Octopus at the Country Club

By Madeleine Sherbondy

The lifeguard arrived at the country club one morning in July, too distracted to bother looking into the pool. She did not see the octopus until it was too late. The octopus did not mind. It had nothing but time.

The lifeguard was thinking too hard about her boyfriend, who was dull and apathetic as most males were, and how the night before he had touched her breast and she had wanted to smack him. Instead, she asked if he would please drive her home because she had to lifeguard in the morning, and she liked to get up with enough time to get her iced coffee before the water aerobics class started. Her dull boyfriend—his name was Eric, but she couldn’t remember the last time she had said it—pouted in the front seat of his car for a moment, then took her home and did not text her for the rest of the night.

They were going to be seniors in high school. She wanted to go out of state for college, and he resented her for it, but she resented him right back for not being in love with her anymore. It was not a secret that he was not in love with her anymore. He had told her right after he tried to touch her breast that he liked her better when they were sophomores and she let him touch whatever he wanted. The lifeguard said nothing for a moment, then repeated that he please drive her home. She got up the next morning with his handprint still on her breast, then covered it with her too-tight red bathing suit and drove to work, where she looked forward to flirting with the server boy whose name was either Alex or Daniel—she could never remember.

Now she was buttered in suntan lotion and crisped from days in the sun, and she felt rather like a fried lobster as she began opening up the pool without looking in the water. This was a good thing, because had she looked in the pool, she would certainly have spilled her iced coffee all down her too-tight bathing suit, and perhaps some of it would have gotten in the pool. If that happened, she would have had to run the filters backwards, and she was seventeen and new to the job and too meek to tell her manager that she had spilled coffee in the pool or that there was an octopus in the pool soaking up the coffee through its skin. Coffee wasn’t good for octopuses, and it could have died, and a dead octopus in the pool was almost certainly worse than a live octopus in the pool.

Yes, there was an octopus in the pool. The lifeguard did not know until after she had carried the backboard down from the bathhouse and retrieved the bag of water barbells for the water aerobics class that would start in an hour and flirted with the server boy named Alex or Daniel, who was putting down umbrellas on the tables where rich people would soon sit and eat overpriced salads. After he had gone back inside the clubhouse, the lifeguard knelt beside the pool to take pH samples of the water. Instead of her distorted reflection she saw the octopus, and she shrieked and flung the chemical kit over her shoulder.

The octopus filled the deep end like water fills a container. It had bright crimson skin that wrinkled like the underside of a mushroom, and it was long enough to stretch out its tentacles and touch either side of the deep end—which is to say, it wasn’t terribly big but much too big to be in the pool where it wasn’t supposed to be at all. It watched the young lifeguard gape on the edge of the pool through rectangular pupils.

“Oh dear Jesus,” she said, even though she did not believe in Jesus, and then she said it again. Her heart was beating wildly, and she remembered from an aquarium she had gone to once that octopuses had three hearts. That was far too many, she thought. What did they need all that heart for if they weren’t even smart enough to stay out of country club pools where they didn’t belong.

“This isn’t an aquarium,” she said sternly to the octopus. The octopus said nothing back. The lifeguard was not even sure where its mouth was—was it between all the arms? One of the tubes protruding from its soft, billowy head? “You need to go home,” she said, then wondered where its home was, and how would the octopus get there?

Animal Control, she thought, and dialed them up at once. The unhelpful man who answered the phone listened to her claim that a cephalopod had taken up residence at the country club pool and then laughed at her. “Don’t you know?” he asked. “Animal Control is for chasing possums out of garbage cans and luring bear cubs back into the woods to their mother, not fishing an octopus out of a swimming pool. That’s the job of Marine Animal Control.” The lifeguard asked if they may direct her to Marine Animal Control, but the man laughed at her again and then hung up, and the lifeguard stared down into the pool where the octopus stared back.

“I really need you to leave,” she said, wondering if she might be able to guilt the octopus into leaving her be. “Water aerobics starts in forty-five minutes, so I need the pool clear by then.”

