The Sea of Light (26 page)

The outside door slams.

“Oh,
God.
Ellie, is that you trying to cook again?”

The roommates poke their heads in. I’m surprised; the way Ellie’s always talked about them before it’s like they’re old enough to be her parents, but here they are just a year or so older than me, I think, and neither one looks much like I expected her to. I would have figured that Ellie, being such a dedicated jock, would be living with a couple of power lifters or discus throwers or something—and these two are anything but. Nan, the one with glasses, is a skinny little scholar type, kind mouth, serious wrinkled forehead. Jean’s heftier, a little chubby even, wears her hair long and dresses like some old hippie from before I was born; she has freckles, full lips, stern eyes.

Both stare at me a second, give each other glances, raise their eyebrows. Ellie blushes. Then she blurts out:

“Nan, Jean, this is Babe Delgado.”

“Whoa. Nice to finally meet you! We’ve been hearing so much about you!”

I shake Nan’s hand, hear EIlie cough off to one side like she wants to puke or sink into the floor or something, and then Nan says This is my lover Jean, so I shake Jean’s hand, and can’t really think of much to say. I mean, what am I supposed to say? Something like: Well, hi there, I guess you’re both lesbians too?

They spend some time then cleaning up, clucking over the kitchen. Ellie and I head out to the living room, such as it is, to blab about the team, and the lit. class, which I am currently flunking.

Later, when I leave, I turn around at the door, pushing it open, letting cold almost-wintry gusts in, look at Ellie fully for a moment, want to tell her things. But I wouldn’t know how, or even where to begin. She seems frail tonight. Not just frazzled but really, really tired, with a flush on her face like fever, and this angry defiant kind of hurt in her eyes. She smiles, briefly.

“Good luck with Mike.”

“Who?”

“Knock-knock! anybody home? Mike
Canelli.
The person we’ve just spent all night
talking
about.”

Tears come into my eyes, suddenly, irrationally, for absolutely no reason, and I step out on the porch, into the cold encircling all the deep protective warm folds of my coat, and blink them away, glad no one can see. It used to happen all the time when I first got out of the hospital. Unpredictably. I was at the mercy of these tears, in a way—never knew when they’d show, rivulet down my face unaccountably, put a fog and ache in my throat.

God,
I mumble at the bottom of the porch steps, inanely, to no one in particular.
Please, please, just love me.

“Huh?” Ellie calls from the doorway, arms guarding her chest from the cold. She coughs. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

My eyes are dry again. I glance up at her. “Nothing.”

“Well, look, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

“And next time,
you
cook.”

Usually we’d both laugh on a line like this. But, tonight, neither of us does.

I want to ask her if it’s going to be okay. Will this stuff in between us come apart soon, so she’ll be Ellie to me again, the Ellie I depend on? I want things to be the way they were, less than a day ago. Before Mike Canelli. Before she said that stupid word,
queer
—a piss-poor way of describing how you feel love.

“Ellie?”

“Yeah.”

“I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

“Oh. Thanks.” She waves, steps back into the dim yellow light of the place, the piles of books and old clothes, wafting remnants of smoke from our ruined dinner. Against the backdrop of light I can’t see her face or eyes. The door begins to shut by increments, so there’s less and less of her. Wait, I want to say for a minute, wait, don’t go, let me back in. Let me back into this warm yellow old house with you, a house my parents and everyone on the team at Southern would despise, and let me stay in it with you, and live.

I have been so homesick.

The door keeps closing. Wind slaps my ears. The last things I see, in silhouette against the inside light, are her wiggling, waving fingers; then a fist, and one solid, firmly held thumbs-up gesture, before the light disappears and the door clicks shut.

I stand and watch maybe a minute or two. There’s a lamp on behind ratty old window curtains, shadows moving across it.

