Aquamarine (10 page)

“Oh, come on. Not
so.”

Two weeks later, Kit left a toothbrush of commitment in the glass on Jesse’s sink. A month after that, Jesse sublet her small one-bedroom and Kit sold the loft, so they could start fresh in a place that was neither hers nor hers, but theirs. Aided by Jesse’s shrewd scouring of ads and following up of leads, and Kit’s ridiculously wonderful salary, they got a small but pretty apartment on a relatively quiet block off West Broadway. Of course, this was pure recklessness in Manhattan. The romance could expire, and Jesse could be out on the streets, looking for an apartment half as nice as the one she’d just given up, which had taken her two years to luck into. At first, she was impressed with her own daring. Now she worries it was ridiculous impulse, and that it has added another weight on Kit’s side of the delicate balance. Too much when added to her also loving Kit too much. “Too much” being more than she suspects Kit loves her.

In the past (with the exception of the heartbreak she was nursing when she met Kit) Jesse has always been light on her feet through the course of relationships, and at their ends, halfway out the door before the other person could even get up from her chair. With Kit, though, her steps are slowed and softened, as though she’s walking through loam. There’ll be no running away. She’ll stay until Kit ends it, probably even past that for a while of wordless calls to Kit’s phone tape, of turning up at restaurants and parties where Kit might be found, while trying not to appear to be looking for her.

Loving Kit strips all the coating off her nerves. It wasn’t until after she met her that Jesse took her first Valium, or saw “Painting with Pamela,” which is on cable at three-thirty a.m. Now, when she waits for Kit to show up at the apartment, she sits in the window looking down, counting people who come around the corner, stopping at one hundred and going back to one again. Feeling as though she has eaten and is trying to digest something large and made of rubber. It’s a lot like the Olympics. It’s the first time since those hundred meters in Mexico City that she hasn’t felt any buffer between her and the sequence of events she walks through which make up “her life.” This is probably good, a step in personal growth. She hates it.

While Kit has settled so easily into the relationship, Jesse can’t seem to come down off the romance of it. This is rattling. She sees herself as a grounded person. She really listens to her dental hygienist when she advises flossing every night. She’s a hard grader on student papers and tries to be critically rigorous in her own writing. She sees things in terms of moral dilemmas and winds up pressing on with this sort of conversational tack even when people don’t want to hear it, when they just want to dance.

In the abstract, she would say love should be an extension of respect, and yet she doesn’t think anything as rational as this accounts for what she feels about Kit. She worries Kit could tell her she secretly dumped toxic wastes in rivers at night and Jesse would still love her, that what she really loves is not Kit—not who she is, certainly not how she looks, the aspect of her that initially attracted and frightened Jesse and which now seems so integral she couldn’t say if Kit is good-looking or plain, only that she is Kit-looking. Rather what she loves is how Kit makes her feel. Lighter, aerated with something like thrill. And she worries that it’s way too late for her to be feeling this. It’s goony. It’s as though, at thirty-nine, she’s on her way to some cosmic prom.

Fifteen hours of interstates, and Jesse, now behind the wheel, turns with a wide sweep of headlights across tall grass, onto 54 heading southwest. For a brief flash of crossroads—Kingdom City—the night is white with the arc lamps of gas stations and minimarts, drawing into their light an edgy population jacked up on Cokes and coffee and maxing the speed limit.

“Look,” Kit says, pointing as she emerges from sleep. They’re coming up on a trailer park with a lit neon sign.
MEADOW ESTATES–CHRISTIAN FOLKS IN MOBILE HOMES
.

Jesse just says, “Mmmm.”

“Guess it’s pretty hard to get fireworks around here,” Kit tries again as they pass the twentieth tourist-trap tent-store. “Or walnut bowls.”

“Mmmm.”

“Ah. We must be getting close. To where the heart is.”

“Where I can never go again,” Jesse says. But Kit has guessed wrong about what is preoccupying Jesse. She isn’t looking ahead to her mother’s house, where the kitchen light will have been left on for their middle-of-the-night arrival. She is looking farther along the loop, to when they get back to New York and Kit will leave her.

