Return Trips (11 page)

Of course I did not tell Betty—or anyone—about crying like that. All I said about going to the shrink was that it was all right, no big deal. And I said about the good-looking furniture. Betty was interested in things like that.

But could the fast-swimming older woman be that shrink? Well, she could be; it seemed the kind of thing that she might do, not caring what anyone thought, or who might see her. But she would never remember or recognize me—or would she?

The job search is something that I try not to think about, along with sex, general deprivation. It is what I should be doing, naturally; and in theory that is what I do all day, look for work. However, these days I seldom get much further than the want ads in the paper, those columns and columns of people saying they want secretaries, or sales people. And
no one, not in a million years, would think of hiring me for either of those slots. Secretaries are all about the same size, very trim and tidy-looking, very normal, and so are people in sales—just ask my mother.

Sometimes an ad for a waitress sounds possible, and that is something I’ve done; I had a part-time waitress job the summer I got out of Washington High. But in those days I was thinner, and just now my confidence is pretty low. In my imagination, prospective employers, restaurant owners take one look at me and they start to sneer: “We don’t even have the space for a person your size,” or some such snub.

Instead I swim, and swim, swim—for as long as I can, every day. I can feel my muscles stretching, pulling, getting longer, in the warm strong water.

An odd coincidence: on a Tuesday afternoon—short Rec. hours, one-thirty to three—both Blond Beard and the big black woman who told me to swim closer to the side, so crossly—both those people on that same day said Hello to me, very pleasantly.

First, I had just jumped down into the pool, the shallow end of the lap section, when Blond Beard swam up and stood beside me for a minute. Looking up at me, he said Hello, and he smiled. However, his small pale eyes were vague; very likely he did not remember that we sort of talked before (hopefully, he did not remember the garlic).

I concentrated on not making too much of that encounter.

Later, when I had finished swimming and was drying off and dressing in the locker room, I was half aware that someone else was in there, too, on the other side of a row of lockers. Hurrying, not wanting to see anyone (or anyone to
see me!), I was about to rush out of the room when at the exit door I almost bumped into the big black woman. In fact, it was a little funny, we are so nearly the exact same size. We both smiled; maybe she saw the humor in it, too? And then she said, “Say, your strokes coming along real good.”

“Oh. Uh, thanks.”

“You re a real speeder these days.”

I felt a deep pleasure in my chest. It was like praise from a teacher, someone in charge. We walked out of the building together, the black woman going up across the playground, where the peace marches gathered, maybe toward Geary Boulevard. And I walked down Arguello, out into the avenues. Home.

The water in the pool is warm. In our cold apartment, where my mother screams over the higher and higher utility bills and keeps the heat down, I only have to think about that receiving warmness, touching all my skin, to force myself out into the cold and rain, to walk the long blocks to Rossi Pool, where quickly undressed I will slip down into it.

And swim.

In January, though, the weather got suddenly warmer. The temperature in the pool also seemed to have suddenly changed; it was suddenly cooler. Distrustful, as I guess I tend to be regarding my perceptions, I wondered if the water only seemed cooler. Or, had they turned it down because of the warmer weather, economizing, as my mother does? In any case it was disappointing, and the pool was much less welcoming, no matter how falsely spring-like the outside air had turned.

“Do you think the water’s colder?” It was Blond Beard who asked this of me one day; we were standing momentarily
in the shallow end. But although I was the person he had chosen to ask, I was still sure that for him I was no one; he remembers nothing of me from one tiny, minor contact to another. I am a large non-person.

I told him, “Yes, it seems a little colder to me” (not wanting to say too much—again).

“They must have turned it down.”

Since the pool is 100 feet long, a half mile is 26 lengths, which is what I try to do every day. “I swim three miles a week,” would sound terrific, to anyone, or even, “I swim a little over two miles a week.” Anyone would be impressed, except my mother.

On some days, though, I have to trick myself into swimming the whole 26. “I’m tired, didn’t sleep too well, 16 lengths is perfectly okay, respectable,” I tell myself. And then, having done the 16, I will say (to myself) that I might as well do a couple more, or four more. And if you get to 20 you might as well go on to 26, as I almost always do.

On other, better days I can almost forget what I am doing; that is, I forget to count. I am only aware of a long strong body (mine) pulling through the water, of marvelous muscles, a strong back, and long, long legs.

