From beside him, Zeke echoed, “Yah, Mary. Not high at all.”
After Zeke said that, Mary tried it. Tom gave her a boost and once she was up there, her usual delight took over. She found a bottle of oil left by either the Lennon’s or some other sunbather from another day. That was fun to her. She said, “Tommy, can I keep it?”
“Sure you can,” Tom said as he moved around her in an arc and captured several more shots.
The thing about Mary is that when she got serious, she had an absolutely beautiful face. She had heavy blotches of acne, but in black and white, Tom thought it would be barely noticeable. She had one of those faces that looked like she was retarded when she was talking or smiling. Her eyes went a bit cross and she had crooked, discoloured teeth. To have a conversation with her made her an obvious case for mental retardation. But to watch her in stillness and without words, there was no hint of it.
If she sat stoic, her high cheekbones and lovely feminine jawline were striking. He asked her if he could adjust her hair. Once he pulled it down over her sloping forehead to hide that, Tom was satisfied. “Hey, Zee. I mean, Zed.”
Zeke was down below them, sitting on the edge with his feet dangling in the hot water. “Yuh?” he said.
“Did you and Mary take your vitamins?”
“Yuh,” Zeke called up.
Next to him, Mary said, “I had doubles today. Nurse Karen said I has to.” Mary yawned.
The timing, Tom thought, might be perfect. “Did you have your nap?”
Mary stretched and threw her arms in the air. “Naw,” she said.
“Are you sleepy?”
“No,” she said absently. Tom could tell she was. Both Mary and Ingrid always denied it, even when they were plainly exhausted.
“Be right back. Mary, can you wait for me?”
“Okaaaay,” she said and laid back on the rocks. Tom saw her ample bosom under her swimsuit. He had guessed earlier that Mary might be about thirty or thirty-five. She had the body of a mature woman and lovely skin. Her breasts were round and full and she had symmetrical hips. From the neck down, Mary could have been a swimsuit model, not like the stick figures with points here and there. That’s what the teenage Lennons had looked like. They would take interesting photos, for sure. But a figure like Mary’s was closer to those the ancient Greeks had chiselled out of their marble. And a figure like Mary’s is what Tom wanted for his portfolio.
Tom climbed down to the middle pool.
“Zeke, buddy, do you think Mary would take off her swimsuit for us?”
Zeke didn’t look as surprised as Tom thought he would. He looked sleepy. Ready for his own nap. It was way past their usual time. And when they had their vitamins, they always had a nap.
“Dunno,” Zeke said. “You gonna take snap-snaps of her ladyparts, like?”
“Some, yeah, but tasteful, like in those ladies magazines, remember them?”
“Yeah, those are some good pitchers. I like dem when I go to the store.”
With his eyes glazed like they were, Zeke looked like he could pass out right into the pool. Tom said, “Come ‘ere, Zeke, let’s go over here in the shade.”
“Okay,” Zeke said. He yawned. The vitamins they’d both taken at lunch were really taking hold. Zeke got up slowly, dreamily, and followed Tom. They walked the fifty paces to the clearing and found a tree to sit under, this one much closer than Karen’s tree. Tom could see the shape of Mary up on the rock pedestal. She was laying in the sun, probably already asleep.
Zeke sat in the shade. He yawned again.
“Mary does whatever you ask her,” Tom said. “She likes you. Do you know that, Zee-I mean, Zed?”
“Uh-huh,” Zeke said.
“Would you ask her to take off her bathing suit?”
“Okay,” he said. Then he called out to Mary up on the pedestal, cupping his hands around his mouth to carry his voice. “Mary, Mary, quite cont-rary!” Zeke shouted.
In a tick, Mary called back. “Zeke the Sneak!” She was being playful.
“Member those ladies pitchers in dem magazines?” he called back.
“Yuh,” Mary called. “Dem purty girls.”
“You want ta take somma dem fer Mr. Tommy?”
She waited a moment, then called back. “Okay,” she called. “Fer Tommy.”
Seeming satisfied, Zeke lay back in the thick green grass and closed his eyes against the sun. His breathing was deep and heavy. Tom thought he’d be out in a minute or less.
