Pineapple Street(37)
“Would you move to Dallas?” he asked Darley, biting at his thumbnail, his nervous tell. She knew he had absolutely no desire to move to Texas, to uproot his kids and live that far away from his parents.
“We’ll live wherever you live, my love,” Darley promised. He needed a job, and she needed to support him. He flew out on a Thursday morning for two days of interviews and a weekend of golf with a business school friend at the firm, and Darley wished him luck, not sure what she even really meant, or how hard to cross her fingers.
* * *
That Sunday Darley began to run the kids at dawn: they went to soccer practice on the plaza, they marched to the bagel store for a second breakfast, they visited the carousel in Dumbo for two-dollar rides on the antique horses, and then demolished a giant plate of mac and cheese that Darley bought for sixteen dollars at the Time Out Market because it was made with Gruyère and lardons, two facts entirely lost on her small voracious charges. Her children behaved best when exercised within an inch of exhaustion, so instead of bringing them home after lunch, where they would inevitably beg to watch cartoons on their iPads, rendering them cranky zombies, Darley took them to her gym to continue the Iron Man–like marathon that was a weekend without child care.
Her gym was inside the Hotel St. George, what had once been the biggest, most glamorous hotel in all of New York City, hosting American presidents and famous celebrities from Frank Sinatra to Cary Grant. The hotel stretched an entire city block; in its heyday the massive saltwater pool had mirrored ceilings and waterfalls, the ballroom held weddings, and the hotel employed more than a thousand people. By the 1980s, it was sold to developers, sliced and diced, and the famous pool was drained. Part of the building was turned into student housing, the tower was transformed into luxury condos, the lobby became a bodega, a butcher, and a liquor store, and the vast section in the middle of the building—the place where the pool used to be—became Darley’s gym. Ghosts of the original remained, the green balconies that once overlooked the swimming pool were now home to a series of elliptical machines where old people and college students climbed to nowhere, earbuds screwed into their ears. Lavish carpeting covered a strange waiting area by the squash courts, and the path to get from the locker room to the tiny new swimming pool required a series of stairs and doors, twists and turns that made Darley feel like she was walking through the underbelly of Penn Station in a wet Speedo.
In the women’s locker room, Darley and the kids pulled on their suits, L.L.Bean one-pieces for the girls, trunks and a long-sleeve swim shirt for Hatcher, who was so skinny he turned blue and started chattering if he didn’t wear a layer in the pool. Poppy was so accustomed to seeing Hatcher in a shirt that the first time she saw a man in the pool bare-chested she started screaming, “Mommy, that man is NAKED,” and caused a minor scene with the attendant.
They shoved their sneakers and clothing into lockers, stepped into flip-flops, wrapped up in thin, white gym towels, and began the long trek to the pool, Darley bringing up the rear with a bag of goggles, noseclips, diving sharks, and bathing caps. They went through the women’s showers, past the steam rooms, through a back door, and down a set of stairs with flaking green tile, along a snaking chilly hall to the pool, where the air was twenty degrees warmer and thick with chlorine. The children threw their towels down and jumped in immediately, ignoring Darley as she asked them to wait for her. They were both excellent swimmers, and she often marveled that their spindly arms were actually strong enough to motor them around so quickly. They looked like little spandex eels, wriggling with pleasure in the bright blue water.
There were a handful of other swimmers, all parents and children, and Darley lowered herself in from the ladder, observing the unspoken pool etiquette, allowing a few feet of distance between them and herself, nodding hello to the parents as they dragged their tiny offspring around on chewed-up foam kickboards. Poppy and Hatcher had no such sense of decorum and lunged gleefully along, darting between parents and children, diving for toys at the knees of strangers, kicking up giant splashes that drenched everyone near them. Darley looked around the place, surprised anew at just how run-down her gym was. The tiles of the pool were cracked in places, a strange showerhead with a chain was positioned in the middle of the room, prison style, and a hot tub filled with old people burbled over near the lifeguard. Since the building next door housed apartments for the elderly, the gym was crawling with octogenarians, and as she watched them soak in the Jacuzzi she often felt she was watching outtakes from the movie Cocoon.
Darley had climbed out to fetch the kids’ goggles when the lifeguard blew her whistle. “Up! Up!” Darley looked over in a panic and Hatcher was floating facedown in the pool. She started to run toward him, but he heard the whistle and quickly lifted his head, flipping over onto his back.
“Hatcher, what are you doing?”
“It’s the dead man’s float, mom,” he laughed.
“Well, it’s confusing for the lifeguard so stop doing it.”
“Okaaaay,” he giggled and squirmed his body to the side of the pool to grab his goggles.
Five minutes later the lifeguard blew her whistle again. Poppy was facedown. Darley grabbed her and flipped her over. “Stop it,” she hissed, and Poppy laughed. They played this game three more times before the lifeguard asked them to leave.
Humiliated, Darley marched them back out into the hallway, thin towels draped around their shivering bodies. She usually dried them off by the pool and wrapped them in fresh warm towels for the journey, but she was pissed. “What is up with you guys? Why did you keep doing that even after the lifeguard asked you to stop?”