Aquamarine (6 page)

Usually she can draw Hallie in right off the bat, but today she can feel resistance tugging through her godmother’s fingertips before Hallie caves in and says, “It’s an extremely
small
hump.”

They are quiet for a time, the silence filled with their thoughts.

“A boyfriend,” Jesse finally says. “A rock and roller. I’d have thought she’d had enough of oddballs with Dad.”

“Come on,” Hallie says, picking up the hairbrush and tapping Jesse’s head with the back of it. “This guy’s a real Romeo, they say. Your old mother’s kicking back.”

“She’s such a puzzle. I thought genes were supposed to give you some affinity, but ... I mean aside from all the trouble between her and me, I’ve just never really felt whatever connection you’re supposed to feel. Is that awful?” When Hallie doesn’t reply, Jesse says, “I think the truth is you’re secretly my mother. Like in those old movies—Olivia de Havilland, Barbara Stanwyck. You know. You were pregnant, but you weren’t married and so what could you do? You slunk off to Jeff City to have me. And then you talked Mother into pretending I was hers and Dad’s. And all these years you’ve had to love me—tragically—from afar.”

“Sweetie, if I’d had you, it would’ve been only the second virgin birth in history.” This is Hallie’s standard line, that she has led a celibate life, is on a high shelf above the sexual shenanigans of everyone else. Jesse knows this can’t be true, knows because she knows all the other pieces of Hallie. There’s a blank spot, but its shape is not denial. There is simply something sitting in that spot that Hallie has, so far anyway, chosen not to reveal. It’s okay. Jesse can wait.

Hallie is the only person she has had the nerve to tell about Wayne, which is to say Hallie is the only person it didn’t take any nerve to tell. Her love for Jesse has always been unconditional. Jesse tests all the same. “Do you think less of me for this thing I’m doing?”

“Your timing’s interesting, I’ll say that.”

“I’ve got to stop it. We almost got caught Saturday. Well, I suppose we
did
get caught. But it was by Alice Avery and she’s so hip and all—”

“And has her own mysteries, they say. Eyebrows are up around here, waiting to see who she’s bringing down to live with her. I think Opal Leach is putting a fax machine down at the post office so she can get the word out instantly.” Hallie kneads Jesse’s scalp for a few moments while suspended in reverie over something. Finally it comes out. “Goodness, I love the food that girl serves.”

“I don’t even know why I’m doing it,” Jesse says. “It’s so dead wrong. You know I love Neal with my soul. And now the baby. I just don’t understand. It’s like something’s come over me.”

“The devil,” Hallie says in a phony, horror movie way.

“Could be. Honestly.”

“We could take you up to Canaan. There’s an old guy there who’s a dowser, does exorcisms if pressed, I hear tell. Has something rigged up in the backyard. Electric currents and moonlight.”

Jesse reaches up and, for a moment, holds on to Hallie’s wrist.

“It’s just that I want to, isn’t it? It’s just that plain. I want something I can’t have but I want it anyway and so I’m taking it. And then, because I can’t stand seeming so selfish, I chatter away about how wrong I know it is. As if that gives me points.”

Neither of them says anything for a while, then Jesse says, “Are you going hard on me today? I feel like you’re digging into my brain.”

“Nope. This is just the standard treatment. I charge extra for the rough stuff.”

But the next time she sees Wayne, Jesse just doesn’t have the heart to lower any booms. She’s over at his apartment in the middle of the afternoon. Both the Re/Max and UPS offices have little clock-face signs hanging on their doors, reading
BACK AT
4.

He lives in a development out by the county airport. The apartments are regular on the inside, but the exteriors are fixed up in this fake English way. The whole place is called Hampshire Mews.

Wayne’s roommate, Stan Feder, works at the Ace Hardware and is out of town at a paint seminar in St. Louis. This is a big opportunity for them. Wayne wanted to fix Jesse dinner, but she wasn’t up to the amount of scheming that would have required. And so she’s here for tea, or at least his idea of tea, which comes from movies and books, she guesses. The tea itself is instant. The sweets are Little Debbie snack cakes, arranged on a scratched plastic plate. He has also set out colored paper napkins. The apartment has central air, which adds a hum and a chill factor. Jesse has to borrow a sweatshirt as soon as she’s through the door. Even though it’s huge, the waistband cinches her stomach like a rubber band.

