Marriage and Nudism

“You got a compliment at Clearwater.”
“I did, really?”
“Uh, huh,” Abie says and opens our yellow-gold fridge. “You drank my root beer.”
“Didn't.”
“So where is it?”
“Why don’t you look before you accuse someone?” My right hand clenches except for the middle finger.
“Well if you know, you could avoid all this by telling me in the first place.”
I worry about my heart which shudders and seizes up like an old car.
And I’m in love with Larry McMurtry who teaches my educational philosophy class. He has a wife and four kids. They live in a house with a wrap-around veranda and they’re enormously happy. No. They’re not. His wife is dying. It’s very sad.

There’s an old man who wears a tight white bathing cap when he swims. Abie says he was a rower in the 1939 Olympics. When I’m at Clearwater, my head clears. My brain’s forecast is generally cloudy with light or heavy rain and frequent threat of storms brewing. Clearwater women walk with tropical ease even though extra flesh drags on them like a mother with six kids tagging on to the hem of her skirt. I think all the women are beautiful and that I am too. Abie and I have our favourite rock at the base of the quarry. It’s flat and specked with flecks of quartz that sparkle in any weather. Once I arrange our knapsacks with extra sandwiches for Abie and fruit for me, I spread out a bath towel, slip out my clothes as though it’s the most natural thing to do, lie down and close my eyes.

“Hey, ya hear Wally’s up for coke?”
“Figured he’d be up for something with those dogs of his,” Abie says.
“Yeah well, he’s turning religious on us, some high priest, something like that.”
“Oh yeah?”
“High Priest, Church of the Universe, so here we are naked before God.'
The man’s squatting between Abie and me. I open my eyes. It’s the man with drooping balls. He drives his shiny black truck down the path to these rocks and unloads his cooler of beer hunkered down with ice. Not everybody drinks and no one gets drunk and if they do, they’re quiet about it.

“That’s the guy who complimented you,” Abie says.
I turn onto my stomach. “The one you started telling me about?”
“That’s the one.”
“So?'
“So he says you’ve got the best tits here.”
“Really? He said that?”
“Yeah. You’re such a sucker, you know that?”
“So I like compliments,” I say.
“Like is putting it mildly,” Abie says.

I get up and walk over to the edge of the rocks and dip my toe in the water. The water is cold and clear because there’s an underground spring. The old rower says there’s a slope of rocks going down just like there is on the outside of the quarry. And one summer a diver bashed his skull diving off the rocks at the top. I just jump off the rocks at the quarry’s base. And then I’m so happy, I laugh and laugh and even Abie smiles.
“You want a towel?” Abie calls out when I pull myself onto the rocks.
“Na, I’m fine,” I say and I lean back as if I’m catching the last rays of sun although the sky is overcast and it’s the end of August.
“You’re so predictable,” Abie says on the drive home.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” I say and I turn away because I can’t help smiling.


© Janice Colman 2008