Aquamarine (14 page)

A heavyset but light-on-her-feet woman bustles up, caf-taned and cologned in some scent much muskier than what most of the women here today have on, and bearing—like almost everyone else who has arrived this afternoon—a foil-covered pan of something. She taps the foil with a fingertip and says to Hallie, “Your favorite. Porcini prosciutto risotto.”

“Alice here,” Hallie says to Jesse, “is changing our taste buds. My goddaughter, Jesse Austin,” she adds, completing the introduction.

“Ah. I’m catering your mother’s wedding,” this Alice says, making Jesse feel excluded, shut out of an occasion that is clearly already well into the planning stage, while she is only up to making fun of it.

William now has all the puppies out of the box and is trying to line them up on the lawn. Sweetie is waking up, cross at finding her babies gone. Hallie hunkers down and tucks the pups back around their mother. She stands up, massaging the small of her back.

“Mama wants me to ake-tay Illiam-way,” Jesse tells her.

Hallie nods. “Give you some family. I worry and wonder about you. New York City. Such hard ground to try to take root in.”

“I’m not alone,” Jesse says, and doesn’t feel any danger descending on the conversation. Hallie has always known. She has always been able to read Jesse without anything having to be said to clutter up things between them. Jesse thinks that if love were measurable by an equation that factored in both time and heart space occupied, she has probably loved Hallie Butts more than she’ll ever be able to catch up and love anyone else.

They had their astrological charts done once by a man in Hot Springs, Cecil Luster, who said they were both old souls, that they had already lived many lives, the first in ancient Rome. Now they have few left ahead of them. He didn’t often see souls as old as theirs. It was some kind of rarity, and accounted, he said, for their friendship. It was a shared wisdom in part, he’d said. And a shared weight of knowing.

“Come see the bath,” Hallie says now. In spite of living in a house in which nearly every piece of furniture, including the massage recliner, is from the Sears Early American collection, Hallie has used part of her Harper Method Thrift Plan savings to put in a Roman bath.

She takes Jesse in by the hand, through the kitchen, where a cake, an Apricot Cloud, Jesse’s childhood favorite, sits on the kitchen counter.

“I didn’t want the Huns to get to it before you arrived,” Hallie says, gesturing out the open window toward her yardfu0l of guests. When they get to the bathroom, she flips on the light switch with a flourish and says, “Well,
veni, vidi, vici.”

Jesse stands in the doorway in amazement, staring at a huge, round sunken tub, the steps up to it flanked with handled urns. Two alabaster nudes (one male, one female, no fig leaves) in the corners, tiles picturing women carrying baskets, oxen pulling carts.

“It’s pretty amazing, but I like it,” Jesse tells Hallie, and she’s not quite lying. And she promises herself she won’t sacrifice Hallie by sending this up to friends back in New York.

When Jesse comes out of the house, she sees that some dancing has started up, on the driveway apron. Somebody has propped a boom box on a folding chair and Whitney Houston has joined the party. Although it’s the kids who have brought the music, it’s mostly their parents who are uncool enough to dance on a driveway to a radio in the middle of the afternoon. In spite of the heat, Darrell and Jesse’s mother even get out and do something restrained and vaguely like jitterbugging.

Jesse watches for a little while, then suddenly pulls away, whiplashed by a sixth-sense radar. Willie loves to dance, thinks he is a great dancer. Why isn’t he out here? She turns sharply. Back by the wooden fence at the edge of Hallie’s lot, three high school boys—two of them Mavis’s grandsons, the Cooney boys, the third she doesn’t recognize— are encouraging William to blow out the fuse on the cherry bomb they’ve lit in his hand.

Jesse has forgotten the pure dumb meanness that grows up around here as a glandular part of adolescence, in minds running on high idle. In a crushing second she remembers all the cats flambeaux and squooshed things in play lots, and Lewis Frey at the party where he took a gulp of the Clorox-on-the-rocks someone slipped him.

She starts to move, but everything, herself included, has downshifted into slo-mo. She shouts but can’t tell whether she’s making anything come out. She is in the middle of some wild, flailing leap through the crowd when she sees Kit come off her peripheral vision and get there and grab the cracker.

And then there is only the terrible sound.

