Sirens of a Suburban Neighbor’s Swimming Pool
By Carl Peters
October 15, 2023
October 15, 2023
May, Holly, Kris and Monica. They were the four high school girls my friends referred to as the Roberts Girls because they hung out with the delinquent Robert brothers. The rumor was that when the Roberts parents weren’t home, the brothers and the girls drank wine and sang and danced and occasionally — so we heard — went skinny dipping in the family’s in-ground pool. They were a couple of years older than us, and we were ready to believe it. We wanted to believe it. We talked about it a lot.
The two brothers and the girls were friends with Paul, my older, good looking, athletic brother — the guy who turned his head and pretended he didn’t know me when he passed me in the school hallways. He was a big deal then. Now he needs a knee replacement. He’s going through his second divorce and is applying for a second mortgage on his house. Things change.
Still, even now, sometimes I think about an encounter I had with Monica. She wasn’t the prettiest of the four Girls, but she was the one I was most attracted to. She was the one I saw when, in my imagination, I looked over that privacy fence surrounding the Roberts pool.
She was barely five feet tall. I was walking past her in the library one day and she said, “You’re Paul’s brother, right?” She had a friendly smile and a melodic voice.
I pictured her in a bathing suit.
“Can you reach this for me?” She stretched, standing on her toes — her heels rising out of her shoes, skirt rising — and pointed to a book on a high shelf.
“Uh, yeah.” An all-purpose yeah. Yeah, I was Paul’s brother and yeah, I could reach the book. I tried to think of what I could say next besides, “Here.”
“Here,” I said.
“Thank you so much.” That generous voice of hers. She touched, just briefly, my forearm with her hand.
“Tell Paul I said hi,” she said.
I swear I could not just hear her voice, but I could feel it all through my body. I nodded and left, but I still remember her hand touching my arm: an exquisite millisecond.
“Here.” That’s all I could come up with then. “Here.”
Now I can talk to anyone. I do very well with a consulting group that teaches non-profits how to run fund-raising campaigns. If clients do what we teach them to do, they can get what they want. One of the most important lessons is simply to identify potential donors and ask them face-to-face for money. Tell them why you need it and — do not soft-pedal it — how much you need. Believe in your organization, believe in the generosity of your donors, and that will give you the self-confidence you need. And so forth and so on.
From working with clients and their donors over the years, I’ve learned to ease myself into conversations, even with perfect strangers; to nod my head with interest; to ask probing questions without appearing nosy; to offer insights occasionally but not too frequently; and to nurse a gin and tonic for hours.
And then, like the enactment of a dream from years ago, I found myself nursing a gin and tonic at a hotel bar with (three of the four) Roberts Girls.
I had just spent tedious hours consulting with a particularly dense client in a hotel room.
He had been taking up so much of my employees’ time that, in an effort to spare them some grief, I’d taken it upon myself to meet with him personally. Now all I wanted to do was get home and get into my own bed, but I was so keyed up I decided to have a quick drink first.
The moment I walked into the hotel bar I saw Monica, May and Holly, still as recognizable as when I used to stare at them as they got textbooks out of their school lockers.
I thought of a famous photo of Marilyn Monroe about to climb out of a swimming pool in “Something’s Got to Give,” her last movie, the one she never finished. I felt that fate allowed me a chance to go back and see Marilyn actually come out of the pool. Not literally, of course. But I had a chance to see what has become of those young women who took hostage of my youthful imagination all those years ago.
“Excuse me. I don’t know if you remember Paul, my brother, but he was in your class,” I said. “I recognized you and had to say hello.”
It turns out that their class was holding a reunion in one of the hotel’s assembly rooms, and they had broken away to spend some time making fun of their former classmates in private. Plus, they said, they didn’t like the music at their reunion, and they were hoping the bar would have a karaoke machine. They wanted to know about Paul, but soon enough they were taking delight in telling me about the inadequacies of the men at the reunion and men in general. I smiled and listened with self-effacing patience.
May, still the most beautiful, seemed to have the most money. She was wearing a showy and obviously expensive strapless aquamarine dress. She had a string of pearls around her neck and pearl earrings. She wore a big ring but said almost nothing about her husband.
