The three old ladies sat by the shallow end of the pool. They were playing dealer’s-choice poker. Jean liked poker and listened to the games they called out: seven-card whores and fours, high-low, baseball, follow the queen. Baseball, oh I like baseball, Jean told them. One of the ladies ran up an outlandish baseball hand, an extra card with a dealt-up 4 and wild cards with a 3 and 9 and another 9 from the 4. Only Jean could follow along and the ladies were delighted to have an appreciative audience over by the deep end. The winner finished with six jacks and bemoaned the fact that only five of them counted. Jean tried not to laugh because it jarred her head. The ladies asked her to be a fourth, but she wasn’t up to it, which they understood: Did it hurt much? Not at all, she told them. Jo started to volunteer for the card game but Jean warned her off: poker players don’t like to teach. Jo hadn’t noticed how the ladies, always so talkative, got silent during the games.
Charlie finished swimming his laps, an activity the old ladies, who found almost everything whisper-worthy (she had heard them whispering earlier, referring to Harry as a lot of nothing), actually engaged in themselves, although usually in the evening. They smiled approvingly at Charlie’s undue heaving. Miss Dazzle kicked open the office door and backed out with a tray. She was wearing a stiff new overly blue pair of overalls. A sleeveless shell was barely visible underneath. She had earlier served drinks and now she came out with a lunch of tuna-fish sandwiches. The ladies grabbed at the sandwiches eagerly. Miss Dazzle put sugar in their mayonnaise. Everyone else got their sandwiches without the secret ingredient.
The tabby had finally showed up and Jean saw Beth put down her latest Lois Lenski to twiddle her fingers and call meow. But the cat settled by the ladies’ feet and they fed him under the table like he was a dog. Miss Dazzle held up three fingers. “Got hit again while you were gone,” she told Beth. “He gets stranger but not any deader.” “It must be true about nine lives,” Jo commented cheerfully. Miss Dazzle didn’t answer. She checked on Beth’s leg. Swimming in the pool had helped to dry out the scrapes. Then she came over to check Jean’s head. She had already swabbed the spot with iodine. She said well okay, everything was looking pretty dandy and let’s just let the sun do its work before we put on a bandage. Jean hadn’t realized her scalp was largely numb until she registered the tingling thickness of Miss Dazzle’s careless but gentle strokes.
“Charlie, you need to eat your sandwich,” Jo said. “Here, let me dry you off.”
Miss Dazzle looked a little askance at Jo.
Jean watched her son and wanted to run to him and hold him. He was standing the way all those boys in his winter swim class did after their lessons, dripping, shivering in place, holding their elbows, not a single one of them bothering with the solution of a towel. Jean held up a towel and beckoned to him. Charlie ignored her. With a towel would come a hug, and a hug would be noticeable. She tried never to be noticeably extra nice to Charlie. Extra anything asked the question why. It drew attention—it drew his attention—to why his mother treated him so special.
But Miss Dazzle grabbed the terrycloth and went after Charlie with big, bear-hug strokes, holding him against her for one long tussling snuggle. When she released Charlie, the front of her new bib overalls was soaked. “Probably have a blue bra now,” she said, happy to prove entertaining. “Well, the two boys have made it to California,” she announced. “They finally got through to me. Lordy, do I have a talker on my party line.”
“It’s terrible,” the old lady with the whitest hair said. “We’re up to eight now on our line.”
“And I have calls to make,” another added.
Miss Dazzle said, “Of course it provides them with a nice excuse not to call their mother and let her know they’re not camping in Yellowstone anymore. They can tell me they’ve been calling and calling but the line was busy—like heck.”
“How’d they like Yellowstone?” Jo asked. “Who are they, your sons?”
“Just delicious!” the old lady with a champagne tint called over, holding up a sandwich.
“That means they want more,” Miss Dazzle whispered to Jean. She headed to her office, calling back to the ladies, “If I make a few more sandwiches, will you eat them?”
“Don’t make them on my account.”
“Only if somebody else wants one.”
“I’m sure somebody does,” Miss Dazzle said.
After lunch Jo said, “Charlie, why don’t you show me that piece of petrified wood you brought back?” Miss Dazzle narrowed her eyes at Charlie’s and Jo’s departing figures. From the motel room came the sound of the radio, turned up too loud. Jean tried to act like it was nothing, but Jo’s excuse had been too theatrically casual. She called over to the ladies, “Sounds like another six of a kind over there!” Even though she was a much better actress than Jo, it was no good. Antennae might as well have grown out of Miss Dazzle’s head.
“Check or bet,” the ladies demanded.
“Check,” came the resigned grumble.
The other two cackled at the third one’s tone of defeat. “She’s got to check every time so we don’t fold,” they called over gleefully to Jean.
“I win the hand but no chips,” the third lady complained. She was the one with the whitest hair, almost a painted white. Jean had been sitting there admiring it.
“Is there something wrong with your son?” Miss Dazzle asked.
“My, you’re direct,” Jean said. She gave a sharp glance toward Beth. Her eyes swooped toward the old ladies, who, too busy laughing, had missed hearing.
“I have two sons,” Miss Dazzle said in a conversational tone.
“I know,” Jean said.
“So whatever you’re going through I might understand.”
Jean again aimed her eyes toward Beth and the ladies.
“Point taken,” Miss Dazzle said.
The ladies stalled in their shuffling and tried not to look over. “What did she say?” one of them whispered.
The sky as usual was cloudless, and its vast blueness was almost but not quite the same color as the pool. That little bit of difference made the pool depressing. Against the real sky it could not compete. It had the same lingering dreariness as the Y indoor pool where she had taken Charlie for his lessons. It was against doctor’s orders, but she believed the exercise was good for him. Pounding him after swimming, she could always tell that his lungs cleared more easily. And Charlie liked it and he liked the instructor, young and muscular and free, whose crew cut and glasses turned him into an accountant once he was out of the water, and Charlie liked the other boys in the class, too, and the boys all liked him.
