Sallie Reynolds

Word Count 995

That last summer was impossibly hot. My husband and I would go in the late afternoon to swim in the quarry outside of town. If you’ve ever been swimming in a quarry, you know how it is—the sides are rough and razor-sharp. You sit in a cloak of dry heat, brushed now and then with a whiff of cool stone smell. You can’t see the bottom. The water lulls you with its warm top layer and shocks you with the sudden touch of ice on your legs.

On these outings, my husband seemed more open, looser than he had been for months. While he was finishing his degree, he fretted over his exams, talking less and less, finally fading to silence. But now, we sat together looking down in the water, and he told stories about his childhood, puffing on his pipe as he talked.  

We’d just gotten our son little soft shoes for his first birthday, and my husband told me about his own baby slippers, which he called “goggies.” His mother sewed ears on the toes, he said, and they bobbed when he ran. “Oh,” I said, “let’s do something like that!” Our baby’s small warm feet were lovely to hold and his smile was all wide gums with little pearly knobs.

The quarry was a deep green pool—a mile deep, people said. No gradual incline, just a narrow shelf where you jumped into the water over your head, and then had to crawl out like a spider. Or you could take the high rocky path up to the top of the cliff, for a real dive. That’s what we usually did. I would go first. My husband, thin and so pale his bones showed through, held our plump little boy awkwardly against his chest, dimpled legs kicking. The two of them watched me walk to the edge.

I always had the insane feeling that the quarry was going to suck me down to the center of the earth. I was afraid to look, it was such a drop. I’d shut my eyes and slowly tip over, a spine-chilling drawn-out plunge into air. Then that shock of the water.

Delicious! I never feel my body as completely as when I’m naked in cold water. It holds me, touches, caresses, inside and out. Electric and soothing all at once. I used to wonder if my husband got that shiver—almost a pain, his sensitive parts being so exposed.

Once he told me that the first time we made love—I was a virgin—he felt my vagina catch him, pull him into a dark current, pull and pull, like sea dragons do with careless fishermen in fairy tales. He felt it all the way to his spine. “The water-witch got me,” he said.

We weren’t very good at the sex stuff. He wouldn’t talk about it, or say anything, like what felt good, what didn’t. I was too embarrassed to talk, too, and I kept getting cystitis. My fault for drying up, I suppose. Sometimes when it felt good, I laughed, and he thought I was laughing at him and got mad. I was really laughing at both of us, we were so ridiculous—kids, gawky and ashamed. One time in the shower, I draped a washcloth on his erection. I wanted it to be lighthearted and funny. But I also wanted to shock him, a little. I knew he’d had sex with somebody before I came out to be with him. The semester after we married and found our apartment here, I had to go back East to finish a class. In the drawer by my side of the bed, I found red hairpins. Where a woman, loosening her hair, had left them.

Coming up to the surface of the green pool, I sucked in air, opened my eyes—there were my “men,” high over me, the fat and the thin, blue-white skin gleaming in the light.

By the time I got back up to the ledge, the baby was fussing with hunger so I sat feeling the tug of his lips on my nipple, the hot, almost painful rush of milk in my breast-pipes, the warm stone under my thighs.

My husband lit his pipe and began to talk. When he was three, he said, he went to a neighbor’s house and asked, “May I please have bread and butter and jelly?” His mother was horrified. “We don’t ask strangers for food!” she said. So the next day, he asked, “May I please have pots and pans and jelly? What would you do,” he looked at me, “if a child begged for sweets?”

I said, “They were neighbors? Not strangers?”

Instead of answering, he went right on, saying he’d found a sick kitten in his grandmother’s barn. “It was the weakest, the one I should have cared for most.” When it wouldn’t stop crying, he threw it into a bob-wire fence.

“My god, you killed it?”

He didn’t answer that either, but set his pipe down and stood, getting ready for his dive. He said his mother showed him a picture of himself, age five, in a little baseball outfit with “Cubs” on the shirt, holding a mitt and ball. Just after she took that picture, he threw the ball at his father and hit him in the leg. “And right there, that very spot, is where the cancer came.”

He was poised on the rock above the pool, close enough I could have touched him. But before I could collect myself to say, That’s crazy, you couldn’t possibly have hit your father really hard, this is not the way we get cancer, you had nothing to do with your father’s death—he dove.

The water closed over him. Zipped him tight.

When he came up, it seemed to cling to him, a bubble. He came wet and shining back up to our rock and there wasn’t the smallest seam anywhere.

He didn’t say another word.

Sallie is 85, lives back of beyond in Northern California with her painter-writer-mechanic husband, a grand dog, and two hawks (she’s a licensed falconer.) She had to live this long in order to become a decent human being. Her stories are here and there, her two novels are on Amazon.