Sometimes, walking around the neighborhood, I see swimmers from the pool—or, people I think I have seen in swimming; in regular clothes it is hard to be sure.

Once, passing a restaurant out on Clement Street I was almost sure that the waitress with her back to the window was the big black woman, formerly cross but now friendly
and supportive. Of course I could go in and check it out, even say Hello, but I didn’t want to do that, really. But I was pleased with just the idea that she might be there, with a waitress job in such a nice loose-seeming coffee place. I even reasoned that if they hired that woman, big as she is, mightn’t someone hire me, about the same size? (I think swimming is making me more optimistic, somehow.) Maybe I should look harder, not be so shy about applying for waitress jobs?

However, one day in late June, there is no mistaking Blond Beard, who comes up to me on Arguello, near Clement: I am just coming out of the croissant place where I treated myself to a cup of hot chocolate. I am celebrating, in a way: the day before I had pulled all my courage together and went out to a new “rehabilitation place” for old people, out in the Sunset, and they really seemed to like me. I am almost hired, I think. They would give me a place to live—I could leave home!

“Hey! I know you from swimming, don’t I? In Rossi?” Blond Beard has come up close to me; he is grinning confidently up into my face. His clothes are very sharp, all clean and new, like from a window at Sears.

“You look so good, all that swimming’s really trimmed you down,” he tells me. And then, “This is a coincidence, running into you like this when I was needing a cup of coffee. Come on back in and keep me company. My treat.”

He is breathing hard up into my face, standing there in the soft new sunlight. I am overwhelmed by the smell of Juicy Fruit—so much, much worse than garlic, I suddenly decide. And I hate sharp clothes.

Stepping back I say, “Thanks, but I have to go home now,” and I move as smoothly as though through water.

I leave him standing there.

I swim away.

Actually it is Jimmy, Stella’s fourth and final husband (Stella died a month ago), for whom everyone is waiting, all these old people, in this large sunny clearing in a grove of ancient redwoods. It is high noon, on a bright October day, and time for lunch, but Rachel, the hostess, has delayed serving the food, because of Jimmy’s lateness. This will be everyone’s first sight of him since Stella’s death; he took off for Santa Barbara just afterward to visit a sister there, and presumably to recuperate, travelling in Stella’s old car. Perhaps the car is making him late this morning? The guests, old friends, sip nervously at tomato juice or club soda, while a few of the hardier ones have white wine; they are all in their seventies or eighties, except for a young dark, vividly pretty girl, Day, a visiting friend of Rachel’s, who will help with lunch.

Everyone, including Rachel and her husband, Baxter, and Day, the visiting girl, is seated at a long bandanna-cloth-covered table, on benches. Not far from the table is a small oval concrete swimming pool, its unused murky water now flat and still. Here and there in the grove are clumps of huge
thick-fronded ferns, a dusty gray green, quite motionless, in the moted sunlight.

They are all waiting for Jimmy, of course, but it is Stella whose lively absence dominates the mood, so that several people, especially Rachel and Baxter, have to remind themselves that they are waiting for Jimmy, not for Stella.

Rachel and Baxter’s house is up on a knoll, invisible from the pool, among tall thick eucalyptus trees, gray thickets of manzanita. It is a big house, though cheaply and somewhat flimsily constructed of clapboard, now nicely weathered to silver. It was a great bargain forty years ago when Rachel and her first husband had it built. Now it is probably worth a lot of money, as she and Baxter wryly say to each other from time to time, and they add, “but only if we sell it.” (Baxter is Rachel’s third husband, and surely her last, she thinks.) Near the house, a little way down toward the pool, is the guest cabin, slatted, green.

All the houses in this small enclave, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, are somewhat similar, as, not quite accidentally, are their owners; friends, they all were professional people, “liberais,” mildly intellectual. Rachel was a doctor, a professor of medicine, rather distinguished; Baxter, although he inherited money, was an art critic. Stella was a painter.

What once were vacation homes now house their retirements.

In those younger, summer days, feelings sometimes ran high: dissensions occurred over love affairs, real or imagined; opposing political views split their ranks. But now old feuds are quieted, if not forgotten—especially today, as in an almost unified way they think about Stella, the first of them to die, and they think about Jimmy, who is
very
late.