Tom was hot. He got up and kicked off his Birks. He checked the exposures left on this roll and then went over to his case. He pocketed two more rolls of film and then decided to grab a third. By this time, Mary was already climbing down from the pedestal on her own. “Careful!” Tom called and rushed to her with his new Pentax K1000 bouncing against his stomach where it hung from around his neck. “Careful, careful,” he repeated as he got to her.
She turned, light on her feet, but moving slowly, as if in a dream. “S’okay, Tommy,” she said. “I won’t fall. Mary’s not clumsy. Not like Ingy.”
Mary lowered herself into the pool and smiled at the warm water as it came up her legs and hips and finally settled near her waist.
“Can we take a few more?” Tom asked.
“Snap-snap?” Mary asked.
“Yeah, snap-snap.”
“Uh-uh,” Mary said, all the joy gone from her face. She had her stoic look on that went with the sleepiness those vitamins gave all the residents of Ocean View this late in the afternoon. She looked very pretty to Tom just now. “Zed says if I be in pitchers you get to go to smart people school.”
“That’s right,” Tom said, readying his camera, then snapping one.
“Mary wants to help you go to smart people school.” She reached the straps of her one-piece with opposite hands and then pulled them down, letting the suit come down to her waist and lay pooling on the skin of the water. Freed, her breasts fell out and the removal of the swim top showed Tom her naked upper body. “Like this for them purty pitchers in the lady magazines?”
Tom’s heart was hammering. She had a lovely shape, curves and valleys that he’d seen in his textbooks and at galleries he’d been to.
She rubbed herself as if she was cold. And in a second, gooseflesh rippled across her chest and stomach. Her dark nipples stood out now too. She reached down into the water and pulled the swimsuit down to her ankles. Her breasts kissed the water. She raised an ankle and brought the suit to the surface, then grabbed it with a finger off her heel and flung it out into the grass, making an arc of water in the air.
“Just a few pitchers, kay, Tommy? Mary sleepy.”
“Okay,” Tom said. And then he pinched one eye shut and he started to snap-snap.
11
Tom went through the remainder of this roll plus the three in his pocket. Mary seemed to perk up as he gave her instructions on where to sit, what to do with her arms.
There was a series in the middle pool, some on the edge, some mid-thigh and up. Different poses, different angles. He had no real clue of what would turn out, but he experimented and he did it quickly. He did close-ups of her body parts. He did shots of her in the tall grass sitting on his shirt to keep her bum out of the thistle. There were some from behind with her looking over her shoulder or ignoring the camera completely. He got her back up on the pedestal and did full-body shots of her sunbathing. Head to toe with no shadows on her milky white skin and large, hard nipples plus the bush at her crotch looking stark and velvety in the viewfinder. He hoped he would be able to make contrast adjustments when he developed these.
He got her down on all fours and took a series that showed the fullness of her bosom hanging playfully while she arched her back and spread her knees. He did some from behind and from the front. Then he asked her to get on her haunches to squat in the shallowest pool and she squinted up at the sun leaning heavy to one side of their private afternoon sky.
All in all, he went through five rolls. Expensive, but way ch
eaper than if he’d had to pay a model.
Convincing Farrah or her girlfriends to pose for him would have made it obvious: they were still girls. Girls pretending to be grown-up. Mary, though she retained the intellect of a young girl, had the body of a woman. He wondered if Mary had had a baby to create such rounded, perfectly feminine proportions. Maybe that was even why her parents had put her in Ocean View—to keep her out of harm’s way just like Zeke’s father had.
He also couldn’t get Farrah or other girls his own age to pose for him because he’d need a parental release form and no father of a teenage girl in his right mind is going to let some nineteen-year old boy shoot naked photos of his daughter for a school project. Uh-huh, right, her pop would say. Now, vacate my property before I blow your head off. Go get a magazine and a box of Kleenex, kid, and leave my little girl be.
