Aquamarine (18 page)

“Anthony’s got himself in deep shit again,” Jesse says non sequiturily, although since all her conversations with Elaine are really just installments of the same long, running conversation, there are really no non sequiturs, no antecedents left too far behind.

Elaine nods and listens to the grisly details while she stands over Jesse, turning her cup right side up onto its saucer and filling it to exactly one-quarter inch from the top, all in one smooth professional motion.

“And now Tom’s coming down here, to the rescue. I hate when I have to see him,” Jesse says. “The experience beats me up, reminds me of everything I usually manage to forget. I don’t know why he doesn’t mind seeing me, but he doesn’t seem to. Maybe he’s just smoother at looking like he doesn’t mind. But then again, maybe he really doesn’t. He doesn’t have anything to hate me about. I get to hate him, though, because there I was, sick to death of him, but determined to stick it out, and then he up and left me. Plus he sprung it on me so fast I didn’t realize until the dust settled that his leaving meant I was the one stuck with the life we’d made together while he was the one going on to a clean new slate. Argh. I just think of him and my hands get itchy. Like a strangler.”

“He’s just a blip on your radar screen,” Elaine says. “He’s nothing. He’s something dumb you did when you were young. Like sleeping all night with your hair in rollers.”

“I try to come up with any of the feelings I must have had when we were first married. The closest I can get is remembering how I used to like watching him wash our car, then massage it with Simoniz paste for a whole Sunday afternoon. I think I thought this was virile, or something. It doesn’t seem nearly enough to marry somebody for, though. I think he was just a bad choice based on hazy motives.

“I know I must have been crazy about him, though, because there was this other guy, back home. Cute in a big bear sort of way. I’m not sure why I let him slip away. Probably I thought he was too nice, or too, well, ‘back home.’ I think I thought that with Tom everything would be different. Instead, it was the same, just in a different location.”

She sweeps a hand through the air to include all of Venus Beach, like a model on a game show while the announcer describes the seven-piece living room suite the contestants might win.

“When I look back it seems like there was this short little span of time right after Mexico when I had to make all the crucial decisions in my life. Only I was way too young to do anything intelligent. I was younger than Anthony is now and he seems impossibly unformed to me. Barely beyond protoplasm.”

“Criminal protoplasm,” Elaine says. She gets to say stuff like this. Her own child is a Deadhead. The girl left three years ago—after Elaine put in seventeen years of hard, mostly single motherhood, several thousand dollars worth of orthodontia, private school tuition, and horseback riding lessons—to devote herself to following an aging hippie band.

“Most of what I did back then was just react, really,” Jesse says. “My mother wanted me to go to college. Take English and teach, like she did. So of course I couldn’t do that. She thought Tom was ‘fly-by-night’ and that clinched it. My path was clear.”

“You should just be glad you’ve put him behind you,” Elaine says. She has taken a seat opposite Jesse, and is pulling out a plastic cigarette, part of a three-hundred-dollar program that’s her fourth shot at quitting. “Much better than the mess I’ve got with Steve. Just when I’ve pretty much forgotten him, he drops into the middle of some lonely night I’m having and gets me loaded on spumante and up to the Eros Motel, where they have that damn Taiwanese basket.”

“What do those rooms look like? I’ve always wondered.”

“Oh, you know. Water beds and big-screen TVs with porno tapes. Brown shag everywhere. Every possible surface is carpeted, horizontal
and
vertical. And then he just disappears again and I’m left all riled up and confused.” “I don’t know how you can have any confusion about Steve. He’s living with a high school senior.”

“She graduated.”

Jesse doesn’t let this even slow her down. “He drives that penis extender thing on truck tires. He goes to those pit bull matches. He’s a nightmare. I hope you don’t mind me saying this.”

“No, I know.”

Tessa, Elaine’s second-shift cook, is standing over them now, a huge but extremely graceful black woman from some dot of an island in the Caribbean.

“I just need to know, are we keeping on the Stars and Stripes pancakes now that the holiday’s past?”

Elaine thinks a moment. “Give it another week. People seem to enjoy a patriotic breakfast.”

“What are ... ?” Jesse says as Tessa drifts back into the kitchen like a float.

