The Deep End (2 page)

Separated, Joanne repeats silently, following Paul back into the hall. An especially apt description. Almost schizophrenic. Separated, she thinks, like an egg.

The girls are waiting for them at the foot of the stairs. “Got everything?” their father asks.

Joanne stares hard at her daughters, looking for hints of the children they once were in the young women they are now. Lulu has changed the least since infancy, she thinks, her enormous brown eyes—a gift from her father—still the focal point of her face, her other features existing merely as backdrop. If the baby jowls have thinned and shaped themselves into adolescence, if the lips have acquired an almost sultry pout, and the nose is now clearly a nose and not just a tiny bit of upturned flesh in the middle of her face, the eyes have remained the same. She has grown up around them.

Robin is different, although she, too, has her father’s upturned nose and square-set jaw. At age fifteen, she is only now starting to peck her way out of the awkward shell that puberty imposes, one that Lulu has yet to enter. As a result, nothing quite matches, the legs too long, the body too short, her head too big. In another year or two, Joanne thinks, Robin will be beautiful, the elegant swan emerging from the ugly duckling. Surprisingly, however, and unlike Joanne at her daughter’s age, Robin’s looks are very “in.” She dresses accordingly. Even now she has obliterated the bland statement of her camp uniform by
defiantly lacing a shocking pink chiffon scarf through her short, overly permed hair. Her eyes—ordinary hazel eyes like her mother’s—stare resolutely at the floor.

“I’ll wait in the car,” Paul tells them, opening the front door and stepping outside into the bright sunlight.

Joanne smiles at her daughters, feeling her heart beginning to pound against her chest. This is the first time, she realizes, that she will be completely on her own. Her entire life has been spent living with—living
for
—other people. Yet for the next two months, there will be no one but herself to look after.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Lulu begins before Joanne has a chance to speak. “I know the speech by heart: I’ll be careful; I won’t take any silly chances; I’ll write at least once a week; and I won’t forget to eat. Did I leave anything out?”

“How about having a good time?” Joanne asks.

“I’ll have a good time,” Lulu agrees and throws her arms around her mother’s neck. “Will you be all right?”

“Me?” Joanne asks, smoothing a few stray hairs out of her daughter’s eyes. “I’ll have a ball.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

“Things have a way of working out,” Lulu intones so seriously that Joanne has to bring her hand to her mouth to hide a budding smile.

“Who told you that?”

“You do,” Lulu informs her. “All the time.”

This time, Joanne’s smile spreads beyond her fingers into the corners of her face. “You mean you actually listen to what I say? No wonder you’re so smart.” She kisses Lulu as many times as the child will allow, then watches her run down the stairs to Paul’s car. Robin is immediately at
the door behind her. “Will you at least
try
to have a good time?” Joanne asks.

“Sure, I’ll have a ball,” Robin responds pointedly, using Joanne’s words.

“I think you’ll see that we made the right decision …”

“You
made the decision,” Robin corrects. “Not me.”

“I meant your father and me,” Joanne continues, aware that she has never made a major decision entirely on her own in her life. “We all need time to cool off and think things through …”

“The way you and Daddy are doing?” Robin asks with just enough politeness for Joanne to wonder if the implicit cruelty of the remark was intentional.

“I guess so. Anyway,” she stammers, “try to make the best of things. You may even find that you enjoy the summer.” In spite of yourself, she thinks.

“Sure,” Robin grunts.

“Can I kiss you goodbye?” Joanne waits for her daughter’s permission and interprets her silent shrug as a go-ahead, enveloping the girl in her arms and kissing her heavily rouged cheek. Robin’s hand moves to smooth the makeup her mother may have disturbed. Or is she erasing my kiss? Joanne wonders, seeing Robin as a child, stubbornly wiping unwanted kisses away. “Take care of yourself,” she calls after her older daughter, watching her skip down the front stairs and disappear into the back seat of her father’s car.

Paul climbs out of the front seat and looks toward the house. “I’ll call you.” He waves to his wife before driving away.