And then they’re in the back of Darrell’s van, doing it His Way to the hospital rather than taking the time to wait for the ambulance. Jesse is holding Kit’s right hand inside an oven mitt stuffed with crushed ice—Hallie’s idea. Kit is on the bottom bunk, breathing with long, grinding exhales. Her eyes are glossy with pain backed by panic.

“Two minutes to the hospital,” Jesse says, looking out one of the portholes. She looks down at Kit, still astonished. “They’re going to kill you on the show.”

Kit shrugs and comes up with a wince that Jesse sees is a smile filtered through pain. Kit lives by a rigid code of not doing anything that would change Rhonda’s appearance. She can’t gain more than a few pounds without getting called on the carpet, can’t change her shade of blond without a conference. When someone gets a great idea to go ice skating or ride the Wild Mouse at an amusement park, Kit has a low-key way of ducking out. She takes no chances, and has taken none for so long that she is immune to the impetuous gesture. And so Jesse knows that what she did in the backyard took the full complement of consequence into account. This information is both thrilling and unsettling. It means that Kit is someone quite other than Jesse has been able to imagine.

Dr. Thoms says her hand will be all right down the line. He called in a specialist from Jeff City who stitched the two blown-off tips back on. The palm is burnt, and Rhonda will have to be vampy and seductive while wearing a big bandage for a while, but in the end she should be back to her former, fully digited self. For the moment though, she is drugged and tranquil in the little room overlooking the hospital parking lot.

“My hero,” Jesse says, holding on to the other hand.

“Sleepy,” Kit says, and drops off like an infant.

Jesse sits silently for a while, and then Hallie comes in and settles heavily into the other chair and pulls out a complicated argyle sock she’s knitting. At first Jesse thinks she’s going to come up with something profound and serious, a soothing aphorism maybe. Hallie waits about two beats, then gestures toward Kit with her knitting. “What a show-off.”

Jesse’s eyes widen, then tear over and then she begins laughing in a helpless, shaking way. Hallie doesn’t even crack a smile; she’s as deadpan as Groucho. Kit wakes briefly. “What’s so funny?”

Jesse leans over and brushes Kit’s hair back with her hand, then eyeballs Hallie, and asks, “Can you give Kit some more local color? She thinks New Jerusalem is so sweet. You know. She loves the Frock Shop, the Noon Hour Cafe.”

Jesse can see this request puts Hallie into a small quandary. She hates being thought of as quaint. She’s always touting all the recent changes that have come to New Jerusalem. Three Oaks Mall. Paddock Towers under construction downtown. That Alice’s new, trendy restaurant, whatever it’s called. Even the franchises, which make her feel the town hasn’t been passed by.

But these aren’t the sorts of things Kit wants to hear. Her eyes are bright with anticipation through the druggy glaze. She wants quaint, and because Jesse wants Kit to be happy, and because Hallie wants Jesse to have whatever she wants, she puts her sock and needles in her lap and says to Kit, “Perhaps your girlfriend has failed to show you Betty’s Button Hut?”

As she smiles, Kit’s eyes flutter a while, then close.

Hallie sighs and settles back into the chair, looking around. “The last time you and I were in this crummy place together was when you got these stitches out.” She reaches up toward Jesse, who is standing over the bed, and traces the small, deep, right-angle scar along her jaw line.

Jesse puts her own hand to it. “This? You know, I don’t even remember how I came by it.”

“I don’t know how you could have forgotten. I remember it as if it just happened. We were out swimming at the country club—your mother and me and you and Willie. You were only seven or eight. You weren’t a swimmer yet, just a kid fooling around in the pool. It was late in the afternoon.

“Your mother and I were tanning on side-by-side chaises longues. She was using me as a wind blind, lighting up a cig. I looked up and saw you. You’d shot up into the air above that old, sprung diving board, and were trying to unfold yourself from a jackknife, but you weren’t fast enough, or you hadn’t dove out far enough. I don’t know. Something. On the way back down, you hit the corner of the board. You sliced down through the water, making this cloudy little trail of red behind you.

“I just went nuts, I guess. I jumped in—forgot about my extra pounds and my terrycloth beach jacket and the small problem of not knowing how to swim a stroke. I was in there before the lifeguard was even off his perch. Dragged you up and out and put you in the back seat of my car.”

