Aquamarine (16 page)

Then, in the middle of nothing, the windshield wipers start up again. They do this quite often lately, and then shut off again, on their own. It doesn’t seem worth taking the car in for. If Jesse is at a light and someone is staring, she just squirts some bluejuice so it looks like she’s cleaning the glass. Anthony wheels the volume up a little on the radio to cover the sound of dragging rubber blades. He looks out at the city beach. Jesse glances over and sees it’s empty of humans in the face of the approaching storm. There is a large flock of gulls on one patch, utterly still and all pointed toward the sea.

Anthony’s station is now playing a lilting instrumental version of “Hotel California.”

“I met a couple of interesting guys in there,” he says.

“Precisely
why you should always try to get into the best jails. So you’ll be able to make those important career contacts.”

She doesn’t know how this happens. She sits blankfaced, determined to be impassive when Anthony says something idiotic. Then Anthony says something idiotic and a switch inside her flips and she is suddenly talk show host to his dopey guest, riffing on whatever he has just said, rolling her eyes innocently and saying something that makes the audience go up for grabs, makes Ed McMahon pull off his glasses to wipe away the tears of laughter. But there is no audience in the car, no Ed. Just Anthony, disappearing into himself as he always does when he’s made to play straight man, and Jesse, once again shorting out a connection she pretty desperately wants.

She tacks around now, tries to pull things back into a more manageable past. “You want to come home? Spend a night or two with me and Sharon? We can make BLTs. Play Risk.”

“Oh,” he says, and then pauses so long Jesse thinks this is all he’s going to say. But then he adds, “I think Lynette is probably expecting me.”

The thick sky has been holding rain for most of the afternoon, which now finally begins sifting down in light starter drops. Jesse looks over to see if he wants the top up, but he shakes his head. “I won’t melt.” And so they drive the rest of the way like this—top down, wipers flapping—objects of curiosity to people in other cars passing them by.

Anthony has been living with Lynette in a trailer out by the old Seminole reservation for about a year. They met at Long John Silver’s, where she is assistant manager and he’s a counter representative.

Lynette has dogs, two of them, a special kind of poodle. She and Anthony drive a beat-up station wagon rigged with wire carriers in the back. They go around Florida, sometimes up to Georgia or Alabama on long weekends, to shows where these dogs win ribbons. They stay in motels, which, amazingly, let in hundreds of these owner-dog combos. There’s some kind of social life around all this. Anthony says it’s fun. Of course a lot of what’s fun in his book is enhanced by boutique drugs and wine coolers.

A few months back, when he had been living with Lynette for a while, Jesse cleaned out Anthony’s old closet. On a high shelf she found a row of paperbacks. She didn’t think he ever read. But these books were puffy, soft and fat from handling. Texts. They were all from the same series, “Adventures at Whitefish Bay.” The covers were
Argosy-
like illustrations of the world within, a place populated with rough and ready guys. Lumberjacks and fishermen and miners, guys who “topple the big trees, bring in the big fish and pan for the big gold.” Clint and Buck and Thor. They might “settle scores with their fists,” but they are always there to help a buddy, even “at the risk of life and limb.” At night they head home to Eskimo girlfriends, devoted women who fix large meals of elk steaks and mashed potatoes.

Since coming upon these books, Jesse’s worries have downshifted. For years, she imagined something jittery and dangerous behind the wall of Anthony. Now she thinks the truth is more likely that although he has a complex, colorful inner life, it’s complex and colorful and banal. A biblical epic movie, a View-Master travelog.

This leaves her with absolutely nothing to do. She can’t go to Plan B. She can’t send out deprogrammers if Anthony is not on some program, if he has only shuffled off—away, but to no place in particular. When she tries to reach for him, to bring him back, it’s all slick, flat surface. She can’t find anyplace to grab on to. Except during these rescue missions, when the phone rings in the middle of the night after he has been picked up—high, usually in peculiar circumstances. Building a giant pyramid of oranges from fruit shaken down in someone’s grove. Spray-painting graffiti on the two buses that make up the Venus Beach public transportation system.

