Juliet in August (20 page)

“This is not relaxing,” Norval has said to Lila about the pace she sets. “It's causing my blood pressure to rise.”

Lila has explained to him about resting and working heart rates. She can sound like the coach of a track team. He wonders how she got to be such an expert on these matters.

But swimming. He used to swim; it's something he knows how to do.

As he watches from behind the tree, Rachelle gets down from the chair and calls to one of the boys. Norval can tell it's a Dolson by the way Vicki looks up from her book. Norval thinks Rachelle is about to reprimand the boy for fooling around, but then he sees her demonstrate a swimming stroke with her arms, perhaps the breast stroke (Norval never did master that one), and the boy strikes out across the pool. Rachelle nods approval. Then the boy gets out of the pool and climbs back up to the diving board, the highest one. Four other boys see him and they gather like sharks below the board. The Dolson boy walks to the end of the board, bounces a few times, and then jumps, pulling his knees to his chest and hitting the water with a splash. As he comes to the surface, the other boys swim toward him and push him back under. When he comes to the surface again, they push him under once more. Norval is alarmed, but Rachelle is there right away. She blows her whistle and shouts so loud that Norval can hear her from his hiding place.

“You boys,” Rachelle says. “Out of the pool!”

They look at her, and then one by one they swim to the edge and scramble out. Rachelle points to the chain-link fence and they line up. The Dolson boy starts to get out, too, but Rachelle says, “Not you. You can stay in.”

Vicki looks up from her book, but then goes back to reading when she sees it's not her own kids who are in trouble with the lifeguard. Rachelle gives the boys a lecture on dunking, all the while keeping her eye on the children who are still in the pool. The boys by the fence stare at Rachelle, completely infatuated by an older woman in a bikini. They sit down on the cement as she imposes a five-minute time-out.

Nothing has changed since his own childhood, Norval thinks. He decides to make his presence known and he steps out from behind the tree and waves to Rachelle. She waves back, and Norval continues down the sidewalk toward home.

When he gets there, he discovers the house is empty. Lila comes in shortly after, sporting a sleek hairdo.

“Oh, you're home,” she says, checking herself in the hall mirror. “Thank goodness for Karla Norman. She knows how to do hair, that's for sure, even if her family is as trashy as they come.” Then she tells Norval there's a niçoise salad in the fridge.

He announces that he's going for a swim at the pool, and would Lila mind packing up his lunch, he'll eat it at work?

She can't believe it. “You're going swimming? Today, just like that?”

“The pool is practically empty.”

“Do you even own a swimsuit?” Lila asks.

“I believe I do,” he says.

Norval goes up to the bedroom and rummages in his bureau drawers. He finds a swimsuit, an old-fashioned, eighties-style suit with long legs and bright yellow and pink splotches, reminiscent of the
Miami Vice
days.

When he carries it downstairs, she takes one look and says, “Oh my God, you're not going to wear that. You'll embarrass Rachelle from here to next week.”

“I don't think the style of my suit matters,” Norval says.

A look crosses Lila's face. “You're not doing this on purpose, are you, to punish Rachelle over last night? Because there's no need. She spent the night at Kristen's. Everything is fine.”

“I'm not going to punish Rachelle by going swimming,” Norval says.

“Because that would be childish, Norval, even for you,” Lila says.

“Even for me? What in the world is that supposed to mean? I just feel like going for a swim. You're the one who's always telling me I need exercise.”

Lila hands him an insulated nylon lunch bag and says, “Well, that's a switch.”

“And I hardly think that I, the hardworking breadwinner of this family, deserve to be called childish. You have no idea what I have to put up with every day, Lila.”

“Okay,” Lila says. “I'm sorry. Good for you. I commend you, Norval. Just don't embarrass Rachelle. What are you taking for a towel?”

“What should I take?” he asks.

Lila shakes her head and goes to find him a towel. She returns with a proper beach towel. “It doesn't match your suit,” she says as she hands it to him.

“Is that required?” Norval asks. “Will it work better if it matches?”

“We don't own a towel the same color as that suit,” Lila says. “Thank God.”

