Cool's Ridge Page 5

  I hadn’t gone very far when I came to a barbed-wire fence. This enclosed a large flat muddy field, a horses’ paddock perhaps, but it was utterly grass-less. On the other side of the field I saw a small yellow farmhouse. It was twilight by this time but still light enough clearly to make out the house with its porch and fieldstone chimney. The yellow was an ugly mustard color. Beyond the house was a row of tall Norway spruces, and beyond the trees, in the gloaming, with a mist gathering, the dim shapes of farm outbuildings—a barn and storage sheds. The front yard of the house was scratched and scraped, full of litter—tires, rusted oil barrels, car parts. As I looked, a light came on in an upstairs window. It came on in a strange way, starting as a small gold dot and growing bigger and brighter like a star or comet that is moving closer to the earth. I was engrossed in this light so that when the shot came I thought that I’d been hit and I stood there transfixed with fright. In my terror I grabbed hold of a strand of barbed wire and caught the fleshy part of my hand. I carefully lifted my hand away, waiting all the while for another shot. None came. I thought to myself that it must have been a rifle shot, there was such a report—a crack and a loud echoing boom. I thought if I turned I’d be shot in the back and I knew I didn’t want to die like that. But after a while I did very slowly turn and then very slowly I walked back down the road.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Sal Victoria asked as we sat down for dinner. Alice had not come in, neither had Skip. It was Len’s night to cook and he had made spaghetti, salad, and garlic bread. He was extravagantly complimented by the others: “Oh this is utterly fantastic, Len!” “It’s too too divine!” “Sugah, honey! Love dat stuff! Ah cain’t seem to gits ennuf!” Wayne said and he scooped more salad onto his plate from the glass bowl. May leaned toward me across the trestle table and said in a husky whisper, “This is all Len ever cooks.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Len,” Shauna McKeown said, “it’s very nourishing.”

  “On the other hand, Leonard,” Wayne said, sitting up and wiping his mouth with a paper napkin, “if you don’t learn to cook something else pretty soon we’ll be forced to boil you in olive oil.”

  “Don’t be cruel,” May said. “I think Len deserves E for Effort.”

  “E is for Excellent,” Sal Victoria said. “At my house we had spaghetti at least once a week. After my father split we had it three times a week.”

  “Who did you end up living with?” Shauna asked.

  “Mother,” Sal said, although it came out “muver” because his mouth was full of garlic bread.

  “All the time I was growing up I kept wishing and wishing my parents would split up,” Shauna said. “I wanted my father to take the other five kids and then I would go off with my mother. We’d live all alone in a little house in the country and never have to see any of the others again.”

  “Well,” said Leonard, “your wish has come true. I am your mother and here you are.”

  “You?” Shauna laughed. “You’re not my mother. My mother is five-foot-two and weighs one-ten.”

  “Hey, whoa,” Sal said. He sank back into his chair with a depleted look as if spaghetti eating had drained his energy instead of restoring it. “I can understand ditching the sibs, but how come Dad gets left out of that sweet country deal? You didn’t like your father?”

  “Obviously not,” Shauna answered. Although she was tall and broad, red-haired, freckled, Valkyrian-looking, she tended toward clothes I always thought of as “garments,” loose-flowing, pale-colored Indian cottons that reminded me of photos my college alumnae magazine would occasionally publish, of students circa 1905, barefoot and with wreaths on their heads, doing interpretative dances in “Grecian” tunics. I always thought there was something sad about these pictures, I don’t know why.

  “Why not?” Sal inquired genially.

  Shauna glared at him through her glasses, which had bright plastic frames the color of lime Lifesavers. “It’s a long story,” she said.

  Sal glanced at his wristwatch. “So go ahead,” he said, “I’ve got time. What does your father do?”

  “Lawyer,” she said. She tore the crust off a piece of garlic bread and popped the soft center into her mouth. “You know what’s odd about lawyers? They know everything.”

  “My mother’s a lawyer,” I said. “She doesn’t always give me that impression.”

  “How about most of the time?” Shauna asked, sarcastically.

  “Part of the time,” I admitted.

  “Did your mother work?” Sal asked Shauna.