Holly was not married, but it sounded like she could have been at one time. She had close-cropped hair with a streak of blue. A nose stud. She had several tattoos. The one on her wrist looked like Pisces, the astrological sign. She was the most casually dressed. It sounded like she was living with a woman.
Monica’s hair was cut in a bob now, she wore a simple black dress, and she was a little bit heavier, just enough to make her look like a woman and not a girl. She still had that winsome quality, but she was subdued, quiet. She was drinking less than her friends. She smiled often, but it looked more like she was trying to be a good sport than actually enjoying herself. Even I didn’t notice when she slipped away.
I enjoyed myself for a while, but that ended when May and Holly started singing along to a Motown song. I had originally planned on finding out if they really used to go skinny dipping with the Roberts boys, but when they started singing— not well and too loudly — I lost interest. I marveled at my own juvenile fascination: what, really, had I even been curious about? Monica hadn’t come back, but when Holly spilled her drink, I said, “Got to get home and feed the fish,” and left.
On the way to my car, I found Monica outside smoking a cigarette. Across the street was a panhandler holding a cardboard sign with the scrawled words Homeless Vet.
“Those guys — there are shelters they can go to,” I said.
Monica flicked her ashes. “He and I have something in common,” she said.
“You’re a vet?” That didn’t seem right.
“No. I’m thinking he might be a drunk. Like me.”
I should have seen it. That was probably just soda in her glass all night.
“That’s why I’m out here,” she said. “I should avoid places where people drink a lot. I kidded myself into thinking I could handle it. I never go anyplace and they wanted me to come, but this is no good for me. Would have left before but Holly is my ride.” She said she was thinking about ordering an Uber. As she moved, I saw her bra strap peeking out from the shoulders of her dress. At my age, why should that thrill me?
Without much trouble I talked her into texting her friends goodbye and letting me drive her home.
“I won’t be very good company,” Monica warned me, which I thought meant that with a minimum of encouragement, she might talk a lot.
The night air was a little chilly, so I offered her my jacket, and she allowed me to put it around her shoulders. By the time we got to the car, she had taken off her stilettos — she obviously went for high heels because she’s so short — and was carrying them. She looked like a girl coming home on prom night. As she tucked her dress under her thigh and pulled her legs into the car, I looked at her bare right foot and imagined it standing at the edge of the Roberts pool.
She talked mostly about her son. A good kid, she said. Very smart, sensitive but a little sullen lately, and now starting to get into trouble. He had been caught shoplifting recently. It sounded like typical kid stuff to me, but she was upset about it. He was spending the night with his father. That’s how she referred to him, as her son’s father, not as her husband or boyfriend or ex. It seemed like they didn’t live together, but I couldn’t tell if they were separated, divorced or had never been married. I don’t know why I didn’t ask.
“He’s a good father, and a good role model in a lot of ways. He put up with a lot from me when I was drinking. He drinks too much, too, I think, but not like me. And he’ll teach Gus to be respectful to women, and that’s important. I’ve been with too many guys who weren’t.” She paused. “But Pat is always pushing. A pushy father. Aways thinking about money and status, and a drunk for a mother,” she said. “I wish I’d been a better mom, but I hope he’ll be OK. He’s a good kid. I pray for him. I pray for him all the time.”
I said I’m sure he’ll be fine.
“Thanks for taking me home. It makes me feel a little less like, I don’t know, an outcast or a loser — you know, having to leave while everyone else is having a good time.” She quickly added, “Do you want me to give you some money for gas?”
“God, no. It’s my pleasure.” I looked at her and smiled.
I noticed her eyeing a liquor store as we passed it. I will admit something unconscionable. The idea of arranging an opportunity for her to start drinking crossed my mind — but only briefly, and I felt guilty for even thinking it.
I asked about her friends. I always thought of the four of them as inseparable, but where was Kris?
“Lost at sea.”
I squinted. Was this like me thinking Monica had been in the military? Was she really lost at sea?
