Photographs courtesy of the author.

I was married to a moody millionaire Parisian and I was trying to stay with him—I still loved certain things about him, and I loved everything about my stepchildren and the French way of life. But it was hard. My husband wanted to be who he was, and he wanted a happy wife. Not easy to have both at once! I did all these things—got on Zoloft, got a dog, went to spas and Belize and the opera—to make me so-o-o happy it would last through his tirades. He knew he was a monster—he was an honest man—so he did things to help too. He built a cabin outside our home in France for me to go be alone in to recover, and he gave me money to put down on a dilapidated hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old house in Pittsburgh for me to go be alone in and recover even farther away from him.

When all those fixes didn’t fix it, I came up with the ultimate salve. “I know what we need,” I announced. “A pool. Never in my life have I managed to be unhappy when there was a pool around. I’m a Scorpio, a water sign. It’s a miracle I’ve ever been happy on dry land at all.”

We had one of the few homes in Paris with a large enough yard—a whole acre!—to fit a pool. And so we went to go buy one. We have very different shopping styles. My husband is a connoisseur, while I’d be fine licking my morning coffee out of a puddle at a truck stop. I pick the first thing I see and pay for it and that’s the end of it. Cars, clothes, even houses. (Even husbands, ha ha.) I don’t ask questions. I figure we have time and brain space for a certain number of answers, and I don’t want to waste mine on dimensions and things of that nature. If it’s wet, that’s all I need to know about a pool.

My husband likes to gather all the answers, then ask someone else and compare conclusions, sleep on it, and finally go to a café and tell his plan to an old man he just met and argue for three hours about what’s best.

Ultimately he decided on this special pool that mimics the ocean, meaning you have to swim against the “tide.” But a really weird tide that blasts you with hot water from six directions. And it has a light show. It cost €60,000. He called all around France to find somewhere that had one we could try out. Three hours away there lived a man as maniacal about details as my husband. He owned not only one of these six-directional pools but also a manmade hot spring and a manmade ice bath. It would cost €500 to go swim and then sleep there.

Upon arrival, we changed into our bathing suits and got into the weird ocean pool in the middle of a cold rain. Despite this pool being my husband’s ideal (how most can man interfere with nature) and the opposite of my barbarian aesthetic, upon hitting the water I felt immediately romantic. I tried to catch my husband’s eye or touch his forearm, but I couldn’t compete with another man willing to debate the correct way to turn knobs to organize spray arc and force. They then moved on to adding up all the wars of 1200 to 1500 C.E., proving that England is actually just a part of France.

Normally after a while of listening to French I get a headache, as I understand maybe 60 percent and my brain can’t stop straining to fill in the other 40 percent, but this time I didn’t care. I was an otter. Otters aren’t bothered by remote controls and war winners. This otter swam against the currents and did somersaults and said “Look at me!” and was happy.

Even after our trial, my husband wanted to shop around some more. I protested that summer would be over by the time he made up his mind. He told me that if that was my attitude, then never mind, he’d tell me what he’d told his daughter: “If you don’t take my advice, you don’t take my money either.” Anyway, he said, he’d realized I didn’t deserve a pool, as I’d never mowed the lawn. I said that was because I don’t believe in lawns, they’re unnatural. Me and Edward Gorey—he never mowed a lawn either. And then I told my husband I was leaving him and getting my own pool. He said I’d never get my own pool, for I am irresponsible, impulsive, have an unhealthy relationship with money, and am given to flights of fancy. He said if I wanted a pool, I’d have to take him back or find a new husband. I said, “Watch me.”

I had $20,000 from selling my car when I’d moved to France four years earlier. I decided to spend half of it on a one-way flight on Bark Air, a private jet service, which was the only way to get my dog to the United States without putting him in the hold, where I felt sure he’d have a heart attack. With the second $10,000, I’d get my pool. I am irresponsible, impulsive, and all that other stuff. And glad of it!

I threw some things in a gym bag, kissed the children goodbye (crying till I turned purple), shook my husband’s hand (somehow that felt to me the most vicious power move), grabbed the dog, and we were gone.

A closer inspection of the house in Pittsburgh revealed a knob-and-tube electric system from the 1800s that could catch fire at any time, a crumbling chimney from which a stray brick could topple off and hit me on the head and kill me when I went out to check the mail one morning, and a foundation for the addition (kitchen and deck) that was DIY-built out of dirt columns propped up with bricks, tiles, pieces of wood, license plates, and whatever else the old homeowner had found lying around, and now the dirt columns were turning to dust and blowing away. So a sinkhole, the contrator said ominously, could open up in my kitchen and suck me down tomorrow. Or the next day. Or never. I got an estimate to bring it all up to code: $110,000. I figured, Eh, if I can die in so many ways and I can’t afford to fix them all, I may as well fix none and get the pool and at least die happy.

But first I’d have to dismantle and dispose of the moldy super-shed dominating the backyard to make room for it. I called 1-800-GOT-JUNK and they quoted me $1,250.

My friend Tallulah came over and we walked around my neighborhood, interspersing complaints about the expense of things with oohs and aahs over all the abandoned houses made of brick, with arches for doorways, stained glass windows, angels carved into the molding. Who would abandon these stately homes and move into modern, thrown-together prefab houses?

Can I take a minute to tell you an aside? There’s a mansion across the street from me, condemned. A neighbor told me the story. A doctor had it built for his wife in maybe 1960, with the best of everything, all stone and tile and columns, a fireplace in every room. It cost a million dollars back then! Well, then he got depressed, and he went all over the world looking for a cure. He’d go off with tribes in Africa, South America, Asia, he tried everything. He spent $2.5 million looking for a cure. When nothing worked, he came home and tried the old-fashioned way, a bullet to the brain. Only he missed—didn’t get the whole brain. We don’t know what happened to the wife. They put him in a rest home, yet he refused to sell the house. Deer and groundhogs and rabbits leap about its overgrown grounds. Vines have surrounded it and climbed in through every crack to get a more secure grip; they’re trying to drag it down into the bowels of the earth. But it’s hearty, it’s gonna take another hundred years to kill it.

