Aquamarine (2 page)

As many times as she has been down here, she always gets a small thrill when she first comes out of the low entrance tunnel into the main cavern, where the stone turns slick and opens wide, like a yawn. She feels she is standing inside the mouth of a giant petrified creature from an earlier chapter of time. She likes to hear the sighs of surprise pass through the huddled clusters of tourists as they come upon this underground cathedral. Anyone seeing it for the first time feels like the first person seeing it, ever. It brings out the explorer in people. For those so inclined, there’s a religious cast to the experience.

She shuts down lights as she goes, rattles bar handles on the exit doors, drags her fingertips along the cool, moist, smooth walls. On her way out, she passes the Azure Grotto, washed in blue floods. She’d like to go in and sit for a while, make the blue go to aquamarine. Drop in on the past. But it’s dinnertime now, and she has to see to the people in her present. She goes to fetch her brother.

William helps out in the curio shop, but not as cashier. They tried that, but money confounds him; twenties are much the same as ones. It’s easy for him to foul up, and for people to cheat him. What he’s good at is dusting the old pine shelves and the merchandise, replacing the stock—stalagmite-shaped salt and pepper shakers, cutaway log slices laminated with pictures of the Azure Grotto and Bagnell Dam up by the Lake of the Ozarks. Old-fashioned souvenirs they buy from out-of-date companies. O-K Goods. Golly Notions. The only problem is when he occasionally takes too good care of things, gets on a dusting jag and polishes everything twice through. Or loses sight of the point and yanks a souvenir out of a customer’s hands, placing it back on its shelf, just so, where it belongs. He always has such a look of righteousness afterward, a job well done.

Coming into the shop now, she finds him in another mode, sitting on a high stool in the corner, the lights off in the back of his eyes. He brightens slowly when he sees her, as though he’s on a rheostat. She worries that when no one is around, William waits in this deactivated state—for whomever, but especially for her.

She thinks about Willie and the coming baby. In some ways he may be great with the kid. He loves repeating things, can play the simplest games for hours. That’s the up side. He can also be full of mischief. When they were little, he used to enjoy coming up behind Jesse on the stairs and giving her a little push. She’ll just have to keep an eye out.

“Hungry?” Jesse says, smoothing back his damp hair.

He shakes his head.

“I know it’s hot. Come anyway. Have some lemonade, at least.”

She takes his hand to pull him off the stool, but he begins shaking it hello. A joke he enjoys.

“Let’s hit the bunker,” Neal says, back in the kitchen, stacking bologna sandwiches on a plate. It’s so humid the white bread triangles bend limply over his fingers as he picks them up. Jesse hands William a stack of paper cups and the lemonade pitcher. She brings a bag of barbecue chips, and the three of them go into the big back bedroom.

She and Neal used to beat the heat by spending the worst nights sleeping in the cave on camp cots they would clatter down the steps, bundling themselves against the damp in cotton blankets, holding hands across the gap between the frames. Drifting into sleeps kept restless by light moans in their middle ears or stirrings in their cerebral cortexes or chills passing through their marrow—excitations caused by the nocturnal sighing, the subterranean exhalations, of the cave.

They don’t do this now that Willie lives with them. He likes open spaces; even windowless rooms agitate him. One time years ago they brought him down into the cave, and he looked around in a wild, ratchety way, pivoting his head like an insect, and began slapping his hands against the outside of his thighs and making sounds that fell just shy of words. It was awful to watch. Jesse brought him up and out, calmed him down some with a ride behind her on the power mower, letting the slow circling and the wet green smell massage him. For the most part now, he pretends the cave doesn’t exist.

After the first few days of this spell of heat, Neal tricked up this room—the only one in the house with an air conditioner—as a survival shelter, bringing in the TV and VCR on their castored cart, sofa pillows to prop at the head of the bed, lawn chairs to flip open at its foot. Now the three of them chill out in here and pass their evenings in the wide world of cable.

