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Helen. Like of Troy. A face so alluring those lusting after her condemned themselves to death. The irony is not lost on Carol, leaning behind her, bare feet rough against aggregate concrete, goosebumps prickling the longer they stand there, the both of them, staring into the depths of Helen’s ex-ex-girlfriend’s pool, willing themselves to be the first to make a move.
She casts a glance in front of her, shifting from her right to her left. In the night’s darkness, Helen is just a shadowy outline, her lean figure vague except for the deep blue light cast across her front, barely illuminating the curve of her jaw and slope of her nose to blend with the aquamarine of her eyes, now gazing steadily at the offending body of water. Her furrowed brow barely visible, and Carol, matching it in frustration at Helen’s indecision that is really her own, too, takes two forceful strides to match her at the pool’s edge.
“I’m freezing my ass off here, you know.”
“You know, you could jump in first.”
“No.”
“Just ‘no’?”
“No. I mean yes. Yes”
“Real smooth.”
“We can’t all be fancy-pants grad students at some Harry Potter ass school.”
“You could.”
And Carol feels it catch in her chest, just a little, enough so that her next jab isn’t a jab, isn’t quick or witty enough to pretend Helen’s words didn’t have an effect on her. Which is stupid, because they don’t. They can’t.
“So are you going to jump in that pool or what?”
And Helen just shrugs at her, lazily, exaggerated, shoulders coming up near her ears and back down.
“Are you?” Helen asks.
“Are you?”
“I double dog dare you”
“I triple dog dare you”, Carol replies, drawing out the “i”, rolling it luxuriously back in her throat, almost savouring its taste. The way the corners of Helen’s lips tug the edges of her cheeks, Carol knows she’s won. The who has been decided- it’s all a matter of how.
“Do ya wanna flip on it?”
“Sure”, she replies, looking over at Helen, a slight shrug with her left shoulder, running her right through her other pocket to fish for loose change. Found, she balances the penny carefully on the torn thumbnail of her right hand and the index finger pressing against it, locking eyes with Helen as she does, slight smirk crossing her face.
“Tails you win, heads I lose” she quickly calls, deftly flicking her index finger to send the small coin spinning through the cold air, watched closely by both pairs of blue eyes as it rises before falling, clattering unceremoniously against the smoothened rock embedded in the sandy-coloured pool tile. Against the ultramarine glow emanating from the swimming pool lights, its copper hue darkens, shadows lengthening underneath the relief so Carol can’t tell if it reads “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum”. It doesn’t matter, she’s won anyway.
“Tails”, she calls, the much-agreeable latter over the detested former, and Helen sighs, rolling her eyes. Carol crouches to pick up the penny, intent on letting Helen in on her little scam, a trick she picked up in a bar back in the day, sophomore year, but just as she stands up, eyes affixed to her face, attempting to gauge her reaction, Helen winks back, amused, a ghost of a smile crossing her face.
“You’re really doing it, aren’t you?”
“You’re really doing it, aren’t you?” Helen teases, crossing her arms to grab at the bottom of her t-shirt, pulling it over her head and turning it from inside-out to rightside-in, folding it over itself until the garment is just a square of fabric in her hands. Her torso bare except for her bra and a thin gold chain long enough to curve over her collarbones and rest flat against her sternum, once hidden underneath the shirt now resting on the tile near her feet.
Carol can’t look away.
“Here, undo the clasp for me, won’t you?”, she asks, turning her back to Carol, pulling her dark brown hair, barely visible in the darkness, to the side, exposing the small clasp of the chain shining at the nape of her neck.
Carol, with trembling hands she tries to hold steady and a deep red flush blooming from the base of her neck, steps forward. She so gently, so carefully, brushes a finger against the cool skin behind the clasp, bringing it to her hands so she can fiddle with the tiny locking mechanism. It’s long enough that Helen could’ve easily lifted it over her head, following her shirt, she knows. She tries not to notice how the necklace has transferred the tiniest portion of Helen’s body heat to hers, warm against the pads of her fingers.
