Solitaire and Brahms

by Sarah Dreher

  "Did you use that in the Army?" Shelby asked.

  "Sure did. If you want, I'll mark your name on yours after we get home." She looked at Shelby and grinned. "If we survive, that is."

  "We'll survive. I have no doubt about it." The whole thing had taken less than an hour, and Fran had packed the car so that every bit of equipment was available when they were ready for it. "I think you're the most organized person I ever met."

  "No, I've made more than enough mistakes in my time." She sat down on her sleeping bag. "Try your bed."

  Shelby stretched out on the sleeping bag. It was hard, but not as hard as she expected.

  "If we were going to stay longer," Fran said, "I'd have had us dig hip holes under the floor. But I guess we can live with a little stiffness for one night."

  "Absolutely," Shelby said. She looked back over her head at the triangular window covered in mosquito screening. She could see the sky, and clouds, and a feathery limb of the pine. "It's like living in the trees."

  "I guess it is." Fran was looking at her in a lighthearted, affectionate way. "You do like this, don't you?"

  "I love it." She got to her feet. "Let's finish putting stuff away and go exploring."

  They unloaded the Coleman lantern and set it up in the tent. The kitchen equipment was stowed in a canvas duffel bag. Fran set the axe in a stump and found a shady spot for the water container.

  "I think," Shelby said when Fran indicated they were finished, “you forgot something.”

  Fran looked around. "I did?"

  "You know. Like—food?”

  "It's in the trunk of the car. From the way the garbage can lids are fastened down, I'd guess they have bears around here. Or at least raccoons."

  "Do you really think there might be bears?"

  "If there are, we'll know it. They're clumsy, and they smell to high heaven. But they can rip a food chest apart faster than you can watch."

  "Would you think I was stupid if I said I hope we see one?"

  Fran smiled. "I'd like to see one, too. But from a distance, thank you."

  They found a foot trail that wasn't too muddy, filled a canteen from the pump by the lake, and trudged off into the laurel single-file. Shelby kept her eyes on the trail avoiding tree roots that could trip her and smooth stones she could slip off of and do serious damage to her ankles. They were going uphill at a steep angle. Her sneakers felt insubstantial and weren't doing a thing to support her. She envied Fran's scuffed, sturdy, crepe-soled boots that held her ankles and gripped the rocks and generally prevented disaster. Before they did this again, she was going to get hiking boots. First thing after work Monday. And spend at least an hour each day breaking them in. She could do that while she was talking to Ray on the phone. Maybe she should get a longer phone cord. A very long phone cord. Then she could walk, and wash dishes, and do all sorts of useful things.

  She didn't notice that Fran had stopped ahead, and crashed into her.

  "Oops!" Fran said. "Daydreaming?"

  "Sort of." Shelby was embarrassed. And, now that she had stopped, aware that she was breathing hard.

  Fran opened the canteen and handed it to her. "It's my fault. I'm leading this like a forced march. We'll rest a minute, and then you lead. I'll try not to walk on your heels."

  "I'm just out of shape."

  "And I'm just out of the Army."

  Shelby looked around and realized they were standing in a shower of sunlight. Tall grass grew in the clearing, and an occasional pasture juniper. Buttercups sparkled in the sun, and wild violets made a white-and-purple border separating the clearing from the woods beyond. "Somebody must have farmed up here," she said. "And this is all that's left. Isn't that amazing? Whole lives, people with plans, and ideas, and fears. Families. Don't you wonder what they talked about on winter nights?"

  "Do you think we could find the old cellar hole?"

  "We can try." At the edge of the woods Shelby saw what looked like a fallen stone wall. "Over here," she said, and trudged across the open space.

  Fran trotted after her. "What did you see?"

  "The wall."

  "That's a wall?" Fran looked down at the pile of large gray stones and white stones, lichens, decayed leaves and creeper.

  "It was. You probably don't have stone walls in California,"

  "Not like this." She knelt down to examine it. "This is what Robert Frost was talking about?"

