Aquamarine (5 page)

He looks like a pink, freckled lily pad, the picture of contentment. All his life, people have been telling Jesse he might well be better off than everyone else, without the usual cares and woes, happy all the time. She hates this. She has never thought of his retardation as something that
is
him, but rather something that wraps and suppresses him. A too heavy overcoat that muffles the real Willie inside. And she thinks if you asked the inside Willie if he’d like to get out of the coat, even though it would mean dropping the protective layer, he’d jump at the chance.

Jesse wishes she could see in there. Sometimes this happens for a flash; she gets a glimpse. One time they were in the A & W lot. She had just ordered a couple of mugs over the speakerbox, then turned to ask if he wanted onion rings, too, and got stopped by his expression, which had taken on sharp, focused aspects of adulthood. For a split second he appeared full of thought and concerns, poised to say something. And then, the expression faded, his features slipped back into their usual state of guileless expectancy, as though life was just about to start happening for him.

“Don’t you have anything more of Flannery O’Connor?” she says as she hears Vernon Moore coming down the fiction aisle toward her, his stiff khaki pants squeaking as he walks. He’s a large man, a college linebacker easing into middle age with the shadow of his younger, more athletic self lingering around him uncomfortably now that his physicality is constrained between narrow aisles of soft-paged volumes. Jesse knows how he feels.

It’s Monday. She is stopping at the library mostly to pick up detective novels for her godmother. Who is perfectly capable of getting them for herself, but likes the attention.

“There’s a volume of her letters. I could get it through interloan if you want. Might take awhile is all.”

Jesse shrugs. “I’ve probably got awhile.”

Jesse reads in a self-improving way, a meandering program of acquisition she began years ago. She is working toward being well-read—filled with important quotes and stinging observations and hard, clear truths she will keep to herself. One of the most crucial aspects of this program is that Jesse’s mother, who taught high school English for forty-three years until she retired this June and has an abiding belief in literature, shouldn’t find out. She would only take it as tribute.

Jesse’s secret is safe with Vernon. He is still an outsider here, one of the few black professionals in town. He’s from St. Louis and is not very happy with this assignment. The state library system assigned him to this branch, inadvertently pressing a bit of affirmative action on New Jerusalem. In return, the town pays Vernon the sort of overwrought respect and politeness that amounts to ostracism.

“Here. I thought you might be interested in this,” he says, handing her a book. It’s new; she can tell by riffling the pages close to her face and inhaling, a pleasure held over from childhood. It’s a biography of Amelia Earhart.

“I don’t know, Vernon, biographies always depress me. I mean, you know, how they all end the same way.”

“That’s the point. You only munch novels and you get too hopeful a vision. Biographies bring you down. They’re cautionary.”

“But what’s the caution?”

He holds out an open cellophane pack of Gummi Bears to her.

“Now,” he says.
“Now
is what biographies whisper. Soon it will be too late.”

She checks out the Earhart, along with a short stack of murder mysteries for Hallie. Although in real life Jesse’s godmother is even-tempered and filled with good will toward nearly everyone, the books she most enjoys are stories of murderers with villainous hearts and grisly m.o.’s. Although Jesse has never read one of these books, she’s getting pretty good at picking them.

She walks the two blocks to the Fricke Building, New Jerusalem’s “skyscraper,” where Hallie has had her business for more than forty years. A single room at the end of the hall on the fifth (and top) floor. Hand-painted letters on frosted glass:

HARPER METHOD
SCALP TREATMENTS
MISS H. BUTTS, OPERATOR

Hallie opened this parlor in the mid-forties, when the Method was in its heyday. Like most operators, she was a single lady, devoted to her clientele. Among the first was Jesse’s father, who took the Method religiously.

It was one of his embarrassing (to Jesse) eccentricities, along with his unicycle, his rubber bathing cap, the black wool knee socks he wore with long bermudas. Even now, so many years after him, Jesse still sees him in this parlor, the ticking-striped drape over his shoulders. The Method is emblematic of all the oddball notions he was devoted to. But it is also important to Hallie, who, although she is cynical about everything else, has an unswerving, totally humorless belief in scalp hygienics. And so that she will have four regular customers rather than three, Jesse has pretended to be a late convert.

