Aquamarine (17 page)

“Come on, lighten up. Don’t get global. I’ll fix some dinner,” Sharon says, hoisting herself out of the pool, tying a towel around her waist, bending to twist another around her hair. She shuts down the pool lights and takes Jesse’s hand as they start through the breezeway that leads into the house. Inside, she pulls on some shorts and starts up dinner while Jesse pulls a couple of apricots out of the vegetable bin in the refrigerator, then falls into the one-armed recliner they’ve pulled into the kitchen. She sticks to its plastic upholstery. The compressor on their aging air conditioner is no match for the heat and humidity of this summer.

“I may need a lawyer myself. Some dweeb motorcycle cop pulled me over this afternoon. Someone new. They’re doing radar from planes now, so we can all throw away our fuzz busters, I guess.”

“Oh, Ma, you can’t get any more points!”

“Don’t worry. I’m planning on being incredibly slow from now on. People walking will pass me by.”

“Don’t spoil your appetite,” Sharon says, eyeing the apricots. She turns back to the counter. “I’m going gourmet tonight.” She drops a couple of hash brown patties into the toaster slots and goes into an off-camera, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” narration: “One of Florida’s maverick young chefs, Bellini is bodacious with her use of frozen toaster foods.”

“You going out tonight?” Jesse says.

Sharon turns and nods and rolls her eyes like a maniac. “To the show with Janine and the baby. Ian’s meeting us there.”

“She brings the baby to the movies? Doesn’t that drive everyone nuts?”

“Nah. Mostly she sleeps. Mostly I hold her while I pretend I’m watching the movie, but really I get to drive myself crazy looking out of the side of my eye to see if Janine and Ian are making out, or worse.”

“What worse?” Jesse says, and Sharon rolls her eyes again, this time a slow, “get real” roll.

“Well,” Jesse says. “It’ll probably be character-building.”

“You don’t have to say stuff like that.”

“I don’t, do I? I keep thinking I do, but I suppose I really don’t. Sometimes you don’t know what to do, being a parent, so you just mouth some worthless thing your own mother said to you.” She sees from behind that Sharon has stopped in the middle of her flurry of cooking motions, her shoulders are shuddering softly, and so knows without seeing tears that Sharon is crying. This happens so suddenly lately, like the brief afternoon rains down here.

She can’t bear her daughter’s suffering; she feels it too acutely. Sharon knows this, which makes her feel guilty on top of depressed. The two of them get tangled up in the looping lariats of each other’s feelings. Jesse has to get her out of here. Sharon has one more year of high school, then Jesse is going to make sure she goes away to college.
Way
away. Otherwise she fears they’ll turn into some horrifying mother-daughter duo. Alluding cryptically to family secrets, dwelling obsessively on ancient memories. Behaving oddly when visitors stop by.

“Hey,” she says to Sharon’s back now. “Just stay home if you want.”

It will be better for Jesse, though, if Sharon goes out. Then Jesse can slip off and pay Oscar a visit, which she would really like to do. She hates to twirl out of the house like Gidget while her daughter stays home, despondent for lack of a boyfriend.

But Sharon has something else pressing on her mind tonight. Jesse can tell. The tone of her depression is slightly different. Jesse waits.

“Do you think we could get some new furniture?” Sharon asks in a damp voice. “A camelback sofa, maybe.”

“Oh no,” Jesse says, seeing that this is about Tom.

“I only don’t want him to think we’ve gone downhill,” Sharon says.

“I’ll have to remember to put my teeth in on Thursday.”

“No, I mean”—Sharon turns from the stove and waves with a big fork in her hand—“you may have noticed how few kitchen tables in magazines are covered with lime green contact paper. Or how when Barbara Walters interviews celebrities in their homes, the chairs always have two arms.
Both
chairs. The celebrities never have to say to Barbara, ‘Here. You take the good chair.’”

“It’s not like we have a dead washing machine on the front porch,” Jesse says.

“No. That’s Alabama tacky. We’re Florida shabby.”

Jesse pushes the lever forward, launching herself slowly out of the recliner. She lays out plates and forks and paper napkins and a big plastic bottle of Coke on the coffee table in front of the TV.

Sharon brings out the hash browns and a pan of scrambled eggs.
“Au from age,
” she says, indicating the slices of cheese melted on top of the eggs. “Bellini’s genius lies in elevating the humble to the sublime, as in her breakthrough dessert, Ho Hos Suzette.”

