The Palmer Pool

1 | Takes You Back

When I stood to turn in my final chemistry exam, there was a pause in the pencil scratching against paper noise that filled the room. My face started to burn and I knew it was turning bright pink, as it always did when I suspected anyone might be watching me. I turned my test packet face down on the black lab bench and slunk over to the teacher's desk to ask to use the restroom. Mr. Hawkins eyed me suspiciously over the rims of his glasses, scratched his push broom mustache then granted me permission to leave with a quick flick of his hand.

I dashed out of the room before he could remind me to bring the hall pass, a block of wood with the periodic table carved into it.  It was kind of impressive, but embarrassing to carry through the hallway at school and probably pretty gross considering the numerous trips to the bathroom it had made over the course of Mr. Hawkins' thirty-year teaching career.  I wouldn't be able to return the hall pass anyway, because my last final exam was done and I was cutting out to get a head start on the end of the school year celebration.

I ran my fingertips along the smooth wall of red lockers as I walked down the empty hallway.  When I reached mine, I struggled with the combination lock for the last time, grabbed my bag and smiled when the metallic slam echoed down the hall. It was official:  Junior year was over.  It had been an academic hellscape complete with an AP course overload, SAT prep, an average of four to five nightly hours of sleep and an ill-advised number of extracurriculars. 

After changing into my swimsuit in the girls bathroom and throwing my t-shirt and jeans back on over it, I waited for my friends in the gym wing. The rubbery smell of basketballs wafting from the gym mingled with the humid chlorinated air from the indoor pool and the scent of floor wax and industrial disinfectants.  This, I thought as I inhaled deeply, is the aroma of high school.  With an added hint of overzealously applied men's body spray from the freshman wing, it would have been just right.

While I waited, I scanned the class composite photographs lining the walls.  Every graduating class of Palmer High School had a spot. Each student's face looked out from a little oval, as if gazing hopefully through a window to the future.  In one year, I would be one of them: a hopeful face in an oval, a few weeks from finally getting out of town.  A smile crept across my face at the thought of life beyond Palmer, Michigan.

The older photos were delegated to this out of the way corner of the school, but they were the most fun to look at:  cat-eye glasses, feathered hair, pointy oversized collars in mustard, mauve and chartreuse. As I made my way down the hall, the colors became more muted and eventually faded to black and white as the class sizes grew smaller and smaller.  I came across my grandparents' graduation year and spotted them quickly in the small cluster of students that made up the class of 1953.

Rosemary Durand.  Rose.  My grandma's dark hair fell just past her chin in smooth waves and her charcoal grey lips smiled over her shoulder as she gazed straight at the camera.

Walter Brooks.  Grandpa looked more serious in his suit jacket and tie, with a hint of a pensive smile, his deep-set eyes focused somewhere beyond the photographer.

I wondered if they went swimming in the city pool to celebrate their last day of school.

My grandma had been a really strong swimmer, up until literally the day she died.   She used to swim in the river for exercise while my grandpa walked down the boardwalk alongside her.  Grandma Rose did a lot of typical grandma things:  she baked pies, brought her own portable padded bleacher chair to her grandkids' sporting events, and gave us dollar bills for each 'A' on our report cards.  But swimming in the river was more badass than grandmotherly, considering that our river wasn't a brown, meandering waterway, but an international shipping channel with a swift current that stretched out deep and a blue and wide between Michigan and Canada.  Grandpa always joked that she had the heart of a thirty year-old and would outlive him by at least a decade.