See you, Marilyn, Jane said, and vanished into the crowd.
Marilyn observed the condensation on her plastic cup. She fiddled with her obstinate hair, coarse as clustering weeds. Hurry. Run like a rat. Do something, don’t fall behind. She stood, feeling like bottle fizz while the thousand artificial suns above her burned cold. An elderly, bird-beaked man appeared and pointed at her table. Taken? he said. Going or not?
Last night she had laid her head against her new interest’s chest to hear its massive cargo beat. Why are you crying? she said, and brushed her fingertips over the blue pulsing along the side of his face and down his throat. She brought her fingers to her mouth for a second then continued to stroke his memorable skin—not only its blues but also where it was pitted and red in places as if brewed up from some hot spring and in others annealed in waxy moon-strips, souvenir of a somewhere she could hardly imagine. Or could—as with a jolt she suddenly craved the moment just before submerging. The moment just after.
She mumbled an apology to the waiting elderly man and blundered into the food court’s criss-crossing hordes. She walked fast then faster. Her ears rang, her breath caught. She took shelter at a watch-repair stall. She caught her breath. Which way to the exit? She tried to glimpse her friend. Too late—no blond head flickering in the distance. She mouthed the ancient words anyway. See you, Jane.
6
The downstairs buzzer cut through the rain pounding on the roof above her third-floor apartment. He nestled the knife among the diced carrots and onions and wiped his hands on the dishtowel. Want me to get it? he said.
Expensive fish marinated on plates between his bottle of fancy beer and her second tumbler of white. Another shrill and he arched his barbed brows—well? Prize specimen. Oversized pinna and quashed nose. Asymmetrical trench carving a deep worry line into his forehead. On his barrel chest, sprays of grey and brown sprouting from the open vee of his white shirt. Sleeves rolled to display built arms. Medium height—possibly the only medium about him. Age—forty? Thirty? She hadn’t asked yet and he hadn’t offered. No blue tats tonight. They seemed to have a mind of their own.
You stay put, she said. Let’s keep you stored right to the last possible.
He shrugged then swung back to the counter. Happy Halloween to you too, he said, hefting the knife again. Want me to hide in your closet while you and your friend chow?
She pressed against him from behind. I’m terrible, she said.
Yeah. What did I ever do to deserve?
But what had she done to deserve? The first night of his class—water to her navel, chilled in her swimsuit, only semi-paying attention to his bull-voiced harangue, something about the point and the how-to of the training exercise—she’d simply tried not to bang into the other neophytes. But the tank on her back dragged her off-balance and her fin-crippled feet hadn’t helped. Last in line, waiting while one by one his students descended with him, she’d peered impatiently at the surface and discerned only smudges. No sign of the mysterious proficiencies he grudgingly acknowledged as each student resurfaced still in one piece. Finally he gargled her direction—next!—and she dropped. Her regulator chirred, breath exhaust burped. With her newfound tunnel vision, beefy boy-legs reverted to chubby infants’ and princesses sported cruddy pimples along their groomed bikini-wax lines. Halogens glowed like portals along the pool’s sides. And then two raps on her head. Pay. Attention. The point, the point. Something about something called mouthpiece retrieval. So she removed the apparatus from her mouth and tossed it. No air. She groped. Her suit-snuggy threatened to split her crack. A blur of hoses and fins, her own grasping fingers. What had ever tentacled around her and choked. Mr. Eliot in grade-eight math hypoteneusing her low-grades ass into detention for a month. Her father’s hand too tight around her fifteen-year-old’s wrist for too long one afternoon in the dentist’s waiting room. Mother’s all-purpose refrain—no one will ever love you as much as your mother. All the memory-snow crazy. The inflated, wrong-headed. The concern too, the love—all the fucked-up riot love.
She’d suddenly stopped struggling. Chemicals stung her nasal cavities. Anguish runnelled her mind like rebar. For shame. How much she’d once ignored or fled. Allowed to evaporate. She felt ragged as a scarecrow cowering beneath a cement sky.