They turn on “Wheel of Fortune.”

“But, can Vanna handle the pressure tonight?” Sharon says.

They’ve noticed that although Vanna White is required to say only “bye bye,” a lot of nights lately she’s been dropping her second “bye.”

Two hours later, Sharon is out at the Quad Cinemas at the Fashion Mall, and Jesse is lying on the low tides of Oscar’s water bed, the first purchase of his new bachelorhood. When his wife, Louise, left, she took with her a van full of their regular sensible furniture and the next day Oscar went over to Water Bed World and, not on drugs or anything, let himself be talked into this California king with gray marbleized Formica frame and urn-shaped lamps attached to the nightstands. The only thing he didn’t take was the fountain option.

The TV’s on, a PBS special on an old Hollywood director. Clips of his movies, and then little interviews with stars who worked with him, now terrifically old. Most of them look like they were exhumed for the occasion.

“If they ever do a salute to you,” Jesse tells Oscar, “I won’t appear on it. I couldn’t stand for everyone to see me so decrepit and dressing like I haven’t been out of the house since 1958. I’ll phone in my little testimonial.”

Oscar is across the room, posing in front of the mirror on the closet door in Jesse’s cotton camisole, which is stretched tight across his chest, thick black hairs corkscrewing out through the lace at the top. “I’ll bet I could be great at drag, except I’d never get anything that fit. Probably all they have in my size is geriatric wear. Those girdles as long as bermudas. Underpants like cabanas.” He comes back to bed and Jesse eddies a little on the rubberized seas.

“Come on. You’ll stretch it out,” she says, plucking at the camisole’s spaghetti strap.

“Yes, but now it’ll have my musk all over it. Oscar: The Fragrance.”

She and Oscar have been lovers, or whatever it is they are but don’t call themselves, for quite some time now. The five years she has been on her own and the last couple she was married to Tom. At first on the sly because they were both married. Even since they’ve become freed up, though, they haven’t made any big changes. Now she parks in his driveway when she comes over, instead of around the block, is about all.

If they came out of this gray area, it would be into each other’s lives. They’d feel obliged to go out to dinner together and celebrate little anniversaries. They’d have to begin some kind of complicated partnership instead of just hanging in with this low-maintenance thing. And too, they’d be forced to align themselves against the local brand of redneck hatred. Oscar is black, and Venus Beach is a place where enlightenment has pretty much caught on, but race relations are still a bit sticky in patches. Jesse would be willing to take on some trouble around this. She enjoys shaking small minds and listening to the beads rattle around inside. But Oscar isn’t up for it. He says he just wants to sell Toyotas and watch Dolphins games and not wind up as the party torch on someone’s front lawn.

The real issue for Jesse is that she doesn’t want a big romantic deal with anyone around here. She’s trying to lighten up her luggage so she can be ready to take the night bus out.

He traces a finger along the small, right-angle scar on her jaw, bothering her while she does her nails with a bottle of polish she swiped from Sharon.

“How’d you get this anyhow?” Oscar says. “Knife fight?”

She closes the bottle, sets it down, and touches the scar carefully, not wanting to smear the polish. “Back talk from a diving board.”

He kisses her, then rolls over.

“Paint my toenails?” he says, stretching his long, thickthighed leg across her lap.

“I might be able to get Anthony something at the dealership,” he says as she takes his foot and begins. “Washing the used cars. Writing up the windshields. It’d be kind of like vandalism, so he might really get into it. And he could work his way up. That’s the problem with working at that fish hut. No future.”

“What would he write on the windshields?”

“Come on.
RUNS NEW. ONE OWNER, HATES GAS.
Baby, I could get you such a deal on a Corolla right now. I could do the financing and spread your payments over forever. You wouldn’t even notice you were buying anything.” This is an old conversation. It kills Oscar that she won’t let him sell her a Toyota.

“You’d give me a trade-in on the Boss Hog?” Jesse says.

“The Hog we dump at night in the Everglades,” he says. “Let the quicksand take her down.”

