Pool Hopping

 

I'm the girl hiding her eyes.

 

I learned to dive in order to show up my big brother Andy, who trembled visibly at the plank’s edge while our swimming instructor at the Phoenix Swim Club tried to coax him into the deep end of the pool.  Then as now, my brother was my moral compass; I secretly admired the way he refused to jump to prove himself.  When my turn came, though, I was compelled to leap into the unknown by some instinct I didn’t fully understand — and was then compelled by expectation to repeat this false act of bravado over and over again.  I was scared, but by pretending to be bold, I learned to love diving:  the chilly moment of impact, the explosion at the water’s surface, the stunning quiet below.

This begins to explain how I grew into an “over imaginative” teenager prone to nightmares and poetry, a girl who found herself one summer night, at fourteen, hiding in another family’s oleanders, clothes dripping with water from that family’s pool.  I crouched there, along with two friends who shall remain nameless, straining not to scream from anticipation and fear.  We breathed quickly, taking gulps of hot, heavy air that tasted like coconut and citrus, sweat and cooling mud.  We were waiting for something, anything, to happen.  Around us, the night was alive with the hiss of cicadas and another sound that defines my childhood in Phoenix:  the pulse and hum of laboring pool pumps.

That summer, it was our unspoken quest to hop every pool in our North Phoenix neighborhood.

“Hop” as in to make a series of quick, springy leaps into water contained in rectangular, pinched-oval or kidney-bean shaped pools.  “Hop” as in partake surreptitiously, without prior written permission of the pool owner who was, conveniently, asleep.

“No one’s coming,” I said finally, after we’d crouched in the bushes so long our knees were practically fused to our chins.  I pointed to a ranch-style house on the corner and whispered, “Let’s try that one!”

Our first attempt had been disappointing; after all, we weren’t out there just to make a pool-by-pool comparison or even to seek relief from the oppressive summer heat.  To put it plainly, we wanted to make something happen.  We wanted to make a noisy splash, to wake someone’s parents, to see them framed in the bedroom window:  a worried mother in hair curlers and a red-faced father shaking his fist and shouting, “You kids!”  Like most teenagers, we sought our independence awkwardly, trying to sever ties to our parents by mocking their good care.

Who are those kids? we hoped our victims would wonder.  We wondered ourselves:  Were we really bad girls sneaking out past curfew?  Or good girls bound for good colleges, who always finished their homework before tucking themselves into bed?  It is the confounding nature of adolescence to say you’ll do one thing and then to do just the opposite; to hold, against all logic, contradictory desires.  Looking back, I see how lucky we were; our rebellions were only minor blips on the trajectories set in motion by our parents.  We played at badness as we huddled together in the oleanders, half-hoping for car headlights to pursue us to our hiding place, for someone to slow, to search for us, to reveal who we were outside our families’ homes.

When it didn’t happen, we emerged from the bushes and set off for the next pool, avoiding the streetlights like burglars, trying to keep to the safety of the darkness in between.  Most of the neighborhood was asleep at that hour of the morning, like the peaceful pillow doubles that occupied our own beds.  There were lights on in a few of the houses, though, showing the guts of family life through windows arranged between the bones of walls.  This intimacy was thrilling to us; in the outdoor culture of Phoenix, we didn’t know our best friends’ houses as well as we did the shared spaces:  the schoolyard, the mountain park, the Christtown mall, the backyard pools that I naively believed everybody had. 

At the next house, we scaled the cinderblock fence and paused at the top to survey our escape route.  “No dog,” I said.   No gate either; on the way out, we’d have to get a leg-up on the branches of the orange trees that squatted near the fence. “Good pool,” someone said, as we admired the curvy water slide and shark-shaped rubber float.  “Let’s go!”

The first time I wrote about Phoenix, I was 23 and enrolled in a New York writing workshop.  Previously, at Bryn Mawr College, I’d penned unconvincing stories featuring commuter trains, skyscrapers, and on-street parallel parking, writing myself into this landscape as the hip urban character I thought I’d become when I went east for college.  But in that Manhattan classroom, I closed my eyes and saw oleanders, orange trees, a long block of ranch houses, a lighted swimming pool at midnight glowing weirdly green.  I saw three girls perched on the threshold of adulthood, straddling a cinderblock fence, and an idea began to shimmer distantly, provoking me the way those pools had at fourteen, the way the real story – the one you’re meant to tell – always does.  Writing requires a kind of boldness, a willingness to leap into the unknown.  I teach my students that you must begin with what you know, but write to discover what you don’t.

