The Sea of Light (31 page)

She blushed. “It’s okay. I already ate.”

I started to ask why, and with whom. But then I just knew; and the knowing stopped me. I waved smoke around with a dish towel, opened a couple of windows so cold air blew through. It smoothed my face, chilled the sweat on my forehead.

“Never mind. Want some melted dessert?”

She shook her head.

“Well,” I said, “I do.” And grabbed the pint—Fancy French Cream it was called, or something like that—pressing the cardboard sides with my fingers. They gave easily, as if they contained only liquid; which, in fact, happened to be the case. But I had my spinning little mind set on that Fancy French Cream. I pulled open drawers and grabbed a soupspoon. Then Babe and I headed out to the living room, shoved some books and newspapers off the sofa, sat down there on opposite sides while I slopped liquid ice cream into my mouth.

“Wow.” She grinned. “I’d like to see you do a barbecue.”

Out of politeness, I laughed. I figured all her attempts at humor ought to be rewarded.

That’s when the Hour of Misery began. Because from eight forty-five to nine forty-five p.m. I was the fly on the wall, the third wheel on a ten-speed,
persona strictum unnecessarium.
During which time she grilled me, as if she was in training to be an FBI interrogator, about all the details of that unpleasant blowhard Mike Canelli’s life. I kept spooning sugary glop between my lips, stopping once in a while to answer, feeling nauseated sometimes and unable to speak—at which times she would just stare at me intently, as if the fate of the world rested on my reply, and I’d start to feel like I was in some torture chamber with electric probes attached to my private parts.

How old was he? How good a swimmer? Did he date a lot of girls? Did he really take steroids? Was he a really good spelunker? So I gulped out the answers, feeling weakly feverish: twenty-two or twenty-three; good enough once to be national-class, but he never worked hard, never made it; I didn’t know whether he dated a lot but he obviously thought of himself as some kind of ladies’ man; I’d heard that he took steroids last year in training, but wasn’t sure, he didn’t look like it now; for all I knew, he was the world champion spelunker—but then, spending time underground in smelly old caves had never exactly been my cup of tea.

The place was starting to air out. Back in the kitchen I chucked ice cream away and scraped the blackened pan of charred fish off into the garbage, set it in the sink to soak. She watched from the threshold. Even though I had never been at a loss for words with her before, I was now. I’d start to say something, then panic.

Finally I asked had she done the reading for lit. class? Partly, she said. Well, I asked, had she brought her book along, did she want to do some of it now? Because study time was study time, after all. Midterms weren’t exactly too far in the future.

Fine, she said. Then: “Did you ever date him?”

“Who?” I heard myself echo bleakly, knowing full well.

“Mike. Mike Canelli.”

“No,” I blurted, “I’m gay.”

There it was. Unintentional. Clumsy truth. Sitting on the floor between us like some big unmovable dot. I felt this buzz travel up my spine, drain all the red from my face, a tingly sensation pepper my skin like miniature pinpricks as I realized that I had said it without thinking. I wished that I had not. Then thought maybe it was okay to have said it after all, and for a second the whole smoky ceiling-lit room seemed to spin around and around. I turned to see her still there in the doorway, unblinking, with some expression on her face I couldn’t read.

“Oh,” she said.

“Oh?”

“Um, yes.” She blushed. “That explains it.”

“It? What’s
it?
That explains why I never dated Mike Canelli? Well, of course. Only a queer would refuse a date with Mike Canelli, right? I mean,
who else could resist?”

“No, Ellie.” She smiled a little. It was a gentle smile somehow, which surprised me. “I mean—oh, never mind. Look, I don’t care. I’ve known some gay people before. They were good people, good athletes. They were fine. I mean, it’s okay with me.”

Great, I muttered. God forbid it should
not
be okay with
you
, Delgado.

“What?”

“Nothing, Babe.” And I wanted desperately for it to be ten minutes ago, a day ago, a month ago. “Listen, can we just forget I said anything? I mean, can we erase this dinner from the blackboard of life? Fling it into the cosmic abyss? Feed it to Moby Dick? What do you say, Miss Superstar? I mean, let’s just
chill.”

“Do you have a—lover? Is that what you call it?”

