Until someone got hold of her bathing suit and hauled. Above—air, the menace of the world reinstating itself. She coughed, her snot streamed. Something scraped her right buttock. The divemaster—he had his head cocked in seemingly voracious surmise. Saliva build-up spooled along his cheeks and chin like a nearly transparent handlebar moustache. He opened his mouth and she could see down his shiny gullet. Still with me? he’d boomed.
High up in her third-floor apartment she clung to him from behind as he resumed chopping the vegetables. Maybe, she thought, her parents lay where she’d stored them, safe where she could find them. At the bottom of a pool. A small freshwater lake. A wherever apart from gravity’s ordinary demands.
The apartment buzzer stabbed once more to life and she startled, wrist twisting painfully from the front of his pants. He quickly hoisted the kitchen knife high above the counter. Hey, he said, laughing. Careful, you.
She picked her way down the stairs and opened the front door. Elf, cowboy, pretty pony. Not-Janes. They cackled and shook tiny appendages. A rain-slickered woman wearing a pointy witch hat wielded a striped umbrella above her charges. Be nice, the woman warned.
Marilyn took up the candy bowl from the rickety entryway table. So few kids trick-or-treated here that none of the other tenants of the converted-to-apartments ramshackle Edwardian even bothered to provide. But she had once been a pony and an escaped convict, and Jane a Jack-in-the-Box Jane who had grown up to now be officially late for dinner. If Jane showed at all, who might she be this time?
Beasts, I swear, the witch woman exclaimed at her charges. Enough! Be done!
The trio made off like bandits. Where they’d been stood a suddenly re-materialized best friend. She was sopping, clutching a soaked bunch of flowers while water ran off her nose, which she deigned to wipe.
Thanks for the invite, she said. Thought you’d never ask. Now if you’d be so kind, step aside and let me in.
Marilyn made no move. Please, she said. Can’t you just for once be nice?
Ha. Some trick.
Jane, I’m only begging.
Jane ramrodded her free arm in front of her, aiming right at Marilyn’s chest. Coming through, Madam, she said. Coming through.
Inside the foyer Jane dripped on the worn parquet and sniffed the air. She thrust the bouquet of orange mums forward then licked her pale lips. So can I change? she said. I appear to have come as a puddle.
Jane, Rand. Rand, Jane.
Done and done, Jane said to Marilyn. Happy now?
Rand poured Jane some wine and held the glass out to her. Not so bad, is it? he said.
Not so, Jane allowed.
He held his beer up for a toast. Here’s to not so, he said.
7
Dessert. Thunder boomed outside and echoed in the cavernous living-dining room and the windows clattered in their loose frames. The bulbs in the chipped chandelier blinked off and on—the district’s next scheduled brownout wasn’t until the following evening but whole cheap-rent blocks like hers sometimes darkened with no warning and she’d switch to her stores of battery reserves and race to meet her deadlines before her back-up power drained. Rand—who was now waving his fork across the table at Jane—happened to live in one of the more affluent enclaves, whose grids he happened to underground for his day job. He was an electrical engineer with a lot of quality training and a fine income with excellent benefits including a flexible work schedule with decent time off, so Marilyn had taken to feeling no compunction in blaming him for her own inadequate power situation. Plus, now he’d allowed Jane to irk him throughout the meal.
So why not your social-action tourism right here at home? he demanded of Jane in some kind of counter-attack.
Good luck with that. As if Marilyn even knew about this other-Jane—a younger one, just out of college and kicking it in an ocean-side drought-land of gated oases and armed insurrections and kidnappings, of resistant strains this and influenza that. Her devout-yet-non-missionary family had nearly died just contemplating. She was gone a year give or take, a time about which she rarely spoke, and the longest gap in their friendship. Marilyn’s fault. Overwork learning to visualize the bio-pathogenic status updates of the body brought to her fresh weekly from autopsies at med-school complexes. And also the overwork in those days—she admitted it now—of her own version of crummy self-absorption. A bad boyfriend or three. Bad parenting, she’d been sure at the time, from her squalling, over-involved mother and father. You never write, you never call, they called frequently to complain. True, she hadn’t called them much, and increasingly at the time not Jane either. Marilyn had let her hair grow greasy, missed classes, barely graduated a semester late. She deserved Jane’s heel now digging into her thigh—Jane almost lying in her chair on the same side of the table as her friend, one leg atop hers as if she were an ottoman.
So what did you do out there anyway? Rand went on when Jane ignored his question.
Marilyn squirmed as much as Jane allowed her. Rand, let up, Marilyn said, though secretly she herself wanted to know the answer too.