Pilgrimage
By Suzanne Barnecut
The fog began to burn off and by noon gave way to blue sky. The onset of heat was sudden and miraculous and the late August day announced itself as a welcome and long overdue guest. Office workers left for long lunches, keen to bare shoulders and loll in the park midweek. Because sun. Lines formed for nitrogen cold brew and there was a rush on outdoor café tables. Celebratory bottles of rosé were uncorked. Because sun.
“It’s so hot,” people remarked in complaint and greeting, as the answer to every kind of question. It was 79 degrees Fahrenheit in a city that rarely topped 60, lending truth to hyperbole. It would grow warmer as the day weathered on.
Selma Myers was not spared from this viral outbreak of optimism. She’d grown up in the heat, had loved to lie on the pavement for hours after a swim and let the sunlight prick her like a torrent of tiny needles until she was once again induced back into the water. But she’d long ago acclimated to San Francisco’s cool and fluctuating microclimates, becoming accustomed to the salty breath of an ocean breeze and the wet layer of fog that slowly steamrolled the city. Someone, somewhere had named the fog Karl, personifying it into a German man. Selma was by now so used to Karl that she’d become a wilting flower in even moderate temperatures.
“What I need is a pool,” she said to her colleague, Livi Spalding, pulling out her phone.
This is how they came to book “Heart of La Jardin,” a bean-shaped pool that came with a couple of Adirondacks, some spaghetti tubes, a BBQ, and a gazebo covered by boughs of flaming bougainvillea. Fifty dollars an hour was a small price to pay for this luxury. Selma had never used the pool-sharing app before, and had only read about it recently on social media and felt the urge to download it, just in case. She quickly entered in a username that she felt was a clever, watery play on her real name: @atthehelm, which suggested that she had a sense of direction.
By the time they arrived, the temperature had risen to 85. The sun was high and the water nearly perfectly clear against the pool’s dark blue Moroccan tiles. The girls poured cold white wine from a sweating bottle into plastic tumblers. Selma wore a black one-piece that pressed her large breasts down. She was tan and full-bodied and wore loungewear well: large colorful earrings, linen wraps with dangling tassels, oversized plastic sunglasses. By contrast, Livi was pale and sprightly and wore a bikini designed, like an underwire bra, to give her cleavage that she did not have. She stood mostly still in the water, back to the wall and arms spread wide. Then she sank down to her neck, closed her eyes, and admitted, “This is heavenly, but I’m not much of a swimmer.”
Selma abandoned her glass on the ledge and swam a few laps, allowing her body to remember the way it felt to somersault under the surface and to use the wall as a launch pad. She heard the sound of her own velocity and witnessed the sun’s gleam and shifting light patterns from beneath the water’s surface. For a moment she was a veritable mermaid. When she came up for air, her dark shoulder-length hair slicked back like a seal pelt, she felt at home in her skin in a way that was both reminiscent and new.
The windows of the adjacent house were dark, shrouded by overgrown hydrangeas. Selma wondered where the family was, why they had not abandoned all responsibility to run home and enjoy their private oasis. Perhaps they had no sense of spontaneity, or perhaps they had other oases.
When the hour was up Livi announced that she felt both soaked and sun-baked. She climbed the pool’s stairs, pausing to press her breasts and squeeze out the water from her suit’s extra padding. “Sam is making kebabs,” she said. “Come over. We’ll get an early start.” Livi and her partner lived in a high-rise building punctuated by shared rooftop decks, BBQ pits, and astro turf lawns. It was pleasant when it wasn’t windy.
Selma shook her head, no. Livi and Sam had that kind of harmonious relationship that appeared effortless, which Selma sometimes found difficult to stomach. You prep the skewers, I’ll buy the wine. One called, the other answered. They weren’t married, and yet they were doing marriage better than most.
Livi dried off, called herself a car, and waved good-bye, calling: “You can always change your mind!”
