Aquamarine (15 page)

Jesse can remember standing exactly where the girl is now, shooting cherry syrup into the bottom of a Coke glass and suddenly she’d hear her father’s voice come booming up from the back of the store. Fitting some old guy for a truss. Or giving directions on how to apply drawing salve to boils. Announcing the importance of roughage in the battle against constipation. Embarrassing her so much the tops of her ears heated up and turned red. She closed her eyes and wished him into silence. And then he died, suddenly, terribly—embarrassing even in death—crumpling inside his tuba in the Fourth of July parade. Collapsing onto the asphalt of Sycamore Street, leaving Jesse with a bundle of feelings she has never been able to square the corners on, tie up with a single string.

She has gold-plated keys to both her training pools, the one out at the country club and the one at the high school, both given to her after her parade. “Thank you, Mr. Masso,” she said to Louis Masso, who was the mayor then. Now he’s dead so many years. He shot himself the day he found out he had bone cancer. But this was the summer of 1968, and he was still alive and hugely fat, and Jesse was seventeen and in the center of her big moment, absorbing the spotlight as though it were afternoon sun. She read from the damp, scribbled speech in her hand.

“I accept this key to the James Monroe High School pool with deep appreciation, and some sense of the appropriateness of the gift. Probably no one in the history of the pool has spent quite as many hours in it as I have. As Coach Trembley once said to me at the end of a long, long practice [nod at Coach T.], ‘Jesse—I do believe you’ve worn that poor water out’ [wait for possible laughter].”

She still keeps the gold keys on her ring for good luck. Today, inside the school, the halls are dark and she can’t remember where the light switch is. She pushes open the door marked
GIRLS LOCKER
and walks between the rows of tan metal. She has been here before in recent years and so it’s not a total shot of past. More like an oldie that has come up on the radio enough times to start having a life of its own, disconnected from any direct buzzers.

Jesse got into swimming by a fluke of ability, as opposed to an interest pursued. It was just one of the alternatives in a mandatory phys ed program. In sixth grade the choices were swimming or calisthenics. She hated the idea of shinnying up ropes and vaulting stationary horses, and so took swimming even though it would mean getting her hair wet. That she turned out to be any good at it surprised her as much as it did anyone else.

She got little encouragement from her mother, who thought all sports were ridiculous. Her father’s interest she squelched early on when he turned up with ancient books on swim technique, an absurd-looking rubber cap he’d ordered for her through the Harper Method catalogs, a flesh-colored item that promised to protect the scalp from the hazards of chlorine. She had to keep him away from this part of her life, or he would take it over, throw it off balance.

While it was a relief to be involved in something that didn’t center on Willie, Jesse knew there was only so far she could get in swimming on her own. Beyond a certain point, there was no one in the area to coach her. She’d have to hook up with someone at the state university, or better yet, from one of the training camps or big swimming schools in Florida or California. But this would take money, which, in the family of a high school English teacher and a small-town druggist with a retarded child in special programs and schools, was in short supply.

And then out of the blue, Doc Wemby stepped forward with generous and continuing checks. She has always marveled that he did this, what with five kids of his own, including Keith, the Korean boy he and his wife had adopted. It was a curious thing about Doc, how much he turned out to love swimming.

Jesse hangs her pants and T-shirt on the broken hooks inside the locker and pulls on a racing suit so chlorine-corroded only the seams are anywhere near blue. It’s a Bellini Jesse Austin model. She still has a boxful in her closet, a gift from the company.

She thinks of Tom Bellini and the promotion tour for this suit—greeting girls in swimwear departments, making her speech (“Open a New Window”) in high school auditoriums, retreating from Tom’s hotel room advances, writing letters to Marty down in Australia, determinedly light in tone, desperate in content. The tour ended in New York, which seemed so much like where she should be that she felt already home. It wouldn’t be necessary to go on, back to New Jerusalem. And so she lived for a time on her money from the tour plus a cashed-in plane ticket, while she pressed the Olympic committee to press Columbia to let her in on scholarship.

She grabs her towel, slams the wiggling locker door shut, and heads through the doorway under the sign to pool.

