The Orphaned Swimming Pool
Marriages, like chemical unions, release upon dissolution packets of the energy locked up in their bonding. There is the piano no one wants, the cocker spaniel no one can take care of. Shelves of books suddenly stand revealed as burdensomely dated and unlikely to be reread; indeed, it is difficult to remember who read them in the first place. And what of those old skis in the attic? Or the doll house waiting to be repaired in the basement? The piano goes out of tune, the dog goes mad. The summer that the Turners got their divorce, their swimming pool had neither a master nor a mistress, though the sun beat down day after day, and a state of drought was declared in Connecticut.
It was a young pool, only two years old, of the fragile type fashioned by laying a plastic liner within a carefully carved hole in the ground. The Turners' side yard looked infernal while it was being done; one bulldozer sank into the mud and had to be pulled free by another. But by midsummer the new grass was sprouting, the encircling flagstones were in place, the blue plastic tinted the water a heavenly blue, and it had to be admitted that the Turners had scored again. They were always a little in advance of their friends. He was a tall, hairy-backed man with long arms, and a nose flattened by football, and a sullen look of too much blood; she was a fine-boned blonde with dry blue eyes and lips usually held parted and crinkled as if about to ask a worrisome, or whimsical, question. They had never seemed happier, nor their marriage healthier, than those two summers. They grew brown and supple and smooth with swimming. Ted would begin his day with a swim, before dressing to catch the train, and Linda would hold court all day amid crowds of wet matrons and children, and Ted would return from work to find a poolside cocktail party in progress, and the couple would end their day at midnight, when their friends had finally left, by swimming nude, before bed. What ecstasy! In darkness the water felt mild as milk and buoyant as helium, and the swimmers became giants, gliding from side to side in a single languorous stroke.
The next May, the pool was filled as usual, and the usual after-school gangs of mothers and children gathered, but Linda, unlike her, stayed indoors. She could be heard within the house, moving from room to room, but she no longer emerged, as in the other summers, with a cheerful tray of ice and brace of bottles, and Triscuits and lemonade for the children. Their friends felt less comfortable about appearing, towels in hand, at the Turners' on weekends. Though Linda had lost some weight and looked elegant, and Ted was cumbersomely jovial, they gave off the faint, sleepless, awkward-making aroma of a couple in trouble. Then, the day after school was out, Linda fled with the children to her parents in Ohio. Ted stayed nights in the city, and the pool was deserted. Though the pump that ran the water through the filter continued to mutter in the lilacs, the cerulean pool grew cloudy. The bodies of dead horseflies and wasps dotted the still surface. A speckled plastic ball drifted into a corner beside the diving board and stayed there. The grass between the flagstones grew lank. On the glass-topped poolside table, a spray can of Off! had lost its pressure and a gin and tonic glass held a sere mint leaf. The pool looked desolate and haunted, like a stagnant jungle spring; it looked poisonous and ashamed. The postman, stuffing overdue notices and pornography solicitations into the mailbox, averted his eyes from the side yard politely.
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Some June weekends, Ted sneaked out from the city. Families driving to church glimpsed him dolefully sprinkling chemical substances into the pool. He looked pale and thin. He instructed Roscoe Chace, Ins neighbor on the left, how to switch on the pump and change the filter, and how much chlorine and Algitrol should be added weekly. He explained he would not be able to make it out every weekend—as if the distance that for years he had traveled twice each day, gliding in and out of New York, had become an impossibly steep climb back into the past. Linda, he confided vaguely, had left her parents in Akron and was visiting her sister in Minneapolis. As the shock of the Turners' joint disappearance wore off, their pool seemed less haunted and forbidding. The Murtaugh children— the Murtaughs, a rowdy, numerous family, were the Turners' right-hand neighbors—began to use it, without supervision. So Linda's old friends, with their children, began to show up, "to keep the Murtaughs from drowning each other." For if anything were to happen to a Murtaugh, the poor Turners (the adjective had become automatic) would be sued for everything, right when they could least afford it. It became, then, a kind of duty, a test of loyalty, to use the pool.
