The Pool Knows What It Did

First things first, and I want this on the record before I even get into the meat of it: whoever built the Washington Post website in the year of our Lord I-don't-know-when has never once had to load a page on a modem that made a sound like a dying cat being introduced to a fax machine. I clicked on this thing and it asked me — asked me — to accept cookies. Cookies. I have never once eaten a cookie off a website and I resent the implication that I might start now. In 1982 the newspaper came to your driveway wrapped in a rubber band and if you wanted the sports section you had to fight your brother for it, and that was that, that was the whole transaction, nobody was tracking my preferences. Anyway.

So here's the deal, as best I can piece it together between the pop-up asking me to subscribe and the little video that autoplayed a car commercial at a volume clearly designed by a war criminal: Jeanine Pirro, who I am given to understand is a television person of some renown and a longtime ally of the former and possibly future president, has broken — publicly, dramatically, in the way people only break things on television now, with the whole audience watching — with her own side over a plan to move the Reflecting Pool. The Reflecting Pool! At the Washington Monument! They want to relocate it, or modify it, the article is a little cagey on which, and Pirro, God bless her, has planted her flag and said no. Not this. Not the water.

And you know what, I respect it. I don't know the woman. I've seen her on the television screen at the tire place while I'm waiting for a rotation, gesturing, always gesturing, like she's conducting an orchestra that's about to be fired. But something in me sits up straight when I hear that a person of consequence has decided, out of everything they could pick a fight over, to pick the fight over a reflecting pool. Because a reflecting pool doesn't do anything. That's the whole point of it. It just lies there and shows you the sky and the monument, twice, for free, and asks nothing of you. And somebody, somewhere, in some office with recessed lighting, looked at that and thought: what if less.

Now — and stay with me here, because this is going somewhere, or it isn't, we'll find out together — this puts me in the mind of Gordon Weickhardt, who lived two doors down from us on Larchmere in the spring of nineteen eighty-two, and who I would like to stress up front had absolutely nothing to do with reflecting pools, monuments, water features of any kind, or Washington D.C., a city he never once mentioned wanting to visit and in fact actively distrusted on the grounds that, and this is a quote, "too many buildings shaped like other buildings." Gordon drove a Buick the color of a healing bruise and he had a above-ground pool in his own backyard, vinyl-sided, the kind you filled with a hose over the course of what felt like a geological era, and every June without fail a raccoon would get into it at night and Gordon would come out in his robe — just the robe, no additional information necessary or wanted — and stand at the edge of the pool at two in the morning negotiating with the raccoon. Actual negotiating. "I'll let you have the Tuesday trash if you leave the pool alone." I heard this through my bedroom window on more than one occasion. Nothing ever came of it. The raccoon never held up its end. Gordon moved to Zanesville in 1987 over a dispute with the township about a fence, and that, as far as I know, was the last anyone heard of Gordon Weickhardt or his robe or his Buick. I don't know why I'm telling you this. It has nothing to do with anything. Where was I.

The Pool. Right. Here's what gets me, and I want to be fair about this because I contain multitudes and I am not, whatever you've heard, a man of fixed opinions — here's what gets me is the *scale* of it. You've got the entire apparatus of the federal government, the whole marble-and-limestone circus of it, and somewhere in there a committee, a real committee, with an agenda and a projector, sat down and decided the thing that needed fixing about the National Mall was the water. Not the — I don't even know what else is down there, I went once, 1979, my uncle Ray took me and my cousin and we saw a guy selling one single hot dog out of a cooler with no cart, just a man and a cooler, entrepreneurial spirit, God love him — but the point is, out of everything, somebody circled the Pool. And now Jeanine Pirro is out here defending a body of water like it's Fort Sumter and the guy who used to be her guy is apparently fine with draining it, and I don't know what that says about anything except that we have reached a stage of civilization where the fights that used to be about wars are now about landscaping, and I can't decide if that's an improvement or the single most damning indictment of the species I've encountered all week, and it's only Tuesday. Wait, is it Tuesday. I've lost track. And another thing —