We dropped heavily, like grapefruit, onto the grass and sprinted to the pool, cannonballing into water strangely warmer than the air.  Afterwards, we ran for cover, our hearts beating out of our chests.  Citric air scraped our throats as we laughed and whispered and told it over and over.

“Did you see the lady in the bathrobe?” someone said, though there had been no lady.  “Yes!  And the carport light coming on?” someone else fibbed.  “They almost caught us!” I shrieked.  And when the coast was clear again, we slapped arms around each others’ backs and swaggered down the street.  It was almost dawn.

I had to write this story many times in order to understand it.  Now I see that pool hopping was my adolescent way of acting as protagonist, making a splash in order to make a story.  The first time I told the tale, I looked up from what I’d written and was surprised to see interest in the faces of those New Yorkers.  I learned then that my stories, set in the peculiar landscape of Phoenix, might take the reader – or the writer – someplace she hasn’t been, can’t go, might have gone.  After 30 years in the east, I still travel home this way, where I’m still that girl swaggering down the street at dawn as if she owned the neighborhood.

 

The Phoenix Indian School

 

The Phoenix Indian School, 1891

I attended Central High School in Phoenix, Arizona, next door to the Phoenix Indian School.  As a freshman, I played softball with my team on the south field, which was separated from the boarding school by a flimsy hurricane fence.  Occasionally, we’d see a few Indian boys, their fingers hooked through the wire as they watched us silently, but we never spoke to each other. This border — and the Phoenix street named Indian School Road — marked the limit of what I knew about the school. 

Not until 1991, when the Indian School’s closing coincided with my writerly interest in my hometown, did I investigate further into this educational system designed to make many tribes into one and, through enforced assimilation to Anglo culture, to make Native Americans disappear.  Though the so-called “assimilation era” ended in the 1930s, and the Indian School curriculum was reformed to teach academic subjects and not just basic trades, the words of Indian Commissioner Thomas Morgan are irrevocably part of the school’s foundation: “It’s cheaper to educate Indians than to kill them.” 

Artifacts tell the story.  Before the new Steele Indian School Park opened on the site in 2001, archaeologists excavated the contents of a 230’ x 165’ trash dump near where my team fouled a few balls.  Among the tools of assimilation abandoned there between 1891 and 1926 were the porcelain heads of white dolls used to socialize girls and rusted steam whistles that blasted at intervals to teach the concept of clock time.  But there is also evidence of resistance: forbidden fetishes and pottery sherds smuggled from home; flaked stone points showing off a traditional skill (and the school’s fine-china plates used to practice);  a cache of combs not marked, as required, with a name to show appreciation for individual possessions and tangible wealth.  These relics are beautifully subversive — ironic imagery in a landscape where students were compelled to trade tribal clothing for uniforms, native languages for English, the Native American we for the American I. 

I thought of the Phoenix Indian School recently, as I reviewed Sherman Alexie’s new book, War Dances, for the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Alexie’s exile from the Spokane Indian reservation to attend an all-white high school was self-imposed, prompted when he was issued an outdated math book his mother had once used.  But the outcome of his education is the same as that of a kid taken from his tribe:  neither assimilation nor a return to tradition, but a troubled and complicated identity – one he articulates in poems, stories, screenplays, and novels. 

Given the part educators have played in oppression, no wonder Alexie lampoons academics — like the “the Sioux writer and scholar and charlatan” orating on sovereignty and literature in the book’s title story, or the tenured professor “strangely thrilled to list all of the oppressors” in his poem, “Go, Ghost, Go”:  

            And I, a red man, think he’s correct,

            But why does he have to be so humorless?