“That two-tone car, cream and—”

“Brown, yes indeed. So you do remember after all. We went to Doc Wemby’s office, do you remember that? He sewed up your face while I held on to your hand, which I remember as being very hot, while you—you were always such a tough little thing—you just stared straight ahead.”

Some moments supersaturate, take on almost more than one tiny fragment of time can hold. How, Jesse thinks, can you hold this sort of memory of someone and at the same time just try to seem normally, regularly, pleased when she comes to visit for a few days every few years?

“Did we really go to Doc’s office?” Jesse says. “What I remember is being at your house and he was there. Maybe it was a Sunday and he wasn’t at his office? I can see him putting my stitches in on that giant old sofa you used to have. I was watching TV. Some show with singing mice.”

“I thought you didn’t remember this at all,” Hallie says.

“I didn’t. But now I remember the part about the stitches and the singing mice.”

Hallie looks like she is about to say something, then reaches down and tugs loose a length of crimson yarn. She catches Jesse looking down at the gnarled socks, suppressing a smile, and says, “Be nice to me or I’ll give you these for Christmas.”

They sit in silence for a while, then Hallie goes down the hall, “for a smoke.” When she’s gone, Jesse sits and watches Kit, who, sleeping and bandaged and so vulnerable in both of these aspects, elicits in Jesse a hard-to-gather-up constellation of emotions. She leans in to kiss her lover, who stirs from sleep just enough to vaguely kiss back. It’s a
goofy,
muddled, private moment, which, Jesse sees when she looks toward the door of the room, has been witnessed by Laurel Owen, who is clearly nonplussed, and holding a bouquet of helium-filled balloons.

“It was just so awful,” Laurel says, trying to regroup, holding the balloons out to Jesse. “The accident, I mean. I thought I’d—”

Jesse gets up and welcomes her, and they pass back and forth between them the necessary questions and answers about the stitches and the hand and the prognosis, but through these Jesse can see Laurel isn’t coming down any. Standing there in the doorway, she was presented with too much information all at once. There’s no way for Jesse to go back and fill in the blanks in an orderly progression. Laurel has already hardened from the inside, Jesse can feel it. She is now here only until the first possible moment she can leave, go home, and tell her husband and the two sisters she’s close to, but probably (after a brief internal debate) not her mother.

Sometimes this still happens. Because of the life Jesse lives, and the tolerant strip of territory she inhabits, she almost never runs into it anymore. When it does happen, it’s always in surprising ways, from unexpected directions. A cleaning woman who quit abruptly in a burst of Spanish Jesse didn’t understand, but of course did. The new poetry instructor who made a dinner date to “network” with Jesse, and then, a few days later, called to cancel with some excuse peculiar enough that Jesse got the drift.

Even with so much time passing between these sorts of events, they always clip her, and then make her sorry for herself, and then for the person locked in place against her, and then for everyone, for the benighted planet. Now, though, she has only gotten to the part where she’s sorry she and Laurel won’t be able to catch up with each other and find a little bit of their old coloring book camaraderie.

Laurel is long gone by the time Hallie comes back. Jesse is thinking and stretching, hands pressing out against the window frame.

“Get out for a while,” Hallie tells her. “I’ll spell you for a bit.”

“But—”

“Go for a swim.”

Jesse walks from the hospital, past her mother’s house, where she picks up a bathing suit, then heads toward the three-block stretch that constitutes downtown New Jerusalem. She goes past the bronze revolving door of the Fricke Building, where Hallie has her Harper Method parlor, then farther along stops in front of the drugstore. The ancient neon sign still reads
AUSTIN DRUGS,
although it has been more than twenty years since her father owned it.

She presses against the glass of the door. Once inside, she is instantly overwhelmed. It’s the smell of the place, exactly the same as the summer she worked here, when she was sixteen. The summer before everything changed.

As soon as swim practice was over, Jesse was expected to come straight over here. Her father thought part-time jobs built character. He was big in Junior Achievement.

Jesse is surprised to see the soda fountain still there. An older woman—she thinks it might be Louise Gates, who used to be ticket taker at the Vogue movie theater—is having a Coke and a grilled cheese sandwich, with a flutter of potato chips and two dill pickle slices at the edge of the plate. The counter girl is someone she doesn’t recognize, an earnest-looking girl.