Aquamarine (11 page)

“Told you,” she shouts, although in the din no one will hear her but Jesse. “We’ve won. All the fastness, it’s ours.”

And for a brief moment—the one Jesse needs to carry her away from the pain scissoring into the wall of her heart—she believes this, buys Marty’s version and feels herself being pulled into the next lane, then borne aloft, the two of them arcing into the air, then backflipping into the water, somersaulting along the bottom, skimming the aquamarine floor.

From here, the color of the memory bleaches up to white, the dead white one of the night before. Down in the showers on a wide bed of fresh towels they’ve scattered on the tile floor, then fallen onto. It’s late. Everyone else is upstairs, held in restless, pre-race sleep. In their collective unconsciousness, they are all winning their events, all of them. The beds of this dormitory are filled with gold medals, gleaming like coins overflowing treasure chests.

Floors beneath them, Jesse is lying very still under Marty, feeling the full press of her, taking on her imprint, committing her body to memory. The small, hard breasts. The wide span of shoulder, wider even than Jesse’s. Today was Shave Day, a ritual among women swimmers—the
psshhh
of foam, glint of blades across this shower room as months’ worth of hair was whisked away to eliminate its infinitesimal drag in the water, to make the body the smoothest, most aquadynamic set of planes possible. And now she is feeling these planes, Marty’s hot and dry at the same time, against her own.

She looks over Marty’s shoulder, down the long length of the two of them, for they are both tall girls with great, long reaches. When they are swimming, their arms seem to catch the water as though it’s a field of a million aquamarine dragonflies. Although they are both fair by nature, a blonde and a redhead, they are extremely tan from summer training and in this peculiar moonlight, against the white of the towels and the tile, their limbs are black.

Jesse’s specific sensation in this moment is one of thrill ebbing into safety, of having vaulted over a high bar, and fallen onto a feather bed. The small tugs of doubt about Marty—that maybe this friendship did not come up out of pure impulse and mutual desire, but was calculated, planned—these fears slip away now. Jesse, who is seventeen and touching and being touched for the first time, thinks no two people can be this close and have any secrets from each other.

By the time Jesse wakes up, she is alone in the bedroom, the Imogen Cunningham card propped on the pillow of the other, empty, twin bed. “Try to know me,” it says. “Don’t make me up. K.”

There are traces of coffee and conversation in the air. Her mother and Kit are downstairs in the kitchen. From where Jesse lies, it sounds like everything is humming along nicely without her. The rhythms, the lilt and fall, seem pleasant and superficial. Kit is probably being charming, making life in New York sound “My Sister Eileen-ish,” life as it hasn’t been lived by anyone in Manhattan for forty years. A whirl of working girl wiliness and colorfully eccentric neighbors and rounds of parties featuring fascinating, but alas impossible, men. Jesse’s mother has so far shied away from visiting New York, and so these fictions would be easy to perpetrate.

Jesse doesn’t, though. She isn’t out to her mother in an explicit way. They’ve never had a “talk.” On the other hand, she has never lied outright, or concocted boyfriends. And she told her mother when she moved in with Kit. And now she has brought her lover home.

When Jesse gets downstairs, she sees she was wrong. Up close, the rhythms are not good. Now she’s sorry she stayed so long in bed, then in the shower.

Her mother is standing at the stove, waiting by a tea kettle rattling its way to the boil. With age, she is becoming a stark figure, the sort of old woman who frightens small children. She is nearly as tall as Jesse, five eleven or so, and has perfect posture, which only adds to the looming effect. She has always considered her height an attribute rather than an oddity, won Tallest Girl ribbon one year at the Mullen County fair, was never bothered by towering over Jesse’s father.

She is thinner every time Jesse comes home, now has the rangy look of the farm women she has always felt superior to. At the moment, she looks even more severe for being tense. Her mouth is pulled tight, tucked in at the corners. Something has gone wrong. Jesse tries to smash through whatever it is with a lot of entrance. She gives a hug and gets back an awkward yank around the waist. Her mother has always been uneasy with physical show. If they were alone in this kitchen, Jesse wouldn’t even have tried. But in front of Kit, she doesn’t want to seem like Camus’ stranger.

