Weird Things People Wear In Pools

And more about nervous dogs

This is a free post from The Real Sarah Miller. If you enjoy this newsletter and can afford it, please consider subscribing so that I can keep it free for those who can’t. Last week I wrote about when friends stop talking to each other. The last episode of The Real Sarah Miller podcast Didn’t See It, Don’t Need To, with co-host Joshua Clover, was a year end roundup of movies we extremely did not see. 

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My mother always told me to bring a bathing suit whenever I went on a trip, even a short one, because you never know when you will have the opportunity to swim.  A few weeks ago, just after a giant record-breaking snowstorm. I was headed out of town for a night. Packing, I paused to consider my bathing suit, but then left it behind. The snowstorm had been intense enough that I must have been thinking something like, “There are no swimming pools left, not 200 miles from here, not anywhere in the world, even the indoor ones are all filled with snow.”

Our friend was supposed to take care of Ruthie, our stubby, nervous dog, a shaking and terrified creature who, lucky for her, is also cute. But in the end he was just too snowed in. We do not live quite as high up or as in the middle of nowhere as he does so we managed to dig our car out and head southwest from rural Northern California to urban Northern California. 

Since it was unclear until the last minute if this trip would even happen we hadn’t booked a hotel. I found one while my boyfriend drove. It needed to take dogs, and it needed to not be in the middle of the city, to be more of a motel-like thing where it would be easy to take Ruthie out at night, with no stairs or elevator, and a door that opened right out onto grass. The dog made it really expensive. None of this matters. What matters is that this place had a pool. My heart sank when I saw this on their website. I didn’t want to go to a hotel with a pool, to know it was just sitting there and I couldn’t get into it because like a fool I’d left my bathing suit at home.

Maybe we could stop at Target. But did they even have any? Also, my boyfriend does not count among his hobbies the wasting of time or the wanton expenditure of money on items already in possession. A stock phrase of mine, “You can always buy one when you get there,” has never once passed his lips. 

“Are you alright?” he asked me as we crossed the Carquinez Bridge. I had been sulking since Dixon. “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.” I smiled to prove it.

I checked us in. The lobby had automatic doors on both sides which seemed to be open more than they were closed. It was freezing outside so the lobby was freezing too. “It’s freezing in here,” I said to the front desk clerk, and I noticed she was wearing a parka and gloves before I noticed that she was looking at me like, yes, asshole, I know. 

She assured me that our room was on the first floor with doors going out to a courtyard, on the quiet side of the building.  I gave her 8 billion dollars and went on my merry way.

Our room was fine, with the promised sliding glass doors, looking out on a rain-soaked courtyard, shrouded in mist.  Through it, I swore I spotted something tropical, the outlines of a leafy plant, a slice of blue. “Goddamit,” I said. What, my boyfriend said. “It’s the pool,” I said. “Right across from our room!” He said something like so what. “Doesn’t it make you SO UPSET to look at that nice indoor pool and not have your bathing suit?” He wished he’d brought his bathing suit, he said, but he was by no means upset. I didn’t respond — I mean, where would I even begin?

Ruthie had been cooped up in the car for a long time and I got her ready for a walk which means I put two leashes on her, one clipped to her harness, and one clipped to a collar, so if she experienced something terrifying — like if a car drove past us playing music at really any volume at all, or she saw a bicycle — and she managed to wriggle free of one I’d still have hold of her. I went to open the sliding glass doors, no dice with normal effort. I gave the sliding glass door a hard pull. Still nothing. I set the leashes down and tugged with both hands, and then I screamed. I had pulled the door right off its tracking, one corner of it was a foot in the air. I let it go, it landed with a deafening thud. That was it for Ruthie.  Loud noises really, really upset her, and between my scream and the thud, the door was now, in her estimation, possessed.  She would not walk through it. She flat out refused, digging in her heels, giving me a look like “Do not expect Ruthie to pass through the door that Ruthie can see is constructed from the very bones of the devil.”

I had to take her out the room’s front door, back down two long corridors, through a series of doorways — doorways bad — and she shook the whole way, cowering behind my legs every time someone passed her. “This is your fault,” I said to her. “We could be alone in that courtyard right now, and you could be peeing,  but you had to freak out. This is on you.”

I had to walk her away from the hotel, to a desolate stretch along the bay, before she calmed down enough to squat down and pee, but that was it. I walked her ten more minutes and then we headed back, Ruthie pulling the whole way.