“Oh, you know. You top the cakes with blueberry and cherry compote, squirt lines of whipped cream between. Why don’t you just tuck up with Oscar? He’s so sweet. You could wait until Sharon’s out of high school, then marry him and move north to one of those progressive cities where they ban guns and recycle everything and have gay marriages and black and white marriages, and are tolerant of everybody.”

Jesse shakes her head and goes to pick up the creamer. In the process, she loses a strip of small hairs on her forearm to the tabletop’s permanent coating of syrup. She tugs a napkin out of the dispenser, dips it in her water glass, and wipes the purple glue off her skin.

“Oscar and I’ve got a good thing, but it’s an as-far-as-it-goes kind of thing. I’m trying to keep my options open while I’m looking for ... I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m even looking for anymore. Some next thing, but I can’t even imagine what it would be, really.”

“At least I don’t have illusions anymore,” Elaine says. “At least I’m free of that. For me all that was over early. I knew everything else—even my marriages—would be downhill after ... well, you know.”

Elaine will never say the name directly. The most she’ll say is The King. She hates to tell the story, which took place when she was sixteen in Detroit and Elvis was on tour and she was down near the front and when he slammed his guitar against his groin and sneered a little with his cruel lower lip, it was Elaine he sneered at, and immediately about twenty girls leapt on top of her and ripped off her charm bracelet and buttons from her jacket and pulled her nylons out of their garters and tore them to shreds. Second-class relics. Something belonging to someone Elvis had sneered at. Later, in back of the theater, one of Elvis’s pack of guys asked Elaine and her friend Marilyn if they wanted to come to a party at the hotel, in Elvis’s suite.

“How did he come on to you at the party? I mean, did he have a line, or did he just give you some sort of signal and you knew he wanted you to go to bed with him?”

Jesse, who thinks this is about the most fascinating thing that has ever happened to anyone she knows, always tries for a few more details on the rare occasions when the subject comes up. Usually Elaine guards the incident. Jesse thinks this is because she doesn’t want to wear it out. Today, though, as she’s flipping on the calculator so they can begin figuring what they’ve got to charge on the sweet sixteen party in order to turn a profit, she says, “He asked if I wanted to look at his coin collection.”

The Hog is parked just outside the sliding glass doors of the baggage claim, in an area strictly forbidden with red and yellow stripes and several stern signs. A cop is looking the car over. Jesse rushes up, drops Hallie’s bags, and bursts into an elaborate explanation. Hallie is an aged relative, the car had to be brought up close. She hopes Hallie, following a bit behind her, will get enough of the drift of this to look decrepit, and she does, stooping a bit, grabbing on to Jesse’s arm with a quivering hand, allowing herself to be slowly folded into the passenger seat.

With the cop still glaring after them, Jesse slips into drive and pulls out in a restrained way, like a librarian behind the wheel of a bookmobile. By the time they get on the highway, though, she’s up to the sort of speed that keeps her in a lively relationship with the Florida highway patrol.

Jesse looks over, sees Hallie is holding onto the glove compartment knob. She slows down a little.

“Did I miss anything?” Hallie says when Jesse has negotiated the swirl of exit lanes and they’re headed in the right direction on Fed i.

“Anthony’s gotten himself in a spot of trouble,” Jesse tells her. There won’t be any way to keep the news from her, not with Tom coming down and all.

“He’s just in that confusing patch,” Hallie says when she has heard the details. “Sorting through all the ways he can be until he gets to who he’s going to become.”

Jesse takes her eyes off the road long enough to look over at Hallie in amazement at her ability to put a good cast on even the worst situations when they involve Jesse or either of the kids. Tom Bellini is not on this short list, though. Hallie’s opinion of him, voiced at the slightest opportunity, is that he’s not a serious person. His faithlessness, which began in the first year of his and Jesse’s marriage, along with his hypochondria and self-dramatizing and petulance in the face of disappointment, were all signs, she says, of a pampered childhood.

“Let his family have him back,” she said when he left Jesse and the kids and the swim school and Venus Beach in a peel of rubber out the driveway. “They deserve him.”

Whenever his name comes up, as it does now, Hallie is poised to go after him. Jesse puts up a hand to stop this. “He’s not even down here yet. I don’t want to have to think about him one second sooner than I have to. Tell me about the boyfriend.”

