Trollope,” said Meade. “That dreary march through chapter after chapter, waiting for Planta-genet to be named Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
It was late April, and Meade and Hilma were arguing about what book to read aloud on their Thursday Evenings in May. It was a ritual they had cheerfully observed since the early days of their friendship fifty years ago, when they had both been new teachers at the old Midway School. But this year they were wrangling.
“You only want to read the Palliser novels because you have an adolescent crush on Phineas Finn,” Meade said.
Hilma sighed. Meade wanted to read Emma, although they had already read Emma in May of ‘79 and again in May of ‘85. It was true that Hilma had a soft spot in her heart for Phineas Finn, but it didn't seem fair that Meade's love for Mr. Knightley counted as a loftier emotion than hers for Phineas, more literary in tone.
“You know, of course” said Meade, “that the character of Mr. Knightley is one of the most finely drawn in literature.”
And suddenly Hilma felt sick to death of Mr. Knightley and Emma and Meade and all of the Thursday Evenings in May. “Why do we shut ourselves up in this little room anyway, and read aloud in the month of May, when the ferns in the woods are unfurling, and the lightning bugs are coming out in swarms? We should be doing something daring, with action and adventure,” she blurted out desperately.
“‘And why do we read anyway, when the lightning bugs are swarming?’ I said to Meade, and then she said in that challenging way, ‘Exactly what did you have in mind?’ But of course, Ethel, I didn't have anything specific in mind, just not Emma for the third time,” Hilma said to Ethel the next day. They had taught first grade together too, for Ethel's first and Hilma's last ten years. It had been nothing for the two of them to figure out how to make the inside of a shoe box look exactly like the Okefenokee Swamp in a few moments of whispered consultation in a darkened classroom at rest time, so it was natural for Hilma to come to Ethel with the dilemma of the Thursday Evenings in May. “Meade is my oldest and dearest friend, Ethel, but she can be so difficult at times.”
“The sap is rising,” said Ethel. “You are feeling restless, that's all. It's spring. You need a change.”
And she handed Hilma a book off her shelf: Bar-tram's Travels.
“Come with me on Saturday to the Fountain of Youth,” she said.
“Fountain of Youth,” said Meade to Roger. “Action and adventure. Ethel has taken her off to central Florida, where they are to bathe in one of the springs near the spot where William Bartram ate tripe soup with the Seminole chief Cowkeeper in May of 1774. My oldest and dearest friend will probably be swallowed up by one of those giant central Florida alligators, and all because I didn't want to spend my Thursday Evenings in May reading about the Duke of Omnium's great campaign for the five-farthinged penny.”
“The dangers of central Florida have changed since 1774,” said Roger. “I don't think the alligators will bother them.”
“Still,” said Meade, “ I do hope Ethel will look after her. Hilma is not as strong as she pretends to be.”
“‘Two very large ones attacked me closely’”—Ethel was driving nearly 80 miles per hour down 1-75 and reciting her favorite passages from Bartram's Travels by heart— “‘roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me. They struck their jaws together so close to my ears as to almost stun me, and I expected at every moment to be dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured.’ ”
But Hilma couldn't keep her mind on alligators. She kept noticing the billboards rearing up out of the cow pastures along the side of the road—a skimpily dressed, dyspeptic-looking young woman nine feet high, and the great words towering against the blue sky: we bare all. Hilma thought wistfully of the familiar comforts of the Thursday Evenings in May, Mr. Woodhouse with his basin of thin gruel and his frettings about the damp and the dirt and the dangers of sea air. It's spring, and the sap is rising, Ethel had said, but when they finally pulled into the sandy parking lot and heard through the woods the splashes and screams of the spring bathers, Hilma just sat in the car, feeling vulnerable and frail. Now when she thought of sap she remembered the morning sun shining through the chunk of amber she kept on a windowsill at home, and the little million-year-old fly frozen inside, with its bent and folded wings and its crumpled little legs.
“The waters appear of a lucid sea green color,’” Ethel recited, gathering up towels and canvas bags of swimming gear. She stood patiently, holding the car door open for Hilma. “The ebullition is perpendicular upwards from a vast ragged orifice through a bed of rocks.’” And sure enough, around a shady bend in the sandy trail and through the woods, there it was— the Fountain of Youth.
It was dazzling—the brightness of the clear water, the deep new green of the surrounding vegetation, and the turquoise blue of the little spring and its river. The white sand glittered.
“ Tt is amazing and almost incredible, what troops and bands of fish and other water inhabitants are now in sight,’” quoted Ethel.
But there were no fish in sight. The only water inhabitants were people, splashing and shrieking in the shallows or floating down the crystal stream belly-down in inner tubes, their bare feet poking stiffly toward the sky like ghastly plants struggling for sunlight. Something about the sun and the bright clear water and the luxuriant vegetation made the people look vivid and surreal, the white people whiter, the hairy people hairier, the stringy people stringier.
“My goodness,” said Hilma, but Ethel had left the canvas bags in a heap on the shore and was gone. Hilma could see her little head bobbing in the water where she floated, twirling slowly around and around over the boil. Every now and then a little burst of spray would shoot up from her snorkel.