Watching Mary pose for him, it became clear that she’d likely never learned to be ashamed of her body, not like regular girls with all the pressures of boys and magazine covers and pinup posters. Mary had likely lived her thirty-plus years in a kind of bubble. Tom bet no parent had ever given her ‘the talk’ except to maybe explain her cycle—and even that, he bet, would have been revealed without mention of sex, or of men and women and what they do together when the lights go out. No man would have shown interest in her, not that kind of interest. She’d taken off her suit in two strokes. She didn’t hide herself like swimsuit models do, and there was nothing abashed in her demeanour. She was just helping Tommy get into his smart people school. As the late afternoon wore into dinner time, any guilt Tom had when she’d first dropped her suit and showed him just how perfect God had crafted her, had melted away with the heat. Tom snap-snap-snapped her for more than an hour.
The whole time Mary posed, she seemed... robotic. Not sleepy anymore, but easily suggestible. Like one time he’d gone to a fair with a group of friends and they’d seen a hypnotist get twenty-five members of the audience up on stage. He hypnotized them in no time flat and made them cluck like chickens, pretend they were vacuuming the stage and even shoot each other with pretend ‘finger-guns’. Tom wondered what those vitamins of Karen’s did to the houseguests, but decided not to think too hard on it. Not now. He was getting what he wanted and wasn’t about to jinx it.
Finally, Mary seemed like she wasn’t listening to his instructions any more. Maybe the hypnotism had worn of. Or maybe she hit a wall of fatigue—though she didn’t seem like she had. He climbed out of the ankle deep water where he stood and put the cap on his lens. He got her now-dry suit in a ball from the grass and weeds and brought it to her.
He reached out and gave Mary a peck on the cheek. “All done,” he said to her. She beamed her famous smile of crooked teeth. “You did a great job, Mary. Zeke would be proud.”
She finally turned and crouched down into the water, hiding her naked form. Tom saw she was squirming into the swimsuit under the water. Getting shy now? he thought. But he didn’t say anything. Just took his spent rolls of film from his pockets and headed to Zeke, still snoozing in the grass under the tree. The shade had moved and his legs were in the sun, turning pink.
He didn’t stir when Tom walked past and Tom thought, It’s going to be the devil getting him to sleep tonight.
12
Tom was glad he’d left the windows open on the bus. It was humid inside regardless and he could only imagine what kind of hot box it would be had it been sealed up the last hour and a half. He reached in and got a pen from the dashboard. It was black with gold lettering in an engraver’s type face that advertised Cobb’s Funeral Home.
Zeke and Mary followed Tom out to the trail, then branched off to Zeke’s truck. Zeke had put on his shirt and Mary had put a long cover-up over her swimsuit. Her hair was dry now, but crispy looking. Its usual black sheen was subdued by hard water. Both of them looked pooped out. Zeke was yawning and got in to the driver’s side, key ready.
“Mary,” Tom called. He headed over to the truck and unfolded a paper from his back pocket. It was a copy of a release form he’d taken from the shop where he bought his Pentax yesterday. “Do you know how to sign your name?”
“Uh-huh,” Mary said, coming around to the hood of the truck to meet Tom. “Nurse Karen says I’m big enough I can sign my name better than just in exes.”
“X? Like the letter ‘x’?” Tom asked. Mary nodded and took the pen from him. “Has Nurse Karen asked you to sign some things for her?”
“Oh, uh-uh,” Mary said. “I be signin lotsa things for Nurse Karen. She say we all gotta do our part for Oshun View.”
“I see,” Tom said, considering. Mary had already made her marks on the paper and he was surprised to see it was her first and last name as plain as day. Mary Smithson, spelled out perfectly. No errors, no mystery letters.
“I been a pra-tissing, Tommy.”
“Good,” he said. “Well, this isn’t to help Ocean View. This isn’t really anything at all. This paper just says you give me permission to have the pictures I took of you today. Snap-snap.” He added that at the end and made a motion like he was snapping a camera with a squinted eye. He felt stupid suddenly, like he didn’t need to talk this way to Mary. She wasn’t Fidela. Her English was fine and she showed how much she really did understand.
Mary erupted. “Tommy YOU TOOK MY PITCHERS?”
It was Mary’s squealing volume, but she wasn’t delighted. Mary was angry. Seething with anger. “WHO SAY YOU TAKE MY PITCHERS?”
