Aquamarine (13 page)

“When you made us start reading it, I thought I’d never be able to slog through,” Bob goes on. “But to this day it’s the only poem I can remember one darn line out of.”

This seems to Jesse a left-handed and puny offering, but her mother looks to be genuinely flattered and happy.

“You had the best penmanship of any boy I ever taught,” she says to Bob Weeks, and instead of looking embarrassed, he beams.

As she and her mother watch the plaid back of Bob Weeks’s sport shirt disappear into the crowd, Jesse says, “They really ought to put out a
Greatest Hits of Poe try.
Like those records of just the highlights of classical music. This would have only the lines everyone remembers. You know. ‘But only God can make a tree.’”

She meant this to spark camaraderie between them. But she sees just too late that she has diminished Bob Weeks’s tribute and one-upped her mother, who, while she pretends to be delighted Jesse has followed in her footsteps, teaching English, actually hates it. For her part, Jesse goes along with the expressed notion that she has followed in her mother’s footsteps, when of course they both know she has passed her mother by.

A light plane sputters overhead and a Chicken Little chain reaction starts with one and then another and then everybody looking up into the cloudless sky, across which is sailing a banner reading 65
YEARS YOUNG—GO FOR IT FRANCES!

Jesse’s mother throws her head back and laughs in a full-throated way Jesse has seldom heard. “It’s our UPS man, Wayne,” she tells Jesse. “He’s a true live wire.” She pauses a moment, then squeezing his arm, earnestly asks Darrell, “Go for what, do you think?”

Mavis and Marlene, Jesse’s twin aunts, flutter up. They are dressed in matching outfits, something Jesse suspects they’d like to do all the time, but hold down to “occasions.” Today’s outfits are checked sundresses with white sandals. They are trendsetters around here. Marlene’s husband refers to them as “The Mod Squad.”

“So you’re still working at that college?” Mavis says now.

Jesse nods.

“Any handsome professors?” says Marlene, who has studied Joan Rivers and Barbara Walters and knows to go for the kill fast.

“The handsome ones are all married,” Jesse says, faster still. The twins, though, are onto her. She can tell. Between them, they have five regular children who are making the appointed rounds of life, getting married and having kids of their own and staying in the area and holding down decent jobs, getting promoted and advancing themselves with night classes at the J.C.

In addition to these, though, Mavis has a daughter, Rosemary, who dated hoody guys all along and eventually married a long-haul trucker who periodically lands her in the hospital with black eyes and hairline fractures. Sometimes in the middle of the fights Rosemary calls her mother for moral support. The last time she did this, Mavis hung up and called the police. By the time they arrived, Rosemary and her husband had patched things up and were in bed toasting each other with lambrusco, and Rosemary hasn’t spoken to her mother since. Lloyd, the husband, says Mavis is an “agitating influence.” Right now, Rosemary and Lloyd are at the far end of one of the long, paper-covered tables, eating ham and corn and drinking lemonade and laughing with old friends and looking like a Country Time commercial.

It is because of Rosemary’s failure that Mavis and Marlene are treading carefully around Jesse. Everybody is holding cards they don’t want to be forced to play. The twins will speculate later about who Jesse is going to bed with. Kit is extremely girled up for the party, though, throwing them a curve.

Jesse sees her over by the giant Weber packed with foil-wrapped ears of corn. She’s surrounded by a small group and appears to be the center of it. At first, Jesse is touched by these small-towners, doing what doesn’t come naturally, opening themselves to a stranger. And then she sees Kit sign two autographs and understands that this is about Rhonda. Apparently not everyone in town belongs to Save Our Sinners.

“Why, Jesse Austin, can it really be you!?” shrieks a woman in a dress with a lattice print to it, like the top of a pie. Her hair is shoulder length, curled under in a style Jesse remembers envying on the straight-haired models on the magazine covers of her teen years. The most remarkable thing about this woman, who now has Jesse in a crushing embrace, is that Jesse has no idea at all who she might be.

“It’s wonderful seeing you again,” Jesse says, leaning back from the hug, trying to see behind this person in the here and now, to who she might have been.

“I wouldn’t miss your mother’s retirement for anything,” the woman says in a vaguely familiar voice. “I still have nightmares sometimes. She’s making me diagram some hideous sentence on the blackboard. Something with a jumble of prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses. She’s standing right behind me with that long pointer—ready to leap out at my first dangling modifier or split infinitive. I think the whole English language will probably breathe a little easier with your mother out of it.”

