Mavis and Eddie in Summer

Day 5 of Streak

This is Emily Writes Back for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Mavis and Eddie

“All swimmers MUST shower before entering the pool.”

This is the best rule to break. Because the second you break it, it becomes a moot point and undetectable! It’s your word against theirs. Also, it’s too late! Any contagion you had resting on your skin has already made its way into the pool water.

Eddie’s got a raspy voice, like he’s sick or about to suffocate from smoke inhalation and only has the breath to say one last thing. But he keeps saying one last thing after one last thing. (Not that he talks to Mavis that often.) He’s usually talking sort of to the world in general. He’ll say, “Ain’t no red popsicles left,” or “This has got to stop: People got to stand in a line for the diving board, not just shove on.”

Hey, you’re wet. And what is “clean” anyway? Define that. Also, have you ever really looked at this water, like with good goggles on? It’s filled with floating things—hairs and strings, dark blades of grass, cloudy patches, and scabs.

Mavis likes Eddie. He’s skinny, not too tall, and his hair is thick, like a square wedge of afro-turf just laid into place. She likes how dark his almond eyes are, and how they flick clandestinely, significantly, from one thing to another. She’s jealous of everything he looks at but her.

Mavis jumps into the pool from the edge without even psyching herself up for the cold or the inevitable water up her nose.

Cold between her legs, cold under her arms, on her face, the back of her neck.

As her rigid body plunges the fourteen feet to the bottom of the deep end, her head fills with the essence of summer: chlorine, sun-heated concrete, and a soupçon of other people’s bathing suits. She bounces herself off the bottom and soars to the surface just in time not to drown. Someone did drown in this pool last year, but it wasn’t a kid, it was an old white lady with soft, flat arms and waxy skin, one of those ladies who use the lap lanes and try to pretend the rest of the pool isn’t churning with youth. She had a heart attack, they said.

Mavis treads water and takes in the action: hilarious screaming and laughter that echo off a solid blue sky, cannon ball splashes, and the ratcheted boing of the diving board just after a kid has leapt off it.

Mavis looks down at her own body. There’s her fancy royal blue one-piece. She pushes out her belly—in out, in out.

“What are you looking at?” Eddie asks asks in his cute, raspy voice. He’s suddenly there in the water in front of her.

“Hey, Eddie,” she says.

“Wanna race to the shallow end?” he asks.

“On your mark, get set, go!” Mavis says breathlessly, before dipping down under the water and starting to swim. It’s like in one of those dreams when you really, really want to run fast, but you are stuck to the ground by slime or school glue. It doesn't totally stop you, but you sure are slow. Mavis wants to dart through the water like a fish and beat Eddie to the wall.

She feels laughter bubbling up in her chest, but she better not laugh underwater! Her arms churn and she frog kicks. Where is he? Oh, way up ahead of her already. His suit is bright, light blue, almost the same color as the water and the painted sides of the pool.

OK, he won.

Without a word, just smiles, they get out and walk together to the snack bar for freezy-pops. She gets cherry, he gets lime. His eyes hop like a sparrow from the twins on a striped towel to the overly strict blonde lifeguard (she yells so much) to the clock over the snack bar. He glances at the dark doorways that lead to the locker rooms. His glance moves to the trees rustling beyond the fence and to the empty basketball court and finally back to her face.

“Your tongue is red,” he says.

“Yours is green with orange spots and it’s frightening,” she says back.

“Girl,” he says with a half smile and a nod of his head. He takes a big bite of his green popsicle, leaning his head back in pleasure, putting his face in the sun like a tanner, his eyes squeezed shut. Mavis sighs, happy as a queen on a picnic. “Why I like to see him eat?” she wonders. “I don’t know, but I could watch him eat seven thousand popsicles.” But he’d never eat that many. Eddie was the kind of boy who only did things a few times, not enough to satisfy you or become predictable.

The Oracles

Maybe when she was ten or eleven, Mavis visited an oracle and asked, “What’s the minimum amount of studying and homework I can do and still have a decent life?” And the oracle told her the answer and Mavis followed that to a T. She graduated from high school with a B minus average and some mildly worded college recommendation letters. She was headed to Towson State in Maryland.

Eddie, on the other hand, had also visited an oracle, but he’d asked a different question. “I’m going to do everything to the maximum, now what’s the highest I can go? And if you tell me anywhere below the very top, I want you to explain why.” The oracle said, “No, no! I wouldn’t dare! Go anywhere! You are in charge!”

Eddie studied and did homework as quickly as he could, and as forcefully. He wasn’t about spending all his time reading and studying, he was about spending the time necessary for straight A’s. He had other things he wanted to do, after all: Spend time with Mavis, race cars illegally, play basketball with his friends, jump off cliffs into rivers, lift weights, box …

He knew she probably wouldn’t like it, but Eddie sometimes thought of Mavis as a pet. She was his pet seal—plump, sleek, pretty, almost inert. Seals don’t have legs. They act like they are stuck on their backs wearing a tight skirt and can’t get up. Mavis was content just to look at him and listen to him talk. He liked her half-shut eyes, the lack of expression on her face, her curly eyelashes. On his application for college, he’d listed his extracurricular activities and they were many. Mavis listed Latin Club, which almost never met and when it did, they just talked about books and clothes and movies—in English.

The welcome packet from Brown University features lots of mini-brochures about different aspects of university life. Eddie and Mavis pore over them in his bedroom one Friday after school. His father walks by the half-open door and pushes it farther open. He is always alert to the possibility that Eddie and Mavis may be making out.

“Hi, Mr. Williams!” Mavis calls out.

“Hi yourself!” Eddie’s dad calls back, already halfway down the carpeted stairs. Eddie’s mom died when they were in seventh grade.

Eddie and Mavis make out all the time these days, but stealthily and briefly, the way Eddie does everything. Thirty seconds of having your neck kissed by Eddie Williams’s soft lips is worth thirty minutes of anything else with any other guy probably.

“Brown is so far,” Mavis says. “Here’s driving directions from ‘the north, south, or west,’ in case you need them, she says, flapping a mini brochure out to him.

“They never heard of GPS?” he rasps.

“It’s for in case this is 1980,” she says.

“Did Towson send you a welcome packet?” Eddie asks.

“I think so,” Mavis says.

To be continued…

Up next:

Will Mavis and Eddie stay in touch during college?