A dark-gray truck pulled in and although it wasn’t a yellow International Harvester, Harry stepped out of the driver’s side. Jean didn’t know the smallish man who popped out of the passenger side. He was introduced to her as Dr. Randolph. Harry lingered by the truck, the way a mother might who had a sleeping baby inside. The doctor said something about is this the little lady with the six-shooter, something stupid like that, she didn’t catch it all. Miss Dazzle had had her fill of the doctor from what little Jean had learned, but that didn’t stop Miss Dazzle from being hospitable. The tray was still mostly full with a second round of sandwiches. The doctor picked up a diagonal half of sandwich and aimed his bite into the center, the way a child would do. Miss Dazzle brought out a cold drink and the doctor said, “You got anything of the stronger variety to put in this drink,” and she said, “Already in, Randy.” “You know me too well,” he said. Jean wondered if the doctor could possibly be named Randy Randolph. She doubted it, but out here anything seemed possible.
The doctor stood over Jean at the pool. He said they didn’t have to move to the room for the exam, the light was better out here. The old ladies were so busy craning that the one dealt the cards right off the table. “And of course whatever I say everybody’s going to find out anyway,” he said. He twisted over his shoulder toward the ladies. “We’ll just make it easy for everyone, shall we?” The shall we seemed to suit the physique of the doctor, something a little prissy and tiny in its impact. Jean had begun to notice that so many of the men out here in this rough world, suited only for the toughest of men, were physically small.
The doctor dabbed Jean’s head with some iodine, clearly not noticing the medicinal yellow already coating it. She smelled the tuna fish anew when he paused and took another bite. He didn’t bother with a bandage; he said the air was a better healer.
Miss Dazzle, peering down with him, said, “We have a little girl with a big splinter, too.” Her robust flesh and personality towered over him, the thick red hair, teased at the crown this morning, adding another two inches to the two inches she already had on him.
“Let’s look at your leg,” Dr. Randolph said.
Beth came over and Dr. Randolph glanced down and said something like why that’s just a scraped leg. Beth sat on Jean’s lap and asked her when they could have the barbecue. The doctor, who stopped being a doctor to Jean at the next moment, said, “Why that’s a selfish little girl to put yourself first when your momma’s laid up. You should get off her lap and leave her alone.”
Jean had already jumped upon one man and pummeled him to no good effect, so she stayed put. She could only hope he might get close enough to the pool for somebody to knock him in. She held on tighter when Beth tried to get up.
Randolph looked up as Jo and Charlie returned, and Jean saw how his features opened up at the sight of Jo, and she noticed how he took the steps in being a man, drinking, enjoying women, and exaggerated them in opposite proportion to his size. But he made that little mistake, biting into his sandwich like a little boy. Plus she hated him for what he had said to Beth.
She noticed Miss Dazzle studying Charlie. Charlie looked better, his skin flushed and clear. It could easily be from his swim and the sun and the water, but of course Miss Dazzle wasn’t going to fall for any of that. Jean glanced over at Randolph’s watch: only half past noon. Already Charlie had needed a second session. Miss Dazzle swept up her hair into a hand-bound ponytail. The underarm moons of her sleeveless shell were turning blue. She let her hair drop and fanned out the wet bib of her overalls. The dye of the new overalls was leaking blueness everywhere. When Jean closed her eyes, the smell of chlorine took over. There was something about the smell of chlorine in the summer, especially on your own skin: it turned the everyday into magic.
Randolph said, his smile upon Jo, “If they’d told me there were so many pretty women to take care of, I would have been out here a lot sooner.”
“Harry, you didn’t tell him that?” Miss Dazzle teased, raising her voice so Harry could hear her down by the truck.
“Did you say we were ugly?” Jo asked.
Harry kicked around uncomfortably by the tires.
“You’re not coming up to visit?”
“Gotta get going,” Harry said.
“I got some tuna-fish sandwiches all prepared.”
“That won’t get him up here,” Jean said.
“What’s wrong with you, Harry?”
The old ladies took note of Harry’s strange behavior and added it to their list of whispers. Jean realized (and even with her head injury, saw that she was the only one appearing to realize it) that Harry was waiting for something, that he had some errand, some mission of consequence. She encouraged Randolph, well, don’t let us keep you, we know you have important business to take care of. She had never been good at any of the glib social clichés, but now they seemed to spin out of her on their own. They were so much easier to say now that her head had been grazed by a bullet. Her thick skull of self-consciousness had thinned to a porous skin.
Randolph had seated himself in another chaise longue and to her chagrin accepted a second drink from Miss Dazzle. He took a swallow before calling over, “Okay, Harry, you go ahead and take off. You don’t really need me. I think I’ve signed what I need to sign.”
Jean thought of things this man’s personality reminded her of: a doorknob, a second coat of paint, a plain piece of paper, a penny with an unreadable date, a shirt abandoned to a mud puddle. If only she could talk to a doorknob and get the answers she needed. As a sort of perversity she imagined broaching the subject of Charlie with Dr. Randy Randolph, imagining what he would say. Some cough syrup should fix him right up. Even the doorknob would have a better answer: Turn, then push hard.
Before leaving, Harry dared to abandon the vehicle long enough to drop three letters on Jean’s lap. Not postcards. Letters. Three letters, postmarked from Springfield, Ohio, sealed and crinkled with saliva. Three sealed letters from her mother, thick with hidden words. Perhaps very important words. She would throw them away as soon as she was alone.
“Thank you, Harry,” she said.