Pool Wedgie
A story for Summer
I step outside and the breeze is so light and fluffy on my calves it could almost be from the beach. Constant it is in its blowing; this breeze is gentler than when coupled with sand and wave, but strong in its own right. It’s making tolerable this augustian summer heat, and is a gentle wave hello from the future. This breeze will help stir the transition into fall. In this moment, however, it’s not yet believed in its ability to transform seasons.
From my calves it rises to the tops of my knees. My legs are enveloped in a stirring embrace. Yet it’s truly my leg hairs that dance with the air and bring in this extra ounce of sensation a half inch or so out from my skin. The strands, coarse and long with space in between each one of them, lets the breeze pass through as if they were a corn field. Catching and releasing. Silent, joyous wooooos from my hairs as if they were a child’s hand playing with the lapping edge of the ocean.
My leg hairs surprised me for the first time at my neighborhood pool. I must have either been home visiting from college or without worry for a time in high school allowing them to get long. I dove in to the crystalline water from the left of the lifeguard stand, my favorite spot, as I had hundreds of times. This time a new sensation burst with me through the water, almost startling me. What was I feeling? It took me a second but it was the swaying of my leg hairs. A new extra sense unlocked under the water and as it enveloped me completely, my leg hairs moved in unison with the dynamic direction of water. As I mermaid-kicked my legs together, they undulated with wavy movement. It felt crazy! Wonderful and unexpected! Is this what men felt with their never-told-to-shave legs? How could they have never mentioned this sensation to me before? Or was their leg hair different? This new sensation was a case for never shaving again. This flowing connection I was now feeling with water instead of the jolting feeling of razor sharp goosepimpled flesh my legs usually felt like bare.
The beautiful blue Princeton square pool, it was ours: Emory and I’s. It was our base. With Kara, Miranda, the Beaches, Jacob every now and then, and other characters to be mentioned another time. All coming and going, Emory and I remaining always.
Hours were lost with unconcerned joy or natural boredom. Hours were described by the glow of the sun, the tan on our skin. Emory’s skin tanned in a different way than mine. Her calves and shins always darkened quickly and her skin soft was glowy. My legs and arms would tan but the rest of me felt like it was too much skin to darken. We theorized that my legs and arms were used to receiving all the sun from my years solely wearing a one piece. My stomach wasn’t used to seeing the sun and somehow always stayed a pale white.
My two piece ventures started when I was young but were hilariously halted by a somewhat traumatic accidental wedgie that occurred as I scooted on my belly into the water. The perfect adhesive pair: bathing suit and scored cement. As I scooted, my bottoms caught with the wet cement. Somehow my little body continued into the pool, bottoms remaining in place, and a wedgie ensued that had me calling play time quits, swimming to the stairs instead, confused about the weird pain my butt was in.
I’m surprised I told anyone (I remember going mute). Maybe my dad noticed my shift from uninhibited excitement being at the pool after dinner to a worried face, opting now to sit on the pool chair and call it a night. I was not one to wrap things up early at the pool.
Next thing I remember, my bottoms are off and my dad and the neighborhood doctor were two bobbing heads of concern in between my legs which were now bent up over my head, my whole butt out on display. The doctor was saying almost in slow motion, ‘ I think you may need to go to the hospital.’
I thought he was full of it and wished we had never brought him into this situation. Surely my dad would just take us home now. Maybe consult my mom. This neighborhood doctor, he’s never even seen my little butt before! All I knew about him was he lived down the street from Emory, in a house with dormer windows. The windows I coveted most in this world. A little box of a window to sit in and look out of? A box that could become a nook perhaps? The way that window must jut out from the wall and ceiling. My mouth watered for this design. A mini triangle roof over this little box? How adorable, how exciting. I couldn’t imagine anything cozier that I almost couldn’t take it. Easy access to the roof? So I may serenade the afternoon with violin practice like I saw in that one movie with a young Evan Rachel Wood where she was caught between loving two boys, then tragically falls off the roof and breaks her arm, spurring both of their love on even more furiously? (Little Secrets, 2001). My identity lay in having one of those windows to call my own.
The potential cozy superstar I would be if I had just one of these dormer windows! The neighborhood doctor had three, evenly spaced out and yep, cozily jutting out from his roof. Three mini roofs over three cozy little boxes. One for each of his children I imagined. I knew he had a daughter Emory and I’s age, a cool older sister to two younger siblings. What was her life? As an idol to two baby brothers living in a mini box with a mini roof? I thought she must be the coolest girl I could conjure based on her access to that window. I knew I’d be the same type of cool if I had just one of these windows too. Just one! I knew we would be friends if I shared the same insider knowledge as she, gained from knowing what it was to be cradled by a nook.
She was there that day at the pool. We may have been inching towards conversation at some point, or at least combining our mermaid games. Did we both reach for the same torpedo? Was this competition or the tendrils of love?
