by Ily Goyanes
If it was raining or too damn hot, we were inside, opening each other’s bodies, tongues and fingers and thighs, splaying each other open with the same fierceness that we had on the court. In two years, Mary’s body hadn’t changed that much—lean as a boy, small pale breasts that fit perfectly into my palms and butted their nipples against my thumbs—but my own had curved, widening into something as creamy and soft-churned as butter. Boys gave me that look, something that I both feared and craved, but it was Mary I gave my body to, my mind to.
“Come for me, Maggie-May,” she’d say a hundred times a day. On the court. Off the court. Passing me in the halls. And it was enough to make me wet all the way to the inside of my knees. She’d crook her fingers at me from across the room, that little come-hither that I loved inside me, and I’d feel myself open up for her, wet and wanting.
A month before graduation, we were lazing in our dorm—we’d pushed the two single beds together to make something that fit us both, always laughing about how Mary was so skinny she kept falling into the crack in the middle.
“Almost out of here,” Mary said. We’d never talked about what came next. Just kept our heads down and our racquets up and our bodies together in the quiet dark of our room.
If you squinted just right, the freckles on Mary’s back made the shape of a tennis racquet. I grabbed my pink highlighter off the floor, connected the dots with the neon marker and drew in the oval curves and the straight string lines while she talked.
Mary turned mid-draw, making one of my lines go all squiggly. “What are you going to do after?”
I shrugged, re-capped the marker. It hurt me, somehow, that she’d asked you and not we, but I didn’t know why. We hadn’t talked about the future, but somehow I’d assumed we had one. “I don’t know. I’ve got that summer camp offer in Connecticut. But I’d rather hang out and watch you play tennis.”
I dipped my face into the curve of her neck, met her skin with a soft parting of my lips and teeth. She tasted like sunshine, like sweet and sour, like lemonade. I thought I could live off of nothing more than that.
“You should take it,” she said. “I’m not going to play tennis anymore.”
I’d laughed. Her saying no tennis was like her say no more fucking. But she looked serious. “What?” I asked. “You think I should take it?”
“Yes,” she said.
My stomach was doing odd things, rolling over and over, too tight. “Why?”
She took the marker from me without answering. “My turn,” she said. But she didn’t use the marker. She used her tongue, slid it over my skin, drawing with the heat of her mouth. Nipple to nipple, the mole on the side of my shoulder, the birthmark near my belly button, the soft point of skin between my thighs.
I wanted to ask whether she meant the tennis thing or not, but she was dragging her tongue along the wet heat of my center, dipping her fingers in. She played my body the same way she played tennis. Instinct and passion, competition and drive, forcing me over the edge even as I begged her to wait, to let me play too.
I took the Connecticut job, taught summer camp for two months. I wrote Mary every week, letters full of longing and lust, stories about the summer camp kids, about their tennis skills or lack thereof. I wanted to make her laugh, to make her wish she was with me, to keep us as close as we’d always been.
That whole time, Mary wrote me once. Just once. Her letter was a page long and it said nothing much at all. Still, I held on to it as a sign, as gospel that she still loved me, still wanted me, still ached for me.
I couldn’t wait to go home.
Thirty
By the time I got there, Mary was already gone. She’d taken a job with some smoke-jumping fire crew out in Oregon. I hid my heartbreak by breaking my back on the tennis court and by courting women who looked nothing like her. Fucking my way through the country club where I worked—married women who hadn’t been touched in years, mothers and wives with diamonds as big as my fist. Not a one of them could play tennis or play me, but I didn’t care. I just needed a place to put my fingers, my fist, the sharp point of my despair.
There were two things Mary never did tell me, things I didn’t find out until much later. The first was that back when we were in high school, Cornell had offered her a spot—a free ride on their tennis team. She’d turned them down, said she didn’t want to go without me.
The other thing she never told me? That she’d loved me. More than anything. Even more than tennis.