  "Probably. There were stone fences like these around all the old farms."

  "Didn't they have anything better to do with their time?"

  "They didn't have anything better to do with their rocks. A lot of the land around here was left behind by the glaciers. Dig down and you come to bedrock pretty quickly. The farmers claim the rocks grow like potatoes over the winter and surface with the spring thaw."

  "What kind of rocks are they?"

  "Mostly granite and basalt. Maybe shale." She knelt beside Fran and picked up a large milky, slightly translucent stone. "This is quartz. There's a lot of it around here.”

  Fran took the stone from her and turned it over and over in her hands. "It's beautiful." She gazed around. “How old do you think this farm is?"

  "More than a hundred years, certainly." She studied the trees. "The woods are mostly pine going to hemlock with a few maples and birches. That happens when it's been undisturbed for 100 to 150 years." She ran her hand through her hair. "High school geography. I can't believe I still remember that."

  "I wonder what it was like," Fran said, still holding the stone. "Living out here. How did they survive?"

  "Not easily. You should see an old cemetery. Most of the kids didn't live into their teens, and the women were worn out by thirty-five."

  "And the men?"

  "Most used up three or four wives."

  "Why am I not surprised?" Fran said. She looked from the rock into the deep woods, then back to the rock in her hands. Thoughtfully, wonderingly.

  Shelby felt a sudden jolt, as if everything in her had stopped. As if someone had punched her hard in the stomach, taking away her breath.

  Fran's face was in profile. The sunlight turned the tips of her eyelashes to gold. Her short-cut air caught the breeze in tiny feathers. Already she was beginning to tan. Her features were soft but distinct. She had turned her attention inward, as if trying to listen to the voices of the stones. But her face was filled with life. Shelby had never seen anyone so completely present.

  She thought she could look at her all day. She wanted time to stop. She wanted to study every feature of Fran's face and imprint it forever in her memory.

  She's beautiful, she thought.

  Fran turned to look up at her, breaking the stillness, making time move on. Her eyes were deep and sea blue. "Anything wrong?" she asked.

  Shelby shook her head.

  "I thought maybe there was something hideous crawling on me."

  "No. I just... had a moment, I guess."

  Fran got to her feet. "Want to try to find the cellar hole?"

  "OK."

  “Are you sure there's nothing wrong?"

  "Positive. This place… it just struck me. Go on ahead. I want to look at wild flowers. I'll catch up with you."

  Fran wandered off, following the remains of the wall.

  There were quaker ladies in bloom in the tall grass, their tiny pale blue faces following the sun. And monkey flowers. The mayflowers were beginning to open. One night they'd all bloom at once, and fill the forest with their sweetness. She'd experienced that only one time. She'd never forgotten it.

  She still felt shaken by what had happened. She needed to sort it out. It wasn't that Fran was pretty. She wasn't, not by conventional standards. But there was something stunning about her face... an inner strength... clarity.

  That was it. Most of the people Shelby knew had barriers around them, self-constructed out of fear or hurt or shame or the simple desire for privacy. Some were as solid as brick, others transparent like Plexiglass, some wispy and gauze-like. But they
all served the same purpose… to hold something back. It wasn't secrets. Secrets were singular entities, and you decided who to share them with the same way you decided to share a favorite toy. If the other person was the crude, clumsy type who might break it, you didn't. If you knew the other was gentle and respectful, you did. It wasn't secrets people hid behind those barricades. It was truth.

  At that moment, in the sunlight, Fran had no barricades.

  It was an unsettling thing to see. Shelby wanted to tell her to look out, to protect herself, because the world is a hard place and you can't go around so open.

  Fran probably would have thought she was out of her mind.

  The one thing she was sure of was that she wanted to put down her barricades, too. Not just because the only moral response to openness is openness. But because she wanted, if only for a moment, to be like that.

  It was the most frightening thing she'd ever thought of.

  She heard Fran rustling through last autumn's leaves. It felt safe to go find her. Her breathing was back to normal. Her mind was working again... sort of.