Anyway, Tallulah and I were discussing my shed dilemma when a skinny, three-toothed man walking by added his two cents. He said he’d just bought a house for $2,000 and was redoing it himself from top to bottom. I said, “Ooh, wanna come see mine?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll come look at it!” I showed him the collapsing basement and he wasn’t scared at all. He said, “Three hundred dollars for labor and you buy the parts and I’ll have it reinforced in a weekend.” I said, “You’re hired!” Furthermore, he said he’d take the shed apart for free, then reassemble it in his dad’s yard and live in it while he was working on his $2,000 house. Then he told us how he’d recently gotten out of jail and gotten married and a week later caught his wife having sex with his friend and then—I’m not even kidding—his truck died. So this was a very fortuitous meeting for both of us! I could have an $85,000 job done for $300 and a $1,250 job for free, and he’d get the money to fix his truck and a moldy shed to live in. He said the only days he couldn’t work were Sunday and Monday. Because he goes to see his mom on Sundays, and on Mondays he hangs upside down for hours. Because he got shot and the bullet’s still in there, and the only thing that relieves the pain is hanging upside down. I said, “Where were you shot?” He said, “Behind Family Dollar.”

When Tallulah left, she said, “Wow, I can’t believe you weren’t afraid to do that. To say, ‘Come into my house, weird guy in the alley.’ ” I said, “Why, what could he do to me?” I was thinking she’d say he’d rob me or rape me, but no. She was afraid that I wouldn’t know how to ask him to leave and then I’d be cooking for him and giving him rides to his grandmother’s and such for life, because “you know that man’s truck’s never getting fixed.” Because that keeps happening to her—she takes care of all the stray men and women in her neighborhood. Tallulah’s an awfully nice lady.

Well, I made a different mistake, one that cost the handyman his life: I paid him in advance. I knew better, but I guess I was moved when he gave me a big ugly painting of a fern he’d found in the basement of his $2,000 house. The next day, he sent a text that he’d died, got hit by a car—again in the Family Dollar parking lot!—but they’d brought him back to life, but he was too sore to be doing any work that involved using any of his limbs or his torso.

So I found Big Larry to take the shed away for $800. Big Larry had business cards printed, so I knew he had some kind of longevity. And he wore a sleeveless shirt and I could see these were arms for tearing sheds apart. Big Larry got it done.

I asked Big Larry for a pool company recommendation, and I said to the pool salesman: “I got $8,900 total for the biggest pool you got, delivered and installed.” He said, “It’ll be there in a week, call the city and get your permit.”

I said, “Permit?! This is Pittsburgh, we don’t need no stinking badges.”

No, I didn’t say that. I called the city. Thus began my nightmare.

The permit people reminded me of my husband, with their gathering of facts, arguing about them, and finally not doing anything. After FOUR MONTHS of conversating, I’d paid the city $320 and still had no permit, and it was starting to get cold out! So I stopped arguing. I simply lied to the installers and said, “The permit’s on its way, bring your bulldozer to flatten the yard and put up my pool.” And so they did, and I became an outlaw otter, swimming in my illegal revenge pool every single day, loving it as much as I thought I would and more. I swam back and forth, back and forth, beneath the open sky with my open heart. Sometimes, while doing a leisurely backstroke, I’d see a plane and feel so happy to not be in it. I belong in the water, not in the sky. My big plan was to swim forever, every day, even in winter. But the electric bill to run the filter year-round was too high, so I shut it off.

One morning shortly thereafter, I noticed the water was green. I’d turned my pool into a petri dish. I called the pool guy and he said it was an algae infestation and it would be $1,300 to fix. “Can’t I do it myself?” I wailed, hopefully for $13 instead of $1,300. “Sure,” the pool guy leered, “if you want to climb into an algae infestation without protective gear and risk getting sick so you can mop every inch of the bottom and the sides to loosen the algae before treating it chemically, which could cause an explosion if you don’t get it just right.”

If only I’d read the manuals, I would have known this would happen. My husband was right—I don’t deserve a pool.

Luckily, I don’t believe in deserving; I believe in luck. It was luck that caused Neighbor John to peep through the weed trees into my backyard just at that moment and yell: “Lisa, your pool is GREEN.” I know, I told him, and it’s $1,300 to fix it. “Bullshit!” Neighbor John exploded. He burst through the weed-trees and demanded a mop. He jumped right in my pool with all his clothes on, and when he was done mopping (and screaming … it was very cold), he asked for baking soda and Clorox and threw a bunch in there, saying that that combination would kill anything. The next day, my pool was blue.

So now I can add algaecide to the ways this house may kill me, along with an errant chimney brick or electrocution or the sinkhole. Or if I ever go to Family Dollar. But we die on only one day … the other thirty thousand days, we live. If my husband hadn’t denied me the ocean-tides light-show pool in France, I bet I’d be in it right this very minute, lasting another year, another decade, in the not-right life for me. Instead, I’ve landed straight in the middle of my best irresponsible-flights-of-fancy Princess Otter life in my ramshackle kingdom with valiant knights Big Larry and Neighbor John. I left my husband for a pool. And it was a bargain!

Lisa Carver published the nineties zine Rollerderby. She lives in Pittsburgh. Her latest book is Lover of Leaving, and her Patreon is called Philosophy Hour.