How funny that would be, she thought deliriously. Fifteen elderly women in their elderly floral bathing suits, doing water crunches with their floating barbells while the octopus watched just feet below them. The octopus could participate in the class, too, if it pleased. It could do water crunches and bicycle kicks, too, holding eight water barbells, one for each arm. Its water-pruned mantle would match the skin dripping from the old ladies’ arms, and after the class, it could drink lemonade with the lifeguard and the old ladies, and all would be good.

She sat by the edge of the pool as she pondered who else to call. She almost dipped her feet into the pool out of habit, but her toes curled at the thought of the octopus’s tentacle reaching up and touching her. It must be slimy, she imagined, although she wouldn’t know—she had never touched an octopus before. Calling management was out of the question, because she was caught sleeping on her break last week, and a rogue mollusk in the pool while she was on duty would not look any better. Out-of-state college was expensive, and she needed the job. So she dialed up her dull boyfriend next and reminded him of the time two years ago when he had kissed her and promised her he would be at her beck and call. He picked up and groaned when he heard her voice.

“I have never needed you more than I need you right now,” she cried into the phone. “And if you do not come help me with this problem, I will break up with you right here and right now.”

“I was sleeping,” he said.

“Get here now. I don’t know who else to call. I don’t want to get in trouble,” the lifeguard said. “I love you.”

The dull boyfriend did not believe her when she told him what was happening, but when he arrived at the pool five minutes later, he nearly kicked a lawn chair into the pool in surprise. The lifeguard yelled at him to be careful. A chair in the pool might hurt the octopus, and though she loathed its presence in her pool, she had spent the minutes waiting for him to arrive looking at it. It had an octopus family somewhere, she realized while she waited. Somewhere in the ocean was the coral reef where it was born, because octopuses don’t appear out of thin air. She felt bad for the octopus, because it didn’t look like it wanted to be there any more than she wanted it to be there. She wondered if it had a name or if octopuses referred to each other with sounds. She wondered what sound meant when you were hundreds of feet below the ocean with enough water pressure to crush you flat. Somewhere in all of the wondering, she had begun to appreciate the octopus.

Her boyfriend did not appreciate the octopus. He was wearing a hoodie in the sun as he always did, because he did not care about summer or heat, and he glared down at the octopus with hatred.

“You look so angry,” the lifeguard said to him. “It’s not your problem. It’s my problem. If I get fired because the octopus is here, you’ll still have a plan. I won’t.”

“I care about it because I care about you,” he said. “I love you.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Then why did you call me to help you with this thing when I can’t even do anything about it?”

The lifeguard wanted to cry. “I don’t know. Just help me think of something. Please.”

The dull boyfriend paced the side of the pool, looking at the octopus. It looked at him right back. The boyfriend dipped the toe of his shoe in the water and sloshed it around as if antagonizing the octopus. It did nothing but watch him passively.

“Well, you know what you’ve got to do,” he finally said. “You gotta go in there and get it out.”

“I’m not getting in that pool,” the lifeguard said. “I can’t do anything. I’m not strong enough to make it leave. And I don’t know where it would go.”

“Well, you need to make it leave! Or do you want to get fired and be stuck at the state university with me?”

The lifeguard wanted to leave the pool, leave her dull and apathetic boyfriend with the octopus. She wanted to leave the state, to go to university and live in a dorm room with a stranger and eat dining hall food that made her stomach hurt. Her dull boyfriend wanted to live in his parents’ house and eat boxed macaroni and cheese for as long as he could, and when his classes at the state school were over, he wanted to go upstairs and kiss the lifeguard’s breasts without having to love her, too.

“Why don’t you go in and deal with it?” she asked.

“Not my job on the line.”

“But if you really cared about me, you would do anything I need you to,” she said. “And you told me you cared about me and that you would pick up when I called.”

“I didn’t tell you I would get an octopus out of a pool.”

“That’s part of love, getting octopuses out of each other’s pools.”

“No it’s not!” Her dull boyfriend grabbed chunks of his hair and sat down on the sunburnt concrete of the pool deck. “Love means…love means that you’ll stay here. For me. We’ll go to the state university together and get married and have two kids, one boy and one girl, and one day they’ll have octopuses in their own pools to deal with. One day we’ll be old and talking about that time there was the octopus in the pool, and we’ll laugh about how we argued about it.”