Before Norval leaves, she says, “I made arrangements for the wedding party hairstyles this morning. You have to make these arrangements well ahead of time.”

He waits for what he knows is coming.

“I'm counting on you, Norval, to take care of the church business,” Lila says.

“Not to worry,” Norval says. “I will be so invigorated after my swim that I will march over to the church and put God's house in order.”

By the time he gets back to the pool, the Dolsons and the adult swimmers have gone, and he's amazed to find the pool is empty. He can see Rachelle standing in the shade, leafing through a magazine. She's pulled a sleeveless orange T-shirt on over her bikini,
LIFEGUARD
written on the front. Norval goes to the pool entrance and gets out his wallet to pay the girl at the ticket window.

“Slow day, eh?” he says to the girl as he hands her a five-dollar bill.

“No kids allowed in the pool at noon,” she says by way of explanation. “And also, you have to get out of the pool if we get a storm. It's a rule. No one in the water if there's lightning. You won't get your money back, just so's you know.”

The sky is blue, like every other day this summer, cloudless.

“I'll take my chances,” Norval says. “But thanks for the warning.”

When he comes out of the change room onto the pool deck, Rachelle looks up from her magazine.

“Holy crap,” she says, staring at his suit. “What are you doing here?”

“What do you think?” Norval asks, dropping his towel on the cement.

“Can you even swim?” Rachelle asks. “Because if you can't, you have to go in the shallow end. You have to be able to swim two widths to go in the deep end.”

“Believe me,” Norval says. “I can swim.”

He goes to the edge of the pool and wonders if he still can. He thinks about diving in but then changes his mind and lowers himself carefully into the blue water. He doesn't want his daughter to have to rescue him. She comes to the edge of the pool and watches him. The water is surprisingly cold.

“Don't watch too closely,” Norval says, treading water and trying to catch his breath. “I'm not an Olympic swimmer or anything like that.”

“That bathing suit is almost ugly enough to be cool,” Rachelle says.

“Tell your mother that.”

“I can't believe she let you out of the house with it.”

Norval strikes out across the width of the pool with a stroke he used to call the Australian crawl. He wonders if they still call it that. He makes it across, but then he has to stop for a rest. He hangs on to the cement lip, breathing hard.

“Can you make it back?” Rachelle shouts. “Maybe move to the shallow end.”

Norval strikes out again and struggles back to where Rachelle is still standing.

“That wasn't very impressive, was it?” she says. “We offer a stroke improvement class for seniors. Maybe you should take that.”

“Can I stay in the deep end or not?” Norval asks between gasps.

“I guess so.”

“Go back to your magazine, then.”

“Oh sure,” Rachelle says. “And you'll drown and it will be my fault.” She climbs up into the chair under the umbrella.

Norval rolls over onto his back and floats. He hears the girl from the ticket window call to Rachelle, but he can't hear what she's saying.

Rachelle says, “Wait till this guy's finished. He won't last long.”

Norval swims a few more laps. He closes his eyes and feels the water on his body, remembers the feeling of buoyancy. He realizes that Lila is probably right, he should do something more to keep himself in shape. He swims back and forth, trying to remember how to breathe properly, and thinks about the strange reality that his irresponsible daughter is at this moment guarding his life. He remembers the time he once saved hers, when he found her hanging from the swing set in the backyard, the string ties on her sweatshirt caught somehow in the chains. He'd gotten there just in time. She was already turning blue. He still feels sick at the thought of how close they came to losing her. He felt no satisfaction in the knowledge that he'd saved her life, only terror that he might not have.

The pleasurable in life, he thinks, is never without a flip side. Sadly.

This water, that feels so good.

Vengeance

Lynn's been angry all morning, and anyone with sense is staying out of her way. Angry, as in,
If I get my hands on this flirty little bitch Joni, she'll soon see who she's up against.
All through the lunch-hour rush she's sharp with Haley and she even has to apologize to the poor girl for making her cry over a broken cup. Lynn herself breaks a plate in the kitchen by slapping it down on the counter so hard that it slides right off the other side and onto the ceramic tile floor.