 

Picking

Philadelphia’s Living History Archeology Lab, where I volunteer every other week, is a haven of unitasking.  I might be assigned to a six-hour session washing Colonial-era dishes or identifying leaded glass using an ultraviolet light or counting and cataloguing hundreds of pottery sherds.  There’s a meditative aspect to this work, especially the task called “picking”:  sorting through the remains of an Old City neighborhood to find the tiny artifacts – seeds and bones and beads – that have been sifted with water through a 1/8-inch screen.   

The goal is to work slowly and carefully, tackling no more than a quarter-sized pile.  First, I scrape the gravel across the tray with a tongue depressor, then separate the contents with a tweezer by type:  brick, mortar, bone, charcoal, flora (seeds), metal, misc. (buttons, beads, straight pins, teeth), insects, and oyster shell.  Focus – and nearsightedness – are the skills I call upon to hone in on a splinter of cream-colored egg shell, a transparent fish scale, the fibrous backside of what looks at first like charcoal but is actually a bit of burnt bone.   

Writers, too, are archaeologists: digging, processing, and repairing the relics of experience to find the meaning in it.  Memory is our medium for binding the human to the object, and as I work through the mountain one molehill at a time, I’m thinking about life’s lost objects and found wisdom, the mysterious ways memory serves and finally fails us, the fragments that float to the surface or fall through the screen.

 

Progress

When I first moved to Philadelphia, the Goldman Theatre, on 15th and Market Streets, was already in bad shape.  The white facade was sooty and most of the tubes that had illuminated the theater’s surname – GOLDMAN, spelled out vertically — had fizzled and burned out.  I walked past it every day on my way to Suburban Station, noting the titles advertised on the marquee — nothing I’d ever heard of or would ever want to see.  There was a red velveteen display case next to the ticket window, featuring curled and yellowed news clippings of the Goldman’s glory days.  Peering in through the greasy windows, I learned that the Goldman was one of the city’s oldest first-run movie theaters, a place where film stars had shown up in limousines for glamorous premieres.  But by 1984, that was ancient history.  The most exciting thing happening at the Goldman was that it was about to be torn down.

It’s funny how you can walk past a building every day and not really see it, how one minor change in its appearance can make you understand what you’re seeing entirely differently.  To me, the Goldman was merely an eyesore.  I was unmoved by editorials that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, complaining that first television and then multiplex theaters had ruined the experience of cinema and that people had lowered their expectations so considerably that film, too, was a dying art.  It was sad, I thought, but that’s progress.  Where I grew up, in Phoenix, new gas stations and grocery stores and houses were born every day.  There was an atmosphere of plenty, a weird consensus among the citizenry (mostly transplanted Easterners) that it was impossible for anything to die or be depleted. 

Such were my sentiments when I visited the corner of 15th and Market one dreary, rainy evening, the evening the wrecking crew was to begin the blasting and hammering that would bring the Goldman down.  I arrived just in time to see the “G” plucked from the tower’s shoulders by the talons of a squealing crane.  The “G” hovered in the black sky a moment, gleaming in the floodlights the crew had set up.  Then finally it was lowered; I remember how it twisted and swung, as if it were resisting, in the gentle wind.

 

Railroad Ties

Russ Mosier at the Pennsylvania Train Museum, August, 2009

From my front porch, I can see the trains pass on SEPTA’s R5 line.  This is the same line where, one hundred years ago, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s monstrous, smoke-belching locomotives sullied laundry hanging in yards; it’s the same track the first electrified train – the Tuscan Red GG1 – traveled from 1935 to 1983, outlasting the railroad that built it.  Though our age is more Get There than Golden, the train – running on track originally laid to connect Philadelphia with the western ‘burg(h)s  – is the reason I was persuaded to move to the Main Line.  Writing is a semi-solitary life, and I am reassured by the train’s warning horn, calmed by the rush of steel through the gauntlet of trees, even as my house trembles cracks into every corner.  To me, the train is connection:  to city, to commerce, to community.   And, as it turns out, to my father. 