On the second try, the chain splits into two, and Carol, in a rare display of gallantry, but not of chivalry, moves her right hand over Helen’s chest and around her head to collect the gold coil in her palm that glows like the riches of fables. At Helen’s slight nod towards her feet, she lets it slip from her hand.
She watches Helen work the thick belt of her jeans, pulling the tab of the square brass buckle out from the hole in the blackened leather, the belt through the loops around her waist until it too rests curled on top of her t-shirt and chain. Belt discarded, her pants slip from her waist to catch at her hips instead, exposing the slightest edge of her underwear's elastic waistband.
“Quit staring and start taking those clothes off, Sturka.”
Carol immediately jolts like she’s been shocked, turning her body all the way around and pointedly staring at the tile in front of her, praying the dim light from the pool isn’t enough to reveal her skin flushing, her jaw clenched in embarrassment, heat prickling her cheeks. She concretes on undoing the buttons down the front of her own shirt, difficult with her hands still shaking from the unexpectedness of Helen’s jab, though lighthearted and well-meaning as always. Helen knows Carol’s into her, and she’s into Carol. Isn’t that what’s this all about, anyway? Why can’t she just make the first move, be the one to take the plunge? Why is she so terrified, so frightened, so scared? Still?
The phantom electrical pains running up and down her forearms answer for her.
She’s so focused on shucking off her flannel that the loud, high-pitched squeal that Helen lets out as she crashes into the pool, her whole body submerged in the freezing chlorine, a massive splash replacing the previously still water where she’d jumped, splattering onto Carol’s bare midriff and against her slacks, startles her completely. She whips her head up, setting eyes on Helen almost immediately, newly surfaced, her eyes shining wide with mirth, wet hair clinging to her temples, a broad grin stretching across her freckled face as she treads water, kicking back slightly to float a little on her back, looking up at Carol, in between taking off her shirt and removing her pants. Positions reversed.
“Hey! Watch it!”
It’s all bark and no bite, and Helen knows it, gleefully enjoying Carol’s pantomime.
“Come on, give me a show!”
Carol hesitates for a second, and for a second Helen’s scared she’s pushed it too far, this thing between them too new and fragile and Carol’s shy, sometimes, and obviously brimming with things she won’t tell Helen, she knows, good but mostly bad, and it is too much for Carol, just a little. She’s not good at being looked at, unlike Helen, who projects a confidence and charisma that can make Carol uncomfortable at times. Times when she feels like Tennessee sawed her open and drained her of blood and bone and flesh and marrow and stuffed her full of hatred where her heart should be. Shame.
She looks down instinctively, gaze fixed on the pool tile in front of her, and Helen takes it as her signal to gulp down a great big breath of air before dunking her head under, time Carol makes quick use of to hurriedly step out of her own pants and leap into the pool.
She hits the water with a loud slap, gasping at the sudden cold, panting in and out as she furiously kicks to keep her head afloat, attempting to halt the rush of panic that comes when she coughs a little, abdominals clenching, her windpipe blocked on some of the pool water she must’ve accidentally inhaled as her face hit its surface.
She recalls unending, humid, summers spent on the shores of the Mississippi, the hidden current of the river’s flat curve pulling her body under after she’d dared to wade too far into its murky depths, her long blonde hair whipping across her sore, sunburned face as she’d frantically turned her head, barely bobbing above the waterline, praying there was some stranger on the shore who could throw her a life preserver or something, anything, to avoid her dead, lifeless, body being found, decomposed and rotting, in the greasy mud of some anonymous estuary near the Gulf.
