Cool Water (21 page)

Willard looks up from his fence repairs to check for Marian in the window. He can't really see her. The house is too far away and too dark inside, but just the same, he suspects she's there. Willard has a makeshift workbench set up on the tailgate of his truck. As he rips the blackened, damaged boards off the fence and measures up for new ones, he wonders where Ed got the idea that a window would tip the scale for a woman considering marriage to him. He tries to remember, when Ed first brought Marian home, whether she was as impressed by the window as Ed thought a woman should be. It's not as though the window looks out over a green meadow or a pretty little creek. Ed had insisted the window face out over the drive-in lot.

The next time Willard looks up, he sees Marian crossing the yard with a thermos. She's wearing sturdy shoes and a housedress, and she's pulled a John Deere cap on over her hair, which she has tied in a ponytail. Willard thinks she looks a little like the young girls in town with their caps and ponytails, only Marian's hair is mostly grey, and not some wild shade of red, or even blue. He overheard a couple of girls in the grocery store one day, and they were buying Kool-Aid to put in their hair.

He stops work and lays his hammer on the truck's tailgate.

“You looked hard at it,” Marian says. “I thought you might want some iced tea.”

“I never turn down moisture,” he says.

“There are sandwiches in the fridge,” Marian says. “I imagine you'll want to have lunch inside, what with the heat. You can come in whenever you're ready.”

“Another half-hour here ought to do it,” he says.

Marian sets the thermos down on the tailgate, next to the hammer.

“I just heard on the radio that we might get rain later in the week.”

“Too late now,” Willard says. “Anyway, I'll believe that when it happens.” He looks to the west and there's not a cloud to be seen. He takes off his work gloves and unscrews the top on the thermos.

Marian turns to walk back to the house.

“Wait,” Willard says.

She stops and looks at him. The anticipation on her face tells him she thinks he might ask her something important.

“I was just wondering,” he says, “what you thought of Ed's window there, when he brought you to the house that first time.”

“Ed's window?”

“The picture window,” Willard says, nodding toward it. “Did you think,
Now there's a window right out of a
magazine
?”

“I'm not sure what you're getting at,” Marian says.

“He didn't ever make mention of the window?”

“Not that I can recall.”

Marian looks puzzled. Willard doesn't know what else to say. He's sorry he mentioned the window, and Ed. He hasn't talked to Marian about Ed since they buried him, and even in that difficult time they didn't say much. Marian had asked him what hymn they should sing at the funeral and Willard had said probably no hymn as Ed was an atheist, but maybe “Amazing Grace” would do. Ed would agree that people were wretched, and if you stretched it, “I was blind but now I see” might refer to Ed's political enlightenment.

Marian finally says, “Well, it was night, as I recall. And there were no curtains. I looked out and thought,
If I'm
going to live here, the first thing I will do is make curtains for
that window
.”

“Hah,” Willard says. “Did you tell Ed that?”

“I don't remember, but I did go out and buy material and of course he thought that was a waste of money. When I brought the fabric home he said, ‘You're not going to cover up that window?' ‘Oh yes I am,' I said. No woman wants to stand in a window that big, for all the world to see, unless she's a you-know-what kind of woman.”

Willard feels himself flushing at this reference to a prostitute. He and Marian absolutely don't talk about things like that.

“But I had a different thought the first time I saw the window in daylight,” Marian says. “I looked out and saw the movie screen and the speakers lined up in the sand, and I thought,
If I had one of those speakers in the house I could sit
in the window and watch movies every night
. Well now I can do that, can't I, since we updated the sound system.”

That's true. There's a radio in the living room and sometimes, when Marian isn't helping Willard in the concession stand, she tunes it to the movie frequency and pulls a chair up to the window. When Willard sees the lights go out right after the movie starts, he knows Marian is settling in to watch. He's been curious over the years about which movies she selects. She doesn't like violence or the horror movies that the kids are so fond of, but she doesn't seem to like the romances either. She likes musicals, and movies set in other countries, and once she starts watching a movie she commits herself to it. When the movie's over, she draws the curtains and turns the lights back on.

“Why all this interest in the window?” Marian asks.

Willard says, “Ed put that window in as a special drawing card, when he was looking for a wife.”

Marian starts to laugh, right out loud, in a way that Willard has rarely seen. The only other time that comes to mind was when he put her up on Antoinette and took her for a camel ride around the drive-in lot. She'd laughed like a girl, so hard that Willard thought she might fall off. He figures she enjoyed the camel ride as much as anyone ever had, even young Lee Torgeson.

Marian walks back to the house laughing, and when she gets to the door she turns and waves at Willard. It's the oddest thing and throws him completely, so he waves back without knowing why they're waving at each other when neither of them is going anywhere.

He turns to the thermos and unscrews the top, and as he does, he hears ice cubes clinking against the glass liner and just the sound of ice cools him off a degree or two. He takes a swallow, and feels the tart lemon taste, and thinks how lucky he is to have Marian looking after him, and then he puts the thermos down and quickly goes back to work.

It's the best thing about work, he thinks, how it keeps worry at bay.

Blue Pool

Norval has pretty much spent the morning staring at the walls of his office and when lunch hour arrives he decides to go home and eat with Lila. On his way, he passes the swimming pool. There's Rachelle in her bikini, perched up on the high chair, protected from the sun by an orange umbrella. An orange cap is the only thing identifying her as a lifeguard, that and the fact that she's sitting in the chair.

For a hot day, the pool is quiet. Just a few young children in the shallow end and a half-dozen rowdy ten-year-olds lining up to do cannonballs off the diving board. There are two adults swimming laps, one of them a woman with a giant plastic flower on the top of her bathing cap. Both swimmers are wearing goggles, so he can't tell who they are. The absence of teenagers sprawled on the pool deck likely means they're all still asleep, as Rachelle would be if she didn't have this job. Norval would like to march over to the fence and give her a good talking-to about her disappearing act of the night before, but of course he can't, she's at work after all. At least she showed up for work.

She hasn't seen him yet. He stands behind one of the elm trees that line the sidewalk and watches her. She could still see him if she looked his way, but she's keeping her eye on the boys. Norval notices Vicki Dolson standing in the shade of the change building reading a book. So some of the children in the pool must be hers. He always feels terrible when he sees Vicki. He can well imagine the conversations she and Blaine have in bed at night about options and blame and where to turn next.

A small girl in a bikini gets out of the shallow end of the pool and runs back to Vicki, who unfolds a towel and lays it out for her. The child lies down on her back, as though she's suntanning, even though Vicki has placed the towel in the shade. They look so ordinary, Vicki and the little girl, that Norval dares to hope maybe the Dolsons will be all right if Blaine can keep working construction.

The blue water looks inviting. Norval wonders if he should perhaps take up swimming for exercise in the summer. He's been told by his doctor to get on a regular exercise program, and Lila has certainly been after him about fitness. Once in a while he'll agree to walk with her around the town perimeter in the evening. Lila dresses in an exercise outfit and pumps her arms as she walks, and tries to get Norval to do the same. Normally an intense socializer, Lila is curt when they run into people they know, other couples in exercise wear. They exchange hellos without stopping, in recognition of the fact that they're all out for
earnest
walks, and doing something too important to be interrupted.

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

Lila explains to him about resting and working heart rates. She sounds 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 heads 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 humiliate Rachelle from here to next week.”

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

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,” he says.

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

“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 hard-working bread-winner of this family, deserve to be called childish. You have no idea what I have to put up with every day, Lila.”

“Okay,” she 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?” Norval 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?” he asks. “Will it work better if it matches?”

“We don't own a towel the same colour 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.