During his visit, Dad walks to the station every morning to, as he says,  “keep the trains running on time.”  At seventy-five, he moves more carefully, counts the steps up to the platform, grips the banister tighter than he used to.  He chooses a seat in the shade and watches a fox rummage in the underbrush, a commuter balance hot coffee and a briefcase, a student hoist a backpack as she hurries to catch the express to Philadelphia.  He is alert to what, for the non-retired, is routine: the crackle of the speaker making track announcements, the scent of damp decay in the September air.  After a while of watching, he returns to my house to tell me a story I’ve never heard before, one he fished from memory while sitting and surveying our neighborhood from the Chamounix Road bridge.  

My grandfather Luther worked repairing bridges on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad line when my dad was a young boy.  Back then, 1938, men went where the work was – and so Luther traveled from Hamilton and Okeana, Ohio, from Richmond and Lynn, Indiana, to the day’s job, sleeping in a club car and returning home on weekends.  By day, the crew built and bolstered bridges suspended over rivers where, by night, they’d gather to fish and to dream. 

One night, Dad says, Luther and a confederate wired an old railroad tie and sank it in the black water, then watched from the opposite bank of the river as one man after another cast his line and hooked the heavy hunk of wood.   Every now and then, they’d pull on the wire to make the thing move, baffling the crew members, who could never manage to haul the Big Fish to shore.   “The next day,” Dad says, smiling and shaking his head, “he’d be back up on the bridge, thinking of the next trick.” 

Luther, my Bible-gifting grandpa, a prankster?  As Dad tells the story, I’m thinking about how unfathomable fathers often are.  That is, until the first line of a treasured story hooks you to him and tugs taut between you, and you can feel if not see the weight of years, of life traveled, at the other end of that line.

 

My Mother’s List

 

Ruth Rodgers Mosier as a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana

 

The summer before I left Phoenix and went to Bryn Mawr College, my mother gave me two things:  my first serious wool coat, mail-ordered from Talbots, back East, and a list of books I should have read by that point in my life.

The coat was classic and elegant and perfectly ugly, I thought — my mother’s idea of a Bryn Mawr woman striding purposefully to the library to translate something from ancient Greek.  Of course I had to hate it; I was 17, and still had trouble untangling my mother’s taste and ambition from my own.  Even my decision about college was corrupted by her favor.  Bryn Mawr was my first choice, but first, it was my mother’s choice for me.

The list is three pages long, single-spaced, recorded in my mother’s neat, slanted script.  There’s something old-fashioned about her handwriting; it is guided by the same untroubled faith that allowed her to create a canon for me by consulting no higher authority than the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our own family room.  She listed the authors alphabetically, leaving no room between their names for debate.  

That day just before I left home for college and forever, my mother stood frowning at the bookshelves, pen and paper in hand.  Watching her, I knew that the list, like my fancy education, was intended to help me surpass her.  I understood, too, that I would never catch up.  I am an avid but turtle-slow reader, unable to comprehend the words on the page without wondering about the person who wrote them or revising the passage in my head.  My mother, by contrast, didn’t read books; she devoured them.  In my memory, she wears an apron over her clothing as she makes her list, as if to protect her business suit from her giant-sized appetite for facts, stories, words.

I find now that I’ve filed the old list under “Resume,” that drop-safe of things I’ve done to enable a writing career or perhaps, at times, to avoid one.  My mother, a successful real estate broker who implored me occasionally to take a job with tangible benefits, used to give me a new business suit every Christmas.  And yet, this same woman also gave me what amounts to her resume in the form of a book list.  As if the true measure of success is not what one has done, but what she has read.

This image of my mother at her bookshelves is almost like religious symbolism to me; I conjure it when I need to ward off a bleaker vision of unread books piling up in warehouses, their jackets torn and bodies remaindered.  Whatever greater fate my mother had in mind for me when she gave me her list, she conveyed to me the hope that the life of a writer is worthwhile.  In that way, she sent me off to school wrapped up in something dignified and durable and better able than that tasteful wool coat to keep out the cold.

