“Young man?” she said.
The lifeguard looked down at her. He wore black sunglasses and she couldn’t see his eyes.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Would you keep an eye on that elderly lady over at the refreshment stand? I’m afraid she might wander off and fall into the pool.”
The lifeguard looked down at her for a moment, then over in Lura’s direction.
“The lady with the big hat and the sunglasses, ma’am?”
Agnes looked and saw that Lura had pulled out her pair of giant, squared geriatric sunglasses and put them on.
“That’s her,” she said.
“Yes’m,” the lifeguard said, “I’ll keep an eye on her.”
She looked up at him a moment longer as he put the silver whistle to his lips and blew two short notes, like a songbird’s call, and nodded to some action out in the pool. He looked like a Greek god on the mount, like Neptune.
“I thank you,” Agnes said, and went back to her lounge chair. Students from the college lay on their towels along the pool’s edge. It was very hot, and every now and then one of the girls got up and stepped down the pool ladder into the water, holding her hair up on top of her head, until the water touched the back of her neck, then climbed out of the water, still holding her hair. Some girls liked to wet their heads, arching their necks back and lowering their long straight hair into the pool. The boys behind their dark glasses watched the girls lower themselves into the pool and emerge with water sparkling on their oiled bodies, then watched them walk to their towels again.
Agnes watched them all. They were all very nearly naked and all brown as the glazed doughnuts Pops used to bring home from Shipley’s on Sunday mornings after his early drive to smoke his Sunday cigar. She thought about the students having sex, she knew they all did these days, and wondered if they had to get to know one another before they did it or if they just did it casual as dogs, without a thought. She remembered the taste of the hot soft doughnuts Pops would bring home and it made her so restless she sat up straight in the lounge chair.
Lura was still in the shade at the refreshment stand, fanning herself with a magazine. Agnes got up and eased herself over the pool’s edge, let go, and sank to the bottom.
The water sent a great shock of cool through her body. She felt immersed in a great big glass of ice water. She looked around. Everything was green and bright. Way off down at the other end someone dove in and swam across, just thrashing arms and legs. She could see the legs of children dancing around at the shallow end. A cloud sailed over, made all jumpy by the waves. She could see people walk along the pool’s edge, their bodies broken into pieces and quivering like Jell-O. The legs and bottom and shoulders and one arm of a girl came slowly down the ladder and slowly climbed back out, jerking like something big outside the water was taking her bite by bite. Agnes felt fine not breathing, as if there was a great supply of air in her lungs. She’d always had wonderful lung capacity. At some point, she thought, it seemed like a body would simply stop needing to take in so much air, stop needing to breathe all the time. Another girl came partially down the ladder, dipped her long hair back into the pool, and then walked back up into the air. Agnes felt as if they all belonged to another world, too thin and insubstantial to sustain her, and the one she was in, her world here deep in the clear green water, was much more pleasurable, much more peaceful. She remembered a dream, swimming in the ocean in a vast school of swift metallic fish, their eyes all around her, the feeling she got eye to eye with the fishes, and their effortless speed and flashing tails. She felt something stir in her, growing, until she felt filled with it. Her chest ached with it. Saturday nights, Pops would cook their meals. He loved to fry fish. Take Bob out to the lake and get on a bream bed. Pops would come home with a stringer, a mess, wet fish flopping and mouths groping for air. Made her chest ache, watching them. Pops would clean the bream out back, throw Bob a fish head. Bob tossing fish heads around the yard like balls. She was on the brink of a wonderful vision, as if in a moment she would know what Pops had seen as he passed through his own heart and a pile of washed foundry sand into the next world.
She thought she heard the distant trill of a bird and looked up as a crash of bubbles shot down from the surface. The bubbles cleared and she saw it was the lifeguard, his dark and curly hair about his face like a nest of water serpents. His eyes were a clear blue revelation, open wide and upon her. She held out her arms. He came forward and held her and pulled her gently upward. Her hands felt the muscles moving powerfully along his back. She thought that he must have wings, this angel, and he would take her on some beautiful journey.
AGNES LAY IN HER LAWN CHAIR, WATCHING THE LAST RAYS of the afternoon sift through tiny gaps between the leaves. The light shifted in an almost kaleidoscopic fashion as the leaves trembled in a breeze that seemed an augury of the evening. She did not fear them, the passing of the day nor the coming of the evening. She had never felt so relaxed or open to the world around her.
On the way home, Lura’s words had been as distant and melodic as a birdsong. The drive had taken only seconds. Lura must have been driving all of thirty-five.
She heard Lura now, as she leaned over Agnes’s lawn chair to look at her.
“I imagine you’ve had enough sun,” Lura said. “You’re addled. I’m lucky I’m not dead of a heart attack, you nearly scared me to death.”
Bob ran full-speed in broad circles around the yard just inside the fence. He stopped and stood rigid beside the monkey grass patch beneath the pecan tree, then leaped stiff-legged into the middle of it. He thrashed around and came tearing out of it as if something were after him. A few feet away he stopped, turned around, and barked at it.
“Be quiet, Bob,” Agnes said. Bob looked back at her, as if measuring her authority.
“You ought to let me take you to the doctor, anyway,” Lura said. “You nearly drowned.”
“I was all right.”
“I don’t know how you can say that. That boy had to pull you out of the water like an old log.” She touched her hair. “I’ve left my hat.”
“Lura, just sit down and be quiet or go home. I’m feeling so peaceful.”
“You’ve had a near-death experience,” Lura said.
“Oh, be quiet,” Agnes said. Lura touched her hair again, started to say something, then sat down in a lawn chair, and Agnes again turned her attention to the sunset coloring the light behind the trees. The light deepened and the breeze ran through the leaves like the passing of a gentle hand. Agnes didn’t know when she had felt so much at peace. It had not been her time to go. But she had been close enough to see into that moment, and she did not dislike what she had seen.
The bank of orange clouds behind and above the treeline began to fade into slate against the deepening blue of the sky. The loud and raucous birds of the day had retreated, and the quiet of evening began to settle in. The light faded measurably, moment by moment. It was so beautiful she did not think she was not seeing it with two eyes. She heard Bob and looked for him against the purpling green of the lawn and the shrubbery. He’d begun again his racing around and around. He’d worn a narrow path in the grass, a perfect oval like a racetrack. She found him, a speeding, blurred ball of black and white led by a wild and wide-open eye, and watched as he zipped past and approached the far fence. And then, in violation of what had seemed a perfect order, he suddenly leaped. He leaped amazingly high, and with great velocity. He leaped, as if launched by a giant invisible spring in the grass, or shot from a circus cannon, and sailed over the fence into the gathering darkness.
“My goodness,” Lura said.