I am always getting pulled somewhere by my arm. I am dangling like a monkey. I sort of drag my feet on the ground in my buckled sandals. In my mind it is always summer for some reason. And then some one is attached to the top of me by my hand and I am getting dragged around at a rate that is faster than I want to go, because I am not going! I don’t want to go! Wherever it is, I don’t want to go there! I am not moving or budging, I am only screaming and wailing and refusing to pick up my sandals. I am in a tantrum.
Sometimes I am dangling from my arm in a pleasant way. Someone is dangling me like a monkey, and I will not put my feet down because this is the way the game is played. I dangle by my arm and try to get my feet over my head, or get my feet up onto the body of the dangler. Up onto their waist is okay, but I want to get my feet up onto their chest or even shoulders and drag them down to my level. When they collapse, I have won! Sometimes someone is attached at the hands and someone is attached at the feet and then I am being tossed like a feedbag. Sometimes I am being tossed like a feedbag onto a big bed or onto a trampoline. This is the best, this feedbag-tossing. It is forbidden because my mom says they are going to pull my arm out of the socket.
I don’t know who does this sack-tossing thing—cousins probably. There are all sorts of cousins due to my father’s brother Fuzz being so much older and having so many kids and then those kids all having kids when they are basically still kids so that sometimes I meet my cousins and they are practically elderly and they have two generations of other cousins beneath them. My dad has other brothers and sisters too, and they all have kids, there’s too many to count. Then there is this strange half-family, that no matter how many times I ask about it, I don’t understand what it is, because it means my dad’s friend Larry is really his nephew, but as a half-nephew? Who has a half-nephew?
Sometimes I am dangled by my arm into the aboveground pool. Because half-nephew Larry is rich from doing electrical work and he has an aboveground pool that is seven feet deep, and when we go over we swim. My dad used to be a lifeguard when he was young, and he takes great pride in teaching/forcing us kids to swim very early on. Aboveground pools are floppy. You can’t sit on the edge or sit on some steps, and there is no slow gradation from the shallow to the deep, they just toss you into the trough. And everything disgusting that falls in the trough stays in the trough unless someone takes it out, because there are no drainage systems or cleaning devices, and probably no chlorine either. Probably they fill it with the garden hose. Everything in the aboveground pool—leaves, dirt, bits of mown grass, used bandaids—rotates in a circle like a mild whirlpool.
I float on an alligator, and there is only room for one alligator in the pool at a time, and when I hit the edge, in I go, down and down into the trough with a twang of the reverberating floppy sides, until I touch the smooth plastic bottom of the pool, and I can feel the pebbles and soil and grit and sticks and whatever the pool is sitting on right through the plastic.
Then, swoosh. My dad pulls me up by my arm. Was I drowning? My brother seems unconcerned. My cousins seem unconcerned. My dad seems concerned but undaunted. My mom, who cannot swim, even in the aboveground pool, who had been sitting in a lounger chair in the grass in her white slacks and pink blouse and pink suspenders and buckle sandals perfectly still while I floated on the alligator, now is shaking the floppy sides of the pool and flipping out.
No more aboveground pool. No more cousins tossing me like a sack.
But it is so quiet inside the aboveground pool, at the bottom. You can’t hear all the bullshit loud nonsense of all the kid cousins and all the parent cousins and all the grandparent cousins. Inside the aboveground pool there is this muffled sound of the heartbeat and the reverb of the wobbling floppy pool sides, and this is the sound I think that vampires hear when they are really in the moment and they are about to drain their victim.