Maria

Maria

Maria lay sunning on the yellow Chase lounge, pondering over the idea of death. She was holding the idea like a candy on her tongue- pushing it around, tasting it slowly yet with death (unlike the candy), she couldn’t fully swallow the concept.
A leaf fell from an Elm tree above and slid on to the surface of the pool creating tiny waves around it. A small bead of sweat rolled down Maria’s forehead and broke into her eyebrow. Then the landscape was still once more and Maria continued with her thinking.
After a few more moments of stillness and silence, a metal gate was clicked open then clicked shut again and Maria opened her eyes as a shadow was cast over her. She held her hand up to block the sun and squinted only to see Beatrice standing there.
“Mama says come inside,” the plump black haired girl commanded of her sister, “You’ve been outside sitting all day. I had to wash the dirty kitchen tiles and scrub a red-wine stain from Mama’s best white dress while you just sit outside in the sun all day long. Are you going to come in now or sit here and blame Richard for your laziness?”
“Do not talk about Richard. I do not like it. I will be inside in a few minutes. Now- go away!” Her ugly sister turned to the gate, unlatched it, latched it, and went into the house. Maria thought the sun had bleached Richard from her thoughts like it does to the color on a clamshell but now that Beatrice had mentioned him again; Maria realized Richard was just like the tide; gone for only a while before now returning again.
To Maria, Richard was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen. When she heard his name, the same picture always crept into her mind- it was a mental image she had saved of Richard leaning on the chain fence outside school, smoking a cigarette and surrounded by his buddies but their faces were blurry. She walked passed him that day and never forgot his hard, chiseled face and his dark, dirty-looking hair.
When her friends asked her in the cafeteria later that same school year why she was dating a boy like Richard, she could never explain to them for she couldn’t really explain to herself. She knew Richard was not the type of boy she should fall in love with but she also knew that she in fact did love him.
Now the summer was passing Maria by and she was without Richard. She sat up from the Chase lounge, reveling little indents from the chair’s course texture on her back. Sitting on the chair’s side, she took in her surroundings for one last moment reminding herself that the most of the trees around her will live longer than she. In some attempt to comfort herself, she thought of how the trees and everything else surrounding her knew nothing of her love Richard and his sudden death two months ago.
Maybe sudden is not the right adjective for Richard’s death for when the police found his body among the minnows and the tan, smooth rocks that line the bottom of the Soussan River, most folks around just said they saw it coming. The police told Maria what they thought had happened to Richard- that he had parked his old black car that was found the next morning at the rest stop off the highway and walked down the dirt path that started behind the porter potties. From there he had staggered down the overgrown trail towards that river and that was where he was found lying the next morning.
Maria’s mama said he deserved it but then again, she never liked Richard anyways. Her brown eyes had hardened up when Richard stood in her kitchen for the first time and her lips curled down at the sides at the sight of her daughter’s love. When she first heard about his death, her lips curled back a little as her eyes softened but her happiness was short lived for she realized her daughter was wilting before her.
The pool area surrounding Maria was where she had spent the last two months for she felt that the sun helped her feel better. Instead of heading for the path that crossed under the metal gate and would take Maria into the cool kitchen, she dipped her toes into the even cooler pool. Slowly, she let her whole body slip into the chilly water.
She took a breath and put her head under the water and swam to the bottom of the deep end. Once at the bottom, she opened her eyes and felt them sting a little while getting use to the chemicals in the water. Looking up, she saw the sun sparkling on the water’s surface, creating a shadow on her face of the fallen elm tree leaf. With the reflected sunlight on her body and her face covered with a shadow, she let herself stop treading water and slowly float towards the surface and while floating, she began to think about Richard once more. She thought about how his now meaningless body was rotting away and for a brief second, she let herself think of joining him and letting her lungs fill with water, leaving her as lifeless as the leaf floating in the clear water.
But suddenly the shadow spread from her face to her whole body and she looked up once again to see Beatrice standing there, hands on hips at the pool’s cement edge with an angry pout across her cubby face. It was her thought instead that drowned inside her brain as she swam up and pulled herself dripping from the water. As she pulled herself up the cement ledge, she imagined the thoughts of Richard and her thoughts of dying trapped inside the little water beads that were falling from her body and back into the pool. Feeling different and wrapped in a towel, she followed the complaining Beatrice into the kitchen.