Hallie lets go of her security knob and starts going through her oversize handbag, so stuffed its clasp is permanently wedged open. She pulls out a fat yellow package, plucks a snapshot off the top of the stack, and hands it over to Jesse. Who pulls off to the side of the road and props it against the coat-of-arms center of the Hog’s steering wheel so she can get a good look.

The guy in the picture, who appears to be about a decade younger than her mother (around whose shoulders his arm is draped) is wearing a black shirt and slacks with a white belt and boots. His hair is the too black of home dye jobs, maybe Grecian Formula.

“He’s in rock and roll,” Hallie says. “He plays pedal steel in this rowdy group that headlines over at the Blue Light on weekends. B. Sting.”

Jesse looks at Darrell again and tries to figure how he and her mother link up, from what oblique angles they can possibly approach each other.

“You think he’s after her money?” Jesse says to Hallie.

“That king’s ransom in savings bonds and pass book accounts? Please. If anything, he’s giving up more than she is. He has a house back up in some holler, down in Arkansas, but he’s thinking of moving into town to be with her.”

“This sounds serious.”

“Wellll, let’s just say I wouldn’t be surprised to hear wedding bells ringing sometime soon.”

“Oh, Hallie,” Jesse says breathlessly, putting her hand on her godmother’s pantsuited knee, then shifting into drive as she gets back on the highway, “they don’t
have
to get married, do they?”

After picking up Hallie’s dog, Sweetie, at the kennel, they go to Hallie’s apartment, where, once Jesse has brought in the luggage, and Hallie has rolled up the hurricane shutters and opened all the windows to get a cross breeze going and put on a pot of Mr. Coffee—an all-day beverage where she and Jesse come from—they sit down side by side on the sofa bed and go through the rest of the photos, most of which are from the party.

A ways into them, Jesse says, “Now I’m kind of sorry I didn’t come up,” then notices who’s missing. “Hey. Where’s the Cowboy? Why wasn’t Willie there?”

“Oh, they switched his shift on him at the last minute, and you know he absolutely won’t miss work.” For almost a year now, William has had a job at the McDonald’s outside New Jerusalem. “It really suits him,” Hallie says. “He packs all the Happy Meal boxes and keeps all the napkins and straws and ketchup packet bins refilled, and empties the trash and polices the lot. He’s really good. And I don’t just mean good for a retarded person. He was Employee of the Month.”

“I know. He called from Mama’s. He was so excited.”

“They put his name on the special parking space.”

“But he doesn’t drive.”

“Well, so what?” Hallie says, as though Jesse is the one acting retarded. “The whole group home thing has been good for him, and there’s you to thank for that.”

Jesse went up to help her mother with this a couple of years back, to cut through all the red tape. Frances just couldn’t have done it by herself, even though everyone agreed it was time Willie got out on his own more, got used to living without his mother in anticipation of a time when he might have to.

“It would just make you so pleased, I’m sure,” Hallie says. “The house staff—Lois and Dan, you remember him—make sure the residents don’t get too far off track. But basically they fend for themselves, and it seems to make them go further than you’d expect. I went over for dinner once, and for a patch of time, you’d think you were just at the dinner table of a regular family.” She catches Jesse’s look and scales down. “Well, an
ir
-regular family.”

Hallie has also brought some mail, passed along by jesse’s mother. She dumps the rubber-banded packet onto Jesse’s lap. “I’m not sure what all there is.”

The first piece of interest is a booklet from Jesse’s twentieth high school reunion, which she missed.

“Oh, you would’ve been the star of that,” Hallie says as Jesse flips through, looking at the “then and now” pictures.

“Wow. What happened to Louise Franz?”

Hallie pushes her reading glasses down her nose, and peers over the top of the frames. “They say she drinks a bit.”

“Boy. She looks like a marshmallow. She used to be so cute. So perky. Wow, here’s Laurel.”

“She’s back in town,” Hallie says. “Her husband has work nearby. I ran into her at the beauty shop. She asked after you, of course. I souped you up a bit.”

“How? That line about me being the aquatic director of The Academy?”

“Well that, of course. And then it just came to me to say you’d won the Pillsbury Bake-Off.”