Yes, I said bitterly, that is what you call it. And, no, I do not. I do not have anyone. At all.

That’s when the door blew open and Nan and Jean walked in. You could hear them before you saw them, one heading across the sad worn old living room throw rug, one starting to stomp upstairs, then stopping. Nose snorts.

I hate torts!

Me too! Yucch! What burned down
here?

The floor creaked loudly as they ran for the kitchen, squeezing in around Babe. They noticed her, noticed me standing there like a maniac with a mop handle to one side, burnt pan and oil splotches and smoke-alarm on the counter. You could see Jean’s eyes go gray with surprise and alarm, Nan’s barely visible behind the suddenly clouded spectacle lenses. She took them off, wiped them vigorously on a shirtsleeve.

“Trying to cook again, Ellie?”

“Yeah. You know about Jews and ovens.” Then I froze inside, and wanted to puke all over. It had popped out of me without any thought, like a little exploding kernel of hate—at them, at myself, at Lottie and Zischa. I wanted to take words back for the second time that night, and couldn’t figure out which set of words I wanted to take back more. So I said to myself: Shut up, stupid, will you?

Will you just, finally, shut up?

Jean frowned in disapproval, Babe seemed not to react at all.

Nan set each spectacle stem securely behind each ear. “Whew. First prize in the annals of bad taste.”

Give me a break, I muttered.

All right, she told me, since you ask so politely. She turned to Babe and looked up. Saying, Introductions all around! What about it? And in a way that saved me, so I did introduce everyone, watching Jean’s face the whole time out of the corner of my eye. She’d taken in the kitchen mess with motherly disapproval, taken Babe in with nosy interest. I realized that I’d always been more in awe of her than of Nan somehow—even though Nan bossed me around a lot more, kidded me, and her verbal critiques landed a lot harder—in the same way that I’d always been more afraid of Lottie than of Zischa. It made me hate her, and myself, even more.

Nan offered her hand. “Ah. We finally meet. Babe Delgado, of swim team fame.”

Babe shook it, self-consciously.

“This is Jean McCallen, my lover, and co-sufferer in first-year law—”

“Oh,” said Babe. “Hi.” She shook Jean’s hand too. Then we all stood there while I felt red horror flush my face, silence sitting in the air heavier than the breeze-thinned smoke. Babe gulped like some embarrassed teenaged boy, finally blurting: “You’re both in law school?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Sorry if we’re barging in on anything,” Jean murmured. I felt the red horror leave my face, and a ghastly deathlike pall replace it.

I managed to stammer that the only thing they were barging in on was a bunch of bad cooking. And that I hated to put a stop to all the sparkling conversation, but the fact of the matter was that, like the man said, time crept on in its petty pace, and we all probably had a lot of work to do, right?

“Right,” said Babe. “Was that Shakespeare?”

“Partly, yes. But the rest was Marks.”

“Karl Marx?”

Oh, I told her, never mind.

I promised Nan and Jean I’d clean up later. Then everyone muttered good-byes and nice to meet yous; they headed into their bedroom with armfuls of books—to study, they said, but you could tell from the look flashing across Babe’s face that she thought they were going off to bump like crazed weasels.

I helped her find her coat from the bottom of the pile near the door. She put it on and grabbed her bookbag and stood there, for a second, like there was something more to say but she didn’t quite know how to go about saying it. Personally, I wanted the whole evening to be over in a very big way. I was feeling lousy: raspy throat, hint of a cough beginning. If I could have erased history, I would have.

Well, so long, she said, and started to leave. Then turned to face me.

“Is it sort of a secret, Ellie?”

“Is what?”

“That you’re gay.”

“Yes. No. I mean, I don’t know. It’s like, I guess I just don’t have a lot of experience
talking
about it.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“Okay,” I said, miserably, “that’s fine.”

I opened the door. It was cold, a starless and moonless night. Only the streetlamps lit sidewalks and roads. You could hear cars pass sometimes. Sometimes kids in luminescent vests clacked by on bicycles, white helmets glowing, backpacks like dark humps between their shoulders. She stepped out, looking a little dazed.

Get lost, I wanted to say. And then: Come back. Come back and love me.

