Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Page A

course. But even now, my mother doesn’t take it down. Which is so weird. She always just dismissed my swimming, always made sure to point out to me what a waste of time she thought it was for anyone with brains. She never even came down to Mexico City. So you figure this out. Of course she’s very tricky in giving approval and holding it back. She gives just enough so you understand the other ninety-nine percent is being withheld.”
    “Maybe she was secretly proud and just couldn’t show it to you directly,” Kit says.
    “It’s true I gave her an odd sort of status around here. I didn’t come up with a husband or grandchildren, but they named the junior high after me.”
    “I didn’t see that.”
    “I’d die. I took the long way around so you wouldn’t. Come on,” she says and pushes against the door.
     
    “Oh boy,” Kit whispers. “King Tut’s tomb.”
    The room is filled with gold and silver, colored satin—ribbons and medals and trophies, statuettes of girls in modest bathing suits crouched on starting blocks, electroplated into an eternal present tense, poised for the report of a gun that will never go off.
    Kit walks around slowly, like a tourist. She homes in fairly fast. It’s hung from a couple of carpet tacks pushed into the plaster—a silver medal on a heavy red, white and blue ribbon. Next to it is a yellowed newspaper photo of Jesse on the second highest, the left of three staggered platforms. All three girls on the platforms have damp hair, arms filled with roses, and smiles brought on with the first ebbing of adrenaline. They have just proven, minutes before this picture was taken, that they are the three fastest women in the world at getting through a hundred meters of water.
    “How’d you ever come down off this?” Kit says.
    “With quite a thud, I’m afraid,” Jesse says.
    “What’s this?” Kit says now. Jesse has her back turned, pulling a sleep shirt from a canvas duffel. Still, she knows exactly what Kit has found—another photo. Everything inside her jams. Kit holds up the picture in its black wood Woolworth frame. It’s an odd photo, taken from behind. Jesse and Marty are both wearing sweatpants pulled on over their tank suits. They are standing side by side in an atmosphere of aftermath, their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, waiting for some next wonderful thing to happen.
    Kit guesses, “You and the girl who beat you. What’s her name.”
    Jesse turns and tries to gather up a few words. Even a few will do. But she can’t. She sits on the narrow bed in this obscure defeat. Kit sees there’s a problem and takes charge. She comes over and pushes the bag onto the floor and crawls on top of Jesse. She pins Jesse’s wrists to the old chenille-covered mattress and lowers herself until her mouth is on Jesse’s ear. “I love that you have something this important you can’t tell me about.”
     
    Much later, Jesse sits on the floor of her mother’s bathroom, in the bluish glow of the shell-shaped light fixture over the mirror. She’s drawing a weak chill out of the side of the tub with the heat in her cheek. Her eyes are closed, and behind the lids, everything has already gone to aquamarine. She has shot back a few million moments to the one in which she’s slapping the tile at the end of her lane, surfacing to see what the fates have written. Pulling off her cap, shaking her head to drain the water from her ears. As though not being able to hear is the problem, when of course it is actually not being able to know. Looking over at Marty, who’s also just breaking through, from the white-noise rush of the water into the cacophony at poolside, the hard, dry surface of the rest of the world, where they will be judged. They have already done what they came to do, won the medals they came to take, made the times that will enter the record books. But what times? Which medals?
    And then Bud Freeman is hunkering down in front of Jesse, putting up two fingers,