William likes the home shopping channels best. He thinks the announcers are “nice” and wants to buy everything. Jesse thinks that if the retarded had credit cards, they’d have houses piled to the ceilings with air deionizers and Cubic Zirconia tennis bracelets. Neal finesses through the high-numbered stations to get to “Love Connection.” At the moment, Chuck Woolery is laughing and shaking his head in disbelief at a contestant, a thin guy with old-fashioned glasses and a shirt buttoned at the collar. He looks a little like Buddy Holly.

“This guy is so pathetic,” Neal says. “He rented a limo to pick her up for the date. These guys should talk to me. They should call me first. I’m great with women.”

“You haven’t had any opportunity to be great with women,” Jesse points out. “First you were shy, then you met me.”

“Well, I’m great with you.”

When they met, Jesse was just back from Mexico City, looking to fill in the several suddenly open hours a day during which it was no longer necessary to be in water. What she did instead was pace, mostly inside herself. She would spend nights out on the sleeping porch of her mother’s house, listening to the willow branches rustling like satin drapes. Lying on her back, looking out through the old bowed screens at the phosphorescent sky, longing for dawn, and for event.

Neal walked calmly into the middle of this, offering a way out. He didn’t expect her to balance forever on some peak of greatness, or leap to some next peak. He thought it was fine for her just to fall and let him catch her. (Years later, when she went to see “Cat People,” in the middle of the scene where John Heard, who’s a zookeeper, ties Nastassja Kinski, who’s secretly a panther, to the bed so he can make love to her without getting killed, Neal, who was sitting next to Jesse eating popcorn, tugged at her sleeve with buttery fingers and said, “That’s how I felt when we were starting off.”)

He takes things the way they come, which has kept him a contented person all the time Jesse has known him. And now their situation offers even more to be content with. The cave’s a modest moneymaker, the baby’s on the way. He tells Jesse he dreams all the time now of catching plump, rainbow-silvered fish. “Sometimes I don’t even have a rod and reel. They just jump up into the boat.”

He has worked softly on Jesse over the years, trying to persuade her to his contented point of view, but all he has really been able to do is to put a layer of soundproofing between her and whatever it is she has always been listening for. If she is alone and quiet and the phone rings, it explodes inside her like a starter’s pistol. For almost her whole life, ringing phones, mail carriers’ sacks, telegram offices, have held too much promise, elevated her expectations in a way she can’t account for. She can’t say what the call is that she’s waiting for, what is in the letter.

They started trying to have kids around the same time all their friends did. But it didn’t happen. Jesse thought maybe her mother had been right in all her grim predictions about swim training, that her body was now ruined for all standard female purposes. That missing all those periods had thrown her permanently out of whack.

Somewhere into the third year of trying, she and Neal stopped talking about the possibility so much, and moved into an alternative version of married life which quickly filled up with him running the cave and Jesse taking her real estate license. They have a fairly lively social life—Friday night fish fries over at the VFW, Saturday nights playing cards with Claude and Laurel Owen. Roasting a chicken or two on Sunday afternoons for one or another combination of her and Neal’s families.

It is the chickens, more than almost anything else, that have become markers of passing time for Jesse. Every time she pulls one out of the plastic sack and begins washing it off and wrestling out the giblets, settling it slippery in the Pyrex dish, banking it with equally pale and translucent wedges of onion, she thinks, how many chickens does this make? For how many chickens has she been here, standing in place?

Sometimes she’s amazed she has been with Neal more than twenty years. It seems more should have happened. When she hears couples say they’ve been through a lot together, that they’re survivors, Jesse realizes she and Neal haven’t had to survive much of anything other than his attack of kidney stones and the time she slipped on a patch of ice and put her hand through the storm door. And of course they’ve had to adjust to taking on William, which they did a few years back on account of him getting to be too much for Jesse’s mother. But for the most part when she looks back on the long series of days she and Neal have shared, they look much the same.

But now, suddenly, there is change everywhere on the horizon. Sometime last winter—after years and years of having pretty much dismissed the likelihood of having any kid around besides Willie—Jesse suddenly began to feel different from any way she had ever felt before. Heavier, and at the same time more buoyant. She knew right
off,
and began counting in months.

They know from the test it’s a girl. They got a book of names, but most of them seemed too pale and ordinary. For this surprising baby, they needed an exceptional name—to launch her into life with a little something extra. Bathsheba. Désirée. Jasmine. They squabbled over these for a while, then instantly agreed on Olivia, and that was that.

