The Shallow End

In a small town, time slows to a crawl, and since there is not much excitement, if you choose you can live in a moment forever.  Penny had been stretching her fifteen minutes of fame into a life captured in a moment.  Before she was Mrs. Ben Merry, she was Miss Penny Holloway, Homecoming Queen of the class of '54. Just a quick look at the yearbooks on her coffee table (with the extra pages in addendum for extra signatures) would tell you a bit about her social standing. In her small town in the Central Valley, she was popularly described as "ten kinds of pretty, and sweet as a pound of sugar."

In this world beauty is equity, and in keeping with small town tradition, Penny used this leverage to achieve that milestone that women's magazines of the fifties so highly esteemed: she landed the perfect husband.  The second shoe fell in the form of two precocious children and a perfect house, issuing in an age of cookie sheets and lemonade stands and swing sets and station wagons. Soon the tiara and shawl turned into a red-checkered apron and yellow rubber gloves.  Yessir, she had really achieved the American dream, and as the icing on the cake, they were soon going to have a pool.  Oh, what fun: a pool.  It seemed everything had come together.

While the kids were at school and the husband was bringing home the proverbial bacon, Penny would spend her idle time watching the pool being built.  In between laundry loads she would pause to see the plot being measured.  While retracing perfect rows of vacuum tracks with the sweeper, she watched as the hole was dug.  As she finished the morning dishes she saw the cement poured through the steamy window over the sink.

Up to this point, every conversation could go one of two ways.  All things positive would be directed and redirected to Penny's high school years ­ as she saw them, the appropriate agents to administer Prom queen coronations.  These conversations, no matter how much of a stretch, would never fail to mention her brief reign as queen. She would say something to the effect of, "that takes a lot of responsibility ­ like when I was your age and I was prom queen..."  This could be applied to diligence, tenacity, and all manner of virtue or accolade. Likewise, conversations concerning negative experience were referred by Penny, to the Holy Roman Catholic Church, of which she had always been an upstanding member, and whereupon she accentuated the achievement of her first communion. These conversations went something to the tune of, "Just hang in there.  I didn't think I would ever get to my first communion, but it was all worth it in the end."  Now, regardless of subject matter, Penny could only mention her new pool.  When Sam lost his job, at least Penny could invite them to her new pool. When Teddy got a raise, Penny offered to have a celebration around the pool.

She was having just such a conversation at the supermarket with the checkout clerk as she rang-up her boxed macaroni n' cheese, and peanut butter n'jelly (as children seem to have an affliction with "n'" themed foods).  The clerk was mentioning an inevitable strike that she was worried about, and Penny smiled all the while, imagining all manner of shindig, wingding, and jamboree in her backyard.  Walking out, she dropped some change into a poor beggars cup, and smiled to herself as the young bagger boy loaded her groceries into her station wagon. She was imagining a fine barbecue ­ her husband at the grill with an apron and a paper hat, neighborhood children swimming in the pool, and church friends making small talk and telling jokes.  The scene played out so gaily in her head, and she only heard her neighbors complimenting her lovely house when the truck barreled into side of her car, spraying glass and littering freshly bought peanut butter and jelly supplies all over the road.  Everything went black before she knew what had happened.

She heard the church friends talking to her and calling her name, and she opened her heavy eyes, which felt as if they had been cemented shut, to see them gathered around her in a sterile white room.  They all appeared so somber, and to be giving her a poorly disguised look of pity.  She tried to sit up to ask them what the matter was, but it felt as if a heavy person was sitting on her chest; she could not move.  Indeed, she could scarcely move her own head, and only then with considerable soreness.

"What's happened to me?"

Her friends only hushed her and told her to lay still, and before anyone could explain, an orderly came in to change the sheets.  As the friends were leaving, she heard on say, "It's just awful.  She was always such a pretty girl."

Two weeks later she was home, looking through the sliding glass door at the pool, which had finished construction during her long hospital stay.  It was everything she had hoped it would be, though nobody swam in it.  Although it had been two weeks, her honor roll children still did not know what to say around her, and she could see discomfort in their eyes when they tried to smile at her. She sensed a sort of patronizing pity in her husband's speech, and she came to despise it.

Each day was longer than the one before it, and Penny sat by the sliding glass door looking out at the pool with a vacant expression.  She had even developed a slight sunburn from the bit of light pouring through the glass.  She replayed voices of her church friends, promising to visit soon and often, but two weeks and twelve casseroles later, not so much as a phone call had disturbed her distant stares.  As denial and shock wore off, loneliness and depression came to replace them.  After days of staring, Penny decided the time had come.  She had hours yet until her husband would pick-up the children from soccer practice and come home to heat-up some frozen dinners, so she motored her electric wheel chair into her bedroom and reached for her memory box above her bed.  She dug through the black and white photos of her family and found a dark, rose colored rosary from her first communion.  Next to it she found an old silver tiara, which had lost a bit of its luster being stashed away in a box for years.  As she admired her trinkets, a small tear raced down her cheek until it hung for dear life at the tip of her nose.  She placed the tiara atop her head, and held the rosary tight.  She maneuvered her wheelchair to the sliding glass door and painstakingly opened it.  She wheeled up to the edge of the pool and looked in at her reflection.  She had never actually looked into the pool from the outside.  The pool reflected tiny lights that danced around her face.  She peered in and saw a scarred face with a shining tiara on top, looking back at her.  There was almost no resemblance at all between this woman and the beautiful homecoming queen that existed in Penny's yearbooks and in her mind. As a tear finally let go of her chin and fell into the water, creating tiny ripples, she clutched her rosary beads and wondered why life had betrayed her so profoundly.  She cursed God through her tears and slowly backed her wheelchair to the house.  One deep breath later, she drover her chair at full speed off the edge of the pool and into the water.  As the wheelchair plummeted downward and tiny bubbles rushed past her face, she finally felt how great the water was. All of her cares relaxed away into nothingness as she sunk to the bottom.

According to the tradition of the Holy Roman Catholic church, suicides cannot be given proper Catholic funerals, and accordingly Penny Holloway Merry was buried in the local public cemetery, and not the small and private cemetery of her small central valley town.