“No chairs in the pool today,” Anna says. The people in this apartment complex have a bad habit of throwing the lounge chairs in the deep end. The first one was the aftermath of someone’s long Friday night, and it had looked almost meaningful in the early light of Saturday morning—a chair turned sideways like it had a hangover.
Everyone got an email from property management about care for the community and respecting common spaces. It was in all caps and very long, which made management seem so unhinged that it clearly inspired another person to throw a chair, which led to another email, which led to another thrown chair. We’ve been threatened with removal of chairs and loss of pool privileges, but for today, all the chairs are where they should be.
I see Anna looking at the pile of cigarette butts next to the fence which separates us from the parking lot. “The pool at Daddy’s place is nicer,” she says for the millionth time. “I’m having my birthday party there.”
“Ten years,” I say, taking her towel. “My big girl. A pool party will be fun.” Pools were a big talking point in the separation. No more house but two pools, one at each apartment. The apartments were supposed to be temporary. We didn’t know a housing crisis would apply to us.
Anna bops around the pool, singing to herself, asking me to judge her handstands and flips. I scroll on my phone and scan for Mr. Harrison, an elderly neighbor who stares at the pool from his deck in a way that I don’t like. I try not to think about how much urine is in the pool.
There are three young women on the other side of the pool, all with giant water bottles filled with mimosas or seltzers. Their bikinis make a stoplight: one is in red, one in yellow, one in green. They are all scrolling on their phones, too, making lazy conversation until the one in yellow shrieks. A phone is passed around; a man has behaved badly. Again.
“Your problem is that you fall too hard for one person,” the green bikini says. “You should always have at least five guys you’re crushing on. That way when fucking Brandon fucks around, you have a better chance of bouncing back. You have too many eggs in one basket.”
“There’s no one else!” says the one in yellow.
“Oliver is kind of interesting,” says the green light. “And he’s always looking at your boobs.”
I clear my throat and gesture at Anna, who stopped singing as soon as she heard a bad word. She hasn’t turned to face them, but she is bouncing their way, splashing a little quieter so that she can hear. She became a brilliant eavesdropper in our old house.
The pool is small enough that I know they hear me, but they don’t acknowledge me. Anna makes me invisible to women like these; if I were here by myself, I might still be young enough to pull up a chair. I would like to be able to join in on more, now that I am free, with people chatting by the pool or with the older woman who sits on the balcony a few units down from mine and smokes a truly impressive amount of pot. But when Anna is here, and I see the place through her eyes, all I see is the bad behavior of the neighbors. People who play music past ten. People who don’t pick up after dogs. People who throw chairs in pools.
The neighbors at her daddy’s place are nicer.
“Pop quiz time,” says the woman in the red bikini in an ominous way, and I wonder how I will remove Anna before she hears too much. “Name all the ways the apostles died.”
The other two gleefully begin saying names and horrible ways to die. The one in yellow says “flayed” with a scary relish. I don’t know if these are theology students or if this is a kind of true crime fandom. There’s no time to stop Anna from hearing any of it because they’ve rattled everything off—crucified, beheaded, burned—in less than thirty seconds.
“And of course, those are based on historical accounts and not on scripture,” finishes the one in the green bikini.
“Does anyone else think Brandon looks like Jesus?”
“I hope that my faith will be strong enough for a martyrdom. If it comes to that.”
The stoplight women reassure each other that yes, they are all good Christians and would stand up for their faith, even if it involved the worst pain imaginable. I don’t have to feel bad about rolling my eyes because I’m wearing sunglasses and I’m still invisible to them.
Anna, wide-eyed from their performance, climbs out of the pool. I wrap her in a towel. She is still small enough that she can cozy up under my arm, the two of us on one chaise. Anna hums to herself, and the women in bikinis are back on their phones.
I see Mr. Harrison’s brown Oldsmobile pull into his spot, the old man back from his weekly grocery shopping. I hug Anna a little tighter and hope he doesn’t look our way. He has started yelling at Anna and me from his deck. He says he wants to take us out for a steak dinner, and he once named a place so expensive that I feel uncomfortable now because strangers don’t take strangers to places like that. Anna hasn’t pushed the issue, because she doesn’t like steak.
But now she’s up and out of my arms, looking in his direction, and so are the women in bikinis. Mr. Harrison is on his back and groceries are rolling all around him. “Do something!” one of the stoplight women screams at me, and I want to say that I didn’t even see him fall, and it’s not fair that they see me now when they didn’t see me before, now that they want me to deal with this. One of them gets up and runs, and the other two follow. Anna takes off, too, but I reach out and grab her. She looks back at me, confused, and I don’t know how to explain that I might be one of the bad neighbors. The worst kind of bad neighbor, actually, one who knows wrong from right and knowingly chooses the wrong. Maybe her father will tell her about me.
But it’s not so terrible, because he’s not alone. He has three women in bikinis rushing toward him. They are convinced of their goodness; I just didn’t know they were correct. And I don’t know what I would be doing if we were here by ourselves, if I didn’t have an excuse. I think of the way the woman said “flayed” as I look away from Anna.
Even though he fell flat on his back, Mr. Harrison has managed to hold on to his cane, and it points straight to the sky. It reminds me of when a lounge chair settles upside down at the bottom of the pool.