"None are sadder than Amanda getting the whole house together to hold hands and jump in the pool together at the end of their ski-themed Labor Day party. I can see why they would want to get into the pool; they all must have been sweltering in their sun-dried furs, anoraks, and ski suits, but her insistence that this is the last thing that they do as a house, that it is her one wish, her one bit of tradition as her world falls apart, made me want to weep."
"It is something about the forced happiness of them standing on the edge of the pool, its waters in the evening light looking green like it was infested, a fetid swamp, a stagnant pool rife with disease, pests, and enough mosquitoes to empty a whole tube of Benadryl cream. They all jump in, most in their underwear, some in their swimsuits."
"It was meant to feel like the ending to something - to the summer, the season - but it felt like something different. It felt like trying to grasp at strings of the past, like going back to visit your favorite teacher in high school after you've graduated. No. Not like that. Like something else. Like the start of something new you don't know is coming, like the concert you went to a week before the COVID lockdowns, like the swing dance the day before Pearl Harbor, like dinner out at the Olive Garden with your father three days before he died."
"It's a transition, but not from then to now or even from good to bad. It's transitioning from bad to worse, it's the anxiety of ignorance, it's the slow drowning of hope. I have never felt sadder as people splashed, kissed, stripped, and romped around a backyard ruined with Loverboy empties and crushed dreams."
A ski-themed Labor Day party ends with Amanda insisting the whole house hold hands and jump into a pool as her final wish and tradition. The scene feels intensely forced, with green, swamp-like water and an atmosphere of disease, pests, and mosquitoes. Participants jump in in underwear or swimsuits, with some repeating the ritual and others experiencing it for the first time. The moment is intended as an ending to summer, but it instead feels like a transition into something unknown and worse. The sadness comes from ignorance, fading hope, and the sense of dreams being crushed in a backyard ruined by empties and disappointment.
Read at Vulture
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