Jesse pushes open the humidity-swollen door. Inside, it’s 1946. The trio of maroon vinyl and pocked chrome waiting chairs hug the wall, empty of waiters for some years now. The huge single window, framed in dark, over-varnished wood, is blocked by a giant floor fan slapping sluggishly at the dead air. Hallie, wearing her shiny white nylon uniform, although probably no one but Jesse will come by today, sits in the hydraulic client chair, sucking on a Pall Mall and reading
The Corpse Took a Taxi.
She looks up and smiles.

“My, my, what have we here, my little fix?” She crushes out her cigarette, gets up, and comes to look the books over.

“I couldn’t remember if I’ve already brought you this one,” Jesse says, picking up
Cause of Death: Blonde.

Hallie shakes her head as she goes through the rest of the titles. “Nope. You did good. These are all fresh blood, new gore.”

She sets the stack on one of the waiting chairs. When she straightens up, she looks at the wall clock, its second hand sweeping over a picture of a squat white jar of Harper Method ointment.

“Well now, isn’t this just perfection? My two-thirty canceled,” she says for form’s sake. “If we get right down to it, I can probably squeeze you in. And,” she stops to unclip Jesse’s hair, rubbing a few ends between her professional fingers, “you do look as though you could use a treatment.”

Jesse grabs onto the arms of the customer chair and lowers herself with some difficulty. She looks up at Hallie’s arms, beefy from working over the scalps of three generations of heads. Now the skin hangs loose from the giant knots of muscle; she’s still robust, but in a rickety way.

She shakes a can, and bran drifts down onto Jesse’s hair. Then she picks up a wooden-backed, boar bristle brush and begins the punishing strokes. “You know the dead dentists?” she says, referring to the three tiny offices in a row on this floor. “Well, one actually died. This week. He was working all the way to the end, although thank goodness not on me. You should have seen that equipment.”

“What?” Jesse says. “Pliers? A hand drill?”

“Close.”

For a minute or two as Hallie gets her rhythm, there’s just the thwapping of the fan blades and the brush, and the soft-shoe shush of her stepping around in the fallen bran. She stops a moment to tug a brochure out of the mirror frame and hand it to Jesse.

“Joy dropped it by. She says it’s a terrific deal.”

The pamphlet, its cover a collage of the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, advertises a ten-day excursion to Rome. “The Eternal City,” Hallie calls it, having picked this up a few brochures back. She and Jesse have been planning a trip there since an afternoon years ago when they’d driven over to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to cruise the tourist traps. On a lark, they stopped in to consult an astrologer operating out of a red and gold storefront, two doors down from Animal I.Q., where for two dollars you could go inside and see a chicken peck out tunes on a tiny piano, four dogs sitting at a table playing cards.

The astrologer, Cecil Luster, told Hallie and Jesse they were spiritually linked. That this connection had been formed in ancient Rome, and that they would both eventually find their way back there. Once put into their heads, the very improbability of these notions ran a feather under their imaginations and has given them years of feeling mysteriously slipknotted to each other, and to an exotic place, an unknowable past.

“Do you think we’ll ever really go?” Jesse says dreamily, ducking her head rhythmically under the brush strokes.

The case against them becoming footloose travelers is getting pretty strong. Aside from the Olympics and three Method conventions in Rochester, New York, the last of these in the early sixties, Hallie has not ventured much beyond Missouri and Arkansas in her sixty-five years. Neither she nor Jesse has been anywhere to speak of since Mexico City.

“Well, I’ve always felt a bit chafed here,” Hallie says. “And I can get pretty riled up by television travel shows. They make it seem like rolling off a log to get from here to there—to wherever. But when I try to imagine actually going myself, actually pulling on my girdle and catching the Trailways out, all I can think of are all the possibilities for mistakes and embarrassment.”

She sets the brush down, warms her palms by rubbing them up and down over her hips for a minute, then pulls a generous fingerful of ointment out of a large open jar and begins working it into Jesse’s scalp.

