It didn’t matter to my grandmother that he loved his life, only that he wasn’t spending it near her, just as she didn’t mourn my grandfather so much as resent him for leaving her. Those were some of the conclusions my mom and Beth had come up with in their many discussions of our family. Another one was that they never wanted to wind up like Grandma. In fact, the Christmas before last, they both counseled me to “always keep an open heart.”
“An open heart meaning…?”
“Meaning be glad for someone else’s happiness,” Aunt Beth had said.
That Christmas Eve, Grandma had handed Beth her present and before she could even open it, Grandma had said, “Now, I know it’s nothing special for someone who’s got a big-shot job down in Minneapolis, but I thought it was cute.” The gift was a straw purse with a little wooden apple for its knob, and even I could tell that Grandma’s idea of cute was not in step with her daughter’s, yet Beth’s thanks were profuse and genuine-sounding.
“Also meaning letting someone love what he or she wants to love,” continued my aunt. “Even though it would be easier for you if they loved something else.”
It was a tradition to read Roger’s Christmas letter—this one had been postmarked from the Galapagos Islands—after we opened presents, and it had also become a tradition for Grandma to say something like “You’d think he could manage a visit home once in a while, all the world traveling he does” or “Seems he likes to spend the holidays with those natives more than his own family.”
“Above all,” said my mom, wrapping up the tutorial in what constituted an open heart, “don’t let what happens in your life make you bitter. No matter what happens.”
I thought that was pretty brave advice coming from a woman who had been widowed at age thirty-eight; pretty brave advice from both daughters of a woman who was pickled in a brine of hurt and bitterness.
Lying back in Roger’s old bed, I stared at the ceiling, upon which he had painted the solar system (earning another Boy Scouts badge), thinking of the promises and advice I had been given in this room. I didn’t know about the promises, but I sure could have used the advice, although considering the topic on which I needed counsel, I wasn’t about to solicit any from my aunt, let alone my mom.
But what was a guy supposed to do when the finest girl in school was using him as her own personal sex toy and in particular, what was a guy supposed to do when he was more than happy to be that sex toy?
“Are we going steady?” I’d asked Kristi after the second blow job, this one given in her car parked in a secluded spot by Minnehaha Falls.
She was putting on lip gloss and didn’t look away from the rearview mirror, but nodded slightly to let me know she appreciated that I’d made a joke, only she didn’t find it very funny.
“Joe,” she said after she’d blotted her lips, “if you think I’m gonna drop Blake for you, think again.”
“So,” I said, making my voice sound high and wounded, “this is just about the sex?”
Raising one eyebrow, Kristi looked at me, then turned the ignition key. “You want the facts, Joe?”
I let my voice stay high. “Yes, please.”
She slid the lever of the heater and a blast of warm arm huffed out of the vents.
“Joe, I don’t mean to brag, but I’m Kristi Casey, okay?”
I nodded; this much I understood.
“And my boyfriend’s Blake Erlandsson, and come on, wouldn’t you say we’re the couple at Ole Bull?”
My head continued its steady bob.
“And I’m never gonna jeopardize that, okay?”
“So why,” I said, truly trying to understand, “are you giving me blow jobs?”
“For the practice.”
“You can’t get enough practice with Blake?” I had to laugh. “Seriously, I think he’d be happy to practice as much as you’d like.”
Kristi tossed her head and looked at me for a long moment, as if trying to figure out how much she could tell me.
“I’d never think to give Blake a blow job,” she said. “All it would take is for him to tell one person—he’s so tight with Olsen, and you know what a big mouth Olsen has—and then I’ve got some slutty reputation like Sharon Winters, and what do I need that for?”
I shook my head, not quite believing what I’d just heard.
“What makes you think I might not tell anyone?”
The usual calm, cool look of superiority disappeared from her face.
“’Cause I trust you,” she said, a little wheedling note of panic in her voice. “’Cause I think this is a…a mutually beneficial situation, wouldn’t you say? And why would you want to endanger a mutually beneficial situation?”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t. But I know what I’m getting out of it. What are you?”
“Like I said, Joe, practice. I…I want to know how to do things, to be good at things.”
“Like sex,” I said, more as a statement than a question.
“Exactly. And not that I’m just thinking about my reputation—I mean, God, how outdated is that? Then again, the reality is, if you’re a girl, it does matter. And Blake…well, Blake’s not exactly the horniest guy I’ve ever met.”
“He’s not?” I had never gotten this good a scoop as the Roving Reporter.
Kristi shook her head and turned the radio on low. Creedence Clearwater was singing “Bad Moon Rising,” and we listened to it for a while.
“I mean, you can’t have everything—and come on, Blake’s got just about everything. Captain of the hockey team and the baseball team. Two Division One scholarship offers. Homecoming king—although we know the whole thing was rigged. And I don’t think anyone would think he’s not the cutest guy in the whole school.”
I shrugged; on this subject I really didn’t have an opinion.
“Plus he’s smart and I couldn’t ask for a sweeter guy; God, the presents he gives me! So it’s not like I’m complaining…. It’s just that, well, I guess I have a more developed sex drive than he does. And whether we wind up together for good or not, when I go away to college I plan to do my share of sexual experimentation—I mean, that’s what college is for, isn’t it?”