It was nice to have options, an invitation. Yet swimming felt good too. The heat felt like it would last and last, as though an entire summer could be packed into this pressure-cooker of a single stifling afternoon. What had begun as a whim now emerged as a need to keep going.
Selma was an avid swimmer throughout her youth, all the way through high school. Even now she had the thick, muscular shoulders to prove it. She posted a picture of the next pool on Instagram with the invitation: One hour only: Marin City Paradise. Two hammocks, one saltwater pool. BYOB.
Nestled in the hills, this pool appeared serene and expectant. When Selma arrived she found her friend May waiting, towel draped around her neck. “I’m dying,” May said. “It’s so hot.”
This far north the temperature had climbed to over 100 and the sun appeared at its apex, soon to begin its slow descent. Still it would be warm for hours, perhaps all night. People would sleep with their windows open, longing for a breeze.
Selma stopped at a small market to pick up some Lillet, ice, and a cheese platter, although cheese was a poor choice. It would soon be limp and sweating.
She wasn’t someone who usually threw parties; she was instead a person who liked the idea of entertaining. Her San Francisco apartment was prohibitively small, almost dollhouse-sized, but this impromptu event marked a change. Now she was a person whom others might gather around. She added to her Instagram post: Someone please bring watermelon.
As friends began to slowly arrive, asking her how she’d come by the pool, she showed them the app and joked, “Just a reminder: this pool has a no-diaper clause.” It was true, there was a rule about babies in diapers, but she forgot to explain the actual joke, which was that there was no bathroom, a detail she might have considered before blasting her invitation.
A small cohort set about assembling a playlist and looked around for ways to amplify the music. The pool came with Sonos speakers, they discovered. As more people arrived, Selma envisioned herself as the moon, having pull and sway. Above all, it was interesting to see who showed up, this odd smattering of people from across the landscape of her life: her friend Damian from high school, who had for twenty years performed in the Rocky Horror Picture Show nearly every weekend; two millennial colleagues she barely knew; her friend Susan, a dog walker in the vicinity; Harold and Lucy, a couple who had been friends with Selma and her ex, a topic they neatly avoided; Barry, also from work, whose presence was a tad mystifying; her second-cousin Louis… Selma realized it was perhaps less a party and more a motley crew, but introductions around how each person was connected to her made for easy conversation. In this way Selma was no moon but instead a star in a sprawling constellation.
She extended the reservation on the app so that the first hour stretched into a second and then a third. A man named Trevor, Damian’s friend, was the first to shed his swimsuit and declare a skinny-dipping challenge. Because sun. The challenge was not widely embraced. Four men and one woman peeled back their suits to jump in, though the woman stopped herself at the edge to exclaim, “This is not a swimming watch!” before shaking off a heavy metal bracelet, having noticed, for the first time, that it was wet. Selma’s guests threw their heads back and laughed. Here they were, immersed in water even though everything else was insistent upon drying them out, leaching from them every last bit of sense.
The landscape took on a golden rose hue as the sun began its dip behind the hillside. The water gleamed. It was their moment to cram every kind of summertime Los Angeles pool party into a single night. Salt clung to their bodies, eyelashes, lips.
Some of the watermelon, doused with vodka, made it into the pool; the fruit was crushed like paste and floated like wisps of pink-fleshed jellyfish. From here it seemed only natural to keep going, but of course they would need another pool.
It would have to be nearby; they were already wet. The party needed to keep its momentum, before everyone got too cold or realized how tired and sunbaked they were. Selma’s skin felt dry, like it might crack open. She felt the weight of alcohol in her body. Heavy limbs, heavy eyelids. She’d have to stop at another market for chips and beer, water, and something to grill. The next pool would need to have a grill. A half dozen warriors crowded around Selma’s phone and settled on “Rosemead,” which boasted an outdoor kitchen and a pool house with, importantly, a restroom. The catch was, Selma objected, “It says no parties.”
Booked all the same. Just a touch of a button, finger pad against the screen. “This is a gathering,” Damian said. “Semantics.”
“Let’s call it a family reunion.”
