The Diving Board's Edge

The spinach in Maya's teeth had been there for twenty minutes. David noticed it when she first laughed at Tom's joke about the quarterly reports, and he'd been watching it ever since—a tiny green wedge caught between her front tooth and gum, growing more surreal with each passing moment. It felt like a metaphor for their entire marriage. Something obvious, something stuck, something neither of them would mention.

They were standing at the edge of the apartment complex's pool, the water blue and impossible. Around them, his colleagues from the firm splashed and drank. Someone had cut up a papaya and arranged it on a platter with terrifying precision. Maya had brought it. She always brought the right things.

"You should go in," she said now, not looking at him. "Everyone's waiting."

David squeezed his orange juice. The carton was sweating against his palm. "I don't want to go in."

"You're being difficult."

"I'm being honest."

They'd had this conversation too many times before—the one where honesty felt like cruelty, where honesty felt like the beginning of the end. The pool light flickered underwater, casting wavering shadows across Maya's face. She was beautiful, even with the spinach, even with the way she wouldn't meet his eyes.

"Remember when we played baseball that summer?" she asked suddenly. "In that empty lot behind your mother's house?"

"Yes."

"You hit the ball through the old woman's window."

"We never went back for it."

"No. We never did."

The papaya sat untouched on the table behind them. David thought about how papayas only tasted good when you were somewhere warm, somewhere they actually grew. Here, in this cold city, in this crumbling marriage, they were just pretense. Just another thing they pretended to like.

"The spinach," he said.

Maya's hand went to her mouth. She came away with nothing. "It's gone?"

"No. It's still there."

She wiped anyway, smoothed her dress, looked everywhere but at him. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I don't know."

"You've been looking at it for twenty minutes, David."

"I know."

"Why?"

Because if I mentioned it, you'd fix it, and then we'd have to acknowledge that everything else is broken too. Because that spinach was the only real thing between us.

"Tom's watching," Maya said instead. "He thinks we're fighting."

"Are we?"

"I don't know what we're doing anymore."

The pool's surface broke then—someone jumped in, water everywhere, laughter. The moment passed. Maya excused herself to get more napkins. David stood alone with his orange juice, watching the ripples spread across the water, thinking about baseball games and windows and all the things they'd never gone back to fix.