new child would stick to her side, as wide-eyed at the world as she sometimes felt herself to be. Carefully, she would ease him down into the lights, so he could be seen, so he could see. She had thought, that day at the beach, We will watch your father and sister conquer, my darling, and then we will welcome them home.

  And now, years later, she looked at Toni beside her, asleep in the sun. She had thought for so long about invisible children. Mirages in her desert. But how ridiculous not to see what she had. Toni, only Toni, was right here.

  VI

  On Friday, just after talking to Marcella, just after turning around and pointing himself back toward the Cape, Jed pulled off the highway for gas. He was in some cute Connecticut hamlet and the service station was next to a stone bridge, and as he stood there pumping the gas into his tank he realized how foreign it all was, how he was really so goddamn provincial. The air was different: in Atlanta it was soft and lazy, at the Cape it was salty and sharp, but here it seemed clear and uncomplicated. The trees were different too: they were not the Cape’s scrubby pines or Southern loblollies or poplars but instead oaks and maples, sturdy, balanced trees out of a picture book. The pretty little prewar bridge spoke of an older, more steadfast civilization than the interstates of the New South. He could practically feel the self-satisfaction oozing from the ground. And there, hanging above the bridge, among the green foliage of a sugar maple, was one rogue spray of autumn-red leaves. Time was rushing, like the traffic out on the highway, always faster and faster. Everyone was hurtling along, he could not stop them. But, goddamnit, he just wanted to stay still, stay the same, with Marcella. Who had turned him away.