I think I had some subtle knowing that our friendship, or rather me merging into her, would never come into fruition after making eye contact with her as my butthole stared at her father. Her dad, her doctor dad, had to snap into duty. Her neighborhood doctor dad who had just got off of work, still in his nice pants and buttoned up shirt. Her doctor dad who she must see so little of because they were never at the pool during the day. It was after 7, with an hour left before closing. Which was really only 45 minutes in pool sanctioned time because the lifeguard always called adult swim at the end of the hour, not at the beginning. Everyone knew this wasn’t the most fun time to swim. The sun was behind the tall trees surrounding us. 7 pm water was cold and only fun because it was somewhat novel, being able to see the pool after visiting society for dinner. I took her dad from her in that moment. I could see the brightness fading from her eyes as he turned back into what he was most of the time: the doctor she was trying to know as a dad.
She had such little time with her dad at the end of the pool day, and here I was, my butt hogging her precious time with him.
After my little accident I was made to lie down in the back seat of the car. My mom appeared in the backseat. Had she really left book club to get to the pool to go to the.. hospital? Were we really going there? My butt didn’t even hurt anymore. But there she was in the backseat with me, my child legs now on her lap, tears in her eyes. I remember laughing, incredulous that she was crying about my little butt! ‘It doesn’t even hurt!’ I told her.
Whether or not we were really going to the hospital was to be determined. Still, this was all quite exciting. I loved, and still love surprising, unpredicted drama. I liked mild attention on me, or everyone being thrown into a surprising situation together. There was excitement for sure now that there were tears in the mix. Is that because my butt split is dangerous? Is this strange injury somehow life threatening enough to spur on my mother’s tears? Am I in shock and there actually is an unbelievable amount of pain that my body is hiding from me? It’s so exciting to be close to the end of your regular day and then this happens. A proverbial wrench (wedgie) thrown into the mix. Ripping my crack just a little too harshly. Enough to need stitches? What even are stitches? How could there be such a need for my crack? I had stepped on mommy’s upright pitchfork while in the day school and I knew why I needed stitches then. There was blood and pain! Blood and the potential detachment of my big toe. Yet my mom was laughing then, on the phone to her friend saying ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ in between chuckles as I cried out desperate for a body switch with Kara. ‘I wish I was Kara!’ I screeched a few times through sobs. My little sister blank faced staring as I grabbed my toe bloodying my hand and inadvertently my face as I cried out to the air and family around me the unfairness that befell my big toe. ‘Why doesn’t this happen to Kara!’
Laughing then, but crying now? No blood, no pain? ‘What’s the hospital going to be like?’ I excitedly wondered, now realizing we had definitely left the neighborhood. I felt fairly confident we’d be in and out. The neighborhood doctor suggesting ‘I think she may need stitches’ felt like a rouse. Click bait. A commission he would pocket by getting us to go to his hospital. Little did I know that I would be drugged, prodded, put back in my bedroom sneakily, like an injured cheetah cub fixed and returned to the spot of its taking, under a basket waiting for my cheetah mom to smell my return and scoop me in her mouth.
From the bright emergency room I was wheeled back on a cart into darkness. I always wanted to lay in a moving bed and everyone was being suspiciously nice to me. It made sense the lights were low back here, it was now night time. ‘I wouldn’t mind sleeping here,’ I thought. It would be one of my first real tests of being on my own. My family would definitely not be allowed to stay. My sister needed to go to bed, my dad would surely take her. The second string team of support no longer needed. My coach, my mother, would stay, but I would insist, ‘I’m ok. Really. Get some sleep,’ I would say stoically. Mommy would acquiesce but with more tears in her eyes. ‘I want to stay alone’ is what I wouldn’t say. It would confuse her, break her heart a tinge.
I felt old enough to stay here overnight alone. It would transform me even. Skip me four years ahead to an independent, self actualized 11 year old. My mom would come back in the morning and I’d be upright in bed chirping with the nurses, my new long time friends. They’d never forget my bravery, my manners, my personality. To be taken from the pool so unexpectedly and committed to hospital without any fuss. Immediately accepting the new rhythm of my life. Accepting food graciously. ‘Voracious,’ they would say my appetite was. My mother would almost tear up again knowing that to be true.
Instead, the nurse who could have been my long time friend, said ‘I’m just going to put some water up your nose, it won’t hurt a bit.’
‘Ok cool, water, yeah, won’t hurt a bit,’ I’m thinking. Goes against how water usually feels going up my nose, but that was usually pool water I accidentally snorted. But ok, yeah. just water. Here she comes with the little nose tube. Then burning! Fire water! I’m screaming, writhing with fury at her betraying words with the volume of my screams. Then nothing. Blankness, darkness. I wanted to know how they were going to stitch me up because it truly had come down to that. But they knocked me out with my consent.
I wake up having been returned to my bed like the little cheetah cub I am. I wake up on top of the comforter in the guest room in the same clothes I arrived to the pool in. Unchanged but changed.
I would obsessively draw dormer windows for the rest of my childhood. Essentially a decade. It took me years of drawing them as just a triangle, always struggling to fit the window in the space. Never as cozy as they looked in real life but cramped. I would stare as hard as I could as we would pass by all the houses on the bus. I’ve never been able to ask how I need something explained to me. Instead, I just watch with eyes until something finally clicks. A square holds the window, a triangle holds the roof. Finally.