  “My mother?” Shauna said. “No, dear, she slaved. You know what it is to have six kids and be married to a tightwad?”

  Len groaned and got up. He began clearing the table. From his end, Wayne yelled, “Yo,” and spun plates down the table’s shiny lacquered surface. Len neatly caught each plate in his long fingers and stacked one upon another, whether it had food upon it or no. Then he lifted the entire messy, teetering pile and carried it off into the kitchen.

  I got up to help. “What shall I do about Skip and Alice?” I asked Len. He was at the kitchen sink, sweeping each plate with the edge of his hand. He looked up. “Nothing,” he said. “Just leave everything the way it is.” Had I imagined it or was his look ironic, his voice grim?

  “Alice stays late to do her own work,” May said. “She almost always comes in by ten.”

  “What is her own work?” I asked.

  “She runs a crafts shop in Stanton, but she’s really a fabric artist. She has a show coming up soon in a gallery in New York. Week after next, isn’t that right, Shauna?”

  “Opens July one,” Shauna said. “Is anybody else driving in? I know if I try it my heap’ll have a breakdown in the Holland Tunnel.”

  “One of Shauna’s constant preoccupations,” Wayne said, “is not having a breakdown in the Holland Tunnel. I must look into this.”

  “It’s funny about us, me and Alice,” Shauna said. She was smoking and tipped her head back and blew out a cloud of mentholated blue smoke. “We’ve known each other forever—we went to the same grade school, high school and college. We went to the same church! This was in New Brunswick. When she was in college, she majored in sociology, I majored in music. I was into the arts. Now she’s an artist and I’m a social worker.”

  “Are you really?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

  “No,” Shauna said, “I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “One, it’s sad, and two, it’s exhausting, and three, it’s underpaid. So here I am taking the summer off.”

  “Shauna also sings,” Len said. He was wiping a clean plate with a checked dish towel and he looked at Shauna in a shy, approving way as the cloth went round and round on the gleaming plate. “She sings at the Dark Moon Bar on Sunday nights.”

  I wondered if Len was in love with Shauna. He had such a mild smile on his face. So far, I’d only heard his irony. There was something bitter in Len. He was full of purgative rebukes. I felt a little afraid of him and at the same time I wanted him to like me. Well, respect me. Not sexually, as in that old Victorian cliché, but respect me as a person, an individual with my own thoughts and needs and desires. “Can I come hear you sing?” I asked Shauna.

  “Of course you can,” Shauna said, putting her wide freckled hand on my arm. “On Sunday nights everybody drops by. We don’t cook supper on Sunday nights, it screws up the schedule.”

  “How Presbyterian,” I said. She looked puzzled. I said, “In my mother’s family when she was growing up, you didn’t cook a hot meal on Sunday. And you couldn’t go to the movies. She told me she was always jealous of the Catholic kids, because they all went to the movies on Sunday afternoon.”

  “Like Orthodox Jews on the Sabbath,” Leonard said.

  “Was your family Orthodox?” Sal asked Leonard.

  Wayne said, “Leonard isn’t orthodox anything.” He’d been sitting at the table reading The Nation. He tossed it across the table to May and said to her tenderly, “There, Puddin’. Read
it and weep.”

  By ten-thirty, everyone had gone to bed but Leonard and me. I sat on, pretending to read, waiting for Skip to get in. Leonard sat in a chair under the bridge lamp doing crossword puzzles, looking as angular and dangerous as a piece of construction machinery.

  “I’m terrible at this,” he said, and flung the magazine to the floor.

  “At what?” I asked. “Crossword puzzles?”

  He gave me a murderous glance and left the room. I sat on, listening to his footsteps shake the stairs. I’d had no idea that sneakers could make such a din.

  6.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t so much Skip’s absence as the drop in temperature. I’d started out at eleven crawling under the sheet with the window wide open—at two a.m. I woke up freezing. Nights at the Farm were always cold, and the uninsulated third floor relayed all the exciting temperature changes promptly and with minimal interference. And then there was the chenille bedspread. For a reason I can’t tell I have always hated the feel of chenille.