 

Repair

Inside the Antiques Mall at the intersection of Routes 33 & 29 in Charlottesville, Virginia, one vendor’s stand is set up like a kitchen pantry, a nostalgic display of tin spice cans and rusty wire whisks and homespun kitsch of the Old South. Some of it is sadly similar to items I have dumped, sold and donated while cleaning out my parents’ home in Phoenix, to prepare it for sale this past fall. Faced with the crisis of my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and the urgent arrangements for her care, the redistribution of our family’s heirlooms felt haphazard: our best intentions tempered by exhaustion and despair. My brothers and I are mourning, and we’ve barely had time to process what we’ve been through. And so inside the cool, quiet mall with its carefully cased treasures — quilts and tea sets and framed photos of someone else’s ancestors – I am not exactly in a collecting mood.

And then, in a nearby breakfront cabinet, I see a set of blue willoware: china distinctive for the tale it depicts and notable to me because – unlike the sherds of colonial willoware I wash and label and repair as a volunteer at Philadelphia’s Living History Archeology Lab – these dishes are entirely, miraculously, intact. My supervisor, Deborah Miller, taught me to recognize the pattern by its geometric border design and its trio of figures crossing a bridge. “The three dudes,” Debbie calls them, with the affection of a material culture scholar, who has handled and analyzed thousands of broken pieces of 18th-century ceramics. I am surprised and strangely comforted to find the pattern here.

At the lab, we like willoware because its narrative offers clues to aid our reparation. Bottles come in distinctive shades of greens and browns, redware hints at matches with its swirling yellow slip, but only willoware offers a pictorial legend: the story, told clockwise, of the mandarin’s daughter and her servant lover. Pursued by her father’s chosen suitor, they escape across the bridge to a gardener’s cottage, then by boat to an island, where the lover is killed and the daughter dies in a fire. They are transformed into immortal doves, surveying their own lives from the heavens, positioned always at 11:00 o’clock. Knowing the whole story helps us to find the missing pieces in the pile and put them together again.

Already, my mother has forgotten my children;  I’ve been told that some day soon or distant, she will forget me, too. Last fall, alone late at night in my childhood home, sorting through my grief and the flotsam of personal history, I thought I knew the end of this particular story. But as every writer discovers, you can’t find the shape of the narrative until you reach the end of the draft. For now, I’ve kept Mom’s measuring spoons and some of her costume jewelry and have  let everything else go.

I’ve worked at the lab for a year now, long enough to know that what I don’t know about archaeology is as vast as the adjacent storage room, where one million artifacts are still boxed in their sample soil. And long enough to see that some of these objects we work on eventually become whole. Their finished form gives me faith in this sometimes tedious, but always worthwhile, endeavor and allows me to begin with the end in mind. I understand now how essential this preliminary work is to the long process of repair.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far: to use cool water and a soft brush to wash the artifacts, and to avoid scrubbing painted designs. To use mesh trays for drying and aluminum trays for labeling. To make one clean stroke with the B-72 adhesive for base and topcoats, and to thin it with acetone if it begins to bubble or string. To use white ink to number dark sherds and black ink for light ones. To place the field specimen number on the inside of vessels and on the bottoms of plates or the bases of bottles, and never near the seams. To work carefully and steadily, even as tourists lean in through the windows, nodding at us in sympathy as we sit at the long lab table spread with broken glass or china or pottery. To smile when someone says — inevitably, at least once an hour — “That’s the world’s biggest puzzle,” because it’s true.  The truth, after all, is unoriginal.

 

Witness

 

photo by Alison Mosier-Mills

 

 

At Gettysburg, our guide skipped the monuments and tailored his tour to my old friend Laurie and her teenage daughters, visiting from Chicago.

 

“Right there,” he said, pointing to the house-turned-field hospital, “the limbs discarded after surgery were piled right up to the sill of the first-floor windows.  Imagine the gauntlet those brave volunteer nurses – most of them completely inexperienced – had to walk through just to go to work.”  He told us stories of a young woman who enlisted – and cross-dressed – as a Union soldier and another, Tillie Pierce, who gave witness to the battle in her published diary.  He implored us to imagine the sticky summer heat, the air dark with cannon smoke, the line of Philadelphians holding ground on Cemetery Ridge as the Confederates made their slow-mo march — Pickett’s charge — across a field of last resort. 

 

“The poetry of history,” wrote G.M. Trevelyan, “lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone.”

 

Our guide’s stories brought history close and held us to the spot, while lightning flashed in a distant corner of the darkening sky, preceding an afternoon storm that felled the last witness tree in the National Cemetery.