“Like I forget one of my prescriptions. I’m all harebrained getting ready for the trip and leave it behind on the kitchen counter. Now I’m in a foreign place. Not someplace nice where I’m having myself a wonderful time. Just a kind of generic foreign place. And I have to find a drugstore, or whatever they have there that’s like a drugstore. It turns out to be a place with bottles in the window, murky liquids, roots in jars of thick syrups. There’s a dried hoof on the counter. And of course I don’t know the language, so I have to pantomime my problem for the druggist. Something hideously embarrassing.”

“Hemorrhoids,” Jesse helps.

“Athlete’s foot’d do.”

“Well, we’ve got a reprieve from showing we can do it,” Jesse says, patting her stomach. “We can’t go until the baby can do without me for a while, or until she’s old enough to bring along.”

The old dial phone sitting on the glass cabinet of brushes and shampoos for sale rings, crashing into the sleepy atmosphere of the parlor.

“Never fails,” Hallie says, holding up her greased hands. “Probably my three-thirty saying she’ll be a little tardy.” She grabs a towel and wipes her large hands roughly before picking up. Jesse can tell within seconds that this is a personal call, within a minute that it’s Hallie’s best friend, Jesse’s mother.

“Too much bother,” Hallie is saying. Jesse peers over her godmother’s shiny hand, coffee is what she has written in childish block letters on a scratch pad. “Why don’t I just get one of those big electric urns from the U-Rent?” Jesse sees this is one of the hundred details for the big party Hallie is throwing for Frances’s combination sixty-fifth birthday and retirement from the public schools. Jesse will be on the guest list (she and her mother try to hold their breach beneath the notice of the town gossips), but she isn’t being included in any of the planning.

When Hallie hangs up, she pulls a flat box from the bottom shelf of the glass counter, opens it, and offers Jesse a chocolate-covered apricot. She keeps these—a childhood favorite of Jesse’s—around for whenever she stops by. Neither of them says anything for quite a while. Hallie dips up a bit more ointment and goes back to work on Jesse’s scalp. Finally she says, “I’m trusting you to handle this information with a gracious touch.”

“I’m the soul of graciousness,” Jesse says, pushing herself up straighter in the chair, improving her moral posture.

“The fact is—and it’s not all that flabbergasting if you really think about it—your mother has found herself a boyfriend.”

“Oh my.” Jesse tries to imagine this, tries to see her mother on a date. To Jesse’s knowledge, Frances has never dated anyone except Jesse’s father, and that was before Jesse was even around. In the more than twenty years since his death, she has continued a social life of Thursday-night bridge, a subscription to the Lakeside Players summer theater, and occasional lunches at the Tea Caddy with one or another of the same small retinue of friends she has had since she graduated from college and came back and slid into the middle of the middle class of New Jerusalem. Methodists as opposed to Episcopalians or Baptists.

Like many other wives she watched as her husband went into business, began to go bald, and read more and more of the newspaper, and developed firmer and firmer opinions on what he read, and then died sooner than anyone expected of cancer, liver problems, or a heart attack. In her case, the business was the drugstore on Willow, where Ray Austin dispensed medical advice as though he were an M.D. And his opinions became not just firmer, but more and more eccentric as time went on. By the time he died—way earlier than anyone would have expected, of a massive heart attack while he was playing the tuba in the Fourth of July parade—Jesse suspects her mother was exhausted with the effort of nearly twenty years of not being embarrassed by him. After that, she folded up her marital and sexual tents and settled into a social life among the widows, a full calendar of nothing, which nonetheless seemed to leave no room for “boyfriends.”

“His name is Darrell,” Hallie says, still serious, as though she’s talking about someone dying rather than someone falling in love. “He plays with a rock band over at the Blue Light. They played at the church dance awhile back is how she met him. He’s not who you’d expect. I just want you to be nice to her around this if you run into her.”

“I’m always nice.”

“In your heart you’re always nice, but in your mouth there’s sometimes just the tiniest touch of sarcasm.”

“And this Darren will sorely provoke me.”

“Darrell. Just remember, Frances is really happy about this.”

“He has a giant wen,” Jesse guesses. “On his nose. Or, no ... wait. He wears a drool cup.”