Throttled by her sudden volume, Tom stammered, “I-I. Y-you—”
Mary lunged at him and Zeke got back out of the truck. Tom flinched back and fell to the ground after tripping on a small boulder. He might have twisted his ankle over it. The pain was excruciating. Mary’s face boiled with the same colour as Nurse Karen’s gaudy lipstick and she leaned over him. “I NEVER SAY YOU TAKE MY PITCHERS!”
Then Zeke was with her. He strove to put his arms around Mary and calm her, a big deal Tom knew because he didn’t like touching others. I don’t shake hands, he had said. It’s worse than tubbing.
Mary shrugged off his touch and turned at him. She hollered in his face, all her crooked teeth throwing her spit on him. “HOW YOU LET HIM TAKE MY PITCHERS ZED?” He flinched back from her too.
Then Mary fell. Down to her knees in the dust storm she’d kicked up. She covered her face and her volume fell. But it changed too, changed into wracking sobs. Her mouth drew open in a yawn of silence as she struggled to catch her breath and start wailing anew. She was like a two year old girl having a tantrum in a shopping centre.
Tom reached for her, expecting her to shrug him off and start her shouting again. What on earth had happened to make lil Mary-Mary-quite-so-contrary?
She didn’t shrug him off. As soon as his fingertips made contact with Mary’s shoulder, she flinched. And then she was up on her feet and running. She ran off at an angle from the front of the truck and Zeke called out to her. “Mary!”
Zeke looked to Tom, dumbfounded. “What you do to Mary, Mr. Tom?”
“Nothing, Zeke. Nothing.” He rubbed his head and then his hands went to his ankle. “I just needed her to sign the form and—and…She’s heading to the road. Zeke, can you go and get my camera case? It’s under the tree. I’ll take the shuttle and go fetch her up. You come along in your truck and make sure she doesn’t double back. Okay?”
Zeke had that look he got sometimes, that vacant stare. Tom wasn’t sure if he did understand. He was used to having the Ocean View houseguests garble even basic instructions. “Can you say it back to me, Zeke? What are you going to do?”
Zeke struggled. Seeing Mary so upset was stressful and Tom knew from his work this summer that the houseguests didn’t deal well with stress. It often put them into a kind of shutdown mode. None of the lights stayed on. But then Zeke started to speak.
“Y-you go and get Mary at the road. I walk back and find your camera case. I come in my truck. I make sure Mary doesn’t run this way.”
From the woods
, they both heard Mary scream. Oh shit, Tom thought. I’ll bet she fell in a hole and twisted her ankle too.
13
Zeke heard the shuttle tear off. He looked back once and saw the Ocean View insignia—freshly painted this week for James Roundtree’s visit—disappear in a swoosh behind white pines, oaks and a swath of aspen and balsam poplar.
He ran across the clearing muttering to himself. “Gotta-git-the-camera-bag fore-Mary screams-er-head-off. Gotta-git-the-camera-bag fore-Mary screams-er-head-off.”
Zeke looked everywhere for the camera bag. He didn’t remember seeing it so he had no idea what it looked like. In his mind, he pictured a trash bag, one of those big orange things he was given to put his trash in when he speared it with his trash spike. In fact, he looked at the bag twice but his mind swept over it, unconsciously thinking it was just a chunk of dry, black earth amongst the weeds and grass. His heart was pounding. He needed to fix this, to get back with Mary and calm her down.
If purty girls laughing was thee best sound on earth, then purty girls crying was thee worst.
He desperately didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Tom by not bringing the bag. That camera was the most important thing to Tom. He couldn’t remember clearly if that was the reason they were even out here at the hot pool, but he thought it was. All he remembered was getting tired and going into the grass to sleep. Then Zeke wondered if he remembered wrong. He remembered lots of things wrong the last while. Did Mr. Tom tell him the camera bag was in the grass or laying on the rocks by the hot pool?
Zeke was torn. He looked back to the clearing and the space beyond it where his truck stood and where Mary had run off crying. He kept expecting her to burst through from the thicket and run to him. He wanted badly to get in his truck and go look for her like Mr. Tom did, but he needed to find the camera bag. That camera was important to Mr. Tom. He needed to find it.
Zed Page 5
