Aquamarine

Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Page B

Book: Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Read Free Book Online
Authors: Carol Anshaw
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Gay, Lesbian
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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?”
    Alice doesn’t say anything. Jesse tries to catch her expression, but she can’t. The sun behind Alice puts her in eclipse.
    “Why do you want to know what happened? You know. Down there.”
    “In Mexico City?”
    “Yes.”
    “I don’t know,” Alice says. “I just think maybe that’s the place to start.”
    Jesse abandons her tire, and for a while swims slow, strong laps back and forth across the quarry. Then dives under, coming up through the center of her inner tube, tilts her head back, dipping her hair in the water to get it off her face.
    “Okay. That summer—1968—Marty came out of nowhere. They were calling her the Australian Water-Eating Machine. It was like one day she just crept up over the edge of my horizon and was all of a sudden my worst fear. I’d come out on top at the nationals in the hundred-meter free. My times were really strong going down to Mexico City. Which should have given me all the confidence in the world. But it didn’t.
    “The rumors just kept drifting around. Marty Finch was a phantom, a pure natural. Of course, at world-class levels, even naturals have to work, but they still have attitude left over from when they didn’t.
    “I was seventeen, a hick from Missouri. I’d spent a few months in Florida, at Sea Breeze—you remember it? They’d been turning out winners like Buicks off the line. I was the latest. Mostly I got to Mexico City by being a grind—an infinity of endurance laps and sprint work. You can’t know. They’d only pull me out when my back went blue.”
    “Huh?”
    “You know, when my heart couldn’t pump up enough blood. I was the little engine that could. I guess a lot of people thought I’d take my event, but no one would ever have called me a water-eating machine. That’s what got to me, I think.”
    “And then you met her,” Alice says, as though she is inside the story.
    “Yes. I expected her to high-hat me, but right from the start, that first night at the international dinner, she came over to where I was sitting.
    (“Let’s be friends,” Jesse remembers Marty saying. “It’ll be more fun.”)
    “Weren’t you a little suspicious?” Alice says.
    “I don’t know. I was

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