Then the wind starts to freeze my earrings and I pull the rim of the wool hat down over them, over my eyebrows, hoist the bookbag onto my back and head for campus. The ankle’s starting to act up again, aching fire near tendon and bone, and both knees hurt too, and neck, and shoulders. Bren told me she understood; once she herself had been pretty addicted to aspirin, she said, and to this painkiller they inject right into a joint or muscle that numbs it, but she had to cut all that out. So from one old breaststroker to another she was advising me seriously to stop taking Tylenol 3. And I did, but go tell that to the pain. It won’t be impressed. It will dance around like a mockingbird, right in your face, and bubble up, and thrive. You’d think that you would finally get used to it. Only you don’t. Pain doesn’t get easier to take with time—it gets harder.

And I have been around that, too, for most of my life.

* * *

Days start to swing by in this blur, all of a sudden, I don’t know why. There’s morning workout, afternoon workout, weights three times a week. I make every workout—always a little late, as usual, but always there—and somewhere around then I hear that Ellie is sick, really sick, pneumonia, might be out the rest of the semester but no one really knows. A bunch of them call her from the phone in Brenna Allen’s office. I figure I’ll do it in private—from my own room, thank you. But a couple of days go by, everything’s normal for me, workouts and class as usual, I miss her, but I feel okay, and I don’t.

Then a couple more days. I know something’s tugging at me, making me want to call her and also
not
want to call her. There’s this war in my guts, like some big old jellyfish is getting wrenched apart in there. In between, in the jelly of the jellyfish, is me—and the struggle terrifies me, paralyzes me. I do not call. Sometimes, when the phone rings, I don’t pick up.

Whenever I do, it is Mike Canelli. Gossiping about stuff happening on the men’s team. Cracking jokes. Putting Coach McMullen down. Asking about my classes. Pestering me to stay on the phone longer, meet him for coffee at such and such a place, for a beer on such and such an evening, go out to this movie, or that bar, to see such and such a band. I don’t like him, but I sort of do.

“There’s this great steakhouse in town, Babe. Prime cut. Sirloin. Have Amex, will travel. I’ll take you.”

“Don’t,” I say, “I’m vegetarian.”

“You’re kidding. For how long?”

“I don’t know. More than a year or two, I guess.”

“Very cool, Babe. Very Thoreau of you. What on earth made you do
that?”

The fog sets in again, inside me, around me. Oh, I tell him, never mind.

“Well, what about Italian? You know, pasta, carbohydrates, yummy yum yum.”

Sometimes if a day goes by and he doesn’t call, I start to feel kind of relieved but also very bad, like I’m losing something, like I’m being rejected. Then, too, I’ll start thinking,
Screw Mike, what about giving Ellie a call, Delgado? I mean, what in
the world is wrong with you?

I’ll think about my hand reaching for the phone, dialing her number, and I’ll just freeze up inside.

* * *

We go to the Italian place on Saturday evening: Mike and I, and his roommate Jeff Brader, a backstroker who does the 100 and the 200 and the 4 x 100 medley relay, and Jeff’s girlfriend, Emma, who is slender and blond and wears some nice fourteen-carat jewelry dangling from her ears and neck and wrists, and has these really fantastic clothes and these great leather shoes she says her mother bought for her in Los Angeles. The three of them pick me up on campus, and we head toward town in Mike’s car. Jeff bullshits with me a little about team stuff, gets rowdy with Mike, doesn’t seem to have much to say to Emma. She, likewise, doesn’t seem to have much to say for herself—to him, or to anybody. I look at the good makeup, the expensive jewelry and terrific silks and cottons and leathers of her getup, feel a little ashamed somehow—although not of myself, really—just somehow embarrassed in a way, for
her,
and full of a strange kind of pity. I ask a couple of questions, just to try and be polite. Like, what is she studying? and she says she doesn’t know, a little bit of everything. I can tell by the questions she asks Jeff that she’s not an athlete herself.

Mike parks crookedly in the restaurant parking lot. It’s cold outside, air full of a nasty wind, sky gray and heavy-looking, like it might snow later. There are blank parking spaces on black lined tar surface, opening our way to the restaurant.

