The swimming pool at my grandparent's house was hardly grand; it's relatively small. The pool goes to about 8 feet deep, is rectangular with white concrete steps on the shallow side, and has a metal pole you can't slide down.
Diving has never been allowed at the pool, and when I was a kid, anyone under 18 years old had to get out at noon. That rule was recently changed, allowing kids to swim all day. But that was subsequently voted down 210-15.
The pool and everything around it is symmetrical, like many suburban things. A chain link fence encloses the pool, and a roofed area towers over the west end of the pool, and in the middle of that, exactly where the two sides of the roof touch, is a white clock that presides over the pool like a judge.
I can remember watching that clock as noon approached. Thinking how strange it was, the same factor of time, in fact, the same exact time that during the dreaded school year meant lunch and freedom, was now an harbinger of sadness, when the summer day turned from a rabid cool delight into my grandma's questionable Jell-O salads and tuna fish with egg.
And there was no doubt, that when 12 o'clock hit, my sister and I were ordered out of the pool. There might have been some stalling with grandma, possibly two or three minutes spent on "one last lap", or surging underwater when she uttered the first "Ok" of "Ok, it's time to get out." But there was no such thing with my grandpa. An accountant of strict German stock with a bad, and even babyish temper, there was zero give in the mobile home park's rulebook.
At one point I hated to swim, and would hide under my sister's bed (mine had another bed underneath it) to avoid my swim lesson. I had to be bribed with Taco Bell lunches to go. Swimming was a big deal in my family. My grandfather coached it, though I never knew that when I was young. Two of my Uncles excelled on the state level, I used to see my Uncle Brian's name on the wall of fame for a backstroke record at the junior college I attended 20 years after he had.
But for some reason I didn't want to swim. I probably wanted to watch television, but later, in high school, I didn't want to swim because of my skin. I was white as the snow, red haired and freckled, which in tan happy 1980s California, was hardly accepted. And besides that I was skinny and shy.
My entire 9th grade year I dreaded the annual 9th grader field trip to Windsor Water Works, a waterslide park on the outskirts of town. While I loved waterslides, I loved them with family, close friends and hundreds of strangers who might laugh at my nearly orange and pink skin, but not to my face.
When the time finally came to go to the class party, my Mom, ever identifying with self-consciousness related to looks or shape, suggested a fake tan solution. A cream I put on my arms and legs that would give me the deep dark brown skin I so desperately wanted. Of course the tan in the bottle had to be applied perfectly, or it would darken in some places and leave orange streaks across the backs of my knees and other hard to get to places, but, of course, the women of my 9th grade class would be fooled and would be begging me to take them into the bathroom and give them the fucking of their young lives in the toilet stalls.
Unfortunately the stuff washed off upon contact with water, and as the name Windsor Water Works, or it's commercial tag line "You're gonna get wet", might imply, it was difficult to avoid, though I'm sure I tried at some point. But as the day went on, and as I realized that my tan was gone and would only change to pink if I wasn't careful, I let go of my bronze-skinned bathroom fantasies and managed to get in a few tunnel pileups with a pubescent girls anyway.