Dive (3rd Draft)

The air outside crept through the doorway as my grandfather closed the sliding screen door behind him. He took out his simple white handkerchief and swatted his face with it once, twice, and then rubbed the back of his neck as he walked around the kitchen table, his off white dusty sneakers squeaking with every step on the tile. He moved to the obsidian black refrigerator and pulled out a plastic half gallon of two percent. Shuffling around the island, he reached up and grabbed a glass.

Pouring himself an ample glass (and spilling some on the granite tabletops as well, his aim skewed a bit thanks to the cataracts), he spoke. “You going to stay inside all day?” he asked and put away the milk, taking a seat at the head of the table. “It’s hot as blazes out, but the sun’s nice,” he said with a lopsided smile before taking a long gulp of the cold milk. I put my own glass on top of my plate; it was decorated with painted flowers, swirling vines and leaves, and the long Latin name of whatever flower it was on the plate typed or painted by hand, I couldn’t tell, in pink. “I think your brother and his friends are outside on the deck,” my grandfather said. I got up and brought my plates to the sink.

My brother was back from his first year at a boarding school, complete with monks that swatted your knuckles with rulers. His big black drum set, which had drowned the house in its cymbals and it’s tat-tat-tatting of the different drums, was now stuffed away in the attic section of the storage room, suffocating in the slanted ceilinged, non-air-conditioned cave. His more prized possession, the electric drum set, was gone – sold to someone I can’t remember. The storage room overflowed and my mother didn’t want the expensive instrument neglected for the long months my brother at school.

“Okay, I’ll see if they want anything,” I said, walking around my grandfather and hooking my thumb in the latch to the sliding screen door, and waving it open. As I stepped out onto the patio, the new cement deck, I heard my grandfather push his chair back and get up, immediately he started singing some old love ballad, probably from his days in the navy, maybe from his days as a choir boy at his church. I never really listened to the words he sang, I just enjoyed how his sonorous tenor voice filled the kitchen and drifted its way through the open doors and rose to the rafters of our living room, soaring skywards with the chimney, passing the balcony that was the second floor hallway and disappearing up in the rafters.

My brother and his friend Kyle leaned over the black iron fence that lined the terrace, as my mother called it. The patio-terrace consisted of cement slabs decorated with brick edges and patterns and stemmed out from the first floor of the back of our house. The patio-terrace looked out over the pool, a full story below the cement lip of the terrace. Brother and Kyle leaned out over the fence leering at the clear water tinted blue by the pebble-printed lining. Laurie, Kyle’s twin sister, sat behind the boys on the fake marbled brown leather top of the Jacuzzi. She looked over at me as I approached them and she smiled, her pancake makeup seamless and her lip gloss sparkling. Her opaque, rhinestone encrusted sunglasses perched atop her curly blonde hair like a crown caught the sunlight as she turned back to watching the boys at the fence.

“Hi y’all,” I called when I was close enough. Brother and Kyle looked over at me, Kyle straightening up and Brother remaining hunched over the railing. Both of them wore sunglasses down over their eyes, shielding them from the bright sunlight bearing down on them through the branches of the trees near the edges of the terrace. “D’y'all need anything?” I asked. Brother looked at Kyle and Laurie, his eyebrows perpetually furrowed in an attempt to lessen the amount of sunlight assaulting his senses, even with the sunglasses.

“I could use another coke,” Laurie said in her high voice, shaking a near empty bottle so the remaining liquid swirled about the tinted glass.

“Would you get us some popcorn?” Brother asked after looking at Kyle, who nodded, his shaggy brown hair brushing the lenses of the sunglasses. “Please?” Brother added, tilting his head to the side a bit like his dog, the golden retriever Blazer, who panted in the heat, lying out on the brick wall surrounding the stairs down to the pool.

“Okay.” It got me inside, away from the searing heat and buzzing red wasps that lurked in the bushes on the other side of the tall walls lining the stairs that Blazer used as a throne. The kitchen was empty but the sounds of the television filled the room. My grandfather reclined in his leather chair with his feet propped up in the living room, snoring away in front of his television while John Wayne broke an especially uncooperative horse. I pulled out a packet of popcorn kernels and threw it in the microwave, hitting the popcorn button, and walked around the island to pull out a large bowl. The two large bowls we used for popcorn were nearly identical, only the scratches marring the clear plastic walls separating the two bowls. Both were clean and sleeping readily in the cupboard in the underside of the island in the kitchen.