Forty
“Do you still play?” Mary is popping a tennis ball from one hand to the other, the counter between us like a net that can’t be crossed. In the corner, Elsie has found a racquet she likes. The sound of her swinging it, over and over, cutting the air, whistles beneath our words.
“Nah,” I say. “You?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I missed it too much. There’s an indoor court for us old people, over in Hillsboro. You should come sometime.”
“Maybe I will.”
“This one, mom,” Elsie says. She’s picked a good racquet, and an expensive one, of course. But it’s easy to tell it feels good in her hand, the way she carries it, holds it, the pink flush in her cheeks as she looks at it. I remember how that felt, to own everything and nothing, to not be able to see beyond what was in my hand and my heart.
“You’re sure?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Well, let’s get it.”
Mary is silent, watching.
For the first time, my daughter notices her. How selfish we all are as teenagers, I think. Not in a bad way, but in a real and true way. Everything is glorious. Everything is ours.
“Hi,” Elsie says. Sudden and shy.
Mary smiles her lopsided smile and takes the racquet from my daughter, the one who looks so like me. For a moment, their hands touch, and two small globes come together, crisscross, lob into each other, soft and high. “You play like your mom,” Mary says. “I can tell.”
“My mom played tennis?”
Our eyes meet over Elsie’s head. Why haven’t I told her? I don’t have an answer for that. Maybe because if I’d started, I wasn’t sure where I would have stopped, how much of the story I would have told.
“Jeez, mom, you played tennis?” Elsie is looking at her racquet with a look I’ve never seen before. Whether it’s pride or disgust, I have no idea.
“Yeah,” I say. I slide my credit card across the counter and Mary takes it. Our hands stop at the middle line of the space between us, don’t cross or touch. “I wasn’t very good though. Mary here was, though. She was the best.”
“She was?”
“Yep,” I say, and my heart does that big swell again. “The very best.”
Game Point
Mary’s body is everything I remember plus all that it’s become. Hard and soft, long and lean. Her stomach curves out a little, her breasts rest farther down. When I take her hand and press it between my thighs, her skin is rough with time. It makes me want to cry and to cry out, the sweet feel of her fingers, the painful press of what’s been lost and found.
My own fingers inside her are wrapped in heat and wet, in the tight press of her body. She kisses me, hard, tongue and teeth. Together we are both careful and ravenous, aware of our hunger, barely willing to be aware of our frailty.
She makes me come the way I haven’t come in a long time. That kind that rushes out of you like breath and leaves you empty and falling. The kind that makes it impossible to tell the difference between losing and love.
“You left me,” I say, and I’m sobbing. Stupid. Tears.
“You left me first,” she says. Her fingers are still inside me, filling me.
“You”—I am hiccupping like a child, like a teenage girl in love—“told me to.”
“I loved you,” she says, as though this explains anything at all.
Love. Again.
A few miles from here there is an indoor tennis court where a tall, thin, strong woman named Mary will hit a high, soft se
rve that could have been named for her, she sends it sailing so perfectly. On the other side of the long white net, someone else will wait, racquet in hand, poised to receive this thing, this deceptively easy and oh-so-hard thing that Mary has offered.
That someone will not be me. I will be at my daughter’s high school, watching Elsie dig in, swing hard and sweet and pure, watching her return everything that comes at her without fear, wondering where she learned it.
And then I will remember Mary’s mouth against mine before she left this morning, the press of her tongue, the lemonade taste of her lips. The way she whispers, “Zero, Love,” as if they are not the same thing. And I will rejoice to be on the receiving end of that high, sweet swing of faith.
GODDESS IN A RED-AND-BLUE SPEEDO
D. L. King
All right, this is going to sound like a lie, but it isn’t. I actually won a trip to Hawaii once. I sent in a postcard to a radio contest and two weeks later I found out I was the winner of the grand prize—yup, you guessed it—a trip to Hawaii. I got laid off two weeks after that—’cause nothing’s for free—but within a month I was off to the islands.