“You know,” Monica continued. “I mean she seems to have disappeared. No one has heard from her in ages. Really, I was surprised when Holly contacted me about going with her and May tonight,” she continued. “I think those two have stayed friends all this time, but I was never close with any of them. Not really. The last year of high school we hung around some, and the summer after we graduated, I went to the shore with them a few times, but that was about it. I never really fit. They were always more … adventurous … than me. I was always the first one to go home, and lots of times when they were out, especially during this one period when they were kind of pushing, you know, kind of pushing the envelope, like people say, I just stayed home in my room, usually feeling sorry for myself or feeling like I was missing out on something, but too scared of what they might get into.
“I’ve always kind of scared, I guess, which is why I guess I have a nowhere job —and maybe that’s why I’ve had such bad luck with men, and why I’m a drunk and got pregnant with- out being married.”
I pulled up in front of her apartment building and she — wonderfully — touched my arm as she thanked me again for the ride. She said she was going to have another smoke before she went in the house, and then she was going to call her sponsor and go to bed with the hope she can get through the night.
The girl I daydreamed about was now a woman who had endured labor pains and changed diapers, a woman who got up in the morning and drank coffee, who smoked cigarettes because she was nervous, who probably had trouble sleeping because she couldn’t turn her mind off. With my jacket still around her shoulders, she was sitting next to me, struggling hard not to want a drink. And yet, somehow — whether that image had any basis in reality or not — I could still picture her at the edge of a suburban pool on a summer night, her wet hair slicked back, standing unabashedly in front of a couple of guys, enjoying their attention.
She seemed to linger. Or did she?
Did she really want to call her sponsor, or was she hinting for me to stay with her? She was a vulnerable woman with a drinking problem and a shoplifting kid. The decent thing would be just to keep her company for a while, encourage her to call her sponsor and maybe watch TV with her till she got sleepy. But could it be that simple? It was a long drive, and I was dead tired. I should just go.
“It’s a nice night,” she said, glancing at the concrete bench at the entrance of her apartment building. “Do you want to sit with me while I have one more cigarette that I shouldn’t smoke? I can make some coffee if you’re tired. If you don’t have to get home.”
Home? I wondered, where is my home? I heard a hurt and a yearning in her voice — and somehow I believed I was the only person in the world who could hear it.
The two brothers and the girls were friends with Paul, my older, good looking, athletic brother — the guy who turned his head and pretended he didn’t know me when he passed me in the school hallways. He was a big deal then. Now he needs a knee replacement. He’s going through his second divorce and is applying for a second mortgage on his house. Things change.
Still, even now, sometimes I think about an encounter I had with Monica. She wasn’t the prettiest of the four Girls, but she was the one I was most attracted to. She was the one I saw when, in my imagination, I looked over that privacy fence surrounding the Roberts pool.
She was barely five feet tall. I was walking past her in the library one day and she said, “You’re Paul’s brother, right?” She had a friendly smile and a melodic voice.
I pictured her in a bathing suit.
“Can you reach this for me?” She stretched, standing on her toes — her heels rising out of her shoes, skirt rising — and pointed to a book on a high shelf.
“Uh, yeah.” An all-purpose yeah. Yeah, I was Paul’s brother and yeah, I could reach the book. I tried to think of what I could say next besides, “Here.”
“Here,” I said.
“Thank you so much.” That generous voice of hers. She touched, just briefly, my forearm with her hand.
“Tell Paul I said hi,” she said.
I swear I could not just hear her voice, but I could feel it all through my body. I nodded and left, but I still remember her hand touching my arm: an exquisite millisecond.
“Here.” That’s all I could come up with then. “Here.”
Now I can talk to anyone. I do very well with a consulting group that teaches non-profits how to run fund-raising campaigns. If clients do what we teach them to do, they can get what they want. One of the most important lessons is simply to identify potential donors and ask them face-to-face for money. Tell them why you need it and — do not soft-pedal it — how much you need. Believe in your organization, believe in the generosity of your donors, and that will give you the self-confidence you need. And so forth and so on.