“Hey,” I whispered instead, “good luck with Mike.”

She stepped off the porch and down a couple of steps, so that when she turned again we were about the same height. I thought for a second that some kind of perplexity twisted her mouth around. It was open, full-lipped, white teeth flashing in a background of the almost-white skin.

Not almost-white, really—better-than-white. To me.

But in the dark, it was just dark.

“He reminds me of someone,” she said. “Physically, I mean.” Then she shrugged. “So do you.” And waved briefly, stepped down into the street and the night. “Guess I’ll see you.”

*

During morning workout I felt worse, blew the entire main set of 15 x 200—with crazy, senseless splits that were slow, strained, erratic—and that got Brenna Allen on my back. Hanging onto the pool gutter, gasping in between sets instead of doing the swim-down, I saw the shadow that was her leaning over, through cloudy goggles.

“Out of the water, Ellie.”

I hauled myself onto the deck tiles with effort, sat there cross-legged, muscles twitching, while wet dripped off me until I was sitting in a puddle. She signaled them for the next set, lane by lane, then crouched down beside me. I pulled off the goggles, thought maybe I’d see her angry. But she looked worried instead—for a moment, almost kind.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

Maybe you’re right, I thought. But, believe me, Coach,
you
are the last human being on earth I’d tell my woes to.

The humid, disinfected, chlorinated air was kept unreasonably hot all autumn and winter. Still, it chilled me. She called out times, whistled them off for another repeat.

She offered me a hand and I took it, stood unsteadily. “Take a hot shower and go to Health Service.”

“I have class.”

“Well then, go during afternoon workout.”

I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t. But I didn’t have the energy to fight her openly today. I grabbed my stuff and headed for the locker room instead, looking the perfect team captain, coach’s pet, superb little model of obedience. Wondering, as I sloshed along the tiles, if she’d meant to make me this way, after all. Docile. I didn’t really know, and a part of me didn’t care any more. Because if I couldn’t fight her openly, I would fight some other way.

Before leaving the pool deck I turned to watch the breaststrokers. All doing a set of repeat 50’s. Babe was lengths ahead of the rest, in her own lane, going on a separate and faster interval.

I took a cold shower. Then, shivering, poked my head into the first-aid room on the way to my locker, watched Etta rolling Ace bandages. She saw me and smiled.

“Rubdown, Ellie Marks? Coach says massage for you this week.”

“Nah. I’m tough.”

“Tough like iron, or tough like steel? Think carefully now. Remember, iron bends. Steel breaks. You gotta bend sometimes, to make it in this world.”

“Right,” I said, “tell that to Coach.”

She laughed.

I toweled down, and was sweating. But at the same time I was so cold that I actually considered pulling the foul, long-overdue-for-the-laundry sweatshirt that I used to lift weights in out of the locker, and on over my clean shirt and sweater. I didn’t want to stink, though.

Climbing the stairs, I could hear Brenna Allen’s whistle echo from the pool. I could hear the splat-splat-splashing of a kicking set, ankles flexing in the crayon water, toes pointing, thighs pumping. It all sounded very far away. Like some faint echo from another universe, breaking through a wall to reach me, not nearly strong enough to keep my attention. At the top of the stairs I realized that I hadn’t felt it once all workout—the sway of things—and I didn’t care.

The rest of them were obviously still swimming. So Babe was not there at the top of the stairs to meet me. Although I had the feeling that, even if I’d lasted the entire workout, she wouldn’t have stuck around then, either. Something about those days was over, kaput. Scared away by truth, and by Mike Canelli.

*

I must have listened to the lecture in Modern European History, because I took plenty of notes. Same with Abnormal Psych. Some time that afternoon I started to cough again, but it went away. I felt better, calmer, like things would work out no matter what, senior year would not be a total disaster, the swimming would get better, I’d work harder than ever if I had to and simply tough myself into a blithering long-distance dynamo, two-beat kick and all, tower of aerobic power, nail my fabulous turn at each of the 64 walls. These thoughts—the first positive ones I’d had in many a week, actually—made me anxious for second workout. I skipped lunch, went to the gym to stretch out, was suited up in the locker room early, and out on the deck before anyone else.