— actually, before I get to the other thing, I have to tell you about the barbershop, because it's relevant, or it isn't, I genuinely can't tell anymore and neither can you, so let's just go. Ernie's, on the corner, gone now, condos, don't get me started, actually do get me started, later, remind me. A haircut at Ernie's in 1982 ran you two dollars and fifty cents and Ernie himself had a percolator going all day that smelled like it was brewing regret, and there was a mirror on the wall directly across from the chair that had a crack in it shaped almost exactly like the state of Florida, and Ernie refused to replace it because, he said, and I remember this precisely, "a man ought to see himself broken a little, keeps him honest." I did not understand this sentence at seven years old and I do not understand it now, decades later, a grown man, presumably wiser, and yet. Ernie had a dog, a beagle mix named Cassius who was not friendly and did not pretend to be, and once — this is the part I actually wanted to tell you, I think — once a fella came in, big guy, ears on him like satellite dishes, I never got his name, or I got it and lost it, one of the two, and this fella sat down in the chair and would not stop talking about a fishing trip to a lake that, as he told it, kept changing size. First it was a small lake. Then, four minutes later, it was "practically an ocean, practically." Ernie just kept cutting, didn't say a word, and Cassius the beagle watched the man's ankles the entire time like they owed him money. Nobody ever found out how big the lake actually was. I think about that more than is healthy.

Anyway. The Pool. Reflects the monument, reflects the sky, reflects, presumably, the sheer institutional exhaustion of everybody involved in this dispute, and somewhere in that reflection I choose to see 1982 looking back out at me, disapprovingly, arms crossed, wondering when everybody got so comfortable rearranging the furniture on something that was built to just sit there and be looked at. You didn't move the Pool then. You didn't move anything then. The couch stayed where the couch was for eleven years in our house and if you wanted it moved you moved it yourself and you threw your back out doing it and that was called *consequences,* a concept I am reliably informed is no longer taught.

And here's the thing about Pirro breaking with her own guy over this — and I want to say, before the letters start coming, that I am not on a team here, I have never been on a team, teams are how you end up standing in a parking lot at midnight yelling about a fence, ask Gordon Weickhardt, ask his Buick — the thing is, disagreement used to cost something. It used to mean the phone got unplugged from the wall — the actual wall, a cord, you'd trip on it, my mother tripped on it constantly and blamed the cat, we did not have a cat — and now disagreement is a chyron. It's a graphic. It happens and then forty minutes later everybody's back on the same set doing the same show and the Pool is either moved or it isn't and nobody actually finds out which because the next story's already loading. And another thing — the DUCKS. Nobody in this entire article mentions what happens to the ducks if they move the Pool, and I have to assume that's deliberate, I have to assume there is a duck-shaped hole in this story that the Washington Post, with its cookies and its car commercial at war-crime volume, simply does not want to touch, and I don't blame them, some things are bigger than journalism, some things are ducks.

I had a paper route that touched, at its farthest edge, a drainage pond behind the Kowalczyks' place — not related to anything here, I recognize that, I recognize it and I am telling you anyway — and there was a duck on that pond, singular, just the one, that we called Mr. Newsome after a substitute teacher he resembled in temperament, standoffish, judgmental, always seemed to be grading you, and Mr. Newsome the duck outlived two winters that by all rights should have finished him and then one spring he just wasn't there, no funeral, no explanation, the pond didn't even seem to notice, and I've never gotten over it, and I don't expect to, and I don't see what that has to do with a monument in Washington D.C. except that ducks, like reflecting pools, like Gordon's raccoon, like the fella with the lake that kept growing, don't ask you what you think about them. They're just there. Until they're not. And somebody always finds a reason to move them anyway.

I don't know how this ends. I don't know how any of this ends. The committee's going to do what the committee's going to do, Pirro's going to say what she's going to say on the television screen at a volume the tire place will lower without asking anyone, and the water's either staying or it isn't, and either way I'll bet you a dollar — an actual dollar, the kind with weight to it — that nobody involved has ever stood at two in the morning negotiating with a raccoon over the fate of something they built with their own hands, and until they have, I don't much care what they do with the Pool.

Still haven't told you about the condos. Later.

— Edgar