grass where the swim teams congregated during meets and where the rest of the time teenage girls sunned themselves; on the south side was the baby pool and the sign-in desk, which was also where you got towels (no one brought their own), and the concrete steps leading to the men’s and women’s locker rooms—every summer, a confused child would wander into the wrong one—and the snack bar. (Surely there are no smells and sounds more evocative for me than that particular combination of fried food being consumed under a midday sun, with a backdrop of splashing water and children’s cries. To think of it now—normal life—fills me with nostalgia.) At neither the snack bar nor the clubhouse dining room nor the sports room nor the golf nor tennis stores nor anywhere on club grounds did you use cash. Rather, you were given a half-length forest-green pencil with no eraser that said
MARONEE COUNTRY CLUB
along the side, and you signed a bill that had a piece of carbon paper attached beneath it; I’d write
At the end of the month, an itemized tab was sent to our house.
Either the best or worst part about the country club, depending upon how social I felt on a particular day, was that we knew nearly everyone who belonged; going for dinner there was like going to a restaurant where every face happened to be familiar. For the most part, this was comforting, giving me a stronger sense of community than I’d had even growing up in Riley. Sometimes, however, when I was in a hurry—if Ella had attended a friend’s birthday party at the pool and I just wanted to pick her up quickly—it would not have been my preference to greet seven people, to have to say to Joannie Sacks, “Was France wonderful?” or to have Sandra Mahlberg announce, “Your sister-in-law made the most fabulous horseradish trout the other night!” And at rare moments, the insularity was downright unbearable—it made me ashamed of myself and everyone else at the club, ashamed of our wealth, our unthinking claims to privilege. The previous summer, I had brought that day’s
with me to the pool, and I was sitting with Jadey on the flagstone terrace behind the diving boards when I read an article about a man living in the Walnut Hill area of the city who had hepatitis C and cirrhosis and who couldn’t afford medication. And then I looked up and saw fifteen-year-old Melissa Pagenkopf rubbing oil on her belly, I heard a woman a few feet away say, “We never fly United if we can help it,” and I felt a terrible sense of culpability. In this case, I couldn’t simply write a check—there was no organization mentioned in the article, he was just an individual, and wouldn’t he need medication for years to come? To send two hundred dollars would be a drop in the bucket. And I already knew I was not bold enough to seek him out (his name was Otis Donovan) without a charity acting as intermediary; I wouldn’t want to write him a check that had my address on it, wouldn’t want him to have a way of finding me.
At such moments, I felt that we were like the people in California who live in enormous houses on the sides of cliffs, that our lives were beautiful but precarious, their foundations vulnerable. And then I’d think, was it adolescent to become preoccupied with other people’s problems, or to feel, while reading the newspaper or watching the local news, that if you didn’t consciously will yourself not to, you might cry? Life was so hard for so many people, the odds were stacked so precipitously against them. The other adults I knew did not seem overly distressed about these imbalances, and certainly not surprised by them, whereas to me they were constantly surprising, they were never not upsetting.
I had turned to Jadey and gestured in front of us. “Do you ever feel guilty about all of this?”
“All of what?” she said.
“I’m reading an article about a man in Walnut Hill who has hepatitis, and then I think of how my worst problem is that I can’t get my daughter to eat vegetables. Does it ever occur to you that you should be leading an entirely different life?”
“Oh, I know.” Jadey was nodding sympathetically. “I used to want to join the Peace Corps. Can’t you picture me in, you know, Zambia? How could I have made it ten minutes without my hair dryer?”
Although she spoke warmly, I knew not to push my point—she had sidestepped it the way she sidestepped our mother-in-law’s insults and decrees—and I wondered if already I might have violated decorum, positing myself as ponderously thoughtful, as self-righteous. It was inappropriate to introduce poverty and woe while sunning yourself pool-side; you either ought to be elsewhere, doing something about it, or you ought to sun yourself in the spirit that sunning requires. There was an older woman I knew in Garden Club, Mary Schmidbauer, with whom three or four years earlier, I’d been assigned to host a meeting, and when I’d suggested holding it in the country club’s sports room, as was common, she’d said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, Alice, dear, but I haven’t been a member since my husband passed on. They’re not crazy about having women belong by themselves, and of course they’ve never allowed Jews or blacks. When Kenneth died, I realized I’d had enough.” I had been chastened, and Mary and I had ended up holding the meeting in my living room.
That Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, after Jadey, Ella, Winnie, and I had signed in—there was actually a line, which never happened on a normal day—we staked out lounge chairs on the southeast side of the pool, a little ways behind the lifeguard’s chair, and Winnie and Ella obliged Jadey and me by letting us rub sunscreen on their backs. The second we were finished, Ella followed Winnie as her cousin darted toward the water, and they both dove in; they had the clean form of children who’ve taken lessons for such things. Jadey adjusted her lounge chair so it sloped farther back, then settled in, surveying the scene before her. “Is this a gorgeous day or what?”
It was indisputably a gorgeous day: sunny and still, the temperature in the low seventies. Leaning toward her bag, which was set on the flag-stone between our chairs, Jadey extracted two magazines and held them up side by side: an issue of
and an issue of
“Which one?”
I pointed at
and she said, “I was hoping you’d say that, because I
to know what Princess Di is up to this week.”
