9am pool crew
Welcome to the Sunday post.
My heart is with all the people sustaining and supporting the student encampments around the country. Thank you to every person acting against genocide in ways big, small, visible, invisible.
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From behind a window a person secures my wrist in a neon wristband. These are not the days when a wristband means I am old enough to drink, or have access to some VIP area. My wristband means I paid $1 for the 9am “adult exercise” class in the pool.
This crowd is different from the 10am Aquafit crowd.
She won’t let me jump in, I overhear one woman saying. I’m bending to slip on my pool shoes. My hips, she says. S. has three grandkids and two newly replaced hips. She wants to jump in but the class helper V. won’t let her because she knows S. has to rehab the hips.
I got a hip x-ray yesterday, I say. One is degenerating faster than the other. Osteoarthritis. My hat is off today, my dumb little straw visor that I mostly wear, as opposed to my dumb little nylon gray hat. The sky was overcast so I slathered my face and neck and tattoos in sunblock and went hatless. I’ve been watching sun spots appear around the edges of my hairline. My mother’s face and its transformation over time make me layer the sunblock and wear dumb hats.
With no hat, the gray hairs at my temples show. I realized the other day that when I am without a hat I feel like I fit in more with the 9am crowd, who is mostly silver-haired.
Our leader in exercise is back from a trip. I’m glad because I’m not so keen on one of her subs. One time, left in his care, he insisted that everyone—focusing on me and my partner—had to shower. It’s a rule, he said. And certainly there are those who stand under the outdoor shower and let it sprinkle them for a moment, as per “the rules.” And then there’s me and plenty of others who don’t, because why. That day, he insisted. I realized we were giving over to a boomer’s patriarchal demand, but we did it somewhat good-naturedly. Afterward, my partner went up to him and said, I did it today, but I’m not doing it again! with a laugh. She rarely attends with me so I’m the only one that ever has to see him. But I don’t think he even remembers.
In the 9am class I’m one of the younger ones. Occasionally some 40-somethings are there, and this week there were some rather lovely 30-somethings. The truth is I don’t even know anymore how old anyone is. I look around and everyone is either young or old. If you look under 40, you’re young to me now. But I don’t even know what 40 looks like. In the 9am class I’m one of the ones with the least silver hair.
One woman returned from a cruise. She goes alone, I heard her say. I have never been on a cruise nor have I ever wanted to go on a cruise until I read my friend Lizz’s recent “dispatches from the Sapphic seas” in which she went on an Olivia cruise and suddenly I was like, Oh, shit, what am I doing on the Olivia website. Another woman returned to class from a couple months away, when she’d been caring for elderly parents. For the last six months or longer I’d called her Jo Ann Beard in my head. She is not Jo Ann Beard, but she resembles her. I love Jo Ann Beard’s writing, so I imagined that maybe she was here, in L.A., working on a tv show or movie based on one of her books. And here she was in our MWF 9am pool class! When would I get the courage to ask her if her name was Jo Ann? Never. The other day someone called her by her name and my fantasy was blown. I love her smart lipstick, her closed-mouth smile, and her canvas hat. She wears a fit little shorty wetsuit and changes into a flowy smock-like dress post-class. She pulls all her pool gear away in her little rolling bag.
Everyone congratulated L., who also returned to class recently. She’s my favorite person to look at in class. She wears dangly earrings—pearls, or big neon pink or blue hoops that match her rash guard. Her lipstick is pink and her hair is styled. I like her smile.
The other person’s smile I like is a woman in a long-sleeve rash guard who does her own thing on the steps when we’re doing the usual routine. She sits on the steps, stands, stretches out her arms then brings them into prayer position, and sits back down and starts over. Her smile and the fact that she’s doing something different than the rest of the class draw me in.
Today the woman who has had her breasts removed wasn’t there. She’s a world traveler, I’ve overheard. We’ve recently exchanged pleasantries. She has an easygoing energy and wears a bikini, slapping her belly in time to the music of the 10am clas as she strolls around the pool deck. I miss my nipples, she said, laughing.
One half of the pool is the chatty side, the other the library side. I, of course, am on the library side, observing, faithfully doing my crunches in the middle of the pool when most people are up against the sides.
My right hip cries when we are all holding onto the ledge, bent legs doing hinges back and forth. My right hip softens as I circle it around and around then in reverse.
There’s a whole social order I’ve witnessed over time in the 9am. I gather that some folks come over from the nearby senior living condos. The couples are usually on the chatty side of the pool or hanging around by the ropes that separate us from the swim lanes. The library side of the pool chats on occasion, just more quietly.
The name of our teacher is the name of my partner. The name of one of the teacher’s subs is my name. The name of the volunteer who is on hand to guide any newbies is the name of my partner’s ex before me. I find this hilarious.
I miss the Latine family of four that used to come. Where are they, I wonder. I sometimes look around—not just at the pool, but anywhere—and think, My god, everyone one of us has survived a pandemic. So far.
The loudest woman is 66. I know this because she likes to exclaim things about herself all the time. She has tattoos, one of a Grateful Dead dancing bear. After I’d been in the class for nearly a year, she came up to me and took hold of my hands. She looked my hands and wrists over, tattooed as they are. She didn’t remark on the tattoos, just looked. Today she talked to me more than she ever has. I’m not even sure I want to write about what she said here—except to say that in the context of the conversation I mentioned that I’m a therapist and then she exclaimed some things, things people usually only reveal to therapists. She told me she believes we have some things in common. She told me she is an Aries and I laughed. She shouted from under the outdoor shower, That explains some things, doesn’t it?
Where is the woman who sits idly at the edge of the pool, feet in the water, waving at some of her friends in the 9am class? Who are the new lifeguards? They all look to be in their 20s. Sunglasses, red sweatshirts. Where are the ones from last year?
A. doesn’t come on Fridays. She wears a big white fluffy robe outside the water. I bet she’s like me, in her 50s. R. wasn’t there today, either, so there was no one thrashing around into my black square by accident.
These are my people and not my people. I signed up for a potluck that they apparently have every summer in the nearby park. What the hell, I thought. Why not. D., who organizes the “database” with everyone’s email addresses, stressed to me that she would not give out my email address, and no one had to bring anything to the potluck. I wrote my name down and said I’d bring chips and cowboy caviar. I have not uttered the words “cowboy caviar” since my kid was a baby and it was the snack some mother would usually bring to the “baby bonanza” playdates we’d have weekly. As someone who usually feels outside of things, tangentially part of, committed to various groups here and there over time, but never with both feet fully in, it was strange to commit myself to this potluck. These people are each others’ people and as usual I feel like the odd outsider. It’s a role I’ve become accustomed to, after 50 years in this body, with this psyche.
There are still several weeks before the potluck. Three classes per week, which I can usually get myself to, even under the overcast skies, the May gray and the June gloom. I turn 51 in a couple weeks, which means the 9am class becomes ever more appropriate for me with each passing year.
This week I’ve seen a black butterfly hovering around the pool. Sometimes by 10am the sun breaks through the clouds and everyone cries out in joy and lifts their faces toward it. Light breezes flutter the flags that are strung over the pool for the water polo players.
So why the hell not. Cowboy caviar it is.