I peeked in at the pool while we passed it. The glass windows were too fogged up to get a great view, but it looked like there were at least five people present. 

  “Success?” my boyfriend asked when I got back. I told him I’d had minor success but not major success, and he was amazed, considering how long I’d been gone. 

Ruthie had crawled under the bed so that she would not have to look at, or more importantly be looked at, by the bad door. “I wouldn’t be surprised If this dog never shits again,” I said.

We had about an hour and a half before we had to go anywhere. I didn’t want to do any work. I didn’t want to read. I just wanted to go swimming: the sliding glass door was useless, the courtyard was useless, but the pool was still there, and it demanded my use. 

I looked through my bag. Somehow, I had managed to bring an extra bra. How could I have been so smart to do this but not smart enough to bring a bathing suit? We would never know! And it was black! If I had black underwear, I’d be in business. This is just a black bikini folks, I would project to the people at the pool as I waded in, no big deal! l I did not have black underwear. But I had gray underwear, with “love” written all over them in bright colors, in cursive — practically the same thing. I expected there to be a big bathrobe to put on over this ensemble, there was none, which kind of thwarted my plan of slipping into the water seconds after removing it. I put my jeans and shirt back on and announced that I was going swimming in my underwear.

“Don’t get arrested,” my boyfriend said.

I was hoping that everyone would have left, but there was a woman sitting in a black deck chair looking at a road atlas of California, supervising two little boys doing somersaults in the shallow end. They each had a pair of goggles. That wasn’t good. But I was more worried about her. What if she called the front desk? “Yes, my son and his friend are in the pool and there’s some lady here in her underwear.” What if one of the boys pointed at me and laughed? That would be the worst! There were people coming in and out of the sauna, but they were no cause for concern. In my experience,  sauna people are always very self-focused, unless they are at the kind of sauna where you’re trying to pick people up, and this was not that kind of sauna.

I took two beach towels from a rack and hustled into the women’s dressing room. I took off my shirt and jeans and stuffed them into a locker. I was standing there in a black bra and gray underwear with ridiculous designs on it and a blue surgical mask. A wiry gray haired woman stepped out of the shower wearing an N-95 mask and flip-flops, wielding a bottle of Pantene conditioner a bit like a knife. She gave me a stern look, the kind of look people who shuffle around in pool dressing rooms in flip-flops are known for the world over. I wrapped a towel around my upper body and draped one over my shoulders and walked out to the pool area with the rugged confidence of an actual bathing suit wearer. There was a ladder in the deep end and I stepped down onto the very first rung, still wearing my towels. I stepped on the second rung and took the shoulder towel off, unable to resist a glance at road atlas mom, who was safely ensconced in her road atlas. I removed my second and final towel and slipped into the water.

It was warm and glorious, the more so because of the wind and cold outside. I swam slow laps, breast stroke only since I didn’t want to get chlorine in my hair. The sauna people drifted out, the woman from the dressing room left, giving me a strange look, but she seemed like she did this to everyone all the time. After I’d been in about 20 minutes, two more people came in. One of them was wearing Hawaiian board shorts and got into the hot tub immediately. The other wore sweatpants and a bright pink fuzzy pajama shirt. Her breasts were enormous and unconstrained. She removed the sweatpants, revealing sheer black nylon underwear well past its expiration date, and then stepped into the hot tub. She was still wearing the shirt, she held it up so as not to get it wet but the back hem sagged into the water anyway. I did my best to eavesdrop while continuing with my laps, difficult because as soon as I got close enough to get some sense of their conversation I turned around and headed in the other direction. As far as I could tell they’d come to the hotel in a hurry, something had gone wrong with their apartment. They were trying to figure out where and if to move, strategizing how to get as much money as they could from their landlord before moving if they did move. At any rate it seemed they had left the apartment in a hurry and the best thing the woman had to wear in the hot tub was a pajama top and a 12 year old pair of underwear. “Just take it off,” her partner said to her as I swam toward them. “Just go for it.” At this point, I had to turn around and swim the other way, but when I got back to that end of the pool again a minute or so later, I saw that the woman was finally sitting in the water. Her eyes were closed, and the pink shirt sat on a nearby deck chair. I felt happy, doing my slow breaststroke, and seeing this stranger comfortably lowered into the tub. It is important to always go swimming, or get in the water, whenever you can.