In the middle of looking at and listening to her, Jesse puts together enough clues to figure out who this plump person wearing pink-framed sunglasses with downswept temples and smelling of brisk cologne is.

“Laurel Staats,” Jesse says. Skinny Laurel from grade school with her brown rice lunches, from before that even. Jesse can suddenly remember clear as can be Laurel coming by with a giant box of Crayolas, the one with the sharpener built into the back, the two of them drawing and coloring in pictures of everyone in each of their families.

“Owen now,” Laurel says. “I got married.”

“Yes. Hallie told me. But aren’t you supposed to be living in Timbuktu?”

“Abu Dhabi,” Laurel corrects. “But now Claude’s got this territory around here, and so I’m back home, for a while at least.”

Jesse can gather up enough of the old Laurel, the one she lost track of after high school, to see that she is nerved up in this reunion, cheerier than she really is, rushing to fill in conversational gaps before they have a chance to happen.

“But you’re the sophisticated one,” Laurel says, framing the nervousness in words. “Living in New York. A college professor. And friends with TV celebrities.” She nods across the yard toward Kit, who is talking with a continuous trickle of fans. “All I’ve been doing is being a housewife in a bunch of American neighborhoods in other countries. It’s not exactly the same as being global.”

Laurel has put on weight. Her sundress is modest, but has a white elastic belt that accentuates her lalapalooza figure. She looks like Sophia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida in some romantic comedy of the early sixties. It’s not how Jesse would have expected Laurel to turn out. She was such a bag of bones. In junior high she had to wear both thick glasses
and
braces, and walked the halls of Kirby (the school since renamed for Jesse) stooped under this double burden. By high school the braces were off and she’d gone to contacts that made her blink as though she had a tic. Now it seems all that, and all the drab cardigan sweaters and bag lunches and babysitting for five younger siblings, was just a chrysalis Laurel has broken out of, moving into this resplendent butterflyhood of middle-class, middle-aged femininity.

“Boy, you sure look different,” Laurel says, but something in the way she says it makes Jesse think it’s not entirely a compliment. “You know. It’s not just the hair, but something through and through.”

Jesse laughs in lieu of being able to think of anything to say to this. It’s true in a way, and she assumes the questions Laurel is holding under this statement are ones she can’t really get into in this heat and this crowd and this occasion, and while holding a pea puff she has just taken off a passing tray. When Jesse has been silent too long, Laurel puts a hand on her forearm. “Now, I didn’t mean anything by that.”

And then, before Jesse can reply, William is suddenly behind her, his stomach pressing lightly against the small of her back, saying, “Come see.” He has no notion at all of polite distance, of allowing people their space. The closer the better. She turns and brings him around.

“You remember Laurel,” she says, and he shakes Laurel’s hand, but doesn’t give any indication he knows who she is.

“Come see,” he says again, and tugs a little at the back of her shirt.

“I’d better...” Jesse says to Laurel, who tries, “Say, why don’t you come by while you’re here? Meet Claude and the kids. Maybe we could play some cards, have a few beers.”

“Ah ... well, I’m only here two more days,” Jesse says, and then realizes she is confirming Laurel’s worst fears—that Jesse is someone who has gotten loose of this place and now thinks she’s above it. Laurel thinks she’s being snubbed. Which is not at all what Jesse wants. So, to stop this confusion in its tracks, she adds, “But, of course. It’d be great. What about if I give you a call tomorrow? When all this”—she waves a hand to indicate the party—“is over.”

What William wants to show her is around the side of the house. Hallie’s English bulldog, Sweetie, has just had a litter of puppies. Willie has found them, squiggling around Sweetie in a dresser drawer Hallie has set just inside the door to the cellar, where it is tolerably cool.

“Boy,” Jesse says, and drops to her knees next to William. “They’re so cute. They look like tiny old guys. So wrinkled and grumpy.”

“Beany,” William says, pointing to a white one that’s sleeping with great sighs.

“He’s the cutest, all right,” Jesse says. “You want him?”

William doesn’t answer, which doesn’t mean anything.

“You want to come live with me for a while? In New York?”

