A Bright Soothing Noise

Yolanda's Pool

112 Yolanda’s Pool Lucy surveyed the patio. In the glass doors she saw her reflection in the white swimsuit and wondered if she’d lost her nerve. Her eyes hurt. A cloud, high overhead, weakened the shadow of her little table. Sunlight dappled the water. At the far end of the pool, the branch above Scott swayed, the only hint of a breeze. She checked her watch and felt the sun on her arms. It was already past lunch. Time to go. She squinted at the water, she leaned back and rested her eyes. She meant to relax, in spite of Yolanda, to indulge in one last sniff of Yolanda’s vodka, but where had she left her sunglasses? Most everything was packed. She dropped her sandals and put up her feet. She raised the heavy shot glass to her face and swallowed, wincing at the reflected light. Scott, fifteen now, difficult to see over the glare, showed his teeth in a defiant, bewildered smile. She put her drink back on the little table. Shouting so he would hear, she said, “You ready to go?” He shouted back, “No!” and again, “No!” It was Sunday and Lucy also wanted to stay forever. She reached again for the drink. For three days Scott had refused to put his toe in the pool. If only he would swim one lap. Yolanda never spoke of such things— she was nothing if you subtracted her generosity—but how could Lucy forget the five hundred Yolanda put up for lessons at the Yolanda’s Pool 113 Academy? If only she could stand and point at the pool when Yolanda arrived and say, “Hell, he swam the length of it!” As if for the last time, she took in the long curved pool. A sparrow hopped above the glare on the high wall. She made a toast to Yolanda—and to herself, to what might have been. What if Lucy had gone to New York from St. Paul twenty years ago, rather than San Francisco? Or never made that party four years later on the beach, where she met Raoul and where Scott was conceived. Or never met Raoul’s cousin Yolanda—but here she hesitated. She resisted the picture that formed in her mind: an ice cube with a fly in it. A plastic cube really, a confusing gift Raoul had given her as a joke at the party Yolanda threw for them when he agreed to marry her. The wedding had been cancelled by remote control from Uruguay on the morning of the ultrasound , not by Raoul—it wasn’t entirely his fault—but by Señora Maribel, his mother. Now Lucy hurried a slurp of her drink and the icy heat between her ears forced her eyes closed. Raoul had returned to his studies in Montevideo but Yolanda had lived up to her promise to do what she could. She always had Scott and Lucy in to sit her house when she left for the weekend and the only duty Lucy felt was to keep Scott from destroying the collectibles. They spent almost all their time by the pool. Each had a room on the first floor—eight more bedrooms were on the second—and in the kitchen was a set of stainless steel plates, no doubt selected with Scott in mind. Yolanda kept a wet bar to outclass even the MetroClub in Escondido (where Lucy waited tables two decades ago): the finest Argentine and Chilean wines, Iberian sherries and a dozen single-barrel bourbons. Lucy loved the Swedish vodkas best—Yolanda had an impressive inventory in a horizontal freezer with a rack of iced glasses. Lucy raised hers and again toasted the sun-washed patio, the French doors behind her, the densely woven, blue-leather straps of the lawn chairs, the narrow, vaguely trapezoidal curve of the 114 A BRIGHT SOOTHING NOISE pool rimmed by turquoise stone and set in a chessboard of tiles that went halfway around the house. She made up her mind to savor, for these last seconds, the fragrance of eucalyptus. She toasted the Episcopalian version of God, too, or rather, His absence. She toasted the irony whereby Heaven could be fooled into gracing her and her son—this unlucky pair—with such stylish seclusion. She up-ended the glass, refilled it with the last half-shot from the sweating bottle, and raised it again...