  At two I sat up and cursed and fumbled for the clean but ragged quilt folded at the foot of the bed. I pulled that over my shoulders and sank down again, huddled shivering into that most heat-efficient position—the fetal.

  Oh why had I come here?

  I’d come here because of Skip.

  I was always tracking Skip.

  What I wanted was for him to chase me back or at least say, “Let’s forget it.” Four years is too long for everything to remain unresolved. My mother had said to me once, “Death is the only real resolution,” but even though I knew it to be true, it didn’t feel like an optimistic viewpoint.

  It’s not that we didn’t get along. Skip and I got along fabulously. We got along and I would say to myself, You idiot, this is wonderful, what are you complaining about? And then he’d go off, weeks would go by, sometimes months. No calls, no letters. I would sit waiting, pretending to myself that I wasn’t really waiting. I wanted to say to him, Don’t do this to me. Don’t treat me this way. And I would say it and every time he would be completely astounded. “What way?” As if he hadn’t the remotest comprehension, simply did not understand what I was talking about. Was this an act? If not, what was it? Surely this wasn’t typical male behavior. I’d dated before. I had had a boyfriend in high school and several in college.

  It was hard for me to figure Skip out. Was that part of the appeal? There was something mysterious to me about Skip, something I couldn’t explain. It was as if sometimes he’d go off into a world of his own; he’d become quiet and then withdrawn. I’d feel him leave me, as if he were descending into the bottom of a dark sea. I wanted him to tell me about it, describe for me this experience, but he would be silent and completely inaccessible. Then all at once, he’d come up out of that place—he’d be cheerful, we’d crack jokes, eat ice cream cones, drink a little, smoke a little pot, make love.

  But if he loved me, really loved me, wouldn’t he want me more? Did I make it too easy for him? Where was he tonight?

  I sat up in bed and looked out of the window. My room was on the east side of the house, facing the pond. The moonlight on the pond had the look of frost.

  If I gave him up, what would I have?

  Of course it was perfectly true that I didn’t “have” him anyway, so why not give him up?

  Because it seemed to me that I had nothing. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a place of my own to live in. I couldn’t—not even temporarily—move in with my folks. I lived like a Depression-era “Okie,” out of my Volvo.

  Down the hall a door opened and closed. There was a cough from the other end of the barn or the other end of time, that time when Dr. Gerstner owned the place and tuberculars came up from New York to recover their health. I thought how every age has its plague, the Black Death of the Middle Ages, smallpox in the eighteenth century, tuberculosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth. I’d read the life of Keats and thought of tuberculars as fevered and charming. Someone once told me—I don’t know if it’s true—that the fever heightened sexual desire. In the last century, whole families went out west to the Rockies, lived in vast tent cities all dedicated to curing TB with clean air. What will our plague be? Perhaps madness? Schizophrenia? Not, as most think, a double or triple personality, but a state in which thought is sundered, logic riven, the emotive reactions detached from their relevant causes. Once I accused Skip of having no feelings and he looked at me so peculiarly I thought that I’d guessed more than I knew.

  We had gotten off to a bad start, Skip and I. But why do I say that? It was a good start. I fell in love with him at once.

  I met him at Princeton in June of 1968 two days before Bobby Kennedy was shot. I had gone down to pick up my brother John, who had just finished his sophomore year. I was driving the family station wagon, a vehicle so gas-guzzling and decrepit we kept it going out of sheer amused curiosity. It was a 1955 Ford with plump sides of a milky gray color that had many interesting rusty striations. My mother had asked me to pick up John because she had to be in court that particular day, in Morristown. I was free to go because I was home. I’d just graduated from Smith the week before.

  I had done well at college and should have been looking forward to a few weeks off. Instead, once home and more or less unpacked, I felt moody and at a loss—post-college blues. I had no idea what I wanted to do next. My parents were gently encouraging about some sort of graduate school, but I was tired of the learning consumption business and after a couple of days of lounging around the house, sleeping late, polishing my nails, eating bowls of milky sugar-coated pastel-colored cereals while watching the Flintstones and kiddy cartoons on TV (a strange regression, I can’t explain it), playing tennis or meeting friends downtown for lunch, it all began to seem dull and meaningless and unstructured, the “it” being my life. I was glad to go down to Princeton. I was between boyfriends, between structures, between everything.

