Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

there.”
    “I think she may have smiled once.”
    “Well, that’s good.”
    “Whatever.”
    “No. It’s good, baby.”
    “It was good for me,” he said.

Chapter 21
An Old Familiar Impatience
    “ Why is the water yellow?” Mary Ann asked, wrinkling her nose.
    It was barely nine a.m., and the three of them were standing on the edge of the hot springs that Ben had been raving about since breakfast. It was not what she’d imagined. It looked like a smallish suburban swimming pool, complete with a blue-painted bottom. Only it didn’t look blue in the least, it looked green, because of that disgusting water.
    “It’s not really yellow,” Michael asserted.
    “Right.”
    “Seriously. That’s just the light refracting off the minerals.” He sat down on the edge of the pool and dangled his feet in the steaming saffron broth. He was wearing baggy surfer shorts with washed-out purple swirls that worked nicely with his white hair. Ben was wearing a dark blue Speedo that worked nicely with pretty much everything. She did her best not to stare as he eased himself into the water.
    “C’mon, Esther,” said Michael. “You’ll love it once you’re in.”
    This was a reference to her own swimsuit, a modest granny model with overlapping ruffles of brown polyester that looked, in fact, much worse than anything Esther Williams ever wore. The guys had found it that morning, all by itself on a rack at the general store, and brought it back to her bedroom with great merriment. Once she hit that water, of course, her suit took on a sickly orange hue, and its ruffles began quivering like the diaphanous folds of a jellyfish.
    “Eat shit,” she said, seeing the grin on Michael’s face.
    “I have to have a picture of this.”
    “Only if you wanna lose the camera.”
    “At least there aren’t that many witnesses,” said Ben.
    There were half a dozen other people steeping solemnly at the other side of the pool. They seemed to be Eastern Europeans, communally bathing the way they would in their homeland. Mary Ann had already overheard two of the women, both of them large and fish-belly white, chattering away in the changing room. Their grim, guttural tongue had been as foreign to her as Brazilian waxing obviously was to them.
    “This is nice,” she told the guys, trying to be a good sport.
    “You’re looking the wrong way.” Ben took her head in his hands and turned her gaze to the right, then upward, above the redwood perimeter fence. Half a mile away was a canyon wall roofed with unrelenting blue and flanked by a meadow so white it was almost blinding. Wisps of steam were wriggling from its surface like frisky phantoms.
    “My God,” she said.
    Ben smiled and, without fanfare, began to massage her shoulders. “This is why there’s a Pinyon City. People have been coming here a hundred and fifty years. White people, that is. The natives have been here for eons, of course.”
    “They would migrate from Tahoe in the winter,” Michael added. “It’s warmer on this side of the mountains, and the pinyons provided pine nuts for them to eat.”
    This National Geographic Special was not typical of Michael, so Mary Ann figured he was aping Ben, playing faithful assistant tour guide. She might have ribbed him about it, considering his glee over the swimsuit, but she was too blissed out to bother. Ben was working her flesh like a wizard, seemingly unafraid of her aging body, somehow making her at one with the earth in a pool of pee-colored water.
    Then self-consciousness took over. Those gloomy Borat people across the way were deadpan as ever, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what they were thinking. Who were these weird Americans anyway? This silver-haired old couple traveling with their grown son? Why was the son touching his mother’s body with such intimacy? And why was her husband watching them? And what was up with that swimsuit, anyway?
    “That was heaven,” she said, straightening her neck, discreetly signaling an end to the massage. “Thank you so much, Ben.”
    “You want me to stop?”
    “Let him do it,” Michael told her. “He enjoys it.”
    She glanced briefly toward the other bathers, prompting Michael to roll his eyes skyward with an old familiar impatience. Get over it, he was telling her, as he so often had when they were young. Why do you care what anyone thinks, when you could be dead or dying in six months? Nobody’s watching but you.
    “Okay. Fine. Thank you. Have at it.”
    So Ben