Machine Dreams

then,
They grow them tall out there on Brush Fork.
Danner pushed her wire basket forward on the shelf and took the pin with the number, embarrassed, flushed with pleasure. She wasn’t so sorry then that Jean had sewn a bra into the top of her two-piece bathing suit, though the cups were a hard rubber that pinched, pressing her small breasts to a barely discernible cleavage. Everyone laughed about Brush Fork; boys took girls to the country roads to park. Would the Rafferty boys remember her this summer? Probably not; her hair was longer, and she had a different bathing suit. But she’d watched the Raffertys for years: sweeping up, strutting on the sidewalk that ran around the edge of the pool, sitting in the lifeguard chairs with their long legs hanging down. She’d gone to the pool nearly every afternoon in summer, a quarter to get in, noon to six.
    “You noticed they raised the price to fifty cents a kid this summer,” Gladys said.
    “Still,” Jean answered, “you can’t get a baby sitter for fifty cents an afternoon.”
    The poolhouse was a long low building, cement block, painted pale blue and white, and the dark office was just inside the door. The walls were lined with shelves and baskets, and everyone paid admission at the big window. Boys went to one side and girls to the other; Danner wondered if both sides were the same. The girls’ was always damp, the concrete floor cold, and one of the two shower stalls had no door. The dressing rooms were wooden cubicles with a curtain strung across on string; even inside, you could smell a pungence of chlorine, and the heady scent of the honeysucklethat grew by the wire fence. The fence was six feet tall and enclosed the property on both sides, all the way back to the bushes and trees that concealed the railroad tracks.
    Gladys turned around in the front seat to look at Danner. “You sure look nice. Why are you taking your beach bag?”
    “I might go swimming,” Danner said.
    “Silly, no one will be swimming at a dance.” The turn signal clicked as Jean made the turn by the post office, down Sedgwick Street to the pool. “Anyway, you’d ruin your braids, and you look so pretty in your dress. Why would you wrinkle it all up in one of those dirty baskets?”
    “You couldn’t pay me to swim in that pool,” Gladys said. “All that chlorine.”
    “They have to use it,” Billy said helpfully, “because everyone pees in the water.”
    “I don’t,” Danner said. But sometimes she did, and it felt wonderful.
    “That’s enough, Billy,” Jean said.
    There were cars parked on both sides of the street; the dance would be crowded. Would everyone look different at night? Danner glimpsed lights in the back, on the side lawn of the pool, and there was such a crowd! She’d heard the concrete dance floor was in the shape of a heart, then a clover leaf, then someone said it was just round. The band hadn’t started yet. Oh, Danner wanted it to be nice; she’d change her clothes quickly, before any of her friends saw her and she’d have to explain. What would the high school girls wear? Danner had never seen them at a dance. Probably they’d dress just like they did at school, and not wear anything special.
    Summer days the older girls wore their two-piece swimsuits and leaned languidly against the wire fence, talking through wire mesh to boys who stood in the alley. The boys had jobs and drove down on lunch break or came for the last hour, from five to six. The girls had lain in the sun all day, talking and eating ice cream from the snack bar, oiling each other and sleeping. They grew darker and smoother, and let a strap fall off one shoulder to show the dead white strip where it had been. The breasts held in their suits were that white, and their stomachs below their navels.Bonnie Martin was always at the pool, and Ruthie Bennett, the cheerleader, a red-head who wore freckle cream on her face until the boys came. Dawn Marie Kasten, who dated Steve Rafferty, bleached her hair even though her father was a college professor; she was the only girl who had a car and she drove all her friends to the pool. When Danner had walked past their towels last summer with the grade school girls, she’d tried to listen, hear what they talked about. But she could never tell. They turned up their radios or lay speaking secretly, their heads together like lovers. They swam once all afternoon or not at all, only spraying their arms and legs with water from a bottle, the way