During the commercial, Neal pulls from his T-shirt pocket a soft plastic miniature slice of pizza with a hook dangling from its point. “Fred Otto gave me this lure. He says it pulls in the bass like crazy. Who’d think so, but why not I guess? Everybody else likes pizza, why not fish?”

“I think I’ve got another Fenny’s Lake place sold,” Jesse tells him while William inspects the lure. “To Alice Avery. The Inn’s such a big success that she’s being run out of her own home. Wants a place further back up the lake, and I’ve got just the property for her. My red-letter day is right around the corner, I can feel it.”

When “Love Connection” is over, they punch in a tape of the last two days’ episodes of “M.D./R.N.,” a soap opera they’re addicted to. Or more correctly, a soap Jesse is addicted to and has dragged Neal and Willie along with her.

“Why’s she leaving Rick?” Neal says when Sarah, head of the hospital pharmacy (and secret diet pill abuser), has hurled a toaster across her kitchen and stormed out with such vehemence that the flimsy prop wall wobbles. Neal only half watches this show and so often loses plot lines.

“He was selling crack to her little sister. Plus she suspects he’s mixed up with those Asian gangsters. I myself think it’s because their white-bread viewers don’t like the guy who plays him. He has this tufting hair on his shoulders that shows in the make-out scenes. They’re probably going to write in someone new for her. Someone just as rotten, but less furry.”

“Which one’s her sister?”

Jesse puts a silencing hand on his thigh. “Here’s the good part,” she says.

Rhonda, the sexy, wicked intensive care nurse is being interrogated by some cops. She’s in her nurse hat even though they’re at the police station. In all the other episodes for the past couple of weeks, Rhonda has been busy trying to kick over her traces after blowing away Stephen Poole, the hunky heart surgeon, who casually decided he wasn’t going to leave his wealthy wife after all. When Rhonda gave him her ultimatum—Rhonda or his wife—he laughed. Big mistake.

Jesse loves Rhonda. At first she thought it was because the character is so outrageously ruthless, and then for another while she thought it was because the actress who plays her is so good, but then one day the truth just zapped her. In some small but significant way—something about her eyes, something lit up at the back of them, as though she’s in on a secret—Rhonda is eerily reminiscent of Marty Finch.

By the time the second episode is over, Jesse feels cabin fever pressing in on them.

Neal, who can read her moods as though they are weather, says, “Why don’t we go into town and get some ice cream at the Thirty-one Flavors?”

“You two go on without me,” Jesse says. “I might just go for a little walk. Get the kinks out of my legs.” She’s finding that being pregnant is great for getting her out of almost anything she doesn’t feel like doing.

“Supercuts?” William says, his voice giggly with hope.

“Hunh?” says Neal, dragging his attention off a commercial featuring a woman trying to lure a business-suited guy back into bed with how great she smells.

Jesse scissors two fingers across the top of Willie’s hair.

“Sure,” Neal says, and shrugs. “Why not?”

They try to hold these cuts down to once a month, but if Willie gets pitiful about it, Jesse lets him go sooner. It’s only ten dollars, and it makes him so happy. He’d go every day if it was left to him. He has a crush on Darlene, one of the beauticians there, a tiny girl with haggard hair that looks like it has a heavy past separate from her own.

Jesse traces her bottom lip with the side of her thumb, thinking. What she is thinking in particular at this moment is that the Supercuts is in a shopping plaza farther on from the 31 Flavors. And, if Willie gets a haircut, what with having to wait for Darlene, who’s popular, they won’t be back for over an hour. Which would give her time to drive out and meet Wayne Banks for fifteen minutes.

She waits at the window, watching them disappear down the long drive, Willie wrapped tight around Neal on the motorcycle as they set off for Highway 4 toward town. She rushes into the bathroom and puts on mascara, then a dab of concealer on the right-angle scar along her jaw, hits herself with a shot of Jontue, and pulls on a clean shirt and maternity jeans. She takes the Bronco and heads out in the opposite direction, toward Maple Lanes. It’s Wednesday, Wayne’s league night.