I pulled out both bowls and lined them up. The microwave beeped and the door popped open; I took out the packet of steaming, smoking popcorn, and put in a second pack. Dumping out the popcorn into one of the bowls, and careful not to put my arms or hands directly above the steam, I reached for the salt and parmesan cheese. I added both ingredients, measuring by how many times I circled the bowl as I poured. Shaking the bowl to stir the salt, cheese and hot popcorn, a few popped kernels leapt over the wall of the bowl, and I plucked them from the counter, popping them into my mouth as I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a coke for Laurie.

Opening the screen door with my elbow, I brought out the popcorn and coke to the group of teenagers seven years my senior. “Thanks,” Laurie said as she took the coke from my hand. “Yes,” hissed Kyle as he grabbed the bowl of popcorn. I looked down at their feet and saw a piece of plywood protruding from the edge of the terrace. Kyle must have seen me staring because he looked back at me, smirking between mouthfuls of popcorn: “D’you like it? It’s a diving board.”

“You should try it,” Brother said; both he and Kyle had a foot on the end of the story and a half high diving board. There was probably five feet of cement sidewalk between the base of the terrace and the closest edge of the pool. The plywood board extended maybe a foot. It didn’t take me long to reply with a polite no, thanks. “It’s totally safe. Kyle did it, and he’s fine, see?” Brother said with a nod at his accomplice. I only shook my head and turned back to the house.

“Hey, thanks for getting us the popcorn!” Kyle called as I left. “It’s real good,” he said. “We should keep her around,” he remarked with a laugh to Brother. The aroma of the melted butter escaping the packet in the microwave filled the kitchen. I pulled it out and did the same thing as with the bag for my brother and the twins. I grabbed another coke from the refrigerator and walked across the house to my mother’s bedroom. As expected, she lounged in her own leather chair with her feet, clad in white fuzzy slippers, resting on the matching footstool. She still wore her white nightgown with pastel colored floral prints, even though it was afternoon, and was reading an Anne McCaffrey book.

“I brought you some popcorn and coke,” I said, shaking the bowl and making the remaining kernels swirl about the bottom, sounding like small beads in a bucket. “I made some for everybody else, so I thought I might make us some too.”

“Thank you,” she said and put her book aside on the top of the two level dresser next to her. “What’s your brother doing?” she asked plainly enough as I clamored up onto her tall, king sized bed. The bed was higher than my hip so I had to jump myself onto it.

“Hanging out,” I replied evenly.

“Hanging out, huh?” she said and heaved herself out of her chair, the back straightening with a resounding snap. I pulled my lips tight but didn’t say anything as she walked to her own sliding glass door that opened out onto the terrace right behind the Jacuzzi. She pulled back the curtains and stood with her hand on the door. At first I couldn’t tell if she could see the plywood board from here: the Jacuzzi might have been in the way. But she stood quiet and still for a moment, and I knew she’d seen it. The heavy glass door unlocked with a hesitant click and slid open choppily, sticking in the track every few inches. All three teenagers turned around to face her, not smiling, only squinting. My mother closed the door behind her.

“What is that?” she asked.

“What?” Brother replied.

“That – that piece of wood there.” My brother only stared at the unassuming piece of wood he and Kyle had a foot on. “Have you – have you been jumping off that thing?” she asked. I don’t know how she knew. I relaxed my face and shifted my legs underneath me, hoping to appear innocent should my brother look in and see me. Maybe I should sit with my grampa, instead of sitting here, I thought with my brother on the other side of the glass. “You could break your neck! Get rid of that,” she exclaimed in a shrill voice. “Take it to the garage. Kyle, Laurie…” I didn’t hear the rest. My mother, still in her floral nightgown, ushered my brother and his friends out of sight in the steamy Texas summer heat.

I could see the two bowls of popcorn, the one I’d brought out to my brother sat nearly empty, resting haphazardly on the top of the Jacuzzi cover, next to Laurie’s two bottles of coke, the empty one lying on its side, the other only a few sips lighter. The bowl I’d brought to my mother rested on her dresser, next to her untouched drink and the book she’d been reading, a pen substituting for a bookmark. I slid off the bed, grabbed a handful of the popcorn, and moved across the house. My brother and mother remained absent from the air conditioned cold as I joined my grandfather in watching John Wayne saving a woman and her child from some Comanche raiders she swore would never hurt her.