Wayne has Alberta Hunter on the CD player. Everything in this apartment is sprung, broken, and was already junk when it was new. Except his sound system, which cost more than his car.

He has a present for her, a robe. It’s black satin, knee-length, with black lace lapels. She can tell from the Victoria’s Secret box he went all the way up to the mall in Jefferson City to buy it.

“Happy birthday,” he says. Her birthday is in March. “I don’t mean for you to wear this now. It’s for after.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“I can keep it here,” he says.

She starts to cry.

“Don’t say anything,” he says when she still doesn’t say anything.

He cuts a snack cake in two and puts a half on her plate, then licks a dab of white filling off his thumb. “I know it’s hard on you. I’m just thinking that maybe, after the baby comes...”

She puts her head in her hand, to stop the sentence. She already knows where it’s going. His notion seems to be that being involved with someone who is a wife and mother will be less of a problem than being involved with a pregnant lady. She suspects he has hopes of then persuading her to leave Neal and New Jerusalem behind and go soaring off with him into skies above other places.

She can’t imagine any of this. Even in the privacy of her mind, she never takes this any further than it actually goes. She holds it in a present tense of kissing in cars, listening to bluesy music, her being impossibly pregnant, him being impossibly young. This
is
what it is. She can’t find any place on it where she can even pin a hope.

“Oh, excuse me,” someone says. Jesse turns to find out the grocery cart that has just banged into her from behind is being driven by her mother. It’s the express line and Jesse has her package of ground beef, carton of macaroni salad, and Summer’s Bounty starter plate on the belt, ready to be expressed while she reads a tabloid borrowed from a nearby rack. Her mother has caught her at a good moment, looking for the cover story on the baby born with a tattoo on its arm.

“I’ll have to make a citizen’s arrest on you,” Jesse says, nodding toward her mother’s half-full cart, way over the
TEN ITEMS OR LESS
posted on the cardboard sign above the cash register, trying to put her on the defensive, usually the best way to begin a conversation with Frances.

“Wendy and I have an understanding,” her mother says. Wendy is the checkout girl, who still looks about thirteen despite having worked here for years.

Jesse is wishing she didn’t have a ninety-nine-cent plastic plate on the belt next to her, and a tabloid in her hand. Two of her mother’s most cherished beliefs about Jesse are that she is stuck just above the poverty and literacy lines.

“Hallie tells me you’ve gotten yourself a beau.”

“Well, I am seeing someone.”

Seeing someone.
This has an amazing sound falling from her mother’s lips—the foreign, metallic sound of a lunatic pronouncement, as though she’s quoting a headline from the paper Jesse has just slid back into its rack. As though her mother is saying Elvis is alive and living with Natalie Wood in a gas station out in the Mojave Desert. Jesse hopes she’s not looking amused.

“You might wipe that smirk off your face,” her mother says as Wendy hands Jesse her change, as usual dropping the coins on top of the dollar bills so they slide onto the conveyor belt. Jesse picks up the change and stuffs it along with the folded money and the register tape into the back pocket of her jeans.

“Hey, I’m ...” Jesse starts, not sure where she’s going.

But her mother is already bustling her frozen entrees and skim milk and air deodorizer packs out of the cart, flashing Wendy a witheringly false smile, the one she thinks has made her so popular among “shop people” for years.

Jesse tries, against her better judgment, to break this deadlock. “I mean, I’d like to meet him,” she says, pulling her mother’s attention off Wendy, but with the smile intact.

“I’m sure you would.”

Jesse waits just long enough to see that this is it, the conversation has been closed, then tosses her keys high into the air and catches them just above her head as she steps on the rubber pad before the automatic door and heads out to the parking lot.

“Alice?” Jesse asks a collegiate-looking guy who shuts down a vacuum cleaner when she comes into the dining room. It’s early Thursday morning; she’s bringing the contract for the house over to the Fenny Inn.

“Kitchen,” he says, pointing.

Jesse comes through the swinging door and, seeing Alice in a long apron, laughs.

“What?” Alice says.

“You look just like a chef.”