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July was the hottest in twenty seven years. People brought their own lawn furniture over in station wagons and set it up. Teenage offspring and Swiss au-pair girls were established as lifeguards. A nylon rope with flotation corks, meant to divide the wading end from the diving end of the pool, was found coiled in the garage and reinstalled. Agnes Kleefeld contributed an old refrigerator, which was wired to an outlet above Ted's basement workbench and used to store ice, quinine water, and soft drinks. An honor system shoebox containing change appeared beside it; a little lost-and-found—an array of forgotten sunglasses, flippers, towels, lotions, paperbacks, shirts, even underwear—materialized on the Turners' side steps. When people, that July, said, "Meet you at the pool," they did not mean the public pool past the shopping center, or the country-club pool beside the first tee. They meant the Turners'. Restrictions on admission were difficult to enforce tactfully. A visiting Methodist bishop, two Taiwanese economists, an entire girls' softball team from Darien, an eminent Canadian poet, the archery champion of Hartford, the six members of a black rock group called the Good Intentions, an ex-mistress of Aly Khan, the lavender-haired mother-in-law of a Nixon adviser not quite of Cabinet rank, an infant of six weeks, a man who was killed the next day on the Merritt Parkway, a Filipino who could stay on the pool bottom for eighty seconds, two Texans who kept cigars in their mouths and hats on their heads, three telephone linemen, four expatriate Czechs, a student Maoist from Wesleyan, and the postman all swam, as guests, in the Turners' pool, though not all at once. After the daytime crowd ebbed, and the shoebox was put back in the refrigerator, and the last au-pair girl took the last goose-fleshed, wrinkled child shivering home to supper, there was a tide of evening activity, trysts (Mrs. Kleefeld and the Nicholson boy, most notoriously) and what some called, overdramatically, orgies. True, late splashes and excited guffaws did often keep Mrs. Chace awake, and the Murtaugh children spent hours at their attic window with binoculars. And there was the evidence of the lost underwear.
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One Saturday early in August, the morning arrivals found an unknown car with New York plates parked in the garage. But cars of all sorts were so common—the parking tangle frequently extended into the road—that nothing much was thought of it, even when someone noticed that the bedroom windows upstairs were open. And nothing came of it, except that around suppertime, in the lull before the evening crowds began to arrive in force, Ted and an unknown woman, of the same physical type as Linda but brunette, swiftly exited from the kitchen door, got into the car, and drove back to New York. The few lingering babysitters and beaux thus unwittingly glimpsed the root of the divorce. The two lovers had been trapped inside the house all day; Ted was fearful of the legal consequences of their being seen by anyone who might write and tell Linda. The settlement was at a ticklish stage; nothing less than terror of Linda's lawyers would have led Ted to suppress his indignation at seeing, from behind the window screen, his private pool turned public carnival. For long thereafter, though in the end he did not marry the woman, he remembered that day when they lived together like fugitives in a cave, feeding on love and ice water, tiptoeing barefoot to the depleted cupboards, which they, arriving late last night, had hoped to stock in the morning, not foreseeing the onslaught of interlopers that would pin them in. Her hair, he remembered, had tickled his shoulders as she crouched behind him at the window, and through the angry pounding of his own blood he had felt her slim body breathless with the attempt not to giggle.
August drew in, with cloudy days. Children grew bored with swimming. Roscoe Chace went, on vacation to Italy; the pump broke down, and no one repaired it. Dead dragonflies accumulated on the surface of the pool. Small deluded toads hopped in and swam around hopelessly. Linda at last returned. From Minneapolis she had gone on to Idaho for six weeks, to be divorced. She and the children had burnt faces from riding and hiking; her lips looked drier and more quizzical than ever, still seeking to frame that troubling question. She stood at the window, in the house that already seemed to lack its furniture, at the same side window where the lovers had crouched, and gazed at the deserted pool. The grass around it was green from splashing, save where a long-lying towel had smothered a rectangle and left it brown. Aluminum furniture she didn't recognize lay strewn and broken. She counted a dozen bottles beneath the glass-topped table. The nylon divider had parted, and its two halves floated independently. The blue plastic beneath the colorless water tried to make a cheerful, otherworldly statement, but Linda saw that the pool in truth had no bottom, it held bottomless loss, it was one huge blue tear. Thank God no one had drowned in it. Except her. She saw that she could never live here again. In September the place was sold to a family with toddling infants, who for safety's sake have not only drained the pool but have sealed it over with iron pipes and a heavy mesh, and put warning signs around, as around a chained dog.