“A work offsite.”
Susan, who had no dogs left to return to their owners, quietly reassured Selma: “We’ll enter quietly, a few of us at a time.”
Yet when they arrived, there was no lock box on Rosemead.
“Oh shit,” Damien said. “You have to actually ring the doorbell and talk to someone.” It was agreed that it would have to be Selma and, soon enough, the owner — an older man named Humphrey — greeted her at the door. “Been having a day of it, huh?” he said, looking her up and down.
She stood barefoot on the step, wrapped in her striped Turkish towel. “I’m making a pilgrimage,” she explained. “Pool by pool, hour by hour.” Because sun.
He was a silver fox, this Humphrey, with his white-gray hair combed neatly back. Fit and tan, he wore a crisp, starched shirt printed all over with tiny lobsters, making him into a live caricature of a man who owned a small yacht.
“That sounds expensive,” he said, still considering her as though he might not let her in.
Selma shrugged. “You only make a pilgrimage once.”
After a long pause he replied, “Perhaps. But that might depend on whether you know where you’re headed.”
Humphrey stepped out and led her through a small side gate, past a jasmine-scented hedge and into the backyard. Everything was tidy but Selma knew at once that it was hopeless to try sneaking anyone in. She texted: Abort, abort, to her friends in their various cars and positions around the semi-ritzy neighborhood.
It was, at least, a dramatic way to end a pop-up pool party. Selma was hungry now but wanted to maintain the charade. She thanked Humphrey and he disappeared behind a sliding door into the darkness of his air-conditioned home. She had the immediate sense that he was watching her from behind the wide slats of his wooden blinds.
Selma dutifully draped her towel across a chair and dove into the deep end. No pool, as yet, had a diving board, but the shock of water reinvigorated her and she began to swim lap after lap, taking long pulls, enjoying the resistance. She would keep her word, even though the idea of a pilgrimage had only formed in the moment. Now it felt like the truth: she’d come to swim and would continue swimming once her time at this pool was up. Suddenly the water felt firm, solid. Her legs scissored, her arms sliced the surface. The sound in her ears was rhythmic and primal.
She remembered this sound; it used to amplify her determination to be the fastest, to come in first. There was a time in her life when Selma was used to winning. She wondered, vaguely, what had happened since then. This half-thought tugged at her as she felt her lungs grow tight from lack of oxygen. She concentrated only on the blue ahead, ignoring other imagined swimmers flying back and forth across the pool, until she’d traversed a mile. Another half-thought: It was something to have the ability to travel a distance.
When Selma finally came up for air, she found Humphrey sitting in a patio chair, watching. A beautiful charcuterie plate rested on the pebbled glass plane of the table. “I thought you might need to eat,” he said.
She pulled herself from the water and, dripping, reached for the spread. Seeded crackers, purple grapes, salami. He admired her body openly, shoulders to thighs to toenails painted the deep burgundy of Hudson cherries.
She stared at him as she chewed, like a cow working its cud, eyes wide. He was barefoot and had the large, defined calves of an avid cyclist. She could report him on the app if he tried anything, she thought. The app provided an alibi, placing her here in his yard for this hour should anything untoward happen.
“I didn’t know that hors d'oeuvres were included,” she said.
“It’s nearly seven. You must be tired,” he replied. Probably he could see her rental history. That she really had been swimming for hours.
Humphrey’s suburban, fenced-in yard was cast in shade and Selma wished she was near the ocean, wanting suddenly to see the blazing half moon of the sun drop below the horizon.
“You look like you could use a drink,” he said. “I have a wine cellar. Would you like to see it?”
“My hour’s up.” Selma wrapped her towel around her and began to gather her belongings. Just before she left, Humphrey touched her lightly on the shoulder and she felt a chill run through her. “Thank you,” she said, “for the brie.”
Zak Long, San Francisco #34, 2024, color photo on medium format film.
