Anna Woodford
Women in the Jacuzzi
‘and now her face, frail and fine, comes momentarily to focus’
C K Williams
The jacuzzi is bubbling over with women, with laughter, with
bubbly women so full of themselves and their laughter that their
bodies can hardly contain them, that their laughter is over
flowing, it is spilling warmly from the watering mouth of the
jacuzzi and washing over the break-neck tiles, it is tickling
the man who is cleaning up after them, it is getting round
his mop in its bucket of dirty juices, it is the sound of women
pooling their laughter, keeping their hair up, letting their bodies
down into the lovely, levelling waters where, beneath the surface,
their costumes barely distinguish them one from another as though
they have been sucked temporarily into this melting pot as though
they could step out with the wrong body at the end of the cycle.
They are listening over the slap of the jacuzzi’s slap and tickle to
someone tell a joke about a man who asks “Darling, am I the first?”
“You could be,” his darling answers “you look familiar,” and they
are falling about and in the fall-out now her face, frail and fine
comes rising, she is a little girl, a fish out of water, someone’s
daughter, saying nothing here. She is looking forward to the cool
reception of the pool, she is longing to swim out of her depth.
C K Williams
The jacuzzi is bubbling over with women, with laughter, with
bubbly women so full of themselves and their laughter that their
bodies can hardly contain them, that their laughter is over
flowing, it is spilling warmly from the watering mouth of the
jacuzzi and washing over the break-neck tiles, it is tickling
the man who is cleaning up after them, it is getting round
his mop in its bucket of dirty juices, it is the sound of women
pooling their laughter, keeping their hair up, letting their bodies
down into the lovely, levelling waters where, beneath the surface,
their costumes barely distinguish them one from another as though
they have been sucked temporarily into this melting pot as though
they could step out with the wrong body at the end of the cycle.
They are listening over the slap of the jacuzzi’s slap and tickle to
someone tell a joke about a man who asks “Darling, am I the first?”
“You could be,” his darling answers “you look familiar,” and they
are falling about and in the fall-out now her face, frail and fine
comes rising, she is a little girl, a fish out of water, someone’s
daughter, saying nothing here. She is looking forward to the cool
reception of the pool, she is longing to swim out of her depth.
Anna Woodford has received a Blue Mountain Center Residency, an Eric Gregory Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship, an Arvon/Jerwood Apprenticeship and a Tyrone Guthrie Centre Residency. Her pamphlet is The Higgins Honeymoon (Driftwood, 2001).
Page(s) 29
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