My grandfather complained, saying we trampled his lawn, saying it wasn’t a public pool, saying we had the Sound to swim in with our friends. But after he died, and we’d grown older, there was no one to monitor our comings and goings. Leanne and Sarah had stopped swimming, choosing to spend time with boys home on vacation from Loomis Chaffee or The Gunnery. My mother thought we were old enough to monitor ourselves. Younger children weren’t allowed to freely roam, as we had been. The group of kids at the pool was always only our group.
The pool was one of the first installed in the area in the 1950s, oval-shaped, inground, placed at the base of the sloping backyard that joined the woods on one side and the tamed and rounded holes of the golf course on the other. From the pool a path of flat stones led through the privet hedge and up to the house, where large horse chestnuts and maples threw their shade, and my grandfather’s delphiniums waved on tall stalks. He’d never been a real farmer. He was an entrepreneur who sold lightning rods, traversing the New England countryside in a shiny Cadillac, quoting installation prices for barns stacked with freshly mown hay, for clapboard houses with mourning doors. When my mother met my father he was my grandfather’s employee—a young man who climbed the old slanted roofs, nailed the copper wiring and the bracketed rods to sides of silos, to widow’s watches, his boot heels slipping on slate and loose asbestos shingles.
David Pinney was new to our group, someone to pay attention to that summer—his shock of blond hair, his lean, tan torso, his daring on the diving board. I’d seen him at the Spiritualists by the Sea camp a few times when I’d gone without Del. He’d be on the beach with his friends, and we’d watch each other. I’d become friendly with Reverend Earline, and we met to talk in the temple, and sometimes I’d see David Pinney walk past the open doors and peer inside. Looking for me, I’d thought. Not all of the cottage owners were Spiritualists, and David’s family probably viewed the old camp as a novelty, the spirit circles and the organ music quirks of the community. What had once been cart paths were now narrow, tarred roads with rustic street signs on wooden posts: Osprey Lane, Sea Breeze Way, Nehantic Path.
It was hot the summer David died, and the sun had burned the grass. The heat of it along the pool’s concrete rim scalded the backs of our legs. The meadows were filled with black-eyed Susans, and overhead the horse chestnuts and honey locusts swayed. There’d been the sound of the wind through the leaves, and the Spiritualists by the Sea’s organ, its notes almost mournful. Reverend Earline and I had a falling-out—I’d accused her of being a fraud, and she’d been hurt and confused, and decided we should no longer meet. That had been weeks before, in June. The day I’d left, walking home tearful and angry through the woods, David trailed me. When I stopped to confront him he paused as well, lit a cigarette, and then walked back the way he’d come. He appeared at our pool the following afternoon, and no one questioned his arrival. A month later it was as if he’d always been part of our group.
The neighborhood boys in the water performed for us, the girls, rimming the pool in our bikinis. Dragonflies dipped near the blue, chlorinated water. One boy, Curtis, had the best pot. He kept it hidden in a plastic bag in his towel, and after he swam he’d pull it out and roll a joint. Not everyone smoked with him, but those of us who did became closer than the others—me and Del and Jane, a girl named Katy Pepperill, another boy, Paul Grant. David didn’t smoke. He kept to the fringes, mostly kept to himself. People took other drugs they didn’t share—Jane would show up, her eyes glassy from her mother’s Valium. Paul would bring beer in a cooler, or a stolen bottle of Captain Morgan rum, and someone would ride a bike to the beach clubhouse and get Cokes, and I’d slip into the old house for glasses. We’d swim, and then sit on the patio with our drinks, like imitations of our parents.
That summer became a foggy, blurred succession of days—all of them blissful, filled with laughter, with our own clever mocking of one another. It was July when girls began to disappear with various boys—usually into the barn, or around to the back patio, where my grandfather’s flower beds had become overrun with weeds. You’d notice someone was there a moment before, and then you simply forgot about them. No one looked to see who was with whom—and it was only if they were caught appearing together from around the corner of the house, holding hands, or a boy’s arm thrown over the girl’s shoulder, or a girl’s bathing suit bottoms on inside-out, that we’d know anything at all had happened.
I didn’t like any of the boys that way—they were boys I’d grown up with, friends. But I noticed David Pinney, simply for his sun-bleached hair, his habit of hanging out beneath the diving board, watching everyone in his quiet way.