The phone is ringing as Joanne steps back into the house. She ignores it as she proceeds past it through the kitchen,
bending down to unlock the Charley-bar at the bottom of the sliding glass door, flipping open the additional lock at its side, and sliding the door open. She steps onto the newly erected back porch, still awaiting a final coat of varnish, and walks down the newly constructed steps that lead to the pool. Slowly, the phone still ringing behind her, she lowers herself onto one of the rose-colored slabs of flagstone that surround the concrete-lined hole and dangles her feet into what was supposed to have been the pool’s deep end. It’s hard to feel too sorry for a woman with a swimming pool, she thinks, looking up at the house next door and catching sight of her best friend, Eve, staring down at her from the bedroom window.

Joanne raises her hand and waves, but the shadowy figure in the window suddenly backs away and is gone. Joanne brings her hand up to her eyes, shielding them from the sun, as she tries to relocate her friend. But Eve is no longer there, and Joanne wonders if, in fact, she ever was. Lately, her mind has been playing tricks …

(“I’m not saying that someone isn’t phoning you,” she hears Eve say.

“What
are
you saying?”

“Sometimes the mind plays tricks …”

“Did you talk to Brian?”

“Of course,” Eve tells her, suddenly defensive. “You asked me to, didn’t you? He says that everyone gets obscene calls and that you should just hang up on the guy.”

“I’m not even sure it
is
a man! It’s such a strange voice. I don’t know if it’s young or old, male or female …”

“Well, of course it’s a man,” Eve states flatly. “Women don’t make obscene phone calls to other women.”

“These are more than just obscene calls,” Joanne corrects her. “He says he’s going to kill me. He says I’m next. Why are you looking at me like that?”

Eve is about to protest but changes her mind. “I was just wondering,” she admits, trying to soften the harshness of her suspicions with an understanding smile, “whether the phone calls started before or after Paul left.”)

Joanne is wondering the same thing, trying very hard to assign some order to the events of the last several months. But like a child caught up with the eternal riddle of the chicken and the egg, she is unable to determine exactly what came before what.

She knows only that in the last several months, everything in her life has been turned upside down, that she is hanging by her heels from the ceiling, watching as familiar objects fall away from her, seeing them suddenly distorted and strange. There is nothing for her to grab onto, no arms to pull her to safety. Things have a way of working out, she hears Lulu repeating, purposely using the very phrase Joanne has used so often in the past, the same words she remembers her own mother repeating to her.

Joanne pulls herself to her feet, aware that the phone has stopped ringing. She walks around to the shallow end of the aborted swimming pool, and climbs down the three steps into the empty pit. Maybe I am crazy, she thinks, deciding that this is probably the easiest solution to her problems.

Joanne Hunter watches the world recede as she progresses farther into the deep end of the empty concrete hole. She pushes her back against the rough cement at the corner from which the boomerang veers, and slowly slides down along its harsh surface to the bottom. Sitting
with her knees drawn up against her chest, she hears the phone on her kitchen wall once again begin its persistent ring. It’s just you and me now, he is telling her. Joanne nods her head in silent acknowledgement of the unstated fact and tries to conjure up images of happier times.

A
s Joanne recalls, the phone had been ringing just before Eve arrived at her front door almost two months earlier. “Hello?” Joanne said into the receiver, more a question than a statement. “Hello. Hello?” She shrugged her shoulders and replaced the receiver. “Kids,” she pronounced, still shaking her head with dismay as she ushered Eve inside several minutes later.

“You ready?” Eve asked.

“I just have to find my racquet.” Joanne opened the closet in the front hall. “I think I buried it back here somewhere.”

“Well, hurry up and find it. I understand that the new pro is quite delicious, and I wouldn’t want to miss a minute of our lesson.”

“I don’t know why I let you talk me into these things.”

“Because you’ve always let me talk you into everything. It’s part of your charm.”

Joanne stopped searching for a minute, squatting under the family’s assorted spring coats, and turned to face her friend of almost thirty years. “Do you remember what my mother always used to say?” Eve’s quizzical
expression indicated that she didn’t. “She used to ask me, ‘If Eve told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?’”

Eve laughed. “At least she didn’t call all your friends at two o’clock in the morning to find out where you were, or come downstairs to ‘fix the plumbing’ when you were entertaining a boy in the rec room.”