  She picked up a pebble to remind her of the day.

  Fran sent her off to collect dry twigs and kindling, preferably pine and nothing too gnarly. It didn't take long. The woods were filled with broken branches and downed trees, compliments of last winter's ice storms. She stumbled back to camp with an armload that reached high enough to block her vision.

  "Hey," Fran said with a laugh as she took the bundle from her. "Don't get carried away. You could put out an eye."

  Shelby dusted the dirt from her hands. "If you're going to act like a nagging mother, I'm going home."

  "Sorry. I realize you have a perfectly adequate mother who is capable of doing her own nagging." She put the sticks on the ground and began breaking them into smaller pieces. She frowned at the pile. "Are you aware that you gathered these in order of size?"

  "Sure." She picked up the axe and took a few swings at the log Fran had been cutting down to campfire dimensions.

  "Doesn't that strike you as kind of compulsive?"

  Wood chips flew into the air as her axe made contact. "Don't talk to me about compulsive. I've seen the way you pack."

  Fran began building up a tepee of sticks in a sandy space she'd cleared.

  The log broke. Shelby set it up on end and split it sideways, then did a couple more. At last she stopped for breath. "Should I go cut hot dog sticks?" she asked as she reached for the water jug.

  "Hot dogs are tomorrow. Tonight's going to be special. Buffalo steaks."

  "Buffalo?!"

  "That's what we call it. Actually, it's plain old steak cooked in the coals. Very outdoorsy."

  "What about marshmallows?"

  "What about them?"

  "We're having marshmallows, aren't we?"

  Fran looked at her. "Are you whining?"

  "This is a camping trip," Shelby said. "We have to have marshmallows,"

  "We have marshmallows."

  "Campfire marshmallows? In the little boxes wrapped in waxed paper?"

  "And Hershey bars," Fran said. "And graham crackers. For s'mores."

  "This is great." She was as excited as a kid. "I've never had s'mores."

  "Never?"

  Shelby shook her head. "I had an overprivileged childhood."

  "You certainly did." Fran got to her feet and loaded a couple of split logs into place. "Well, there's our first fire of the season." She tossed the matches to Shelby. "Care to do the honors?"

  Shelby changed into her pajamas by the light of the Coleman lamp. The night had turned cool and damp, but it was still comfortable. She wouldn't have cared if it was miserable. It had been a perfect day. They'd stuffed themselves on steak and baked potatoes, also cooked in the coals, and marshmallows with charred skins. They'd walked down to the lake and listened to fish breaking the surface to feed. A faint light, reflected in the water, came from one of the private homes on the opposite shore. At the far east end of the lake, a nearly full moon crept over the tree tops. By the time they came back to their campsite, it was overhead and casting shadows.

  She started to pull a sweatshirt over her pajama top, then remembered that it would be considerably warmer by the fire. It had burned down to embers by now, but the embers were hot. She tied the sweatshirt around her waist and went outside.

  Fran was sitting on the ground in front of the tent, staring into the fire. "Anything up?" Shelby asked.

  Fran glanced up at her. "Just listening to the night sounds and meditating on my sins."

  "Care to talk? They say confession's good for the soul."

  "No, thanks."

  "I'm reputed to be a good listener. I already know more about what goes on with people than I ever wanted to."

  Fran laughed. "I'll take a rain check."

  "Any time," Shelby said, and rested her hand on Fran's shoulder. She felt Fran stiffen. "I'm sorry," she said, withdrawing her hand.

  "You startled me."

  "Do you dislike being touched?"

  "Not at all," Fran said. "It's the Army experience that makes you nervous. They're very touchy about touch. By similarly gendered persons, that is."

  "So I've heard," Shelby said as she sat beside her on the ground.

  "Three or four times a year they cast out their nets to 'clean house' and they don't much care who they catch. They don't even need evidence to get you. Someone gets mad at you, starts a rumor, and before you know it you're gone."

  "Did you ever know anyone that happened to?"