“Now that’s a sophisticated haircut,” her mother says, eyeing but not touching the vaguely New Wavey style Jesse has been wearing for a while. The translation is that she finds it ridiculous, arch. “What do you call it?” The unanswerable question is one of her mother’s specialties.

“Am I too late for the good stuff?” Jesse says by way of not answering. This question, too, is a charade. There
is
no good stuff. Her mother hates to cook, did as little as possible until she was rescued by the arrival of frozen foods and prepared dinners and carryout. She had the first microwave in New Jerusalem. She drove all the way to a railroad siding sale in Arkansas to pick it up.

Now she opens the freezer and pulls out a stack of frosty boxes.

“I’ve got blueberry pancakes. Scrambled eggs with sausage.” She lowers her glasses off the top of her head and reads from a package. “Western omelette.”

“Pancakes sound great,” Jesse says. Her mother opens the box, pulls back the shrink wrap, pops in the tray, slaps shut the door of the microwave, and speed-types commands on the panel of buttonless buttons on the front. She wipes her hands on a dish towel, and sighs, “There.” Like Julia Child coming off the sixth vigorous kneading of the croissant dough. “Coffee?”

Jesse nods and watches another teaspoon of instant go into another cup set next to the two already waiting for the water to boil. She can tell that Kit is trying hard. She is wearing loose white walking shorts and a pale blue polo shirt. She has her hair blown out in a soft young-wife style. She’s trying to be the most muted and acceptable version of herself possible. She doesn’t know something has already gone terribly wrong.

Kit goes upstairs to get the present she has brought, which she refers to as “a little bread-and-butter gift.” She has now profoundly entered “country.” In the time she has been down here, talking with Jesse’s mother, she has already picked up a trace Missouri accent. On the stairs coming down, Jesse heard Kit asking her mother about local crafts. The girl has quilts on her mind, and jams from quaint berries, goose and elder. At thirty, Kit still sees experience as something gift-wrapped in small packages, just for her. Sometimes this aspect of her seems irresistibly ingenuous. Other times, Jesse longs for her to be fifty-five and Piafesque, someone whose high living is past and anecdotal and expresses itself now mostly in regretting
rien.

Kit is upstairs long enough for Jesse to lay out a few openings, to give her mother a chance to spill what’s bothering her.

“It’s a longer drive than I remember. Actually, each time it seems to get a little longer.”

“You said she was an actress. I thought, Shakespeare. I don’t know. Why didn’t you say she was that homewrecker on the hospital show?”

“Oh, Ma. You don’t watch that stuff?!”

The lines pull again at the corners of her mother’s mouth, giving it an artificial set, like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy.

This was the same look, given in this same kitchen, which had caused Jesse to abruptly cut short her last visit, which was supposed to be two weeks long, but ended with her leaving on a night bus to St. Louis after just five days. An unscheduled departure in response to the moment when Jesse’s mother, after having disparaged all the important aspects and accomplishments of Jesse’s life, looked down over the top of her cup of instant coffee and wondered aloud if Jesse wasn’t developing thick ankles, taking after the blunt-shaped women on her father’s side.

It was immediately following this remark that Jesse went upstairs to her old room and packed as people in B movies do when they’re on their way out of a stormy argument or disastrous marriage—stuffing everything into suitcases with no folding, no concern about tossing shoes in on top of white shirts. Sitting on the bulging cases to get their zippers closed, then exiting the house with the detonation of a slammed door.

Jesse came out this time determined not to mention this last visit. She actually expected that, because of it, her mother would be on her best behavior. It looks like that’s not going to be the case.

“We have a committee at church,” she says now, assigning to a higher authority responsibility for her not being able to accept Kit. “S.O.S. Save Our Sinners. We write letters to the shows, the networks. We ask them to take off characters like hers and put on families that reflect Christian values.”

Jesse tries for a serious nod, but her mother can smell her amusement, and makes a small, angry sound, a tiny click deep in her throat, and turns away to wash out a couple of glasses with a complicated looking soap-dispenser brush.

“She’s not the person she plays on the show,” Jesse says, because she can’t not defend Kit against any attack, even one as nutty as this.