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[1970]
GLOSSARY
dissolution ("Marriages, like chemical unions, release upon dissolution packets of energy")—decomposition into fragments or parts; termination of a formal or legal bond or contract.
bonding ("the energy locked up in their bonding"}— the force that holds atoms together; when the bond is broken, energy (motion, heat, or light) is released.
to go mad ("the dog goes mad"}— to become infected with rabies (a dog); to become insane.
to score ("the Turners had scored again")—to make a point in a contest.
to hold court ("would hold court all day")—to entertain visitors, as a queen receives courtiers.
a solicitation ("stuffing... pornography solicitations into the mailbox")—(1) a request made using persuasion; (2) an offer of sexual services. Both meanings apply here.
an au-pair girl ("Swiss au-pair girls'")— a young woman who lives with a family and looks after the children in exchange for room and board.
an honor system ("an honor system shoebox containing change")—an informal agreement that, without supervision, people will follow a set of rules.
Darien ("softball team from Darien")—a very fashionable Connecticut suburb of New York.
Hartford ("archery champion of Hartford) — an unfashionable city in northern Connecticut.
Good Intentions ("rock group called the Good Intentions")—from the proverbial expression "Theroad to hell is paved with good intentions."
Aly Khan ("an ex-mistressof Aly Khan') —a Pakistani prince known as a playboy andsportsman in his youth; Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, 1958-60.
lavender-haired ('the lavender-haired mother-in-law")—with white hair tinted a purplish-blue.
Nixon ("a Nixon adviser")—Richard M. Nixon, American president, 1969-74.
a parkway ("killed the next day on the Merritt Parkway")—a highway on which no trucks or commercial vehicles are allowed.
a Maoist ("a student Maoist")—a follower of Мао Zedong, the primary Chinese Communist organizer and theoretician from the 1920s to his death in 1979.
Wesleyan ("from Wesleyan")—a fashionable private university in western Connecticut.
beaux ("The few lingering babysitters and beaux")— plural form of beau, a boyfriend.
ticklish ("The settlement was at a ticklish stage's—delicate, easy to upset.
QUESTIONS
1. "Upon dissolution," the narrator says, both chemical unions and marriages release energy that had been "locked up in their bonding". That is, when either chemical or social bonds are broken, energy is released. According to the examples in the first paragraph of the story, what kinds of energy are released when a marriage ends in divorce?
2. What details in the second paragraph of the story establish that the Turners are part of the American upper-middle class?
3. How, when the Turners were gone for the summer, did their swimming pool become a center of neighborhood activity? How did the neighbors justify using the pool? What did the neighbors need to do to feel that everything was in order?
4. In every culture, people who fit in are seen to be "the same" as everyone else in their group—the same, for example, in age, income, religion, appearance, and opinion. In Updike's humorous catalogue of people who swam in the Turners' pool, how is each person or group "different"—different, that is, from the Turners and their neighbors?
5. What picture does the story present of the sex lives of the American suburban upper-middle class in the 1960s?
6. What are the ironies (the differences between what could be or was expected and what actually happened) of the weekend when Ted came back to the house? For example, why weren't he and his mistress recognized when they arrived at the house? Why couldn't they enjoy a swim in the pool? What was the difference in their reactions to the situation of being trapped inside the house?
7. Linda's question is referred to twice—at the beginning of the story as "a worrisome, or whimsical, question" (lines 24-25) and the end of the story as "that troubling question" (line 153); but she never asks the question. What do you suppose itwas?
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