This pool has been claimed by Jesse’s past, both inside her, and in the larger reality. It is, of course, the scene of much varsity and junior varsity practice, lifesaving and scuba lessons, weekend Gym ’n’ Swim. And on Saturday nights, in a subterranean tradition passed down through the years, high school couples who know their way around sometimes sneak in by diving naked off the balcony. But to the side of all this, the pool also holds a large part of its identity as the pool where Jesse Austin trained. There’s a plaque, but it’s more than that.

Still, when she comes into it, everything this particular pool calls up is overwhelmed by its universal poolness. It is all pools everywhere, beckoning to her.
Pssst.
The air dulled with overheating and chlorine, the sounds sharpened by reflective acoustics. Footfalls slap, rubber caps snap like toy pistols, flat bodies detonate against flat water.

Jesse gets up on a middle-lane starting block, pushes the balls of her feet into the sandpaper surface, tongues her goggles and pulls them on, then bears down, to somewhere beneath reverie, where, if all the circumstances are right, she can—for an instant—feel it all over again.

She leaps. Arms thrown in front of her, hurtling over the first ten feet or so in midair, then slamming into the water. From there she takes it with S-strokes, starting with hand in front of head, swooping out to the side, then bringing it back, close to the hip. Aquaphysics. The point being to push against still, rather than already moving, water.

At the far end, she rolls into a flip turn and heads back. When her hand slaps the wall, it feels like a pretty good time, but isn’t. She won’t know for sure. She never clocks herself now. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life racing against someone she needs not to be anymore. Or racing against a Marty Finch who is unavailable for revision, standing always unreachable at the horizon. Always eighteen, laughing wildly, high on the oxygen of her own promise.

She wonders how much of her travel in the underpasses of her subconscious have been an attempt to get back to a girl who stopped existing in the precise way Jesse remembers her the day after Jesse last saw her, the day at the airport with stolen kisses in the ladies’ room, then cousinly hugs in the terminal, promises whispered with warm breath. Letters—they would write a flurry of them. ‘Til peel off the stamps and carry them in my mouth,” Marty said. “To taste you on the back.”

They would find their way back to each other. What were a couple of hemispheres to them? This was just the beginning.

And of course, it was simply the end. The last Jesse saw of Marty Finch was that morning in the airport, just before they made dashes for departure gates at opposite ends of the terminal, to board planes headed for opposite corners of the world. Jesse wrote, Marty didn’t. Not even so much as a nervous letter pretending to forget everything, to revise their tiny history into a passing friendship. Nothing. It was like a wall had dropped down into the ocean between them, a great barrier reef holding their lives separate, not touching, on either side of it. This is the part Jesse can’t stand to go over, the part that doesn’t come with any color.

She walks back through town to the hospital. Hallie is still there. Plus Jesse’s mother, who has brought William. They’ve also brought Kit a sack from the Burger King.

“I was here for my female troubles,” Frances says. “I know how bad the food is. It got so I’d throw up just from hearing the cart rattling down the hall.”

Everything has been pulled inside out. Kit is now the most wonderful person in the world. And the injured party. She has seen the worst of this place. Amends must be made.

William sits quietly in a green vinyl armchair in the corner. No one knows if he understands what happened, or not.

The next day, when they let Kit out, Darrell takes her and Jesse up into the hills, where he knows some quilting women. He haggles a good price for Kit on the one she wants, maize and Wedgwood blue with purple dogs in odd squares. Through all this Kit is attentive and appreciative and a little fuzzy from the Percodan.

“They’ll make you a sexy bandage on the show,” Jesse says in the van on the way back to town. Everything’ll be okay.”

Kit nods, but Jesse can see she’s not convinced.

Jesse’s mother stands in the drive on Wednesday morning while they get a horribly late start, running back into the house three or four times for stuff they’ve forgotten, and then finally they pull out with Kit and Jesse’s mother waving and Jesse driving and waving until they turn the corner. They slip out of town the back way. Kit wants a scenic route.

