When I was eighteen, I got a job as a lifeguard at Cherry Park Apartments, a new housing development just outside Chicago. These days pools and recreation centers are dirt-common in suburban developments, but back then the concept was new and a bit daring, smacking of sybaritic luxury. This was some time ago, and things were a lot different than they are now. A lot different. The Beatles had just arrived, the Pill had just been introduced, and I'd just finished high school and was looking forward to going away to college in the fall. It was the mid-sixties and the very start of the era in which everything changed. It was a great summer to be 18, and there was probably no better job I could have had than lifeguarding at a private pool.
I never would have gotten the job if it hadn't been for Barry Bortnik, a guy I knew from high school swim team. We'd taken the Red Cross lifeguard certification program together, and we'd become friends of a sort, though Barry wasn't really the kind of guy I usually hung around with. He was an indifferent student and kind of small for his age, not that fast in the water and pretty unremarkable generally, but he got by pretty well on his nerve and brashness and tenacity, traits that gave him a reputation as something of a small-time hustler and bullshitter, always with an angle.
Bullshitter or not, Barry managed to talk his way into the job of head guard and pool maintenance manager at the newly-opened Cherry Park Apartments, and I thought that was pretty impressive. I found out later that some family business connections were involved, but however it happened, Barry was head guard and could hire and fire people, and when he called me and offered me a job as a guard, I jumped at it. It would be a hell of a lot better than spending my last summer before college bagging groceries and herding shopping carts at the local Jewel.
He drove me out to cherry Park one unusually hot and brilliant day in early June to show me around, and I was suitably impressed. Cherry Park sat in the middle of what was basically prairie, but prairie that was being rapidly developed with buildings and strip malls and the like. People had been leaving the cities for the burbs since the '50's, but this was all second-generation stuff out here, the beginning of suburban sprawl.
The apartments at Cherry Park were actually little townhouses, eight or twelve to a building, eight buildings altogether. Each townhouse had its own patio and balcony, sliding glass doors, central air, and all the buildings clustered around the pool and recreation center. They'd sold out fast, and when he drove me out there, we could see families moving into the last available units. They were young couples, mostly, just starting out, so there weren't a lot of kids. Barry drove directly to the pool, past landscaping so new that some of the trees still had nursery tags on them, and parked in a lot whose tarmac was so fresh that it still smelled like tar.
We entered the pool through the rec center, which was a big empty unfinished space at the time and would stay unfinished the whole summer I was there, with nothing but a single forlorn ping pong table standing in one corner. The AC hadn't been hooked up yet and the floor-to-ceiling windows were covered with brown construction paper, so it was hot in there, like a greenhouse, or maybe a brownhouse.
We passed through the freshly-tiled men's locker rooms and showers, and then into the guard room, which was to be the lifeguards' hang out and pool headquarters, and then stepped out onto the deck of the pool and looked out into the blazing sunlight. The pool was good-sized and shaped like a T, the long top made for lap-swimming with a max depth of 5'6", and the smaller stem serving as the deep-water diving area, with a high and a low board. The water was so blue it looked radioactive.
I shielded my eyes with my hand as I checked it out, but the pool wasn't really as interesting as the people out on the deck. They were all women, lying in the sun in their bathing suits; oiled, glistening, some with straps down, most of them already pretty tanned, and not a man among them.
Barry'd told me the pool wouldn't officially open until they'd passed a sanitation inspection at the end of the week, so I'd just assumed there'd be no one there yet. It never occurred to me that people would just come out for the sun, but there were maybe fifteen or twenty women out there, baking on lounges and recliners, leafing through magazines, chatting or dozing or sipping from plastic cups. They wore shorts, halter tops, a couple were in tennis outfits (there were courts nearby too), and of course bathing suits, both one- and two-piece.
They lounged around casually, comfortably, and they obviously felt right at home here. Apparently the pool had already become the social center for Cherry Park's housewives and female residents even before it had officially opened. The men were all at work, of course, which was the norm in those days, and so the place had the feel of a serraglio, the special place where a harem was kept. There was that unmistakable ambiance of a group of idle women without men. It surprised me.
Up to that point I'd never really thought about who we'd be guarding. I'd just assumed it would be a bunch of middle-aged suburbanites and their kids, and maybe, if we were lucky, a few girls our age. I was a city boy, and that's who I thought lived in the suburbs--middle-aged people.
But these were attractive women for the most part, ranging in age from maybe not much older than I was to mid- or upper-thirties, and there was something about the way they acted, some easy indolence or sense of luxury that gave the place a country-club air. The residents of Cherry Park Apartments weren't especially wealthy. In fact, as I said, most of them were young and newly married and just starting out, but I suppose the uniqueness of having their own pool gave them a special feeling of privilege and status. I could feel it in the way they moved and displayed themselves. I wasn't expecting it, and I tried to look professional and nonchalant as I checked out the pool, while behind my sunglasses my eyes kept returning to those glistening, oily bodies.
I suppose I should say something here about who I was and where I was in my own personal development, since it's kind of relevant to the story. I was 18 and had just finished high school, looking forward to going away to college in the fall. I was a big kid and not bad looking, but I was kind of shy and studious, almost the opposite of Barry's frenetic personality. I'd been laid, I believe, three or four times by then (remember, this was the early '60's, before all the wildness started) and I'd liked it very much and hoped to do a lot more of it. But I still looked at the world in terms of kids and grown-ups, and I had no doubt as to which one I was.
These women at the pool, on the other hand, were adults by my definition. They were married, had husbands, had homes and cars and the responsibilities, and some of them even had kids. Their lives were already well underway while mine was yet to begin. So to my mind, we lived in two separate worlds, and in a lot of ways I thought of the women at the pool as having more in common with my parents and teachers than with me and the kind of people I considered my peers. I could admire their bodies and the skin they displayed, but we played in two different leagues, lived in two different worlds.
So I was a little surprised when a couple of the women called out to Barry and teased him about going swimming with them or rubbing oil on their backs, and he kidded right back, addressing them by name: Mrs. Schechtman, Mrs. Burnett, Mrs. Gross, a few by their first names. There was obviously a lot of teasing and socializing going on here, and Barry was in his element.
"This is Jack Zimmer," he said, drawing me forward. "He's a good friend of mine, and he's going to be another guard here."
He caught me by surprise, so I waved weakly and smiled. A few women smiled back, and a couple made some jokes about what it must be like being a friend of Barry's, but most of them were soaking up the sun or chatting and didn't pay much attention.
There was one woman, though, who from this distance looked hardly older than me, cooling herself off under one of the rinse showers everyone was supposed to use before they went in the water, standing with her head back as she let the water run through her hair. She already had a tan, which made the shocking pink two-piece she wore seem to glow against her skin, and she was totally absorbed in what cooling off under the shower. She paid us no mind.
I'd later find out that this was Shelly Greenberg, wife of Steve Greenberg, and that she was 33 years old and had two kids, Matt and Michelle, aged 8 and 5, but that was still in the future.
Barry walked me over and introduced me to Tom Goelz, the guard on the perch, who'd also been in the Red Cross certification program with us. As we chatted, one of the women stood up and walked over to the pool and waded in, thigh deep.
"If the pool's not open yet," I asked Barry, "How come you need guards?"
"To make sure no one goes in the water."
I gestured towards the woman and he dismissed it with a glance. "She's not really swimming is she, so it's okay. We've got to cut these people some slack. They pay our salaries, right?"
He took me over to meet a kid in dark glasses who was collecting towels.