This is their only time together anymore. Because he’s in a weakened state, messed-up and full of vague regret, he usually lets Jesse bring him home. She turns the shower on full blast and holds his wasted, marked-up body in front of the spray, turned to as cold as you can get water to run down here. She lets her love for him show while he can’t notice. Then when he has resurfaced, she gets out towels and talks to him pointlessly about getting into some job or schooling that won’t leave him at such loose ends. Computers or hairstyling. She’s just punting. She really has no idea what the answers are for Anthony.

In a weird way, this incident, an actual crime, seems almost an improvement. There is an obvious point to boosting a radio. She can say to herself, to Elaine Kurczak over coffee, “My son’s a criminal, Anthony’s been led astray by a criminal element.” There is a definable problem. Until now, the trouble he has gotten into has been vague—foolish statements nobody else gets.

With a real problem, though, he is beyond her gestures of salvation. This time love won’t be enough; money will be necessary. Anthony used his first call to phone his dad, Jesse’s ex-husband, Tom Bellini, who is now going to come down from New York. Mighty Mouse to save the day. This depresses Jesse nearly as much as Anthony’s troubles.

The rain starts really hammering down as they drive into the mobile home park. She pulls in alongside his trailer, under the striped aluminum car canopy. Anthony helps her wrestle the top up, then asks if she wants to come in and dry off. “We have a towel,” he says, opening the screen door, pushing the overexcited-to-see-him dogs back inside with his knee.

Inside, the TV is on, but between channels. Lynette is there, but not really at home to company. She is kneeling on the floor next to the open Hide-a-Bed, her upper body facedown across it. There’s a lot of underside to their lifestyle. Jesse has found it generally pays to call first before dropping by.

“I guess she’s napping,” Anthony says lamely, and drops to the floor next to her, smoothing her rumpled hair with his bandaged hand. She doesn’t stir. In repose, Lynette looks—and Jesse can’t believe she missed this until now—amazingly Eskimo-ish.

It’s dusk when the Boss Hog—wipers flapping away although the storm is long past, back seat loaded with plastic pump barrels of chlorine treatment, fresh speeding ticket stuck in the visor—pulls through the pink and green portals of the Bud Barris Swim Academy, a small compound with stucco walls surrounding the pool, two locker-shower rooms, an office, and attached at the back by a breezeway, a three-bedroom bungalow where Jesse lives, now just with her daughter, Sharon.

When Jesse and Tom bought this school (built in the forties by Barris himself, the great backstroker), it had been through a couple of halfhearted rehabilitations, then had just been sitting abandoned for years. The contractor suggested changing the name and pulling down the corny Hollywood portals, another punch line in this comic landscape of windmilled miniature golf courses and buzzing go-cart tracks and, down the highway a bit, the giant Lucky Whip can. But Tom prevailed. He was at that moment full of notions of possibility. Freshly married, their first baby on the way, Jesse just stepping down from the Olympics. He saw the portals as a fairy-tale entrance to what would surely be a wonderful chain of events.

Now, all these years later, Tom is gone, that first baby a miscarriage she almost never thinks about anymore, the Olympics something that happened to another person, someone she knows well enough and remembers fondly, but not quite her. And once again, the portals are in sad need of paint and replastering. Even here in Venus Beach, which is not so much a place as a franchise opportunity, a dot on the giant connect-the-dots map of Pizza Huts and Gaps and Wal-Marts, even here where there is never that much happening, people still have jazzier ways to spend their leisure time than going back and forth in a rectangle of water.

Jesse is trying to turn things around with enterprise and innovation. She is constantly working on new ideas. She has had some small success renting the pool out for splash parties. She does these with her friend Elaine, who manages the Pancake Haus in town and runs a free-lance catering business on the side.

Jesse has also livened up the school’s schedule with several new programs. A Scared to Death class for adults who have always been too frightened to get in the water. And Tuesday afternoons, Sharon leads a large group of the elderly through Aquarobics for Arthritics. This doesn’t really make money because Jesse has to crank the pool heater up so high, but the old folks really enjoy it. The pool is packed. It’s nice to see.