She’s pretty sure about this. For the past month or so, maybe a little longer, Kit has been seeing someone else on the sly. Jesse has no proof, just feels it, like a light breeze coming in from an open window off to the side. She knows, for instance, that she will not be the recipient of the postcard of Imogen Cunningham’s “Unmade Bed” she found yesterday in a card shop bag under Kit’s keys on the dining room table. She’s not sure who
will
get it. Most likely Yvonne Scherr, who plays Mandy, the tough-talking paramedic on Kit’s show. Jesse can’t stand to imagine Yvonne coming on strong. The girl is wired for vamping, has smoldering looks at her command, like Shanghai Lily. She brings her own web. It’s the sort of fooling around Kit would think is fun for a while. Jesse suspects this trip is Kit’s farewell offering, that the bad news will be delivered when they get back.

They’re on old Highway 4 now. Rabbits and raccoons skitter off the thin gravel shoulders, unused to being disturbed at this hour. The night offers no relief from the inferno they drove into around midafternoon. It’s as though the heat was merely absorbed by the ground, which is now releasing it back into the air. Jesse can feel her back drenched against the velvety upholstery of the car; her foot is prickly from being pressed so long against the accelerator pedal. The lights bounce off the reflector letters on the sign:

NEW JERUSALEM
-7
MI
EULA GROVE
-23
MI

She cruises past the city limits sign.

Kit opens the glove compartment so she can see Jesse’s face by its light. “Is it weird? Being back?”

“Yeah, that. Kind of nice, too. In a weird way.”

She points out the feed store and the houses of a half dozen families she knows. Past the courthouse-library. Past lunch. Past what used to be the dry goods store but is now a video rental shop. The Set & Style has its sign flickering in the window, pale white connected letters:
REALLY GOOD PERMANENT WAVES THAT LAST
.

She drives as though the car is a vaporous phantom rather than a large piece of steel. She takes three red lights as though they’re yellows before Kit comments. “Hmmm.”

Jesse takes a corner with style. “I lived here seventeen years. Unless someone dies or starts having a baby, I can tell you we’re not going to see anything moving at this hour but us.”

“I can’t believe your mother’s sleeping through all this,” Kit says after they’ve dropped a suitcase and rattled the handle of the screen door forever, trying to fiddle it open, and then crashed into a wheeled cutting board cart in the middle of the kitchen, which Jesse doesn’t remember being there before.

“Oh, I think we’ve probably woken her by now,” Jesse says. “But she won’t come down. She’ll want to wait until tomorrow. She’ll want to be fixed up proper to meet you, someone new.”

Her mother’s notions of fixing up have little to do with attractiveness, more to do with old, set forms—short perky hairdos, “daytime” fragrances, slips under dresses, nylons even in deepest summer, handkerchiefs (never Kleenexes). At one time emblems of respectability, these are now also symbols of holding one’s own, keeping back from the slippery slope, of stains on a hem, dust on a bookshelf, mold on a shower curtain. From there it’s straight onto the skids of lipstick applied without a mirror, pajamas worn into the day.

Jesse hasn’t been back here for three years. She is coming now for her mother’s sixty-fifth birthday, and her retirement after forty-two years of teaching English at the high school. There will be a party tomorrow afternoon in her godmother, Hallie’s, backyard. Nearly all the guests will have known each other all their lives.

There’s a note stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet that’s also a laminated card of uplifting verse about kitchens and friendship. The note says, “Have a snack. I’ve left warmups in here.”

“What are warmups?” Kit says eagerly.

Jesse sees that she thinks they are something specific, something regional and delicious, like fritters. She hugs Kit, then disappoints her. “It’s just what they call leftovers down here.”

Kit opens the refrigerator and looks in, then pulls back out with an accounting. “Fried chicken.”

“From the Colonel.” Jesse knows without looking. “I’ll fix you up a plate.”

She starts puttering around the kitchen and gets killed with crummy sentimentality going through the drawers and cabinets, coming across all the old stuff. The plate with the picture of Bagnell Dam painted on it. The scoop they won for naming the new ice cream flavor at Gilley’s Creamery one summer—Passion for Peach.

“Bring it on up with us,” she says as she hands the plate to Kit. “I’m wiped.”

