The Summer We Built the Pool

We built the pool to swim
To swim in the morning
Before work
Before school
Before errands
Breakfast
Bacon and eggs
Bagels with grape jelly

We built the pool
To swim in the afternoon
Skipping work
Scrapping school
Snaking errands
Saying we'd work from home
Saying we'd catch up on schoolwork
Saying whatever, who cares, and why bother?

We built the pool
To swim in the evening
Rather than sleep
Rather than read
Rather than be productive
Riding inner tubes
Reveling in sorrow
Reaping the benefits of evening air

We built the pool
The summer that Danny died
In a car accident
In Quebec

The news reached us while we sat on our porch
Sipping iced tea
Eating iced cream
Allowing drips of it to fall on the patio
Waiting for the words we heard to slip back into the mouth
Of our next door neighbor
The bearer of unthinkable news

The summer we built the pool
The dog learned to sit on its own
We didn't teach it
At least, we don't remember if we did
We thought it learned the trick
To cheer us up
To elevate our moods
To get extra treats
Really, who can say?

The summer we built the pool
Our mother taught literature at the local community college
She taught books about loss
She entertained questions about the structure of death
How it permeates the culture
Until we're all writing papers about it
In class
Articles about it
In magazines
Waiting to lose someone so we can have something to say
Until we do
And then we're speechless

My mother taught to hope to learn to deal with losing Danny
The boy who cried into her shoulder so many tears
She could still feel the wet imprint of them there
Soaking into her skin until his sorrow became her pain
Until his nightmares became her daydreams
The idea of parents not loving their children
Was so repulsive to my mother
That she found she couldn't keep it in her head
And would forget why this beautiful boy was begging her
Pleading with ferocity
Asking her not to make him go home
To cold shoulders
To cold dinners
To icy glares from across oak dining room tables
And cold showers that were said to help
To suppress
To stifle
The unspeakable what it was
That ruled his life

Our mother couldn't teach herself how to take this idea
And essay it into something approachable and therefore defeatable
She couldn't back it into a corner with quotations
With literary examples
With rationalization
Or even her own love for this crying boy in her lap
She couldn't teach herself how to bear losing him
So instead she did something she had never done before
She taught about loss
She taught about something she knew nothing about
In the hopes of looking up at this dark, cloudy skyscraper
This topic that dwarfed all others
And seeing a way to climb it
And climb over it
She taught

Our mother taught with lectures of silence
Slideshows with photos of Danny and us
Her favorite photo was one of all of us
And Danny
Standing in the backyard
On the spot where the pool would be
Eating barbecue chicken and making goofy faces
Olivia has her arm around Danny
George wants to have his arm around Danny
Dad wants Danny to be his son
Mom wants the photo to freeze us all forever
Her students wanted extra credit

Next slide

The summer we built the pool
Olivia sang every night at a local club
She sang standards
Night and Day
The Way You Look Tonight
Tonight from West Side Story
She sang and sang and sang
To alcoholics
To bartenders serving alcoholics
To couples
To singles
To cheating spouses with their mistresses
Sipping martinis and singing along
Every time she'd sing 'Ev'ry Time We Say Good-bye"
In her mind she was singing to Danny
He was at the back table
With a Sprite
And a smile
And he didn't love her
Because he never did
And because she knew that and couldn't make him
Even in her fantasies
She'd wear dresses she thought he'd like
She'd do her hair the way she thought he'd like
She'd lift the ends of every sentence
As if to say that endings are impermanent
And when she'd come home
She'd get in the bath
And hum and whistle and make sound after sound
Because in the silence all she could hear was the glass breaking
As it hit the patio, shattering instantly
And Olivia wanted to walk on the glass
Roll in it
Do something surreal
To commemorate an unreal moment
In which a boy who had never done anything wrong
Was taken far away in a place where he knew nobody
Because his parents kicked him out of the house
For not being a person they could wrap their arms and minds around
So he hitchhiked up north
Until a car picked him up
And then crashed a few hours later
Outside a church
Where the sign outside said "Come Here to Rest"
Olivia sings everything but "Amazing Grace"
Because she doesn't believe in grace
She doesn't believe in God
She doesn't believe in silence
Sincerity
Or sleeping in shattered shards of lemonade glasses
But she does believe in smiling and singing
So she does both
And hope one day she'll believe in swimming

Next slide

The summer we built the pool
Our father remodeled our house
He built closets
He bricked up a fireplace he thought looked Colorado-esque
And since we don't live in Colorado...
He brought down the wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room
So that we could see where we eat and eat where we sit and don't talk
Except about building the pool
He did window treatments
Rain gutters
Stained whatever he could stain
To match the stains he thought he saw everywhere
He reupholstered furniture
What he didn't know how to do he learned
And what he couldn't learn he did anyway
This included building treehouses for teenagers, that's us
This included buildng breakfast nooks for people who don't eat breakfast, that's us
This included building a wall between everyone in the family
So we could be alone when we cried
And cursed
And craved insubstantial explanations.
He was trying to build a shrine to the son he never had
The one he wanted more than the one he had
He was building temples everywhere
But would only knock them down when they didn't bring back his idol
He took a hammer to most of them
And kicked away the dust when the hammering was done
He fixed what was broken
Every last thing
Doors stopped getting caught in the frames
Floorboards stopped squeaking
Windows closed with ease
But nothing was any better despite the removal of flaws
Our father wanted to build a ladder to the sky
To go pick up Danny like he used to pick him up after football practice
An offering to Danny's parents which they gladly accepted
Once they couldn't stand the sight of him anymore
Our father wanted that ladder so badly
He considered the idea of making it one-way
So that he wouldn't be able to come back down with Danny
But would just stay up there with him and never look down
Still, no matter how hard he tried
He couldn't bring himself to build anything
That would stand

