Marco Polo

It's cool, it's blue, and it’s wet.

It's the backyard swimming pool at my family's Massachusetts home, circa 1981.

 

Somehow that old swimming pool game, Marco Polo, came up in a phone conversation several weeks ago with my friend, Molly.

 

I remember that, I responded.

And suddenly I was transported back twenty-seven years, to the summer I turned 11. It was the summer when I developed the “Teacher/Student” game, a game that needed typically two players, but my version required just one.    I would devise a lengthy grammar and math test, and then take it, hoping for a good grade -- but intentionally making a few mistakes so I could correct them with a red pen, and offer myself a genuine, yet stern explanation.

 

It was also the summer of my first period. It was the summer of my blue-green Speedo bathing suit. It was the summer in which both of my parents were having affairs, and I was the messenger in the middle.

 

Out alone in the 20 foot X 40 foot in ground pool on those 80 degree summer days, I  somersaulted backwards and forwards for hours, holding my breath for what seemed like record-breaking amounts of time, and worked to refine my Butterfly stroke. When those pursuits became far too lonesome, I'd try out a game I had read about in the encyclopedia under "P" for Pool-games. Looking back toward the house, I'd call Marco! and quickly dive underwater to swim the entire length of the pool, breach the surface and respond Polo!

 

At this point in our conversation, Molly asked, with her typical dry wit, “Does this constitute playing with yourself in the pool?"

Ha.

 

But when you're 11, bright, and driven stir crazy by silence, you have the opportunity to write story after story, leaving the ending to chance. In that enormous house, I began 101 tales of mystery. When I was not playing with myself in the pool, or lying to one parent for the benefit of the other, I kept spiral-bound notebooks in which I wrote pages of lyrics that spoke to me and the domestic crimes I kept trying to unravel. One day, I took a song written for the 80's show Miami Vice and used it as a weapon against my absent mother.

 

So you can wipe off that grin

'cause I know where you've been

It's all been a pack of lies...

 

I left the notebook page covered with the lyrics to Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight on the kitchen counter, a perfectly logical place for discovery by either my mother or father, whoever returned home first. It was a Casey Kasem-ized threat, a creative nudge to remind them that my eyes were no longer blurred by childlike innocence. I had begun to see them as ordinary human beings, capable of lies, unmitigated desire, and everyday foibles.  Beneath their parental skin lay clues to a careless adulthood, and like Harriet the Spy, I documented them all.

If you're shaped and bent a certain way, you stretch your limits of understanding beyond what is typically expected of your age. When the suspects in my story denied the obvious truths of our household, I searched in frustration for clues in a case I couldn't begin to understand.

 

And like every episode of Miami Vice, the victim in this crime was obvious from the beginning.