“I never entertained boys in the rec room,” Joanne reminded her, resuming her search.

“Yes, I know. You were always so disgustingly pure.” She looked toward the kitchen. “The pool seems to be coming along great guns. I keep tabs from my bedroom window.”

“Well, the man said ten days to two weeks, tops, so it looks like they may finish on schedule. Found it,” she said, triumphantly retrieving her racquet from the back of the closet. “I’ll just tell the men I’m leaving.”

“Hurry, we’ll be late.”

“You’re always in such a hurry,” Joanne laughed as she ran back into the kitchen and opened the sliding door to inform the workers she would be gone for several hours.

“And you’re always so slow,” Eve countered after Joanne returned. “It takes a stick of dynamite to get you moving.”

“That’s why we’ve been friends for so long. If we were both like me, we’d never get anywhere. If we were both like you, we’d blow each other up.”

It was true, Joanne thought in the car on the drive to Fresh Meadows Country Club, reflecting on her longstanding relationship with her oldest and best friend. They had met in seventh grade at the awkward age of twelve. Even then, Eve had been something of a standout, a tall, gangly redhead with an infectious giggle and a commanding tone to her voice.

“I need a partner for science,” Eve had announced one morning in class, indicating to Joanne that she was it. Joanne had said nothing, feeling tongue-tied and overwhelmed that the most popular girl in the class had actually selected her for a partner. “Are you always this quiet?” Eve had demanded later, as their teacher was passing around dead frogs for dissection.

“I’m scared,” Joanne had whispered, hoping she wouldn’t be sick as the plump, lifeless body of a frog was dropped onto the table before her.

“Scared of a dead frog?” Eve flipped it over with casual fingers.

“I don’t think I can do this.”

“You don’t have to,” Eve had assured her, obviously delighted. “I’ll do it. I love stuff like this. Blood and guts. It’s great. If I were a boy, I’d be a doctor when I grow up.” She paused briefly, studying her new partner as closely as if she, and not the frog, were the specimen to be dissected. “Why don’t you ever say anything in class? Nobody knows you’re here.”

“Why did you pick me for a partner?” Joanne asked instead of answering.

“Because you never say anything in class and nobody knows you’re here,” Eve smiled slyly. “I like to be the center of attention.”

They became inseparable friends, one rarely seen without the other. Mutt and Jeff, Joanne’s mother used to tease, not without affection. If Eve asked you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?

Probably, Joanne thought now as Eve pulled the car into the crowded parking lot. “There’s a space over there. To your right.”

Eve automatically turned left.

Joanne laughed, recalling that it had taken her friend three tries to pass her driver’s test. “Isn’t that Karen Palmer?”

“Where?” Eve narrowly missed the car beside them as she backed into a vacant space and bumped into the rear fender of a new Mercedes.

“There. Going inside. It looks like her, but something’s different.”

“My God, she’s got boobs!”

“What?”

“She had a boob job to go with her face-lift. When did you ever know Karen Palmer to have tits that bounced?”

“Why would she do something like that?” Joanne asked as the two women proceeded toward the clubhouse.

“Her husband’s always been a boob man,” Eve confided. “Haven’t you noticed the way he always looks at your chest when he talks to you?”

They deposited their bags in their lockers and headed directly for the courts.

“Is it that important?” Joanne wondered out loud.

Eve shrugged. “To some men. Brian, for example, is an ass man. Did I tell you what he did the other night?”

“Spare me,” Joanne interrupted. “I don’t want to know.”

“You’re no fun. You never let me tell you anything.”

“I would just feel uncomfortable looking Brian in the face if I knew too many details about your sex life.”

“Trust me, his face is not his best feature.”

“Eve!”

“Joanne!” Eve mimicked.

“Eve and Joanne?” the tall, muscular blond asked. “I’m Steve Henry, the new tennis pro.”

“There really is a God,” Eve whispered as she and Joanne took up their positions in front of the net.

“So, what do you think?”

“Seems like a good instructor.”

“That’s not exactly what I was talking about,” Eve informed her friend with a mischievous twinkle.

“I don’t look at men that way,” Joanne told her, her expression midway between a scowl and a smile.