Reflections on the Fourth Week of Fall – Mystery on the Bottom of the Pool

    Lugging my swim gear, I walked through the YMCA toward the locker rooms.

    Murmurs from workmen laying ceramic tile in the women’s locker room mixed with squeals from the family locker room. Two boys, wearing wet trunks and holding towels over their shoulders like super hero capes, burst through a shower curtain, the temporary door labeled Women Only.

    I skirted the boys and entered the family room to change. Ten more wiggling youngsters jostled each other in line. The new fall schedule placed swim lessons for the preschool class before lap swim on Thursdays. While the children filed out to dress in their classroom upstairs, I dodged flapping arms and calculated that I’d be swimming in more pee than usual.

    Beside the pool, the children’s swim teacher, an Allegheny College student and the lap swim lifeguard, rubbed his hair and face with a towel. The whistle hanging from his on jiggled, and he peeked out from the towel to say, “Good morning.”

    Leeanne, hopping from foot to foot in the first lane, flashed me a welcoming smile. “The water’s warm today.”

    I walked down the stairs, dove under, and came up in the third lane. Though a comfortable temperature, the water wasn’t comfortable. It smelled of chlorine which interacted with unwelcome substances and dried my skin. Taking a deep breath, I pushed my feet against the side and pulled my arms in an arc for breast stroke.

    On the bottom of the pool, between the third and fourth lanes, lay a dark, two-inch blob shaped like a tadpole.

    Had one of the children left more than pee?

    Wearing goggles and looking through water, I couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was, the pool vacuum would suck it up later, and I could take a long, hot shower. I kept swimming.

    Eva, a lifeguard before multiple hip and back surgeries demoted her to lap swimmer, pulled on her pink bathing cap in the fourth lane.

    I switched to side stroke, and we pushed off the wall together. Normally she’d out swim me, but she stopped mid stroke and called the lifeguard.

    Carrying a long aluminum pole with a square foot net at the end, the lifeguard walked around the pool and crouched near Eva.

    She pointed.

    He plunged the net to the bottom and dragged it toward the wall.

    Leeanne kicked her legs and stared at the scooping.

    I finished back stroke and switched to breast stroke. If the lifeguard scooped poop, he’d blow his whistle and close the pool.

    The next time I side-stroked past the netting operation, Eva held the now detached net in her right hand, grabbed the edge of the pool with her left, and hooked her left knee on the edge. Then she ducked under the water. Her out-of-the-water limbs wobbled.

    I swam my sixteenth length, Leeanne dog-paddled, and the netting pair peered at the netted blob.

    Would the next lap be my last?

    No whistle.

    The lifeguard carried the net and pole back to his chair.

    Eva kicked past me.

    Curious, I planned to catch her at one end or the other and ask what they’d found.

    She lapped me twice before I reached the deep end seconds ahead of her. “Eva,” I called.

    She somersaulted under the water, pushed her feet against the side, and headed toward the shallows. She hadn’t heard me and probably wouldn’t stop swimming before I left.

    I could ask the young life guard.

    After swimming my seventy-fourth length, I held the edge of the pool for cooldown leg stretches and rehearsed questions for the guard.

    Did someone poop in the pool?

    Was the poop intact enough that we didn’t have to evacuate?

    Do you ask children to use the bathroom before entering the pool?

    Stretching my arms, I told myself, You’re too shy to ask a person, whose name you don’t even know, such stupid questions.

    When I climbed out of the pool, Leeanne had already left for the showers, and Eva back stroked toward the deep end. I grabbed my swim bag from a hook next to the lifeguard’s chair and said, “Thanks for guarding me.”

    He looked up from his clipboard. “Have a nice day.”

    I hung my bag on a hook in the shower room, pulled out the shampoo bottle, and turned on the shower next to Leeanne.

Buck naked, we had showered next to each other dozens of times. And we’d discussed everything from visiting family to concealing a pistol in her bra when she walked through the woods alone.

    “I’m curious,” I said rubbing shampoo in my hair. “What did they find on the bottom of the pool?”

    Leeanne laughed. “It was a black bead that girls wear in their hair.” Her eyes sparkled. “Good thing it wasn’t what we were all thinking.”