Sharon has been holding down the fort all day, is alone in the pool as Jesse comes in. She stands in the shadows and watches. The underwater lights are on, and so a wavy, lurid turquoise floats up against the deep red roses and the terra cotta pool wall and beyond them, a milky pink sunset that has followed the storm. Sharon is a cigarette boat, a high rider through the water. Her freckled shoulders clear the surface by several inches. When she used to do sprint work, she was breathtaking.

A couple of years back, when she beat Jesse at a hundred meters, Jesse thought maybe the baton was passing. If it happened, it would have to be Sharon who took it. When the kids were little, Jesse had thought Anthony would be the one. At three, while Sharon was still splashing around in the baby pool, Anthony was already jumping off the high dive and wiggling his little body the full length of the lap pool.

But then he hit adolescence and figured out he could get at Jesse by staying out of the water. He began to, and still does, go sullen at so much as the suggestion of swimming, a rejection Jesse minds more than she can account for. By the time he got out of the water, though, Sharon was getting in, and Jesse could transfer her hopes. After Sharon had done well in a few high school meets her first year on the team, Jesse began to think about getting her into Sea Breeze down in Pompano, where Jesse herself trained for those last months before she went to the nationals.

But it was a hope that didn’t bear too much close examination, given how confined Jesse had felt, having to train through nearly her whole adolescence. The only thing she could have been wishing for, really, was a replication of her own chance, one she could this time not blow, an erasure of her own failure with her daughter’s success. When she realized this, it made her feel terribly small.

At any rate, it doesn’t look like this is going to happen. Sharon has the intelligence of technique and enough perseverance to blot up the monotony. What she has lost as she has come into the prime of her adolescence are the insane levels of desire required. Becoming a world-class athlete is simply no longer very important to her. At seventeen, Sharon’s desires have irised down to a sequence of guys from her school who, one after another, are not calling her.

Now her best friend, Janine, is going with one of these guys, which has sent Sharon into a summer-long torpor. Most of the time she seems terribly low, as though she is on some medication of misery. Depressants. Even when she swims now, there’s a brooding, urgent cast to it, as though she is boring through the water, escaping the landed world where her sorrow awaits her.

Nights she stays back in her room, enclosed in her Walkman, searching
Glamour
and
Seventeen
for secret passages into the affections of whichever boy is responsible for the current coma of the phone. Jesse wishes she could just call Don Corleone to help Sharon out. The don would send a couple of soft-spoken, extremely reasonable guys in beautifully cut suits over to this boy’s—Ian’s—house. These guys would explain the situation to Ian in a soft-spoken, reasonable way, and if he didn’t come around, dead fishes and horse heads would turn up. Ian’s thoughts on the subject would gain a new clarity, and he would dump Janine and call Sharon.

Sharon’s teenage dilemmas are both like and not at all like Jesse’s. Janine, for instance, already has a baby, Madonna, named, of course, after Madonna. She had the baby at the end of the school year, won’t say who the father is, but Ian is sure it’s him, and this has made him hostage to Janine, who seems not to care about him one way or the other. Before the baby, Ian and Sharon had been dating. Now Sharon says, “Maybe they weren’t really dates.”

Coming out of her flip turn now, Sharon sees Jesse and swims up to the side, pulling off her goggles. “Hey. How’d it go?” She always sounds calm, even when she’s agitated, which Jesse knows she is now, about Anthony.

“The hand. They don’t know yet. Everything else—the situation—is a mess. He called in sick at the fish shop, but when they see that hand, I don’t know. I dropped him at the trailer. Such an upbeat atmosphere. Did you ever notice, by the way, how much Lynette looks like an Eskimo?”

“Mom, she’s blond. I think she’s even Swedish, isn’t she? I mean, her name is Swenson.”

“Still,” Jesse says.

“I was worried they’d keep him in,” Sharon says. “That he’d freak out. You know how claustrophobic he is.” Jesse didn’t know. She knows most of what she knows about Anthony now through Sharon.

“He’s just out on bail,” Jesse says. “There’s a hearing scheduled for Friday. But your father knows a guy—‘turbo lawyer’—who’s supposed to smooth it all over before it comes to that. Of course, this is great for Anthony, but still, it makes me a little queasy that your father is going to just walk in and stuff the situation full of his money and make it right again.”