“I sure hope so.”
Kristi took a box of Marlboros out of her purse and offered me one.
Shaking my head, I said, “I didn’t know you smoked. Cigarettes, that is.”
Her eyes lit up. “You got some dope?”
“No.”
“Bummer. And I don’t. Smoke cigarettes, that is. At least not habitually. It’s against cheerleading rules.” She offered me a conspiratorial smile. “But you know what I think about rules.”
“I know you like to break some of them. But there are other rules I’m not so sure about.”
“Like which ones?” she asked, opening her window. As winter air skated into the front seat, the car lighter popped out and she lit her cigarette.
“Well,” I said, touching her hair, “shouldn’t there be a rule about me having to, well, having to return your very generous favors?”
Shaking her head to dislodge my hand, she took a long drag, and the smoke she exhaled drifted into the icy air.
“You mean like go down on me?”
Like a Labrador retriever begging his master to throw the stick, I nodded wildly.
Kristi laughed and inhaled again. “I don’t think so.” She released an oblong smoke ring and we both watched as it wafted toward the open window before disintegrating. “I mean, no offense, but that would just seem too boyfriendy-girlfriendy.”
Boyfriendy-girlfriendy?
“So for now it’s just blow jobs?”
“If you’re lucky,” she said, shifting the gear stick into drive. The old Ford LTD fishtailed as she pulled out onto the snow-packed road, and she chuckled while I sat with my hands on my lap, feeling as powerless and hopeful as a girl.
I lay there contemplating the deep yellow rings of Saturn and the bright red Mars my uncle had painted on the ceiling. I was beat from
the long treacherous ride, but my mind was too busy to relax, let alone sleep. For weeks now I’d been on the losing side of a battle for sleep. I don’t use the word battle indiscriminately; from Kristi’s first ambush, I had been excited, unsettled, and on watch, like a soldier waiting for the next encounter and what the ramifications of that encounter might be.
It wasn’t as if I was in a slump, but I wasn’t scoring like I had been in those first couple prove-myself games. To make things worse, Blake was the sort of team captain who believed in positive reinforcement and never failed to mention the nice plays I’d made each game, to which I would think: If you only knew. I did feel guilty—I mean, I liked the guy—but hell, could I help it if he wasn’t satisfying his girlfriend on a certain level? And Shannon—our backseat play seemed just that: play. And now that I’d sampled a bit of the serious stuff, play was sorta boring. And if we weren’t making out, Shannon was talking, and that’s where she and my interest parted company.
“Are you seeing someone else?” she asked one evening after I declined her invitation to go to the “library.”
The telephone receiver slipped from my grip.
“Seeing someone else? What makes you think I’m seeing someone else?” My voice, high and wounded, reeked of guilt, but apparently Shannon didn’t pick up on this because she quickly offered me an apology.
“I’m sorry, Joe. It’s just that we seem to be drifting and that’s the last thing I want to do with you…drift, I mean.”
I rolled my eyes and offered that I didn’t want to drift either. More like paddle away as fast as I can! But I didn’t say that either because in truth, I really didn’t know what I wanted or what I wanted to do.
Darva sensed I was going through some weird shit; I could see it in her frank, squint-eyed assessment of me every time I sat down at our art table. But the break in our friendship hadn’t healed yet, at least not enough to bear the weight of a confession. Not that I really wanted to make one.
My life was snarled up enough for me to think that even Christmas spent with a grandma who could scald your skin with her bitterness was a reprieve. At least I knew what to expect here; tomorrow at dinner I, like my aunt and mother, would gnaw through the turkey my grandmother seemed to dehydrate rather than roast, and I would strain to come up with a sincere thanks for whatever personal hygiene product she had ordered from her favorite mail-order catalog (usually soaps tethered by rope or dimpled to look like golf balls and one stellar year, a shoe shine kit housed in a vinyl container shaped like a boot).
I could also expect the tension that would hail Aunt Beth’s reading of my uncle Roger’s letter. Grandma would shake her head and purse her mouth, her lips wrinkling, as if they’d been pulled tight by a drawstring, scowling over the letter’s every description, as if labyrinthine bazaars, lava-spewing mountains, or coconut-throwing monkeys might be of interest to someone, but they sure weren’t to her.
On this three-day trip, I also knew my mom and aunt would clean out the laundry room that Grandma used as an all-purpose storage bin; I knew they would give her a permanent wave to the accompaniment of Dean Martin and Perry Como’s Christmas albums; I knew they would bake and freeze enough casseroles to keep her going until spring thaw; I knew they would bend over backward to make an old woman be something she wasn’t genetically capable of being: happy.
And so to help everyone out, I tried extrahard to be the king of cheer, Mr. Entertainment, the comedian—sometimes even to the point of raising Grandma’s frown into a semi-smile. No sense letting out the real miserable what-the-hell-is-going-on Joe and bumming everyone out.
