A seat raised above the water line

Poolside concrete surrounds the chair's four legs on every side, sun-bleached to nearly the same pale grey as the aluminum itself, so that on a bright afternoon the whole assembly seems built from the same tired material as the deck beneath it. The seat sits eight to ten feet up, high enough to see the pool's far corners and the shallow end's crowd of small children at once, low enough that a fast descent down the side ladder takes under two seconds when someone needs it to. Most chairs face the sun rather than away from it, a design choice nobody seems to love and nobody has fixed, so an afternoon shift means squinting through sunglasses that fog at the nose pad by three o'clock. The umbrella clipped above, when there is one, casts a moving disc of shade that tracks nothing and shelters no one for more than twenty minutes at a stretch. Underneath, the crossbars are wrapped in webbing gone slick with years of sunscreen, and the footrest bar shows a permanent oval polish where heels have rested since long before the current lifeguards were born. A whistle hangs from a lanyard looped twice around the armrest when its owner steps down for a break, swinging very slightly in whatever breeze the deck can manage. Some newer chairs have been swapped for molded plastic composite units built to resemble the old aluminum ones, and they hold up better in the rain, though most regulars can tell the original chair from the replacement at a glance.

Beatrice Womack