“If it’s that important to you, then you get it out!” the lifeguard cried. “Or do you not care about me?” She did not wait for him to say anything. “You never cared about me.”

“That’s neither here nor there,” her boyfriend said. “But what is here is the octopus, and what you need to do is get it out, because you love me.”

The lifeguard pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes to stop herself from crying. It was hot and her skin was peeling and water aerobics started in half an hour and she hadn’t had a chance to drink her iced coffee and her breast hurt from where her boyfriend she didn’t love had touched it the night before, and she didn’t love him. “Love is not as important as the octopus!” she finally said when she found her words.

“Then do you even want to be with me?” her boyfriend asked.

“Yes, more than anything.” The lifeguard folded her arms and turned her back to her boyfriend and thought about how absurd it all must seem to the octopus. Could it hear them shouting to each other from under all that water? Did the octopus have ears? All it would see from the bottom of the pool looking up were two talking heads jabbering to each other like blue jays, and that made it all seem so very inconsequential. The lifeguard wished to be the octopus, because then her only problem would be getting out of the pool she had found herself in.

“Well then how do we do that if we don’t love each other?” her boyfriend finally said. “How do we love each other if we don’t love each other.”

The lifeguard stared into the pool at the octopus and thought about what it would be like to share a dorm room at her out-of-state university with it.

“I can’t do this,” she said, not caring who she said it to, and stepped closer to the edge of the water.

The lifeguard kicked off her shoes and put one foot into the water, then two. It was cold because no one had been in it yet, save for the octopus. She dove underwater to get her hair wet, then swam out to the deep end. When she looked down, between her feet dangling in the water, she saw the octopus’s rectangular pupils looking right back at her. Just a few feet away from her one of its tentacles broke the water. She shivered, thinking about its suction cups on her toes, but shivered more at the thought of losing her job or of kissing her boyfriend who didn’t love her. That much was true—he didn’t love her, he didn’t love her, he didn’t love her. Almost as certain as the fact that she would not be able to move the octopus, this beast that’s suctioned itself to the bottom of the deep end. He did not love her, it would not move, she would not be happy.

She dove into the water and pushed herself to the bottom before opening her eyes. The octopus moved like the water did, all fluid and waves, and she remembered another thing from the aquarium—octopuses do not have bones. She reached out and gave the massive thing a shove, and it quivered like a spoonful of Jell-O. It was soft in the same way that bread dough is soft before it’s baked. It looked at her with something resembling surprise when she touched it—was it possible for an octopus to feel surprised? Could it feel anything?

She shoved it again, first with one hand and then with her entire body, and she came away sticky with octopus slime. It did not budge, not even an inch, and she could feel the eyes of her dull boyfriend looking down on her through the feet of water separating them. She felt him watching her, felt him judging her, felt him wondering why she couldn’t move the octopus or move him to love her. It was always her fault, wasn’t it? It was her fault he didn’t love her and her fault the octopus did nothing but stare at him and her fault she was running out of air in her lungs and rising towards the surface like a torpedo. When she broke the surface, he wasn’t there anymore. He was sitting at one of the tables where rich people ate salads without her.

 She scrambled out of the pool, dripped across the concrete deck, and sat next to him. Water aerobics would start in fifteen minutes, she started to say, but caught herself. What would he say back? What would he be able to say back that she didn’t already know, that she didn’t already think about when she was leagues underwater and it was just her and the octopus and the water and the blood pounding through both of their bodies?

And so, the young lifeguard and her dull boyfriend sat in the oppressive July sun and watched the octopus undulate in the chlorine while it watched them back, and they did not talk. They did not talk or look at each other because they each knew what the octopus knew: that loving each other was like spooning an octopus from a swimming pool. It was slippery and uncomfortable and nearly impossible, and someone was bound to get hurt. They did not love each other any more than they loved the octopus, but instead of getting the octopus out, they sat and stared at each other and the octopus stared at them and they stared at the octopus, and the sun beat down on them until the water aerobics class arrived to find the lifeguard stretching her hand towards the pool, where a tentacle rose silently out of the deep end.