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How long would she swim? Selma felt sober now as she walked through the darkening lavender-sky neighborhood to her car. Might as well keep going. She’d given herself a call to action. She rang Livi, who answered: “I’m putting you on speaker.”
“No, don’t.”
“Selma, come over,” Sam called out in the background. “We’re playing Celebrity!”
“Thanks, but no,” Selma said, too loudly. To Livi she said, “I’m going to keep swimming.”
“Selma, is that wise?”
Livi was so practical. Perhaps that’s why Selma had called her. She needed a voice of reason. She considered Livi’s easy way of standing still in a pool, how it wasn’t even an act of rebellion. It was simply that not even a pool would induce Livi to swim if she didn’t feel like it.
“What’s the point?” Livi probed.
“Endurance.”
In the background, Selma heard Sam say, “What you need is a boat.”
But her brain felt foggy. A life raft? No, she thought, she didn’t need to be saved.
Now Selma was on her own. She decided to book whatever pool was next in proximity, following a loose line toward the sea. Not every pool had an artistic name. Some were just descriptions: “Downtown view, nice deck.” That would do.
When she arrived, the skyline glittered in the twilight and the deck boasted chairs with thick beige cushions. Instead of swimming, Selma laid back and closed her eyes. Maybe, she thought, a disco nap.
There was a party in full swing inside the adjacent townhouse. The pool was apparently off-limits, but just for the hour. Bad timing, people inside remarked. “Too late to cancel on the app,” the host replied with a shrug. “You know how it is.” The party was not because of the heat; it was a thing already planned.
So they all waited to carry their cocktails outside, watching, unbeknownst to Selma, as the sad girl who paid $100 for an hour at this pool lay asleep, with her mouth open, on a deck chair. Because sun.
Inside, conversation around Selma had become an amusement. They didn’t know that she was on a pilgrimage, and how could they? It hardly mattered because this was not her final destination. This was merely a stopover to someplace else, a chance to rest. Hard to put a price on that, Selma might have muttered if she could defend herself.
Someone would have to wake her, guests remarked as they refilled their drinks and watched from the window. Yet there was no cause. As soon as Selma’s hour was up, she was forgotten the moment the french doors leading to the deck flung open. The party swarmed her. The DJ set up remarkably fast and began playing music that was aggressive, pounding. Selma slunk inside the bright kitchen to nibble on tiny versions of regular food. Chicken and waffles, but in miniature. Grilled cheese, deconstructed, as a gross liquid in a dixie cup. Bite-size chocolate tortes. Is this what parties had come to? Who ate like this? she wondered. What was wrong with regular grilled cheese? And in this weather, wouldn’t some melon and prosciutto, a tomato salad, or corn on the cob do? Selma let herself out.
As she navigated the winding neighborhood, without sidewalks or street lamps, she wondered what had happened between the years she’d loved to swim and now. How was it possible to abandon a thing that you once loved — and to forget, even, that you’d loved it?
In the dark she thought she saw a small creature flash past, perhaps a fox. What a strange world. Perhaps she had heatstroke. The thought made her laugh, because it sounded like a swimming technique…. Crawl stroke, backstroke, breaststroke, heatstroke. Back in her car, she bent over the glow of her phone, trying to decide what lay ahead, the perpetual question.
So many of Selma’s friends had arrived at places in their life where they knew. Or, at least, thought they knew. They married, had babies, and then there were all the parties… baptisms, birthdays, holidays. These involved seasonal table runners and candlesticks and perfect holiday card photo shoots. Someday they would all be old and a lifetime of photos would reveal an entire extended family in coordinating outfits. Bills and events would pile up: trips to the orthodontist, college graduations, cancer treatments, weddings, new babies and new christenings. But Selma was stuck in another time and her friends had passed her by. The old questions remained: Which restaurant or party to go to, which movie to watch, which bottle of wine to open? Which person to swipe right on? She was still gambling to find the thing or person or place that would suddenly set her life on a more particular, predetermined course. There was beauty in not knowing, but there was also beauty in staying in a lane.
