Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw Read Free Book Online

Jesse.
    “Joy dropped it by. She says it’s a terrific deal.”
    The pamphlet, its cover a collage of the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, advertises a ten-day excursion to Rome. “The Eternal City,” Hallie calls it, having picked this up a few brochures back. She and Jesse have been planning a trip there since an afternoon years ago when they’d driven over to Hot Springs, Arkansas, to cruise the tourist traps. On a lark, they stopped in to consult an astrologer operating out of a red and gold storefront, two doors down from Animal I.Q., where for two dollars you could go inside and see a chicken peck out tunes on a tiny piano, four dogs sitting at a table playing cards.
    The astrologer, Cecil Luster, told Hallie and Jesse they were spiritually linked. That this connection had been formed in ancient Rome, and that they would both eventually find their way back there. Once put into their heads, the very improbability of these notions ran a feather under their imaginations and has given them years of feeling mysteriously slipknotted to each other, and to an exotic place, an unknowable past.
    “Do you think we’ll ever really go?” Jesse says dreamily, ducking her head rhythmically under the brush strokes.
    The case against them becoming footloose travelers is getting pretty strong. Aside from the Olympics and three Method conventions in Rochester, New York, the last of these in the early sixties, Hallie has not ventured much beyond Missouri and Arkansas in her sixty-five years. Neither she nor Jesse has been anywhere to speak of since Mexico City.
    “Well, I’ve always felt a bit chafed here,” Hallie says. “And I can get pretty riled up by television travel shows. They make it seem like rolling off a log to get from here to there—to wherever. But when I try to imagine actually going myself, actually pulling on my girdle and catching the Trailways out, all I can think of are all the possibilities for mistakes and embarrassment.”
    She sets the brush down, warms her palms by rubbing them up and down over her hips for a minute, then pulls a generous fingerful of ointment out of a large open jar and begins working it into Jesse’s scalp.
    “Like I forget one of my prescriptions. I’m all harebrained getting ready for the trip and leave it behind on the kitchen counter. Now I’m in a foreign place. Not someplace nice where I’m having myself a wonderful time. Just a kind of generic foreign place. And I have to find a drugstore, or whatever they have there that’s like a drugstore. It turns out to be a place with bottles in the window, murky liquids, roots in jars of thick syrups. There’s a dried hoof on the counter. And of course I don’t know the language, so I have to pantomime my problem for the druggist. Something hideously embarrassing.”
    “Hemorrhoids,” Jesse helps.
    “Athlete’s foot’d do.”
    “Well, we’ve got a reprieve from showing we can do it,” Jesse says, patting her stomach. “We can’t go until the baby can do without me for a while, or until she’s old enough to bring along.”
    The old dial phone sitting on the glass cabinet of brushes and shampoos for sale rings, crashing into the sleepy atmosphere of the parlor.
    “Never fails,” Hallie says, holding up her greased hands. “Probably my three-thirty saying she’ll be a little tardy.” She grabs a towel and wipes her large hands roughly before picking up. Jesse can tell within seconds that this is a personal call, within a minute that it’s Hallie’s best friend, Jesse’s mother.
    “Too much bother,” Hallie is saying. Jesse peers over her godmother’s shiny hand, coffee is what she has written in childish block letters on a scratch pad. “Why don’t I just get one of those big electric urns from the U-Rent?” Jesse sees this is one of the hundred details for the big party Hallie is throwing for Frances’s combination sixty-fifth birthday and retirement from the public