I did one of those resort scuba dives and after that, I was hooked. As soon as I got home, got another job and could afford it, I signed up for a National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) certification course. And after hours in a classroom, learning mathematical formulas and safety and history, our instructor, George, announced we were finally going to get wet—in a swimming pool but, hey, it was water.
There were seven of us: a straight couple who were getting married in the spring and planning a honeymoon to the Bahamas; a gay couple who had also done a resort dive while on vacation and gotten hooked; and two girls who were best friends who dared each other to sign up. I was currently unattached, so I was the odd woman out. By the time the pool sessions got started, we were all psyched.
We met each other at the college pool that shared space with the scuba school. The guys headed off to their locker room and the four of us girls headed off to ours. The soon-to-be-married Cheryl changed into a purple, iridescent bikini. The rest of us changed into our Jantzens and Speedos. At least it was nice to see that, as New Yorkers in March, we were all fish-belly white. After all, it really doesn’t matter what you look like in a bathing suit because no one’s ever happy. So we filed self-consciously out of the locker room and into the pool area with our towels and brand new masks, fins and weight belts.
George was waiting for us by the pool. “You won’t need your gear tonight. We’re just going to have swimming trials.” Everyone dropped their stuff against the wall and wandered back to the edge. “This is Lorna. She’s another instructor and a dive master. She’s going to be working with you in the pool sessions.”
She had short sun-bleached blonde hair, long muscular legs, a completely flat stomach and a deep tan. Lorna was a goddess in a red-and-blue Speedo with a racer back. As if I hadn’t felt self-conscious enough.
The echo of her whistle got everyone’s attention. “All right people; you’re going to swim four laps and then tread water and/or float for fifteen minutes. I’m not trying to scare you, but you’ll have to be able to pass this water competency test before you can complete the rest of the course and do your open water dives. Now, everyone in the pool.”
The smell of the chlorine was pretty strong. I figured my eyes were going to be really red by the time we were finished but I wasn’t worried about passing the test; I knew I was a strong swimmer. George told us we could use any strokes we wanted to swim the laps and that it wasn’t a race; we just needed to be able to do it any way we could. Another bleat of Lorna’s whistle and we were off. Larry, Cheryl’s fiancé, and Carson and I were at the lead. We finished our laps several minutes before the fourth fastest swimmer and began our water treading.
I could tread water for a pretty long time, but I was tired. I looked up and saw Lorna watching me. “Do I have to tread for a certain amount of time or can I float?”
“Nope,” she said. “You can float the whole fifteen minutes, if you want. The object is to keep from drowning for a while, if you have to.”
Pretty sure she’d save me, I thought about drowning, but then I remembered what the world looked like under the ocean. “Thanks,” I said and immediately stopped treading water and leaned back, let my feet come up to the surface, put my arms behind my head and relaxed. My ears were in the water, but I’m sure I heard her laugh.
Everyone managed to complete the test. Cheryl was the last one. She was exhausted but George assured her she could still finish and get certified. Carson’s partner, Blaine, had a hell of a time with the treading/floating exercise. The guy had absolutely no body fat and kept sinking. He had a great body, but I felt sorry for him. I always knew my tits and love of ice cream would pay off.
Over the next few weeks we all met at the pool and learned various things about breathing underwater. I never got tired of watching Lorna either giving direction from the pool deck or, better yet, swimming underwater with us. I tried really hard not to look at the way the red of her bathing suit squeezed her flat stomach and smoothed down between her legs, encasing the slightly raised pillow of her sex, or the way the blue around her arms accentuated her small breasts. My excitement mounted through the week, until Thursday would roll around and I could see my goddess again. I took great pains to make sure she never actually caught me staring at her.
