Thin, runny, dirty olive green liquid rolled over it like a conspiracy. Even in the certainty that the space around me was not full of artificially circulating chlorinated water, I felt my insides twist from that unexpected meeting with the figurehead of my phobia.
Don't I get laughed at enough for my irrational fear of water? My fair share and then some. But my fear is based in passionate childhood superstition, the kind that makes people believe in Allah or Jesus, or the irrepudiable wrath of a strong man. In the pool, surrounded by dusty leaves and sprawling kittens, the water god yawned and blew his rotting breath upon me in a cosmic act of ownership, skittering my lazy laboring attitude.
How could I escape him.
We met forever over the floating body of my older brother. The three of us were young. I didn't understand until months later why I had dreams of rippling ceilings, of green lights under water revealing boylike shadows against my eyes, a room with walls of darkness, screams identified by my wandering vocal cords as their own. No, please don't mistake me--he lived; I attracted attention, and he puked up the water from his lungs while in our heroic mother's arms. The pool lived too, in a green abundant living water, under-chlorinated. Choppy waves were at my ankles for weeks, tasting the tendons which I had the power to allow back into the gaping aquatic hole. I gnawed on my own fear.
The shallow end, extending in the pool to the point of the buoy line, marked where I felt safe. Past the buoy line, fifteen by ten feet of water, that belonged to... the drain? or the green? Or perhaps the monsters that my teenage uncle kidded about, the same monster that ate my brother and spit him out to Mommy? The octopus-leviathan tried to kill him, but wound up stopping the clockwork inside my mother's wristwatch instead. Her Junior Lifesaving skills helped give her a level head when she was on the verge of losing her firstborn. I respected her powers of resuscitation, but I held a suspicious, panicking, brainless fear when confronted with the power of the thing in the deep end.
My brother was able to laugh and jump into the pool only days later. His brain blocked out his dark trauma, while I stared and stared at the only thing even visible under all that aquatic opacity--the dim outline of a shadowed pool drain. It moved due to tricks of the light, else under its own power. Sitting uncomfortably on the convex curve of the concrete by the shallow end, I kicked water at my family with my little feet, twisting my childish mouth into a sideways frown that made my uncle laugh nervously and pick me up, to threaten to toss me off the diving board. When my tears subsided I went into the house with a glass bottle of Coke and a dry bathing suit.
Rational thought helped me breathe better. The age of reason helped catapult me to a mentality which forced with a firm hand down the quiet horror of the wet, green smells of algae. It taught me to appreciate the scrapes on my toes as tokens of uneven and poorly applied paint on the floor of the pool. It was not the skin of sharks which made my feet raw. The movie I saw, in which a girl's ankle was handcuffed to the drain of the pool, set my mind in motion about methods of rescue for a victim of similar circumstances. Couldn't one use scuba equipment? A diver's breathing tube would not be long enough, I remember thinking, but a hose would work as well. Meanwhile, someone wearing flippers and a diving mask could reach the shadowy sanctuary of the drain, and somehow use tools to free the foot. Keeping alive and keeping interested in exploring the point of danger worked for a long time to allay misgivings. My sister, a fearless water beast done up in pink bathing suits, shoved a pair of goggles at me one day and invited me for a mid-morning dive in order to place enormous chlorine tablets on the drain at the center of the deep end. Our grandmother towered in approval over us, her classic swimming outfit unchanging over the years and lending me a measure of security. The radio blare, along with the comfortably cool summer morning and friendly sunshine dabbing rippled twists of light along a slanted path on the westerly shallow end, were invitations to put my troubled legs into the smooth water of the pool. With a tiny swirl I slid into the deep end, seeing underwater as I had been afraid to do before, behind the protection of glass and a guard against green waters in tow. Powerful kicks, probably splashing all kinds of wet onto the concrete deck and my cola-sipping grandma, made me smile in spite of myself; I fell in love with flippers. I placed my tablet offering on the altar of the water god once I reached the bottom. I willed that it would trouble me no more.