The only problem getting there is with Emma. She doesn’t want to mess her shoes up. But the air’s freezing, the ground icy, and she does quite a sidewalk dance around all the unlit iced-over puddles, the mounds of crusted mud and dead leaves, that could catch on a heel, ruin leather, scuff toes.

“Jeff!” she yells, almost slipping. “Je-EFF!”

He waits for her in the entryway with Mike, cracking up.

She almost falls on her rear end again and I reach out to give her a hand, propel her rapidly across a slick patch with one palm pressed against the small of her back, the other gripping a coat shoulder. No muscle tone. She seems all upset and nervous. Still, she’s giggling. I basically shove her toward the entryway while those two idiots stand there making faces, and I feel sorry for her—but also, in some way, I really despise her.

Thanks, she mutters.

“Great,” says Jeff. “Nice ice dancing.”

Mike laughs. “Pairs competition.”

It’s a nice place: candles set in glass, dim lighting, plenty of space between tables. The tabletops are covered with actual linen, the napkins cloth, not paper, and each chair bottom and back is lined with a soft tasteful plush. I wonder if my mother would approve.

We are all dressed totally to the max. Everyone here comes from a family with some money. I am almost down to fighting weight these days, and clothes I haven’t worn because they were too small on me are beginning to fit, and look good, and my father’s been bugging me to go out and charge a bunch of new clothes to those credit cards he gave me.

I am wearing perfume, too, and real gems in each ear, and expensive nylons that don’t rip easily but feel like sheer silk, and this dress my mother told me to get once because it is slenderizing—which it is. Maybe Emma’s clothes are more L.A. But it’s not that at all that makes me dislike her. I think maybe it’s not even
her
I dislike so much as it is the guys themselves; Jeff treats her like she’s some kind of bimbo, and Mike just sort of goads him on—and whether she really
is
or is
not
a bimbo seems beside the point. I mean I don’t care, but it doesn’t seem fair.

I wonder why my first reaction is to hate her, though, instead of getting pissed off at them. It’s like I want to be on their side, somehow, by ganging up against her in my mind.

I notice that they’re talking to me differently from the way they talk to Emma: With her, they joke and tease and flirt; with me, they joke and tease a little but more respectfully somehow, as if they might even consider talking to me seriously—like I’m one of the boys. Must be the athletics they assume we have in common.

Which may or may not be true. Personally, I think that their approach to the sport is pathetic. I think they’re full of bullshit; typical devil-may-care big-tough-muscular-guy bravado nonsense from whiners who are basically afraid to really let it
all
hang out and give up on their
image
and just hurt.

Liz had a term for guys like them: Dogmeat.

But I do feel a kind of relief that, for whatever fucked up reason, they seem to genuinely differentiate between me and Emma. I wouldn’t know what to do if they spoke to me like they do to her. Although, to be honest, she doesn’t really seem to mind. The parking lot incident just sort of rolled off her back.

Every little deprecation and verbal cattle prod seems to be something she expects.

I have to admit, too, that she’s obviously had a lot of practice with their crap, handles it well. Which is something I know I would not be able to do; I’d probably freak out, and leave, or cry, or yell, or smack them both. For some reason, knowing that she is better at taking this shit than I could ever be makes me feel inferior to her. I mean, as a girl, in a way, a normal girl. As a woman.

Because I realize—and I’ve known it before, but never really
felt
it until now—that all those years I spent training my guts out, girls like Emma spent training themselves for other things. For the rest of what their lives would be. Lives with makeup, and clothes, and boyfriends, and men. It seems weird and ridiculous to me, as if she is one of a bunch of Martians who just landed on my planet; but I realize, too, that
I
am the real Martian here—I am the abnormal one, in the eyes of the world. Emma never would have dreamed of qualifying for the Olympic Trials, of attaining that level of skill. But, while I was busy attaining that level of skill, I missed out on normalcy.

Not being normal—for the first time, I feel it, really feel the pain and the anguish of it deep, deep down inside—it sticks in your craw like stones. And part of the pain, I know now, is being so alone.