Marlene called me over Tuesday to “see the new setup,” and I knew before I crossed the threshold of her sunroom that something was wrong, because the smell — sweet, slightly sticky, the chemical ghost of a brand-new shower curtain — had already drifted across the side yard.
It was a flamingo. Six feet of hot-pink PVC, fully inflated, hogging most of her wicker loveseat. She bought it at Walmart for thirty-nine dollars on July 8 and has been “letting it live in the sunroom” ever since because, in her words, the twins love it and it “feels festive.”
Reader, that flamingo has been off-gassing into her family’s airspace for eleven consecutive days.
I don’t know how to explain PVC to a person who isn’t already in the Facebook group “Plastics, Plasticizers, and the Pediatricians Who Won’t Tell You” (4,800 members and climbing), but the short version is: big-box pool floats are polyvinyl chloride softened with phthalate plasticizers, which is why they feel squishy and faintly oily and why they smell like a 1996 inflatable raft the second you slit the box. The smell IS the chemical leaving the plastic. The smell is the warning label. When I tell people this they nod politely, the way Garrett does when I read aloud from a Lunchables.
My sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric office in Hendersonville and is basically a nurse, told me last Christmas that DEHP — that’s one of the phthalates, and yes I know the letters — is “the one they keep quietly taking out of teething rings.” She said it like it was a fun fact. I have not been the same.
Marlene, when pressed, told me she “aired the flamingo out on the deck for two days” before bringing it inside. Two days. For a six-foot vinyl object that smells, I am not exaggerating, like the inside of a brand-new bowling ball bag. The Pool Pal company’s own website, which I read in her driveway on my phone, says “some odor is normal and will dissipate.” Dissipate WHERE, Pool Pal. Into Marlene’s lungs? Into her decorative pillows? Into the bloodstream of two seven-year-olds who, and I cannot stress this enough, slept on it Saturday night during a thunderstorm because they thought it was funny?
Garrett thinks I’m being dramatic. Garrett also thinks the smell of a new car is “kind of nice,” so I have stopped consulting him on indoor air quality. When I asked him to come smell the sunroom he said he’d “swing by,” which in Garrett-speak means approximately never.
Here is what we’re doing at our house this summer instead. We have one float, a heavy black rubber inner tube my father bought from a tire shop in Spartanburg in 1994, and it lives in the garage between uses. The kids have a wooden paddleboard I found on Marketplace from a woman in Weaverville who refinishes old ones with linseed oil and a single coat of beeswax. Is it heavier? Yes. Did Tully cry the first time he tried to drag it down to the dock? Yes. Did his developing endocrine system thank me? I have to believe so.
The podcast “Slow Skin, Slow Lungs, Slow Children” did a whole episode on summer plastics in May — I keep meaning to send it to Marlene, but you can’t just text someone a 94-minute podcast and expect the friendship to survive it. So I sent her a screenshot of the Pool Pal ingredient breakdown with the phthalates underlined in yellow highlighter, and she replied with the laughing-crying emoji and a photo of the twins lying face-down on the flamingo’s back.
She also added, and I am quoting directly, “it’s just a pool toy Brooke.” It is not just a pool toy, Marlene. It is a six-foot continuous-release vapor source in your sunroom, where you also keep your sourdough starter and the dog’s bed. And if you’d like the link to the group, I am happy to send it. I send it to everyone eventually.