“Well, I’m sure, but she gives people ideas,” her mother says, not letting go now that she has purchase. “Sets a bad example. How’d you even meet a show business person like that, anyway?” she asks now, fixing Jesse with a whammy.

“I teach with her uncle,” Jesse says, then wonders if this sounds warm and family-oriented, or like Humbert Humbert recalling how he met Lolita. She watches her mother turn back to the sink and sweep into the soapy water a spatula and spoon rest that says “Spoon” on it.

“Look...” Jesse starts, feeling a flash of being up to this. By directly coming out to her mother, she can at least go on the offensive in this conversation, rattle her mother’s cage by speaking the unspeakable, break the regional code of polite conversation: that when something is unpleasant or difficult to talk about, it is simply placed on a lower shelf of fact by not mentioning it.

“You don’t have to tell me,” her mother says. “It’s on all the shows. Donahue. Oprah.” And that’s that. Her mother reaches over and tugs the quilted cozy over the toaster and shuts down the subject.

“There’s something important I need to discuss with you,” she says, further dismissing Jesse’s sexuality as too trivial to bother with even while it is too unseemly to mention. A neat trick. She slaps the pump on a bottle of lotion. Too much shoots out and she comes over and strokes the excess onto Jesse’s hands. “Darrell and I want to take a long trip this fall,” she says. “See the West, in his van.”

“What’s the S.O.S. going to say about that?” Jesse can’t resist.

“I don’t care how old you are, I won’t tolerate a smart mouth.”

Jesse waits.

“We’re fixing to get married. Around Labor Day.”

Jesse doesn’t say anything for a beat too long.

“I know he’s not your father. I’m just asking you to respect my happiness.”

Jesse thinks for a second. “What are you supposed to say to the bride? I’ve forgotten. Not congratulations.”

“Best wishes.”

“Well, you’ve got mine,” Jesse says.

The microwave pings. Jesse goes over, takes out the breakfast. She inhales the steam, which smells like absolutely nothing, then looks up and asks her mother, “What about Willie?”

Her mother sits down across from Jesse, the way the women characters do on Kit’s show when they are earnest and anxious. “I was hoping you could take him on for a while. The home’s all right so long as he can come here on weekends. They take care of the basics there, but ... I mean, they miss a lot of what’s really important. Nobody smiles when he comes into the room. You know. I wouldn’t want to leave him there for months on end. He wouldn’t starve, but he’d surely wither a bit.” She stops, then adds, “I just want you to think about this.”

Jesse nods, dragging the side of her thumb across her lower lip, thinking. She is pretty sure right off that she’ll do it, even though it will turn her life upside down and shake the change out of its pockets. Kit is thudding down the stairs. Jesse lowers her voice. “Let me talk to her when I can find a right time, will you? I mean, don’t mention it just now.”

Her mother tightens up again and says, “Whatever.”

Kit’s present is a sampler of fancy teas. Lapsong soochong, gunpowder, China green. Jesse’s mother eyes the brightly colored tins as if they were ticking. “Why, how interesting. I’ll have to give a tea party.”

Jesse’s heart cramps for Kit, her face lit up with what she thinks is success.

Jesse’s mother pats the tea tins and looks up at the wall clock. “You girls better run on over and fetch William. I’ve got some party clothes here for him. When he comes out of there, it looks like he got dressed at a rummage sale.”

“Does he know I’m coming?” Jesse says.

“Yes, but I only told him yesterday. Otherwise he builds up to too much of a pitch.”

On the drive out, she tries to imagine Kit going along with the plan for William, but can’t. Kit came down from upstate New York—Syracuse—because she thought Manhattan would be “hot.” Hot is not living with your lover and her retarded brother, probably way out in Brooklyn to afford enough space for three. No, Kit will go with Yvonne Scherr, who inherited a place in the Dakota from her parents, Broadway costume designers. She has parties where everyone tries on her large collection of hats. Kit will definitely go with the hats.

Dismissing her as callow is one of Jesse’s hedges against the moment when Kit will leave her. Another is trying to think back on things Kit has said that weren’t really all that interesting, or funny. She’s trying to put as much cushion as possible between her and the falling stone slab.

Of course, Jesse also realizes that she may be turning up the volume and color simply to make things more interesting. A long-standing tic.