–––
The next pool was lukewarm and cloudy. The house attached was more of a bungalow. Dreamcatchers hung in the window. Selma could only make out their spider-webbed outline against the glow of the closed shades. The one after that was an austere infinity pool, lit along the sides like a landing strip at an airport. Where was this pool earlier? Probably booked. Selma was dead tired. She longed for her couch and Netflix. A glass of ice water, a weighted blanket. But here she was alone in this mint-blue rectangle, the temperature of a bath. Faint traces of steam rose off like a thermal hot spring. If Selma could only stop moving and take a deep breath there might be a sense of peace; it was the kind of pool that made one beg for a partner, as a witness to its perfection.
Selma’s journey had brought her to a place of respite that she was unable to enjoy, yet she bookmarked the pool for another time. It was going on eleven now and the app didn’t seem to have a cut-off point. Or else the owners hadn’t set hours. There were only a few pools still available. The next would be the last, she decided. It was described in rather uncertain terms by its reviewers: “Doesn’t seem to be cleaned very often,” someone had written. Leaves and dead insects were found floating across its surface.
Even so. She liked the idea of a pool that would give her a view of the dark and frothing sea from a hilltop. A midnight swim, the nighttime horizon. Perhaps she’d witness the distant pulsating beat of a lighthouse.
For a moment Selma wondered whether she’d confused the idea of a pilgrimage with the business of a flâneur. Pilgrims often traveled great distances to find meaning or a miracle in a sacred place — both the journey and the destination mattered. Whereas a flâneur (and where in her mind was this term even buried?) wandered aimlessly. The flâneur was only about the journey, and the destination was unknown.
As Selma drove up the long driveway, wooded and dark — ominous, really — she felt silly comparing her journey to a pilgrimage. She’d sought only a day without responsibility, and respite from the heat. Because sun.
A sign reading “Pool parking” directed her away from the house. Selma’s footsteps were audible as she walked across the gravel lot and she had the distinct sensation that she was trespassing. Yet the only sign of life from within the house was a dim, flickering glow of a TV behind a drawn shade.
It was the scene of a horror movie. Yet Selma, racoon-eyed, hair clumped from all the chlorine, followed the path to the pool and opened the gate. A chill had settled into the air. Here was the pool. She sat on the cold lip, pulled her damp towel around her, and put her feet in, splashing away a drowned fly.
Somewhere beyond, in the black, was the ocean. She’d missed her window to catch a view of it. Or perhaps she hadn’t — she was looking at it now, only it was indiscernible. The sun had long vanished, so why did she continue following its trail? She knew that she could simply go home, and that no one, anywhere, expected anything from her.
But, a pilgrimage, she thought. She said it out loud: “A pilgrimage.”
She submerged herself into the water, gasping from the cold shock of it. Back when it mattered, she’d always finished her races.
Selma swam using her last reserves of strength. In the meantime, the light in the distant bedroom went dark. She didn’t notice that or the pine needles as they dropped onto the lounge chairs and into the water. Or as the stars, the few that were visible, blinked in the vast sky. Selma only kept on swimming, trusting the moon to pull her along its trajectory. She figured: eventually the day would turn over and the sun would begin its ascent once more.
Robert Singer, ut pictura poesis #1, 2021, acrylic medium on panel, 36" x 36" x 1.5".
Suzanne Barnecut is a Bay Area native now residing in San Francisco. She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts and has published fiction in SFWP Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, and several other journals. Over the years, her short stories have also placed in contests with Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, Mid-American Review, and Cutthroat.
Zak Long is a photographer and filmmaker based in San Francisco. His work explores how man-made structures blend with and impact natural spaces. Growing up in Cleveland, he was surrounded by post-industrial landscapes, which inspired his focus on the ongoing relationship between people and the land.
Robert J. Singer is an intracranial neurosurgeon, multimedia artist, and guitar builder (Waterstone Guitar/Elysian Pedal Co.). His workroom, Whalebone Studios, is located in Southampton, NY, where he lives with his wife and three dogs.