Hilma took her shoes off and waded in gingerly up to her knees, poking at the sandy bottom with the tip of her walking stick. But little sharp rocks gouged her feet and the water was so cold it burned, and after just a minute she crept out. She wrung out her dress tail and carefully spread a towel on the grass in a little glade and sat, hugging her knees. She could feel a sweet aching in her legs and feet from the cold, and the bright glare, the distant shouts of the bathers, and the greenness made her feel dizzy or sleepy, and after a minute she closed her eyes and let her mind wander. For a while she thought about the sleazy motel near exit 73 where she and Ethel were to spend the night. Would there be a hair of the previous guest in the yellowed fiberglass bathtub? Would there be a dark and mysterious stain on the orange shag carpet? Would she and Ethel be able to sleep with the bright lights blinking we bare allthrough the thin curtains, or, worse, would they both be raped and strangled in their lumpy beds by lusty revelers from the Cafe Risque across the road? Then she thought about Phineas Finn. It was in just such a place of great natural beauty as this, at the top of the falls of the Linter, that he had proposed to Lady Laura Standish in that touching way of his, looking as handsome as a god in his velvet shooting jacket, and kissed her.
When Hilma opened her eyes she saw an old man standing beside her, eating a thin sandwich on white bread. His skin was so pale it looked almost translucent, and his feet were so stringy and knobby that they looked more like mechanical models of feet than real flesh and blood. He stood, chewing his sandwich and looking down into the water for a long time. Then he said, “This your first time to the spring?”
“Yes,” said Hilma in her best schoolteacher voice, “although I have read about this spring. The great naturalist and explorer William Bartram visited here in 1774.”
“Lot of folks come with their families—husbands, wives, the kids,” the old man said, “to ride the tubes.” He took a step closer, and Hilma watched the strings in the tops of his feet tighten and loosen.
“Myself,” he said, “I'm not a married man.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed thoughtfully. Then he asked, “Are you a married woman?”
Hilma sprang up, snatched her towel off the ground, and flapped it viciously between them. “Sir!” she said. “That is not a civilized question!”
“I was just thinking,” he said. “They say this spring has powers. And you being here all by yourself and me being an unmarried man, well, I was just thinking, why—”
This time the water didn't feel as cold, and she floundered in deeper and deeper, clutching her skirt with both hands, until she stepped off a little rocky ledge and plunged in over her head. There was the first gasp when she thought she had died, and then, as she began to swim, the gulps for air became more moderate, and she could feel the coldness gradually seeping into her, until the only warmth she had left came from deep inside, and she imagined that she could make out the shapes of her internal organs by their heat: her foamy lungs and her flaccid liver with the little green gallbladder, hot and dense, nestling beneath it. Underwater there was no sound, just color and light. Even the wild dance of the eelgrass in the turbulent surge seemed peaceful in all that silence, and every time she lifted her head to take a breath it was startling to hear a second's burst of sound, like a yelp or a bleat. Hilma floated and gasped and floated and gasped, with her eyes open wide, until Ethel paddled up beside her, and together they climbed out and sat on the bank with their teeth chattering. Hilma wanted to tell Ethel about the flight from the unmarried man, the icy plunge, and how in that silent green and silver world she had felt the last of her anger at Meade and Mr. Knightley seep away along with her body heat until all she could feel was one tiny spot of warmth somewhere near her spleen. But they were both too cold to speak and they just sat on the sand, shivering and grinning.
• • •
“They are spending the night in Micanopy, near the site where Bartram frolicked with Indian maidens,” said Meade, heaping mashed potatoes on Roger's plate, “across the road from the Cafe Risque, where, I understand, women prance around on the countertops stark naked while men eat sloppy joes and poke dollar bills at them through a chain-link fence.”
“I didn't know the part about the chain-link fence,” said Roger.
They sat for a while, eating their civilized meal with a dinner fork and a salad fork, and listened to coffee percolating in the kitchen.
“I do hope Hilma is getting enough to eat,” said Meade. “Ethel is not apt to remember simple things like food.”
The Cafe Risque, painted glossy purple and white, sat in the very center of its shimmering asphalt parking lot surrounded by bright spotlights on tall poles. Fake turquoise shutters framed blank spaces on the walls, and signs had been painted where there might have been windows:
NUDE DANCING
“ ADULT TOY” GIFT SHOP
GREAT FOOD!
24-HOUR CAMERA SURVEILLANCE
“I can tell by your sunburn you been in the spring,” the woman in the motel office said. “You had a nice day for it. Yep, that's mostly who we get in here, tubers.” She wagged her head toward the Cafe Risque and raised her eyebrows at Hilma. “And them. The tubers, at least they're clean, been in that icy water all day, and quiet, wore out from all that paddling. Them, they're mostly truckers.”
The room was shabby but clean. There was no stained carpet and no stray hair in the bathroom, just worn-out linoleum and a row of cigarette burns on the edge of the tub.
Ethel was hungry, and as soon as they had gotten settled in, she went off toward Micanopy to try to find something to eat, but Hilma just wanted to sit still and savor the salubrious effects of an afternoon spent in the Fountain of Youth. She lay on the threadbare sheet on the bed beside the window and watched the Cafe Risque grow brighter and brighter as the night came on until it almost seemed to blaze with light. Just like the orchids you see on educational television, she thought, luring species-specific pollinators with elaborate tricks of mimicry. And right before she fell asleep she remembered with pleasure the name the Indians had given William Bartram: Puk Puggy—the Flower Hunter.