Now, conferring with Day, Rachel decides to go ahead and serve the first course, a gazpacho, which has already been
brought down and is sitting there on the table, in its huge green-glazed tureen. And so Rachel ladles out the soup, and Day takes the bowls around to everyone.

Actually, Stella has always been a sort of unifying principle for this group, in that they have generally been united in opposition to whatever she was doing. Not actual opposition to her views, but Stella always, somehow, went too far. Wonderful of her to march in Selma at already sixty-odd, but did she have to get arrested, so purposefully, and spend a week in that jail? Or, more recently, was it necessary, really, that she scale the fence at Diablo Canyon, protesting nuclear power? Not to mention the fact that she often drank too much, and almost always talked too much, with her proud white tooth-flashing grin; she had too many husbands and lovers (though fortunately, it was sometimes remarked, no children).

Her final marriage to Jimmy Scott, a former alcoholic, former film director (not important), was hard to understand, the other husbands having been, in their ways, almost predictable: Jack, a Communist, and Jewish (this was daring, in 1922, for a New England girl of “good”—Republican, Unitarian—family); Horace, a black longshoreman; and Yosh, a Japanese painter, whom she married just after Pearl Harbor (of course). But—Jimmy?

During the illness preceding Stella’s death, however, the mercifully short three months, Jimmy’s behavior toward her was observed to be exemplary. It was hardly a time when anyone would have behaved badly, but still his patience was remarkable. He searched for out-of-print books that Stella mentioned wanting to reread, for out-of-season flowers for her bedroom (they were not rich people, not at all), for special delicate foods, rare fruits to tempt her waning appetite.

In the last awful month of her life, although she stayed at
home, in the house up the road from Rachel and Baxter’s, Stella refused (through Jimmy, of course) to let anyone visit her; not even Rachel, a doctor, was allowed to see her then, which no one quite understood, except, just possibly, Rachel.

Of the dozen people there—thirteen, counting Day—only Day is not thinking in a concentrated way about Stella. Day is thinking painfully, obsessively of Allen, the lover whom she came to California to see, but with whom things did not work out; they just broke up in San Francisco, where Allen lives. Scenes and quarrels, all terrible to recall. Passing bread-sticks, Day considers the phrase “to break up.” It is odd, she thinks, that people always say “break up
with
,” since the whole point of breaking up is that you are no longer
with
but alone.

In order not to think about Allen, and then, too, because it seems appropriate, Day makes a conscious effort to think about Stella, whom she met fairly often, over the years, at Rachel’s. (Day’s mother, also a doctor, a friend of Rachel’s, named Day for her heroine, Dorothy Day, who was also much admired by Rachel.) Stella was perfectly all right, Day thinks, but she talked so much. And that hair. Bright red hair, for a woman in her seventies or (probably) eighties? More generously, Day then admits to herself that you can’t tell what you’ll do that far ahead. She herself at eighty might dye her hair purple, or green, a one-person revival of punk, in the year two thousand and whatever, out of sheer boredom with living that long.

Stella never seemed bored with her old age—you had to give her that. And even if Jimmy bored her she never let it be known. (“Jimmy was actually more interesting as an alcoholic,” Baxter has remarked. “Poor Stella! No luck at all with men.”)

Day, who in her grief is not even aware of how pretty she is, now sits down with her own cold bowl of soup, next to Baxter, who must have been extremely handsome, a long time ago, Day imagines.

Baxter, who dislikes gazpacho (the peppers seem to disagree with him, or perhaps the cucumbers), looks for diversion at Day’s long thin brown legs, now exposed beneath her loose flowered skirt, in high rope clogs. Day’s legs, which Baxter much admires, lead him back to a sensual dream of Stella. He sees a room in the Sherry Netherland, in New York (he has just married Rachel; she is waiting for him, up in Connecticut—she is giving a seminar at Yale). Gold coverlets drawn back on sumptuous beds, in the half-light of an August afternoon. Champagne in a silver bucket, two chilled glasses. And Stella: all that pink-gold flesh (she was fairly plump in those days), all that flesh, half revealed, half concealed. Silk, rows of lace. That flesh, breasts, and that brilliant hair, spread on her pillow, his pillow.