The week after, we learned cheerful things, like clearing a facemask that had filled with water and buddy breathing (with George) when you ran out of air, and finally, learning to make an emergency ascent with no air at all. We were finally done with the pool part of the course. Walking back into the classroom the following week to take the final written test, I felt a real sense of accomplishment—and a bit of a letdown, when I noticed my blonde-haired goddess wasn’t there. The test wasn’t easy, but I’d studied hard and I passed with flying colors.
I signed up for the open water test, which would be a beach dive and a couple of boat dives. No Lorna there, either. I really wished I’d had the nerve to talk to her and maybe get her number, but now it was too late.
Shortly after I received my NAUI Worldwide SCUBA Diver card in the mail, I got a call from George. He said the shop was organizing a trip to Mexico and asked me if I’d like to go.
I got the details and requested the vacation time. This would be my first dive somewhere beautiful. My open water checkout dives were all in the cold, gray water off the coast of New York where you were lucky if you had three feet of visibility and didn’t freeze to death, even in the summer. I could swear my last dive in the cold Atlantic only afforded about six inches of visibility.
Finally the time came. I couldn’t get out of a meeting and so wasn’t able to fly down with everyone. I had to take a later flight. When I finally arrived, I checked in to the hotel and left a message for George letting him know I was there. The next morning, he called at six a.m. and told me to meet everyone downstairs for breakfast. Our first dive was at eight o’clock. When I got down to the restaurant, the first person I saw was Lorna.
“Hey, I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I thought, maybe, you were going to miss the trip when you weren’t on the plane.”
My mouth was open, but I couldn’t seem to make it work right. Finally, I managed to get the word, meeting, out. She gave me a quizzical look and a little frown before saying she was glad I made it.
God, what a loser!
There were seven of us, plus George and Lorna, on the boat. The only people from my class were Carson and Blaine and again, I was the only single. George told me he’d be my dive buddy. I was a little disappointed that Lorna wasn’t going to be my buddy, but I figured, after the way I acted in the restaurant, why would she want to? Once in the water, I forgot all about wishing Lorna was my dive buddy. The beauty of the underwater world was all encompassing. I didn’t want to come back up when George gave me the signal. I still had almost half a tank of air.<
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Back on the boat, everyone was exhilarated, talking about all the things we’d seen. George explained that different body types use different amounts of air and when the first person began to get low, we’d all surface. We had lunch on the boat and traveled to the next site, diving about an hour after we’d surfaced from the first dive. I went on two more dives the next day but opted out on the third day to go to the beach and sightsee.
Tired from the sun, I got back to my room to take a nap and was awakened by the phone. It was Lorna, telling me they’d booked a night dive and asking me if I’d like to go. She said it was really special and even more beautiful than daytime dives. I couldn’t say no and made plans to meet at the boat dock in a few hours.
There were only three other divers. Blaine had come alone and so George paired us up as buddies. We were given chemical light sticks to attach to our equipment and handheld dive lights to use underwater.
It wasn’t a very deep dive, only about thirty feet at the deepest, but it was really amazing to see all the neon colors of the nocturnal sea creatures. About halfway into the dive, I took a breath and got a mouth full of water. I took the regulator out of my mouth and saw that the hose had broken. Not panicking, I went for my spare regulator, but couldn’t find it. I grabbed Blaine and made the signal for “out of air” and the signal for “buddy breathing” so that we could both share his air. He panicked and dislodged my mask while shoving his regulator at my face. I didn’t get enough time to both breathe and clear my mask before he took it back. I waited for the regulator to be given back to me, but it didn’t come. I banged on my tank with my knife to get the dive master’s attention but I was blind and really out of air by that time.
I began an emergency assent to the surface but felt someone grab my ankle to try to bring me back down. I kicked them and continued upward. Panicked, out of air, I came very close to drowning, but I finally broke the surface and gasped in the air. Lorna surfaced right behind me, and Blaine right behind her. Bobbing on the surface, she signaled the boat, which made it to our location just as everyone else surfaced.
