This is the summer that Meena realizes she isn’t a heroine in one of those nineteenth-century English novels. Maybe it’s the sticky-sweet smell of popsicles or the scorching concrete between the pool and snack bar. Or the chlorine and the oily sunscreen that slicks every surface—cash register, door knob, the pool bathroom’s sea-foam tiles. When she closes her eyes and tries to imagine rolling hills and tree-lined paths to the priory in some ancient English town described in the pages of the novel she is reading, the scream of ten-year-olds playing Marco Polo always brings her back: muggy Virginia afternoon, two hours until the end of her shift.
Meena arrives to the Rec Center at seven-thirty every morning to earn money for college—not the community one fifteen minutes away that her parents wanted her to go to, but the school two hours away. She needs that buffer between her and her parents, who are already counting down the days to graduation and meeting with the local matchmaker, a woman in heavy gold earrings and chiffon sari.
“We’re only just starting to look,” her mother says, as if this is the good news.
Most mornings, Meena starts her rotation at the pool, checking people in until eleven. Then she’s off to the snack bar for the lunch rush, ending the day in the outer reaches of the park. There, Meena dons a helmet and runs around pushing softballs back down the slope into the machines.
She’s been eyeing another summer hire—a tall, blond senior with a wide, goofy smile. She knows she’ll be leaving at the end of the summer and will probably never come back. Until she gets a so-called worthwhile internship that pays shit but looks good on her nonexistent resume, it’s this stop-gap job for fifteen dollars an hour and all the sun a girl could ask for, even though her mother laments her ever-darkening skin. She’s been cultivating Meena’s relative lightness since she was born. “Why can’t you work inside? At the mall?” her mother constantly complains. She doesn’t seem to mind the smell of grease from the frier that lodges itself in Meena’s hair or the oil that leaves spiteful spit marks on her wrists.
One month in and the staff’s already watching the weather report, praying for a flash of lightning to cut across the afternoon. Then the lifeguards can blow their whistles, close up the center to wait out the storm in the snack bar, someone pulling out speakers, someone else a twelve pack.
Whenever the lightning stops before the end of their shift, the whole staff jumps into the pool fully clothed, sliding up against each other. It makes up for all those long, dreary days at the front cash register where Meena pretends not to notice the young dads eyeing her thighs beneath her ugly green uniform, lifting up her copy of Jane Eyre to cover her face.
As the sharp pelt of raindrops falls around them, the blond boy lifts Meena out of the pool, hands under her armpits like she’s some kind of trophy. And for a moment, Meena feels like there’s nothing to worry about, her body drunk on its own possibility. This is when the seed of something begins to bloom within her—maybe resistance, maybe hope. Meena can’t quite pinpoint what it is exactly, just that it’s running through her blood, making it hum, making her thrust her body against the humid air, even higher. And when she slides back down, her toes touching the bottom of the pool, she pulls the boy even closer though she probably shouldn’t. By the end of the summer, it amazes her how quickly the girl she was that day in the pool becomes a memory.
One day, a week into August when Meena gets to work, the snack bar is buzzing about Janine and the park ranger, a guy in his early twenties with sunburned arms. He always gives Meena a hard time. When he catches her reading from the softly worn pages of a book, he calls her “college,” apparently the only insult he thinks he can get away with.
Janine had been working late the night before when the ranger cornered her in the staff room. Said something. Tried something. Janine said Fuck off and maybe laughed at him. Now, he was on leave, and Janine stormed out of the front office, threatening to sue the shit out of the place.
Meena wants to quit in solidarity like a few of the snack bar staffers but knows she can’t. She’s budgeted her wages based on the full fifteen weeks of summer and it’s only week twelve, but too late to find another job. All the excuses pile up and for the first time, Meena realizes it doesn’t matter if she’s a Catherine Linton or an Elizabeth Bennett because they had homes and property and didn’t need a fifteen dollar an hour job. They could, and did, marry well. Meanwhile, Meena lives on the side of town with strip malls and a Multiplex with peeling movie posters. There’s no room in her budget to be a gothic heroine—or any kind of heroine. The lives of the women in those books can’t prepare her for her future.
Meena wants her story to be about longing and circumstance. She imagines herself walking through a countryside so green and far from her current life, that it might only exist in the pages of a novel.
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Vandana Khanna is the author of three collections of poems and her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in The New Republic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Fiction Southeast, Phoebe, and in the Sunday Short Reads section of Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and short fiction have been finalists for the Flash Essay Contest in Sweet: A Literary Confection and in the Raleigh Review Flash Fiction Contest.