They drag their bags up the stairs with soft thumps. At the door to her room, Jesse puts her hand on the knob, then turns and tries to prepare Kit. “It’s kind of a shrine. I mean, I put it up, of course. But even now, my mother doesn’t take it down. Which is so weird. She always just dismissed my swimming, always made sure to point out to me what a waste of time she thought it was for anyone with brains. She never even came down to Mexico City. So you figure this out. Of course she’s very tricky in giving approval and holding it back. She gives just enough so you understand the other ninety-nine percent is being withheld.”

“Maybe she was secretly proud and just couldn’t show it to you directly,” Kit says.

“It’s true I gave her an odd sort of status around here. I didn’t come up with a husband or grandchildren, but they named the junior high after me.”

“I didn’t see that.”

“I’d die. I took the long way around so you wouldn’t. Come on,” she says and pushes against the door.

“Oh boy,” Kit whispers. “King Tut’s tomb.”

The room is filled with gold and silver, colored satin—ribbons and medals and trophies, statuettes of girls in modest bathing suits crouched on starting blocks, electroplated into an eternal present tense, poised for the report of a gun that will never go off.

Kit walks around slowly, like a tourist. She homes in fairly fast. It’s hung from a couple of carpet tacks pushed into the plaster—a silver medal on a heavy red, white and blue ribbon. Next to it is a yellowed newspaper photo of Jesse on the second highest, the left of three staggered platforms. All three girls on the platforms have damp hair, arms filled with roses, and smiles brought on with the first ebbing of adrenaline. They have just proven, minutes before this picture was taken, that they are the three fastest women in the world at getting through a hundred meters of water.

“How’d you ever come down off this?” Kit says.

“With quite a thud, I’m afraid,” Jesse says.

“What’s this?” Kit says now. Jesse has her back turned, pulling a sleep shirt from a canvas duffel. Still, she knows exactly what Kit has found—another photo. Everything inside her jams. Kit holds up the picture in its black wood Woolworth frame. It’s an odd photo, taken from behind. Jesse and Marty are both wearing sweatpants pulled on over their tank suits. They are standing side by side in an atmosphere of aftermath, their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, waiting for some next wonderful thing to happen.

Kit guesses, “You and the girl who beat you. What’s her name.”

Jesse turns and tries to gather up a few words. Even a few will do. But she can’t. She sits on the narrow bed in this obscure defeat. Kit sees there’s a problem and takes charge. She comes over and pushes the bag onto the floor and crawls on top of Jesse. She pins Jesse’s wrists to the old chenille-covered mattress and lowers herself until her mouth is on Jesse’s ear. “I love that you have something this important you can’t tell me about.”

Much later, Jesse sits on the floor of her mother’s bathroom, in the bluish glow of the shell-shaped light fixture over the mirror. She’s drawing a weak chill out of the side of the tub with the heat in her cheek. Her eyes are closed, and behind the lids, everything has already gone to aquamarine. She has shot back a few million moments to the one in which she’s slapping the tile at the end of her lane, surfacing to see what the fates have written. Pulling off her cap, shaking her head to drain the water from her ears. As though not being able to hear is the problem, when of course it is actually not being able to know. Looking over at Marty, who’s also just breaking through, from the white-noise rush of the water into the cacophony at poolside, the hard, dry surface of the rest of the world, where they will be judged. They have already done what they came to do, won the medals they came to take, made the times that will enter the record books. But what times? Which medals?

And then Bud Freeman is hunkering down in front of Jesse, putting up two fingers, his face free of expression from years of practice at bearing news both good and bad. And in this split second of finding out she has lost, Jesse realizes she was utterly convinced she would win, that all along she hadn’t really given any weight to the possibility of losing. It won’t take a scaling down of expectation to accept this defeat, but rather a substantial reconstruction of her notion of herself. And she must accomplish this in the next few minutes, before she’s out of the pool and dried off and sweatsuited and ushered smiling (the smiling is imperative, imperatively expected) up onto the staggered pedestals, positioned slightly lower than Marty. Who, in the next lane, has just received the flip side of Jesse’s bad news, who in her pure joy at having taken the gold is reaching across the lane markers toward Jesse, putting a long arm around her shoulders. She can feel the hot flush of Marty’s skin under the cold film of water.