Out on the highway, the high grass shimmers with the heat coming off it while they are packed in air conditioning. They pass the big billboard for Pratt’s Caverns. Kit says should they stop? Jesse shakes her head. “It’s just a corny old sight. Really.”

“Last chance,” Kit points to the
LAST CHANCE!
billboard for the cave, with a cutout representation of its stalactite xylophone.

Hours later, around Dayton, they approach the junction of I-70 and I-75. A round-cornered green sign reads:

LEFT TWO LANES-NEW YORK
RIGHT TWO LANES—FLORIDA

“We could take the wrong turnoff,” Kit says. “I wouldn’t have to face Decker, or my agent. Everyone’s going to be sweet as pie for ten seconds, then they’re going to kill me. Florida’s nice, isn’t it? We could open an orange juice stand. Sell O.J. and coconut shakes.”

“The thing is,” Jesse says, as the sign flips into the immediate forgotten past, “my mother needs for me—for us—to take William for a while.”

She holds her breath, listening to the light pinging of the rental car’s out-of-tune engine, fearing Kit’s response. But there are only a few seconds of silence before she says, “No problem.”

And then, “Can we stop tonight at that Jailhouse Motel we saw on the way out?”

6S & 7S & 9S

July 1990 Venus Beach, Florida

T
HEY’RE SITTING
in the parking lot behind the Venus Beach police station. Even though there is a smoky storm rolling in from low over the ocean, Jesse unlatches and buzzes down the top on the ancient, silver-blue Cadillac Eldorado—the Boss Hog. She needs to get some air into the situation. She’s feeling spontaneously combustible, her first-line reaction to Anthony.

He’s sitting in the other wide bucket seat, emoting No Problem. Jesse knows this posture is defensive deep cover for some roiling tumble of nervousness and fear and self-doubt. She has read books and books on dealing with the difficult adolescent and knows this is a critical moment when she should help him out, say something maternal and supportive. The best she can come up with, though, is, “You really fucked up this time.”

He reaches over with his good hand to turn on the radio. Wilson Phillips joins them from the dashboard. These girls are having troubles of their own. They’re pleading in wiretight harmony to make someone—baby, baby—understand he’s got to release them.

Jesse has two simultaneous lines of conversation with Anthony. One is the wry but kindly set of responses she means to come up with. (Sally Field would play her in the heartwarming movie version of her relationship with Anthony.) The other is made up of what comes out of her mouth whenever she is actually pressed up against the enormous stupidity of his life, and his studied lack of affect around it.

Last night, he got caught liberating the stereo from a BMW parked behind the Harbor View restaurant. The cops came in with their lights cut. Anthony panicked and ripped his hand open on the teeth of the hole he’d just made in the dash. He has spent the past several hours in the Orange Grove Hospital emergency room, then at the arraignment, then cooling his heels in the Venus Beach lockup until Jesse could get over to the bank and make bail. Now he’s studying his bandage, pressing at it where a watery red is seeping through.

When Anthony was little, Jesse used to sit at the beach with other young mothers and wonder if they all envied her. He was so full of surprises. Drawings he’d crayon of the inhabitants of his imagination—a man made of water, a friendly animal so furry he’d keep a boy warm through the coldest night in the wilderness. Tunes played on a harmonica picked up in a playground trade. Later, magic shows with labor-intensive tricks, scarves pried out of fists, coins found behind ears, but only after a heartbreaking amount of searching.

And then somewhere along the way, he slipped from surprises into secrets, started becoming this elaborately unknowable person. Which makes Jesse crazy. She sits quietly next to him and wants to tear him open and crawl inside, find out who the hell is in there.

He’s pulling up the bandage now, peering underneath. He sees her look over, and shrugs. “Everybody’s a geek when you come down to it.”

He is sitting as far away as possible, hugging the door, looking more eleven than nineteen. He punches two buttons on the radio and gets them away from Jesse’s Top 40 station, to easy listening.

Jesse thinks he must be fooling around. “Like being in an elevator, only going forward,” she says.

“It’s a pretty good station,” he says. Anthony will defend anything Jesse attacks. It’s pure reflex now.