  "Not anyone I knew well." She was silent for a moment. "The worst of it was, the way to get them off your back was to point to someone else. So you had women accusing each other to save their own skin."

  "Why are they so crazed about it?" Shelby asked.

  Fran shrugged. "They have to do something when they don't have a war to fight, I guess."

  Shelby tossed a twig into the embers and watched it flare up. "It seems to me, if you don't like the service, that's a good way to get out."

  "It isn't, believe me. It goes on your service record. If you're lucky, you can get a medical discharge. But it's still not easy to explain to prospective employers.”

  "People are so weird about things," Shelby said. "Sometimes it gives me the willies."

  "I know what you mean."

  She tossed another twig. "There's this kid in my office... well, not a kid, really, a young woman... no, kid. Emotionally she's still a kid. I'm her supervisor. She doesn't know the magazine business very well yet, and her family's lived all over the world, so she doesn't really know how things are done in this culture. She's kind of dependent on me right now. Understandably. But Connie... Connie's one of those people who always has to make things into more than they really are."

  "I've known a few like that."

  "So Connie's decided Penny has a crush on me. It puts things on a whole different level, you know what I mean?"

  "Yep."

  "I hate that kind of stuff."

  "What if it's true?" Fran asked. She added a sprig of pine needles to the fire and watched it flame and curl.

  "What?"

  "That she has a crush on you."

  "She might, actually. I'm trying to spend more time with her. So I won't seem so bigger than life."

  "I must say," Fran said, "you have a unique way of looking at things. Most people would back off in a hurry."

  "That'd be cruel. If she has strong feelings for me, and I reject her, she'd feel awful."

  "I don't know, Shelby. I think your friend Penny isn't the only one who doesn't know how things are done in this culture."

  Shelby sighed. "I know. Sometimes the whole world seems like a big mystery. I mean, I know the rules, and how to do the right dance steps. But there are times when it just doesn't make any sense."

  "Yeah." Fran leaned back on her elbows. "I used to think I was the only person who ever thought that. But if you think it, too, maybe we're right."

  "Maybe we are."
/>   "We'd better keep quiet about it. They do terrible things to people who catch on.”

  "True." She was silent for a moment. "Have they done terrible things to you?"

  “Some."

  "I'll kill them," Shelby said.

  A bit of wood flared up. The red light showed the grin on Fran's face.

  "Give me their names.”

  "These people," Fran said, “aren't worth spending the rest of your life in jail."

  "I still want to know. Names, dates, and actions."

  "Some other time, OK? I don't want to think about that tonight"

  "Promise?" Shelby asked.

  “Promise." The fire was winking out. "I wish…”

  “What?”

  "Nothing." Fran got up. "Race you to the facilities."

  The night was still. The moon cast faint shadows on the tent. Overhead, Shelby could see a cloud rising and falling, churning like the white caps on the ocean. A planet stood out against the cobalt sky. Her hair smelled of wood smoke, her arms of sun. The dusty, musty odor of canvas surrounded her. She was tired, wonderfully and physically tired. But she didn't want to sleep, because sleep would eat up the hours. She wanted to feel and remember every minute.

  "Shelby?" she heard Fran whisper.

  "I'm awake."

  "What do you think you'll be doing in five years?"

  "I don't know," Shelby said. "I probably won't be working. I'll probably have children."

  "Do you like that idea?"

  "What idea?"

  "Children. Not working."

  "I've never thought much about it until recently. Children, that is. People who really want children think about it a lot, don't they?"

  "That's what I've heard.”

  "But it's expected."

  "Who expects it, Ray?"

  "He's mentioned it. But in kind of general terms. Not like he wants a son to go into his practice so I have to keep pumping them out until he gets one or anything like that. My mother will be after me, though. I know she has a deadline somewhere up her sleeve. And my father—I'm an only child, and the only chance he'll have at grandchildren..."

  "It makes you sound like a broodmare."

  "It does, doesn't it?"

  "Kind of a lousy reason to have kids, from the kids' point of view. And from yours."