A ways downriver, tossed and tumbled and turned every which way so that she no longer knew which was up, she’d just barely grabbed at the sodden footboard of a manky rope swing, her small, slippery, fingers on that disintegrating piece of wood holding her weight with single every muscle in her weak body. She’d screamed, and a family, a nice family, with a father and mother who loved each other and two docile, meek, perfect children had come running, and dragged her from the river sturdy hand over sturdy hand, who couldn’t believe she hadn’t drowned and was instead was panting like a dog from the pound in the backseat of their Buick. All Carol remembers from the drive back to Randolph was the mother brushing her right hand against her chest where the gold cross on a gold chain rested whenever she’d turned her head back to check on her from the passenger seat. She had been saved by God, she had been blessed by Him, but what merciful God could’ve allowed her to believe, for minutes that felt like days that felt like the rest of her life that she could, no, that she would, drown?
By the time those sturdy hands, one firm against her head and two others gripping each shoulder, were holding her thrashing, writhing body underneath the freezing water splashing over the side of the baptismal font, her knuckles white from clenching its wooden lip, bent over at the waist wearing nothing but the thin, linen shift pulled roughly over her naked body by a woman with nothing but malevolence in her eyes but only wide, eager benevolence in her beaming smile, there was nothing left to believe in.
And submerged again, for the first time in so many years that weren’t anywhere near long enough to forget, she still feels those hands slippery against her back, her waist, her thighs, gentle but always wanting, always taking, still, still, still.
She was so foreign to herself after Freedom Falls that before she ran away she stole the first of her family’s series of photo albums, snatching the black-and-white prints of her former self out from underneath the sticky plastic and burning all the rest in the metal bin at the end of the street from the bus terminal, just to look into her eyes, her own eyes, one last time, and say sorry. She burned them, too, once she did.
By the smoke that trailed from the end of her first cigarette since, by the first woman at the gay bar on 41st whose wanting throat she’d stuck her tongue into, by the first mouthful of frothy, warm, shitty beer she’d stolen, by the first word she wrote with the stub of a pencil on a yellow legal pad and by the first needle she’d slid, warm and needy, into her vein, she was born anew.
In the pool, she rests against Helen’s knee, dragged into shallower waters. Her back is pressed against Helen’s front, with Helen’s legs around her and her ass on a hard step of the same concrete aggregate of the pool tile. In the water lapping against her chest, the sky is reflected, tiny pinpricks of faint white light all that remains of stars from a backyard in Albuquerque, New Mexico. How many times she’d bowed her head to the same sky, ground hard against her knees, hands clasped tight around each other, thumbs crossed, and how many times she’d craned her head towards it afterwards, praying that He had been listening.
She turns around, her face unreadable and unknowable. Helen’s hands run lightly up her bare arms to her shoulders. Carol’s do the same. Helen looks into Carol’s eyes, and inhales. She slowly moves her hands against the curve of Carol’s neck. Carol exhales.
Helen raises her eyebrows just slightly, questioning. Carol leans in, and all of a sudden her hands are against Helen’s jaw and Helen’s are firm against her head and they both taste slightly of chlorine and the pool’s temperature means they’re both shivering but Carol pushes Helen back against the tile anyways, using the moment to take a deep breath before pressing against her once again, hands moving against backs and cheeks and necks and scalps and desire surges like electricity through her desperately wanting body and at all once she is nothing but an instrument to its fulfilment.
Helen ends up in Carol’s bed by morning, because of course she does, after their skin starts mottling blue from cold and they drag themselves from the pool and quickly throw on their discarded clothes and Helen fastens her gold chain around Carol’s neck because she’s scared it’ll fall out of her pocket and under the cover of darkness they stop to make out against telephones poles on the walk to Carol’s shitty apartment.
Carol wakes first and watches her. Bright sunlight slowly illuminates her freckled face. She thinks of a proud, haughty pirate sailing on amaranthine sand, a devastatingly beautiful woman who completely uproots the life of her overly cautious captain, her confident front concealing something deeper, something darker, and she wonders whether calling her ‘Helen’ would be too on-the-nose.
The first chapter of “The Winds of Wycaro” is written in Carol’s favourite booth at Launchlin’s that afternoon.
She begins to believe again.