  I drove down to Princeton on Routes 202-206. From the traffic circle at Route 22 southward, traffic simply crawled. There was still some farmland then—I passed huge flat fields of growing corn—but as I got closer to Princeton I could see that “progress” had descended in the form of the developer’s shopping mall. Mini-malls lined both sides of the highway all the way into town, and in town itself our beetle-like procession of automobiles inched along, headed for the university.

  On the campus there were signs everywhere of riotous year-end abandon and manic departure. I passed a gothic window just as a coiled mattress came bouncing out, uncoiling in mid-air. Competing stereos were going full blast, as if attacking one another across the quadrangle.

  I navigated my way to Henry Hall, my brother’s dorm, and pulled the lurching wagon up to, but not over, the grass. I noticed, as I parked, a person sitting on the scabrous-looking lawn in front of the building, reading The New York Times.

  I went up the walk to Henry, a Gothic building that just now, with all its doors and windows opened, looked as if it had had its guts blown out, or maybe been hit by one of those bombs, a neutron bomb, that kills the people but leaves the things intact. When I passed the person, he looked up and nodded and then I nodded, straightening just a little. I saw that he wore white crew socks and moccasin loafers. I went on into the dark entry and climbed the stairs, noticing that everything stank of beer.

  “John?”

  My brother lived on the second floor. When I walked in—the door was open—he was asleep on a stripped cot in the middle of the otherwise vacated room. He had on a pair of cut-off jeans and an orange tee-shirt. I said his name again and he woke up, looked at me in a confused way and then sat up, slapped his bare feet onto the floor and scrubbed at his eyes with his fists.

  “Wow, sorry,” he said, “you scared me. I was having this incredibly awful dream.” He yawned and stretched. “I dreamed I made Phi Beta Kappa junior year and Dad kept saying I had to go to medical school.”

  I laughed. “I don’t think he has any such plans.”


  “Damn right,” John said. “You just get here?”

  “Uh huh. Have a late night last night?”

  “Sort of. We were up until four.”

  “Did Bobby leave yet?”

  “Nah. He’s flying home tomorrow. So how are you? Say, congratulations! Sorry I couldn’t make graduation. D’jou win any prizes?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did Mom say you had to go to law school?”

  “Had to? Of course not. She only suggested.”

  “Yeah, I bet. Well anyway, I’m kinda devastated I couldn’t be there to see it, but I needed to do these exams.”

  “How were they?”

  “Okay. I creamed the French and Italian …” he socked his right hand into his left fist and said in mellifluous Italian, “How I love to speak beautiful words.”

  “Que sera, sera. How was the Politics?”

  “Not bad, but I don’t know what I got, he’s a tricky grader, Basically, if you don’t agree with him, he senses it and flunks you. Can you carry this stuff? Sure you can. Lookit how organized I am, everything reduced to its essence right here on the dorm floor. March on, kid. How is Mom?”

  “Good. What have you got in here, bricks?”

  “Hockey stuff. Another year and I didn’t skate but what the heck, my entire career was all to impress the girls anyhow.”

  We walked up and down the stairs a couple of times lugging boxes and duffels. The guy was still there on the grass, sitting tailor-style now, still reading. He had on a faded plaid short-sleeved sports shirt. His hair was auburn, curly, shoulder-length, full of highlights. He had big shoulders and faint freckles.

  “Who’s he?” I asked John.

  “Dunno. Never saw him before. Where the hell is Bobby anyhow? Time to say goodbye to all that!”

  John was an accomplished mimic and often to give a sentence a little musical zing he would raise his voice into falsetto or drop it into a rich baritone. He could also do accents on demand—Scotch, Irish, Russian. One night when I was a senior in high school studying for exams the telephone rang and a voice out of Moscow asked me, “Please. When you come for bolshoi pizza?” “What?” “Da da, dve bolshoi pizza a mecta, u mecta.” “I think you have the wrong number.” “Ah-ha, you want delivered?” “Who is this?” “Pyotr Petrovich Pizza Parlor!”