“Today?”

“No. At the end of the summer. I’ve got to get just the right place for us. Paint your room blue. I’ll have to see if I can find a place that’ll take both dogs and brothers.”

William has picked the puppy, which seems boneless, out of the drawer and put him on his lap. This doesn’t make the smallest dent in the dog’s sleep. He now lies draped over William’s leg, drooling a small spot on the chino cloth. In a fast click of a shutter, Jesse imagines the worst. The dog will have some ruinously expensive ailment—hip dysplasia or skin allergies—and the day program she’ll be able to find for William will either leave him to vegetate, or put him to work in some sweatshoppy situation, shrinkwrapping cheap toys. And the apartment will be half a block from the roller coaster at Coney Island, above a cotton candy factory. And of course, Kit will have left long before they even get there. But then, in a sudden rush of hopefulness, in this tiny moment sitting here in the clipped grass of Hallie’s backyard, with the party a jolly backdrop and tonight’s moon visible in the midday sky, bringing William out, even bringing the dog out, all seems possible, just within her reach.

“What a couple of soft touches,” someone says from above. Jesse turns and blinks into the sun. It’s Hallie. Jesse stands and hugs her and they rock from side to side, absorbing each other.

“My dear, you’ve gone and gotten so skinny!” Hallie says. As she pulls back to inspect, Jesse can feel her adding up the black linen pants, white T-shirt, the hair, which is still red, but not Jesse’s own red, more the magenta of doll’s hair, and the little tortoiseshell Lana Turner sunglasses that don’t look like anything anybody else in this backyard is wearing. “I don’t know,” Hallie says, as though she’s being pressured to make a judgment call.

“I’m
fine
Jesse says.

But Hallie’s not conceding the point just yet. “The thing is, sometimes it’s hard for a person to know for sure that they’re fine,” she says. “Sometimes they need a second opinion.”

Backing off a bit, Jesse realizes—a realization she has had to repeat each of the few times she has seen her in recent years—that Hallie is not an enormous woman, only a matronly, buxom one. When Jesse was growing up, Hallie in her bulkiness seemed colossal, like a tree, someone to lean into. As far as leaning was permitted—by Jesse’s mother, and by the tacit conventions in a small town in the late 1950s, which bound families together and held friends at arm’s length, which left doors unlocked but implicitly unopenable.

It has been an odd shuffle—Jesse coming to her mother, who has never accepted her, and being denied to Hallie, who has loved her so fiercely from the start that, as she once confided, she has always had to hold herself back lest she overwhelm Jesse, and appear peculiar to everyone else.

Sometimes Jesse can almost persuade herself that all of this has been for the best, that given free reign, Hallie would have spoiled her rotten, turned her into someone pouty, lacking in wherewithal, whining over failed career schemes, purple marks on her wrist from where the latest lover grabbed her too hard. Someone like her cousin Rosemary. Maybe her mother’s rejection was also the cement in the foundation of her character. Maybe.

Although not so dramatically as Jesse, Hallie has also changed with the times. Her hair, which for years was salt and pepper, teased and sprayed into something firmly puffed, now is soft and short and permed, and dyed a minky brown. Her glasses are no longer cat’s eyes, but aviators with a tint to the lenses. For this party, she’s wearing pale yellow pants and a short-sleeved floral blouse revealing her oddly muscled arms, knotty from years of working over people’s scalps.

“So Mama’s getting married,” Jesse says.

“Well, I imagine that seems funny to you,” Hallie says. “Her being so smitten and all. And he’s not who you’d expect, it’s true. But it’s turned her so wonderfully girlish. Dr. Thomas says her arthritis has gone into remission, and you can’t tell me there’s no connection.”

Jesse looks over to where her mother is standing with Darrell. They are talking with Evelyn Pond, the new young principal over at the high school. Darrell, she can tell even from this distance, is being witty. He’s holding his cigarette between thumb and middle finger, delicately punctuating his story as he goes.

“No,” Jesse says dubiously, “I can see it’s a good thing.”

“I’m trusting you’re going to be nice about this.” Hallie says, theatrically arching an eyebrow.

“Come
on.
I’m already working on the song about them I’m going to sing at their wedding.” She pretends to be counting a meter in her head, then stops to ask Hallie, “Can you think of anything that rhymes with Rec Vee?”