Next slide

The summer we built the pool
George tried to take his own life seventy-three times
In thoughts
In actions
In attempts
In known and unknown spoken threats
Dares
Verbs
Poetry
Pathetic bids for attention
Blackmailing the universe with his own life
Unless the life of Danny was restored

And when that didn't work, George wrote

He wrote scenarios in which Danny was still living
Living as a truck driver crossing the country
Seeing the places he told George he'd love to live
Minneapolis
San Francisco
Vegas
Seattle
Austin

He wrote about Danny as a baker with a bakery
A restaurant owner with a place just called "Danny's"
A hitchhiker laughing with generous drivers
Who couldn't resist the charming boy
On the side of the road
With nothing but his thumb and a road atlas
Telling stories, not about the family he had
But the family he left
Who gave him barbecue chicken and rides home from practice
And the drivers would be enthralled and saddened
They would suggest he go back to that family
And marry the son--George--because obviously they were soulmates

This is what George wrote

He wrote himself and Danny into a thousand and one love stories
But the pragmatic imaginings always pleased him more
He wrote about the arguments they would have had
The intensity
The rage
The forgiveness
He wrote about the house they would own
With the creaky floorboards his father would fix
The chair where they would sit together and read
The books his mother recommended
And the sound of his sister singing from the stereo in the living room

He wrote about their children
Their hopes
Their ambitions
Conversations
Outings
Picnics
Beach days
Amusement parks
Photographs he could almost see
In his mind's eye, with blue skies above them
They'd be laughing and touching cheek to cheek
And smiling at the world from inside the photograph
As if to say, when we're in here, you can't touch us

He'd write all this and then tear up what he wrote
After he had printed it, read it, corrected it, and rewrote it
It couldn't stay real without Danny
So why bother to keep it
His trash bin was filled with possibilities
When they danced at a nightclub in Morocco
When they caught a train in India and rode it for days
When they were both spies
When they were zookeepers
When they were kindergarten teachers
Actors
Beauticians
Surrogate fathers
Baby-sitters
Friends
Lovers
Alive
Real

Outside of the trash bin, these things were air
Inside George's head, they were something to hold onto
So he wrote them down and clung to them
Until they vaporized
And then he wrote again
And no matter what he wrote
Nothing ever came off the page at him
And held him
And when he realized his own art could not console him
He wondered if he'd ever make art again

The summer we built the pool
Our mother couldn't teach
Our father couldn't build
Olivia couldn't sing with joy or passion
George couldn't write anything worth reading

And so, we built the pool

One morning the dog was sitting
Standing
Sitting
Standing
Walking in a circle
Stopping
Sitting
Waiting
For us to notice
For us to care
For treats

Our father said--We're building a pool
George said--You don't build a pool, you dig one
Our mother said--Why would we build a pool?
Our father said--To see if we can

With that, he moved to the backyard
Where we followed him
He had four shiny shovels all laid out
And the digging began

We dug for hours
We hit stones
We struck the ground with ferocity
Pleased when it gave in
Hitting harder when it didn't
Until it did

While we dug, our mother talked
About how it would be impossible to dig to China
Because of geographic coordinates
And lack of physical strength and strategic planning
We laughed at her
It was the first time we'd laughed
Since the glass shattered on the patio

While we dug, our father broke a sweat
A good sweat
The moisture that came out of him
Could have been tears in another life
But it came out as sweat instead
And it seemed to cleanse rather than corrupt

While we dug, Olivia sang a song about digging
Then a song about dirt
Then a song about pools
Then a song about swimming
And each song got progressively better
Until we were all singing along with her
With words we didn't know
And still don't
But that seemed so appropriate at the time

While we dug, George talked about Danny
This was in between lectures on China
This was after our father talked about digging patterns
This was after Olivia finished her medley
He talked about Danny
About how he missed touch football
And Christmas tree decorating
And barbecue chicken
And Danny there for all of it
And how he should have been digging with them
And Olivia said--
'He can't be here because he's who we're digging for'
And that made sense

When we were finished digging
We were so far down we could only see up, not out
And we realized we didn't have a way to get up or out
This made us laugh, then panic
The summer sun was beating down on us
It would be the last great heat of the summer
And it would be the final thing we had to battle
Before we could have our pool

Our father instructed us to create a human ladder
We clung to the walls of dirt and pushed Olivia up first
She then pulled our mother
The two of them pulled George
And our father clung to George's feet
Until we were all laying on the grass of our backyard
The grass felt cool and dewy
And we rolled around it relieved that we wouldn't die in a hole in the backyard
That was supposed to be a pool
But at that moment, looking down on it
It clearly wasn't
It was just a hole

And yet, we had climbed out of it
We had pulled each other up using nothing but ourselves
And there we were
Where we had eaten barbecue chicken
On the last days of summer
Before we knew that Danny would leave
And never come back
Before we knew there would be a time
When we would doubt what we could do
What was possible
And what we could climb out of
Achieve
Overcome

All of a sudden we were no longer failures
At teaching
At building
At singing
At storytelling

All of a sudden we were a family
With a pool
And a dog
Who could sit
Which seemed like some kind of success

Our father got the hose and began to fill the hole with water
And we all sat around while the dog sat down
All waiting to be the first to dive in