divine angst

I went to the pool today. I sat on my pink towel and read my book and sweated the week’s toxins out of my body. A team of small birds played tag around the pool, first sweeping from the tree, around my back, one occasionally dipping a wing into the pool, and back towards the parking lot and the tree. Some of them seemed to have blue tail feathers—the ladies, I’d guess, running from the boys.

While I was out there, I noticed a paper sign taped to a wall: “Spring Party, Saturday, June 11. 3 pm to whenever! Music and a keg by the pool!”

Sure enough, around 2:15, people began trickling out to the pool. Not many, but a few. I was all by myself until Mr. Angst joined me; then out came the 40-year-old man with mahogany-tan skin and a speedo (and sir, even if you have the body for it, you shouldn’t wear it unless you’re at a swim meet and competeing). Then a gaggle of girls came out, followed by the bicyclist whose sliding glass door faces the pool (I think he was the party organizer, because he seemed to be on the phone with whoever was in charge of the keg), and they converged around a cooler and drank beer from glass bottles.

The last person at the pool was a girl by herself in an odd swimsuit: a bikini with letterman-jacket-style decals affixed. On the top, the letters spelled out the name of our state (and the common term for the local Big State University); on the bottoms was the athletics logo. But, again, these were the stitched or ironed on type of decals, puffy and strange on a string bikini.

And I sat on my chaise lounge and read and drank my vodka-tonic-in-a-water-bottle and felt my skin brown. (My new goal: be the most tan person in my 1L class. It’s important to have a goal.) I noticed that I have two small red moles on my tummy, and if you played connect-the-dots with them, they’d join right up with my bellybutton. I listened to the radio brought out by the party-makers and wondered if my feet were burning. Every few minutes I adjusted my straps hoping to avoid major tan lines that would show in a strapless party dress.

Such is Saturday.