Six
* * *
From the Ole Bulletin, January 1972:
ANNUAL “BEAT THE WINTER BLUES” SHOW SCHEDULED
by Alison O’Grady
“In 1964 we had the entire football team doing a pas de deux from Swan Lake,” chuckles Mrs. Holbrook, advisor to the drama club. “In 1968 Paulette Renfrow sang a medley from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. As you know, our Paulette went on to become first runner-up in the Miss Minnesota contest just last year.”
Are there any burgeoning beauty queens who can sing in this year’s lineup? Any macho football players willing to don tutus for a laugh?
We’ll find out on February 21, when the annual “Beat the Winter Blues” will be put on by the most talented—or brave—students of Ole Bull High.
“We’re looking for all kinds of acts,” says Mrs. Holbrook. “We pride ourselves on the diversity of our lineup—so whatever your talent is, be sure to come and try out!”
Tryouts are the fifteenth and sixteenth of this month at three-thirty in room 304. Mrs. Holbrook advises singers to bring their own sheet music.
* * *
“Did you hear Debbie Teague’s p.g.?”
“Who’s Debbie Teague?”
Kristi rolled her eyes, one of her favorite gestures.
“Only little Miss Perfect—or tried to be. Ha! I guess she didn’t try hard enough!”
I had been told to meet Kristi in the empty audiovisual office, and I was impatient with the social commentary, anxious to get down to the wonderful business of fellatio.
“Shouldn’t we get started?” I asked, unbuttoning my fly.
“My, my, don’t we have a sense of entitlement,” said Kristi, fanning out her fingers to admire her pink frosted fingernails.
“No,” I said quickly, feeling a rush of panic, as if I was an alcoholic who’d been cut off by the bartender before I even sat down at the bar. “No, I was just…uh, so what happed to this Debbie girl?”
“She’s pregnant! Her parents shipped her off to some home for wayward girls to wait out the blessed event. Debbie Teague! I’ve gone to school with her since kindergarten and I don’t know that there’s an honor roll she hasn’t been on, a brownie point she hasn’t tried to earn …Debbie Teague! She was the straightest girl I know!”
“I bet she’s bummed,” I said, when what I wanted to say was, Come on, come on, come on!
“Yeah, bummed that for being so smart, she couldn’t figure out how to use a little birth control!”
Leave it to Kristi to make gloating look attractive. Her moral superiority and cheer over someone else’s misfortune brought a flush to her cheeks and a glitter to her green eyes that left me, well, attracted. Still, I decided a risky move might be the only way to get things started.
“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” I said, standing up, “but I guess I should get to class.”
Smiling, Kristi pushed me back into the swivel chair.
“Don’t you want what you came here for?”
Do you even have to ask such a stupid question?
“Well, sure,” I said, all nonchalance. “I mean, if you want to.”
Kristi laughed. Sitting on the desk facing me, she put her feet on the chair and pushed them so the chair moved side to side.
“Debbie Teague’s not my friend. But she was the accompanist for the Beat the Winter Blues show. And since she’s now indisposed, and Mrs. Holbrook is having a hard time finding a replacement, I told her I’d ask you.”
I planted my feet on the floor to stop the slow rocking back and forth.
“Nah.” I could play stuff like “Till There Was You” and “Send in the Clowns” at home, but I sure wasn’t going to do it onstage. “Thanks but no thanks.”
“Come on,” said Kristi. “Mrs. Holbrook’s my favorite teacher and she doesn’t ask just any lame-o to student-direct. She asked me because she has confidence that I can get done what needs to get done. Besides, you’re such a good player, Joe.”
“Nope. Not interested.”
Kristi feigned a big, shoulder-lifting sigh and folded her hands in her lap.
“Well, if that’s the way you want it,” she said, her voice sweet. She pivoted and pushed herself off the side of the desk. “Only you might as well know: If you can’t do this one simple favor for me, consider all future favors from me over.”
I gulped. “By
favors you mean…?”
“Uh-huh,” said Kristi, smiling as sweetly as a candy striper asked by her first patient to tell him a little about herself.
“You mean now?”
“Now and who knows how many more times?” said Kristi, and before she finished her sentence, I had agreed to the trade by unbuttoning my jeans.
I wound up having an okay time at the talent show. Because of hockey, I only made it to one rehearsal, but it’s not like I needed more. I mean, it wasn’t like I was a beginning piano student.
“Wow, you’re good,” said a girl named Holly after I’d accompanied her while she sang the Carpenters’ “Close to You.”
“You are,” agreed Miss Holbrook. “In fact, if you’d like to vamp at all between acts, feel free.”
And so I did. Kristi, as the student-director, had cast herself as emcee, and on the night of the performance, she walked out onto the stage in a black sparkly evening gown, basking in the enthusiastic applause and whistles the male half of the audience gave her.
She pushed down the air with her hands and finally the crowd quieted.
“All right, then, without further ado, let’s move on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen—Pete and Petey!”
A skinny little ventriloquist came out carrying a dummy. I played “Me and My Shadow.” The audience laughed, and as Pete settled himself on the stool, the dummy looked in my direction and said, “Oh, so we got a wise guy at the piano, huh?”
None of the soloists I played for had bad voices, but none of them had great ones either; the fun for me came in the music I’d play in between acts, or to introduce them.
The View from Mount Joy Page 7