The TV is on when Jesse gets home. Sharon and Janine are watching a rock video featuring some sexually menacing-looking guys in leather and studded collars and sweaty chests. Jesse doesn’t suppose these can be wholesome images for teenage girls just figuring themselves out, but on the other hand, she can’t imagine how she could even begin to monitor all the stuff in the air around Sharon. She just counts on her daughter being able to resist all that is false or corrupt, while she worries endlessly that Anthony will fall prey to the most worthless temptations of the culture. She worries she’s replicating her Own mother’s brand of parenting, leaving the strong child to fend for herself while fighting a lifetime of battles on behalf of the weak one.

Little Madonna is lying on the sofa in her diaper. She’s busy playing with her toes. Sharon and Janine seem to have incorporated the baby into their lives so easily it amazes Jesse. She tries to imagine having a baby now herself and feels a swoon of exhaustion pass through her just at the idea.

“Hallie called,” Sharon says.

“I’m beat. I’ll catch her tomorrow.”

“No, she said call as late as you want, she’ll be up watching a vampire movie at Grandma’s. She wants to give you her flight time.”

Jesse’s godmother lives nearby, about ten miles up the coast. Acting on what seemed to be pure impulse, she moved down here a couple of years back. Jesse would have liked her to move in with them, but Hallie is accustomed to being by herself, and so she bought a small apartment in a retirement community, Golden Sands. There’s a restaurant on the grounds, and the apartment has built-ins like microwaves and dishwashers and a buzzer in the bathroom that will bring help in a crisis.

“I’d never use it,” Hallie told Jesse. “I couldn’t stand anyone finding me bruised in the tub, or headfirst on the floor in front of the commode.”

She loves the atmosphere of the place, which seems to Jesse to be concocted mostly of souped-up fun used as a means of distracting the residents from the fact that the reaper is gaining on them. Hallie is one of the younger women, and cuts a jaunty figure around the grounds riding a huge tricycle, which seems to embarrass her not at all.

She minds Florida only in the hottest, most humid, buggiest part of the summer, and so makes this the time of her annual visit back home. This year, though, from what Jesse hears, it has been hotter in Missouri than down here. Hallie is due back in a couple of days and Jesse will pick her up at the airport in Palm Beach. This call can really wait, but if Jesse puts it off, Hallie—who likes to get everything squared away, written down, her boarding pass preprinted, her special meal (low-salt) ordered ahead—will become unnecessarily agitated.

Jesse pulls a carton of chocolate milk from the refrigerator and brings it along with her over to the wall phone. “I want to drink your blood,” she says when Hallie picks up on the other end. Jesse’s mother will have already gone to bed.

“You can afford to be witty. You’re not watching this. I’m going to have to sleep with the lights on.”

“Give me your flight time. Honestly, I can’t wait until you’re back,” Jesse says, and writes everything down, then says in a low voice, “I will be wearing a pinata and standing under the big clock.”

She doesn’t mention Anthony’s troubles. Hallie is staying in Jesse’s mother’s house, is probably using the downstairs extension in the den. Frances is probably sound asleep, but still. Jesse doesn’t want to take the risk of being eavesdropped on. Her mother doesn’t need to know about Anthony’s arrest.

“How’d the party go?” she asks instead. Her mother retired in June, after forty-plus years of teaching English at the high school. Hallie and some other old friends collaborated on a celebration.

“Oh, it was a yardful. Persis Goudy, that old bag of wind, gave a speech that made your mother sound like Mr. Chips.”

Jesse can’t think of anything upbeat to say about her mother’s career other than that she’s happy she managed to avoid ever winding up in her English class.

“Here’s something, though,” Hallie says. “Your mother’s gone and got herself a beau.”

“Oh my.”

“She’ll tell you herself in a bit, I expect,” Hallie says. “I think just yet she’s a little shy about it.”

“A romance? Mother? Is he a geezer?”

“What a thing to say! And he is especially not. For these parts and our age group, he’s quite a hunk. I’ll give you details ... you know. Later.”

“Polaroids?”

“Mmm. Videos.”

“Can we not do a pink cake this time? Please?” Elaine Kurczak brings over one of the gold plastic thermos pitchers that fulfill the Pancake Haus’s “bottomless cup of coffee” promise. Jesse is sitting in the back booth, which is tacitly set aside for staff. It’s eleven in the morning, past the breakfast crowd, before lunch starts, and Elaine can take out half an hour to go over the menu for a sweet sixteen splash party they’re doing next week.