When the restaurant clears and Lynn finally has time to sit by herself at a table and have a bite to eat, she thinks about how, lately, she's been
letting herself go
. She was conscientious for years about doing her yoga every night, no matter how tired she was, but for . . . what? six months now? a year? . . . she's given up on keeping in shape. And the funny thing is, she feels more self-absorbed now that she's given up than she did when she was trying. When she gets up in the morning and looks in the bathroom mirror, she sees lines and wrinkles. When she walks past the full-length mirror in the bedroom, she sees a thick body without a waist. When she looks in the mirror in the washroom at the Oasis, she sees hair that is streaked with gray and badly in need of styling. And as she works away at whatever she's doing, she puts all these glimpses of herself together into a picture of a thoroughly unattractive middle-aged woman who will never again get a compliment on her appearance, unless it's from another middle-aged woman who understands the meaning of
relative
. Even her daughters have noticed her declining appearance. The last time Leanne was home, she urged Lynn to join her on a spa weekend. “You look like you need one,” Leanne said. She'd said it as though Lynn could up and go on the spur of the moment, without regard for the restaurant. That trip to Florida had taken months to plan and had almost not happened.

Lynn wishes she'd appreciated her looks more when she still had them. She keeps coming back to that little slip of paper in her pocket, and the thought that Hank hadn't appreciated her looks when she was young, either, because if he had, what had he been doing sleeping with someone else? Is it possible that she's wasted herself on Hank? If she'd held out that time she left him, might she have done better? Might she have met a man who was positively bowled over by her, who thought she was Helen of Troy? Well, it's too late for that now.

By the time Lynn finishes her lunch, she doesn't know if she's depressed or angry, and if she is angry, whether she's mad at Hank or herself, and if she's depressed, what she's depressed about. Not just the slip of paper from Hank's pocket, because the concern with her loss of looks predates its discovery. Even so, all morning long, every fifteen minutes if she could manage it, she'd gone to the phone and dialed the number on the piece of paper and then hung up. She knows her behavior is crazy. Maybe she just wants to torment this Joni person for daring to give her husband a phone number, and for daring to be young (she has to be young: the handwriting, the smiley face dotting the
i
). She can just see her: Joni with her little waist and perky breasts. She hopes she has unattractive calves. Lynn used to have good, well-shaped legs.

She can't stop herself; she keeps thinking about those years when she was at her most attractive, and they were the same years that Hank was still traveling the amateur rodeo circuit with his buddies. He was no longer a regular weekend warrior and, yes, he stayed home when there was crop to put in, hay to take off, calves to ship, an event to attend with Lynn and the girls. But she knew where his heart was, where he'd rather be if he hadn't accepted the role of family man. Heaven to Hank was a weekend of rodeo and coming home late on Sunday night to all the benefits of marriage: Lynn's good cooking, the adoration of his children, clean laundry, and, of course, sex. The truth is, she hated those years. She was always tired from being both homemaker and Hank's hired hand. She worried that he'd get hurt, and then where would they be? Or that he'd cave to the temptation of the rodeo groupies, of which there was no shortage, and she knew what cowboy church was for on Sunday morning. Even after Hank swore off booze and promised that rodeo for him was a good ride and a lot of hanging around the chutes with the other cowboys, the marriage was clouded by suspicion and resentment.

Until that August when Dana was eight years old and got sick with meningitis and almost died. Hank pretty much sat by her bedside until she got better, and after she was well again, Lynn had taken both girls and left for a while, went to her parents' place. She couldn't even tell Hank why, what was wrong, what he could do to fix things. When Lynn did go back, not too long before Christmas, she still couldn't explain what had caused her to leave, but Hank seemed to understand. And Lynn herself had been truly regretful when she walked back into their house and saw the look of relief on his face. Instead of thinking about Hank's weekend absences and the dalliance that had hung over their marriage for so long, she'd thought what her unhappiness had done to him. For the first time, she recognized that her own dissatisfaction with married life was not entirely Hank's fault.