“Well, what’d you think?” She nods toward the leatherette Re/Max folder Jesse is holding. “Time to sign my life away, eh? Have you had breakfast? Why don’t you let me fix you an omelette? I’ve given up hope of ever seeing you in that dining room. Might as well feed you in my kitchen.”

There aren’t any chairs, so Jesse hikes herself up onto a wooden stool against the wall, activating an old place of soreness just inside her right shoulder blade, left over from some peculiarity of her stroke, something done wrong in an infinitesimal way, but repeated a million times in all the practice laps of her youth. The insult has never been quite forgiven by the aggrieved muscle, which still kicks back with an occasional reminder.

Alice pulls from a shelf over the black iron stove a copper-bottomed pan, into which she smears what looks like half a stick of butter. She cracks eggs one-handed into a metal bowl, beats them with a wire whisk, shreds a minor mountain of Swiss cheese onto a plate.

“I’ve got one of those hinged pans, does the job for you,” Jesse says. “I suppose I’ll have to hide it if you ever drop by. And my bacon bits. My seasoned salt. My entire recipe card file.”

Alice, having finger-sifted the cheese onto the bubbling eggs, makes a little move with her wrist, which both flips the omelette over on itself and slips it to one side of the pan. When the omelette is done, she slides it onto a plate and hands it to Jesse, along with a fork and a napkin. She pours both of them large cups of coffee, and sets Jesse’s on the windowsill next to her. Then she wipes her hands on a towel stuck in the waist of her apron and leans back against the big chopping block in the center of the room.

“You eat. I’ll look at the papers.” She opens the Re/Max folder Jesse has brought with her and scans the contract, pulls a fat fountain pen from a hidden breast pocket, and signs.

“This is the most delicious plate of eggs I’ve ever had,” Jesse says. “I’m proud to sell a house to the person who made these eggs.”

Alice smiles and says, “Good. Let’s go swimming.”

“I told you, I don’t anymore.”

“I don’t know why, but I just don’t believe that.”

Jesse finishes the last of the omelette.

“Alice, I appreciate your cooking, and your buying this house, and I’d like you anyway, but I’m a different kind of person from you. This is a different place from where you come from. I have my husband and my godmother. My brother. I don’t have many friends. You seem to find me so interesting and I think I’m plain as can be. Or maybe I’m a plain person who just looks interesting. A plain person with a few sticks of dynamite strapped to her chest. I can feel you’ve got all these questions for me. You tripped onto my big secret, which I hope you’ll hold for me. But ordinarily, I don’t share confidences. I hate the gossip around this place.”

“Tell
me about it,” Alice says. “My lover’s moving down at the end of the month and I can practically feel the phone receivers already lifted, all those itchy fingers poised above the push buttons.”

“Maybe I’m being too hard ass?” Jesse says.

“I’m not taking offense, if that’s what you’re asking.”

This seems like a good enough ending to the conversation, and so Jesse doesn’t understand why she feels like it’s a dangling loose end for the two blocks it takes her before she U-turns back and pulls up to the doorway of Alice’s kitchen and hops out. “Well, come on,” she says sticking her head inside, nodding toward the Bronco idling high outside in the lot.

At the lip of the quarry, as she and Alice pull off their clothes, Jesse, who has undressed in front of thousands of strangers in hundreds of locker rooms in her life, is suddenly, unexpectedly modest. She hangs her T-shirt on a peg of broken branch and covers her enlarged breasts with her hands as she turns back toward Alice. “No one’s seen me big like this except my doctor and my husband.”

Alice nods in fascination, watching Jesse pull her suit on over her swollen belly. “Yeah. Pregnant sure is something.”

They drift around each other in the inner tubes. In a way, Jesse feels as though she is betraying Willie, bringing someone else out here.

“How can it stay so cold in this heat?” Alice says, dragging her fingertips through the blue-black water.

“Depth, I suppose. They used to say this quarry’s so deep no one knows where its bottom is.”

“How come you changed your mind? About bringing me here?”

“I don’t know. I don’t seem to
know
my own mind these days. I tell you I don’t want you nosing around in my life, and then I bring you to my most closely held place.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m after your secrets. I’m not. I’m just looking for a way in.”

“Then why do I keep feeling all these questions hanging around? The ones you ask, the ones I can hear even though you’re not asking them?”