 

Detours

 

We got a late start to the Grand Canyon.  We wandered — the term describes our attitude, if not our speed on I-64 — past Circle Ks, planned communities, the long gauntlet of sagebrush and Saguaro cacti.  We were oddly ambivalent about our destination, my brother, my husband, a college friend, and I — driven only by duty to show our eastern friend this southwestern wonder of the world.  When Bedrock City beckoned to us from a roadside billboard, we were easily lured off the highway. 

 

We spent a long afternoon making fun of the amateurishly rendered characters at this makeshift theme park:  Fred’s rug of synthetic hair; Dino barking like an actual German Shepherd, not at all like the cartoon; the “Dino slide” so hot you’d skin yourself alive on the way down.  We photographed ourselves behind painted wooden images of Fred, Wilma, Betty and Barney, our faces slotted in for theirs.  We blew cash on souvenir shot glasses bearing — most likely without license — Pebbles and Bam-Bam.  The audacity of the place impressed us.  Bedrock City was so obviously run down, borrowing glory and charging admission.

 

My twenties were my Age of Irony, a time when I was old enough to find humor in these false gods — they had been cherished childhood icons — and still young enough not to feel wistful about them.  How to explain, though, our reluctance to get to the point of our trip?  We lingered with the Flintstones so long that we ran out of time to see the Grand Canyon; we had a dinner commitment in Phoenix that seemed like it couldn’t be broken.  And so, thirty minutes from the South Rim, we turned around and headed home, taking with us only a funny story and our belief that there was all the time in the world for wonders.

 

 

All That Is Lost Is Found

All writers tell rough drafts aloud, but this was grad school, so we gave ourselves themes: crappiest job, caught-naked scene, best prank, worst party, the moment that changed your life.  It was less like a slam than like dinner theater with a rapt, appreciative audience.  Since that summer, I’ve rarely listened to a story or told one that someone didn’t interrupt.  Sad as it sounds to my students, this was entertainment in the era before YouTube.

 

One night, I told “The Story of Menstruation”, about the sex-ed film the girls at my school were shown in fifth grade.  More to the point:  how, a week before the premier, Danny Favata pulled the pizza-sized reel from the AV closet, threaded the forbidden film through the projector, and wheeled the contraption into our classroom, where we awaited what we thought would be “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.  Blinds drawn, lights out, we watched as a background of purple velvet appeared on the screen.  And then, letter by white girly letter, swirled just enough of the film’s title to horrify, before Mrs. Grimstead yanked the projector’s cord from the wall. 

 

This oral draft was really Danny’s; it paid tribute to his status as AV Operator and his bad boy ingenuity.  It was as truthful as memory could make it, and yet it skirted the true story, which I wrote as fiction years later for a ‘zine called Whispering Campaign.  “What I wanted was his courage,” my female narrator confesses, “which I could only imitate.”  No wonder.  “The Story of Menstruation”, as we were to discover at a segregated viewing of the film, was full of baffling information and censorious imagery:  a girl cluelessly riding a bike in a dress, a girl collapsing in tears over a tangle in her hair, a girl unhappily showering in an avalanche of ice cubes.  This, we were told, was our story.  And these were our instructions, delivered in a voice — as familiar as a lullaby — from Disney’s “Cinderella”. 

 

“All this time I thought you were exaggerating,” my friend, the writer Brian Bouldrey, admitted in an e-mail message that arrived yesterday.  Attached was a link to “The Story” on YouTube, where, as Brian says, all that is lost is found.  “Why is nature always called MOTHER nature?” he teased, quoting the film.  Thirty-five years later, the film is exactly as I remember it.  But I’ve spent those years writing a different story.

 

For me – as a writer and as a reader – the story often hides in the rough draft’s odd image: a perfumed permission slip, a bully’s scabbed knuckles, a classroom arranged in battle formation with boys against girls.  Whenever I read student work or submissions to Philadelphia Stories, I look for these odd images in order to find the writer’s truest intentions.  They are like a treasure map carried across the desert during the long process of revision, instructions creased closed and spread open again and again until the document disintegrates and the gold is found.