Those were pleasant days. The cousins from the next state over were close enough to visit about once a month and turn the pool building, affectionately called the pool hut, into a sopping concrete water park. My four young relatives plus parents, my two siblings and whoever else they managed to dredge up from the neighborhood, sent wails of laughter up through the convertible ceiling and up to the trees above which provided shade in the first half of the day. No matter how dark the water was, I always got in the line to jump off the board in cannonballs or belly-busters. If there were storm clouds and thunderclaps to avoid, we sat in lines along the edge, kicking warm summer water at one another with deliciously malevolent teasing, drinking sodas which our young uncle floated to us from the shallow end steps. I almost forgot about the unhappiness of deep, dark water with the high spirits and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
A fear of heights neatly restored much of my misplaced phobia. I felt shoves on my back as I stood probably a million feet up in the air over a 12-foot pool in a distant town, at a company picnic. I suppose 50 feet of empty air is more horrible than any great unknown lurking in the depths of a dirty pool. After abortive attempts several years running, while at the end of the high dive I was pushed off by someone I never saw for the panic which overtook me on the violent rush towards a godsmack onto choppy waters. My first dive off that terrible scaffold was also my last. The chief suspect in my ongoing investigation of the pusher was my little sister, although I knew pursuing the lead would be fruitless and frustrating. I did not put it past the other nasty children at the picnic to have pushed me towards both the physical pain of landing and creatively manifested, thorough, psychological terror of confronting heights. Masochistic tendencies must have put me on the high dive anyway, because of my double abhorrence of heights and deep water. The lowness of my pool's diving board and the familiar tepid liquid surrounding on even the most overcast days were nothing like the public pool which I never saw after the day of that dive. Nervousness, however, attended again my laps around the pool. Forays across the drain itself were few and ill-applauded. No one seemed to understand my fear.
My mother found the habit of swimming at night alluring and calming. I found it horrible. When the overhead lights in the hut were turned on, the water became dark green, almost black, if not lit from the pool light, and I wasn't about to subject my feet and body to the lurking evil which awaited, unknown, in that opaque universe. When the waters were, on occasion, clear and clean, the light in the bottom illuminated the roof with rippling turquoises and blues. The rest of the time it was green, like a soft spaceship glow. Aliens could have been the things at the bottom. I could not abide to even venture out into the pool hut after dark on nights Mother chose not to swim, for fear of that splashing wet hole in all its dark glory, sucking in the light from amber street lamps and making me fear for the cats.
Kittens were not very good about pool safety. Because my grandmother did not maintain a high water level, and because the edges of the pool were rounded and slippery when wet, we found at least two kittens, drowned, floating in the skimmer. The skimmer was a flopping plastic vent opening to a net basket, capturing in the circulation the various things which fell onto the surface and which should not dirty the pool's surface. I suppose kittens without sufficient light or means to escape in the night fit the bill as well as any stray butterfly or June bug. My worst experience was seeing a week-old kitten lying, still as a stone, a foot down on the steep incline to the bottom. It had crept out of the high box where it was born, on top of which the cats were fed, fallen to the concrete below, and dragged itself aimlessly through the night until it met a horrible end in the water. The kitten was as helpless as if it had been tied in a sack and dumped in the creek. I did not swim in the pool for the rest of that summer, touched by an irresistable urge to recoil.
As I grew older and more unsupervised in my swims, less accompanied due to differing work schedules and summer vacations from studies out-of-town, left alone during the hot waking hours of the day, the pool grew more and more familiar. I helped more in its caretaking and worried more than anyone when my daily laps were interrupted as I hovered over the drain, divided between daring and panic, trying not to inhale water, face pointed down. Was there anything which could get rid of that panic? Would I be doomed to forever shun swims across lakes, invent excuses not to fall into oceans and laugh myself out of my orange lifejacket, face the unreasonable urge to avoid a part of my own home because of one stupid trauma?
I became angry as I cleaned that four foot circle of mud and algae. Clang, dank, the broom made noise on the concrete. I stomped on the steep hill to the top. I emptied my bucket onto the mulch in the back yard. I came back to the pool, running to the bottom. I swept more water into the dustpan and flung it into the bucket again, this time spraying a lazy kitten with green ooze. She was indignant and flicked it off her paw, launching into a bath. The drain burped at me.
"Shut Up," I said to the water god.
The next day, my uncle and his young son helped me sweep the dried remains of the green pond; by noon the hose was refilling the pool with clean, cold water. Laughter once again echoed and bounced against the bare walls, which waited for the quiet of water pressure. Waist-deep in the collecting liquid, my cousin floated boats and let out healthy guffaws at the insects he thought drowned which got up and flew away. Wading up to my knees and leaning against the wall, I complacently watched the kittens dance near the skittering edge of the clear pool, lying in wait for leaves. My cousin reached into the water and called my name after a minute.
"Hey, hey!" he shouted at me. "What's this? I found it on the bottom." In his hand he held a rounded, plastic object, full of narrow slats.
"Put it back," I said nervously.
"Okay," he said, reaching into the water again and stepping like a penguin on the pool's bottom across it. Meanwhile the sun was just setting, and the sunlight moved so as to completely slip away from the top of his head.
"Let's go inside and play video games," he said, running and dripping water into the house. I followed, glancing backwards at the jostled, swaying water.
"You don't frighten me," I told the water god, but I was lying.