From working with clients and their donors over the years, I’ve learned to ease myself into conversations, even with perfect strangers; to nod my head with interest; to ask probing questions without appearing nosy; to offer insights occasionally but not too frequently; and to nurse a gin and tonic for hours.
And then, like the enactment of a dream from years ago, I found myself nursing a gin and tonic at a hotel bar with (three of the four) Roberts Girls.
I had just spent tedious hours consulting with a particularly dense client in a hotel room.
He had been taking up so much of my employees’ time that, in an effort to spare them some grief, I’d taken it upon myself to meet with him personally. Now all I wanted to do was get home and get into my own bed, but I was so keyed up I decided to have a quick drink first.
The moment I walked into the hotel bar I saw Monica, May and Holly, still as recognizable as when I used to stare at them as they got textbooks out of their school lockers.
I thought of a famous photo of Marilyn Monroe about to climb out of a swimming pool in “Something’s Got to Give,” her last movie, the one she never finished. I felt that fate allowed me a chance to go back and see Marilyn actually come out of the pool. Not literally, of course. But I had a chance to see what has become of those young women who took hostage of my youthful imagination all those years ago.
“Excuse me. I don’t know if you remember Paul, my brother, but he was in your class,” I said. “I recognized you and had to say hello.”
It turns out that their class was holding a reunion in one of the hotel’s assembly rooms, and they had broken away to spend some time making fun of their former classmates in private. Plus, they said, they didn’t like the music at their reunion, and they were hoping the bar would have a karaoke machine. They wanted to know about Paul, but soon enough they were taking delight in telling me about the inadequacies of the men at the reunion and men in general. I smiled and listened with self-effacing patience.
May, still the most beautiful, seemed to have the most money. She was wearing a showy and obviously expensive strapless aquamarine dress. She had a string of pearls around her neck and pearl earrings. She wore a big ring but said almost nothing about her husband.
Holly was not married, but it sounded like she could have been at one time. She had close-cropped hair with a streak of blue. A nose stud. She had several tattoos. The one on her wrist looked like Pisces, the astrological sign. She was the most casually dressed. It sounded like she was living with a woman.
Monica’s hair was cut in a bob now, she wore a simple black dress, and she was a little bit heavier, just enough to make her look like a woman and not a girl. She still had that winsome quality, but she was subdued, quiet. She was drinking less than her friends. She smiled often, but it looked more like she was trying to be a good sport than actually enjoying herself. Even I didn’t notice when she slipped away.
I enjoyed myself for a while, but that ended when May and Holly started singing along to a Motown song. I had originally planned on finding out if they really used to go skinny dipping with the Roberts boys, but when they started singing— not well and too loudly — I lost interest. I marveled at my own juvenile fascination: what, really, had I even been curious about? Monica hadn’t come back, but when Holly spilled her drink, I said, “Got to get home and feed the fish,” and left.
On the way to my car, I found Monica outside smoking a cigarette. Across the street was a panhandler holding a cardboard sign with the scrawled words Homeless Vet.
“Those guys — there are shelters they can go to,” I said.
Monica flicked her ashes. “He and I have something in common,” she said.
“You’re a vet?” That didn’t seem right.
“No. I’m thinking he might be a drunk. Like me.”
I should have seen it. That was probably just soda in her glass all night.
“That’s why I’m out here,” she said. “I should avoid places where people drink a lot. I kidded myself into thinking I could handle it. I never go anyplace and they wanted me to come, but this is no good for me. Would have left before but Holly is my ride.” She said she was thinking about ordering an Uber. As she moved, I saw her bra strap peeking out from the shoulders of her dress. At my age, why should that thrill me?
Without much trouble I talked her into texting her friends goodbye and letting me drive her home.
“I won’t be very good company,” Monica warned me, which I thought meant that with a minimum of encouragement, she might talk a lot.
The night air was a little chilly, so I offered her my jacket, and she allowed me to put it around her shoulders. By the time we got to the car, she had taken off her stilettos — she obviously went for high heels because she’s so short — and was carrying them. She looked like a girl coming home on prom night. As she tucked her dress under her thigh and pulled her legs into the car, I looked at her bare right foot and imagined it standing at the edge of the Roberts pool.
