Poolside

Like many couples before us we bought a bigger house in an attempt to salvage our marriage. Later on we would actually build a house for the same reason, but when we moved into the house on Schroeder our hopes were high.

We had a house blessing, inviting over seventy people to come eat burgers on the grill, carrot cake and other typical summer fare. Our priest waited until they were there, then knocked on the door and we invited him in. A very old ritual based on inviting Christ into your house. He blessed each room before we went down to find a possum licking the dead grill on the deck.

The house was large, five bedrooms, four baths, two family rooms, formal dining and living rooms, but it was the bordello bath downstairs that first caught my attention. It lay in the exact epicenter with its flocked red wallpaper, and truly felt like the heart of the house. Almost a beating heart. I intended to redo it in Wedgewood blue later on, but that never happened.

We often glimpsed someone standing outside this bathroom from the corner of our eyes, especially if it was in the wee small hours of the morning, but a second look never revealed who it was. There were no windows to reflect here, it was at the end of a rather short, but dark hallway.

Outside was a huge inground swimming pool, lighted, heated, with diving board, slide, steps, the works, but no one swam at night. Not even the kids. I always had the feeling something I couldn't see might grab my leg, but we never talked about it among us. We just uniformly avoided it after dark. During the day, floating in the shade of the little leaf linden and gazing at the Japanese maple in the garden was delightful.

At night I would lie in bed reading, leaving the drapes over the patio doors wide open. I loved looking out over the distant city lights and listening to the water in the pool as it made water shadows on our walls. If my husband came to bed before I turned out the lights and went to sleep, he would simply go into our walk-in closet and change there, so I didn't give him even a passing thought when I saw him come up and do just that out of the corner of my eye.

It was when he didn't come back out that I began to wonder. Calling out his name did bring him, but not out of the closet. He came upstairs from where he had been watching television in the family room.

That house had several other curiosities. When we redecorated the basement family room, the water heater exploded and flooded everything. Sometimes we would come downstairs in the morning and find the front door, unlocked and wide open. Ducks would fly into our dining room window so hard they often died. Then I would remember the first day we saw this place. The old owner was showing us the pool when a pigeon flew over and pooped right in the middle of his forehead. 

When the awful smells began to emanate from the dining room, we replaced the carpeting and sold it.