She talked mostly about her son. A good kid, she said. Very smart, sensitive but a little sullen lately, and now starting to get into trouble. He had been caught shoplifting recently. It sounded like typical kid stuff to me, but she was upset about it. He was spending the night with his father. That’s how she referred to him, as her son’s father, not as her husband or boyfriend or ex. It seemed like they didn’t live together, but I couldn’t tell if they were separated, divorced or had never been married. I don’t know why I didn’t ask.
“He’s a good father, and a good role model in a lot of ways. He put up with a lot from me when I was drinking. He drinks too much, too, I think, but not like me. And he’ll teach Gus to be respectful to women, and that’s important. I’ve been with too many guys who weren’t.” She paused. “But Pat is always pushing. A pushy father. Aways thinking about money and status, and a drunk for a mother,” she said. “I wish I’d been a better mom, but I hope he’ll be OK. He’s a good kid. I pray for him. I pray for him all the time.”
I said I’m sure he’ll be fine.
“Thanks for taking me home. It makes me feel a little less like, I don’t know, an outcast or a loser — you know, having to leave while everyone else is having a good time.” She quickly added, “Do you want me to give you some money for gas?”
“God, no. It’s my pleasure.” I looked at her and smiled.
I noticed her eyeing a liquor store as we passed it. I will admit something unconscionable. The idea of arranging an opportunity for her to start drinking crossed my mind — but only briefly, and I felt guilty for even thinking it.
I asked about her friends. I always thought of the four of them as inseparable, but where was Kris?
“Lost at sea.”
I squinted. Was this like me thinking Monica had been in the military? Was she really lost at sea?
“You know,” Monica continued. “I mean she seems to have disappeared. No one has heard from her in ages. Really, I was surprised when Holly contacted me about going with her and May tonight,” she continued. “I think those two have stayed friends all this time, but I was never close with any of them. Not really. The last year of high school we hung around some, and the summer after we graduated, I went to the shore with them a few times, but that was about it. I never really fit. They were always more … adventurous … than me. I was always the first one to go home, and lots of times when they were out, especially during this one period when they were kind of pushing, you know, kind of pushing the envelope, like people say, I just stayed home in my room, usually feeling sorry for myself or feeling like I was missing out on something, but too scared of what they might get into.
“I’ve always kind of scared, I guess, which is why I guess I have a nowhere job —and maybe that’s why I’ve had such bad luck with men, and why I’m a drunk and got pregnant with- out being married.”
I pulled up in front of her apartment building and she — wonderfully — touched my arm as she thanked me again for the ride. She said she was going to have another smoke before she went in the house, and then she was going to call her sponsor and go to bed with the hope she can get through the night.
The girl I daydreamed about was now a woman who had endured labor pains and changed diapers, a woman who got up in the morning and drank coffee, who smoked cigarettes because she was nervous, who probably had trouble sleeping because she couldn’t turn her mind off. With my jacket still around her shoulders, she was sitting next to me, struggling hard not to want a drink. And yet, somehow — whether that image had any basis in reality or not — I could still picture her at the edge of a suburban pool on a summer night, her wet hair slicked back, standing unabashedly in front of a couple of guys, enjoying their attention.
She seemed to linger. Or did she?
Did she really want to call her sponsor, or was she hinting for me to stay with her? She was a vulnerable woman with a drinking problem and a shoplifting kid. The decent thing would be just to keep her company for a while, encourage her to call her sponsor and maybe watch TV with her till she got sleepy. But could it be that simple? It was a long drive, and I was dead tired. I should just go.
“It’s a nice night,” she said, glancing at the concrete bench at the entrance of her apartment building. “Do you want to sit with me while I have one more cigarette that I shouldn’t smoke? I can make some coffee if you’re tired. If you don’t have to get home.”
Home? I wondered, where is my home? I heard a hurt and a yearning in her voice — and somehow I believed I was the only person in the world who could hear it.
Carl Peters, who holds a master's degree from the University of Louisville, has worked as a teacher, reporter and editor. He lives in New Jersey.