“Len played hockey too, Joe,” said my mother after she had finished serving us.
“Well, in high school,” said the big guy. “I wasn’t good enough to play in college.” He spooned some of his whipped cream into his coffee. “I sure was sorry to hear about your accident, Joe. How’re you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said, and as my ears grew hot, I attacked the dessert in front of me as if I were an entrant in a pie-eating contest. My fork had turned into a shovel, and after I wolfed it down, I expected a bell to ring with a judge announcing, Winner!
“Whoa,” said Beth. “You were hungry.”
I dragged a napkin across my chin. “Well, I just realized I’ve got this thing…this study group thing. We just started it and—” I looked at my watch with great urgency. “Man, I’m supposed to be at the library now.”
Len stood and shook my hand, and my aunt offered me her cheek to kiss.
“I’m glad to see how seriously you’re taking your studies,” she said with a saccharine smile.
My mom walked me to the door. As she watched me put on my gloves and jacket, she asked, “You think he’s nice, don’t you?”
Her voice begged me to answer yes, and so I did.
“Oh, Joe.” She reached out, wrapping her arms around me, and like a little baby, I held on too long, too hard.
Eventually you get over your mother’s betrayal. Especially when you realize that it’d be pretty psycho to think that your mother had betrayed you in the first place just by liking some guy. I mean, my dad’d been dead for five years; it wasn’t like she hadn’t put in her time mourning. I came to the brilliant conclusion that big, soft-spoken Len Rusk made my mom what I’d wanted her to be for years—happy—and it’d be sort of twisted of me to begrudge him for that.
Besides, I was not one to make good judgments about relationships, considering the one I’d just gotten out of.
Kelly was a devoted hockey fan who, when hockey practice began, hung around the hallway outside the locker room, greeting me with a big “Hi, Joe!” She was cute enough that I found her attention flattering, but during our first date—burgers at Stub & Herb’s—she confessed to me that Love Story was her all-time favorite movie and wouldn’t it be great if she and I became like Jenny and Oliver?
“People have actually said I look like Ali McGraw—she plays Jenny—especially around the mouth.” Wagging her head, she offered a big smile so I could see the resemblance. I didn’t. “And Oliver—Ryan O’Neal—plays hockey too, except for Harvard. So I guess that means you’re Ryan and I’m Ali!”
I ignored the blinking read warning that screamed: Nut alert! Nut alert! and slept with her that night.
“Joe,” she whispered as we lay sweating and spent, “I think we’re making our own Love Story.”
The thrill I felt after finally losing my virginity was tempered by the thought, She’s losing her mind.
The idea of personal space was one that held no interest to her. Anytime I came home, there were notes posted by the dorm phone: “Joe, call Kelly.” A home economics major, she brought pans of brownies and seven-layer bars for me to share with the team—a nice enough gesture, except she did this before every practice, and every home game. I wondered when she found time to go to her own classes, what with all the baking and following me around—I couldn’t walk across the campus without her suddenly appearing from behind a corner. I’d be studying in Coffman Union and there she was, looming in front of me, her shadow falling across my books. Walking across the bridge that spans the West Bank and the East, I’d hear, “Joe! Joe! Wait up!” and have to resist the urge to run.
But like I said, she was cute and the sex was good—any sex at that point in my life couldn’t help but be good—and so I put up with her and her strange behavior, trying to convince myself it was cute and quirky and not nutty and obsessive.
She was hurt when I moved back home after my injury, asking why I wouldn’t let her nurse me back to health.
“Because you’re not a nurse,” I said.
“But I’m your fiancée.”
I cannot tell you the drop in temperature my blood took; suffice it to say I was chilled by her words.
“No you’re not,” I said, and because I couldn’t help it, I added, “Not even close.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I shrugged. “It means I sure as hell never asked you to marry me.”
“Well, maybe not in so many words.”
“Not in so many words, not in so many actions, not in so many anything.” I tried to look authoritarian, not an easy thing to do when you’re lying on your aunt’s couch underneath a quilt appliquéd with butterflies. “Now look, Kelly, I think you’re a…you’re a very nice person, but—”
“But you don’t love me the way I love you.” Hot spots of pink rose on her cheeks and her eyes darkened.
“I guess not,” I said.
“Well, that’s just fine,” she lied, and I knew it was a lie, because as she said it, she shoved the lamp that was on the end table next to the couch and it fell to the floor. Fortunately the floor was carpeted.
“Just fine!” she said, and picked up a photograph of my mother, my aunt, and me and flung it against the wall, where the glass shattered. This seemed to please her, and she looked around for something else to throw.
I don’t need to elaborate on how a guy feels seeing his aunt wrestle a candy dish out of his crazy girlfriend’s hands and then wrestle the crazy girlfriend out of the door. Let’s just say humiliation was pretty high up there on the list.
There was a spate of hang-up calls and a delivery of burnt brownies (with a note that read, “These are black like your heart!”), but fortunately for me (and unfortunately for him) some basketball player responded to the cute girl bearing chocolate chip cookies and is now starring in Kelly’s Love Story fantasy.
The rest of my freshman year passed without any drama, which was good because it gave me a little respite before the excitement of summer.
“Joe? Hey, it’s Kristi! Listen, a couple of us are going up to Taylor’s Falls—we’ve got a big tent, so pack up your stuff and I’ll pick you up Friday morning!”
“Kristi? When did…Friday? When did you get home?”
“So I’ll see you Friday morning, okay?”
“I think I’m working.”
“Get it off. I’ll be by about eight!”
It would have been stupid for me to protest any longer because she’d already hung up.
“I heard from your sister,” I told Kirk as I tuned my guitar at our jam that evening. Ed had bought me a black Telecaster for Christmas (talk about feeling chintzy—I’d gotten him a Neil Young album), and although I still occasionally sat behind the keyboard, I was having more fun with the guitar.
“She’s in town?”
“Well, yeah. I think so. I mean, she didn’t sound long-distance or anything.” Turning the E string peg, I tried to look nonchalant. “Doesn’t she stay at your house when she comes home from school?”
Kirk shrugged. “I guess not.”
He stomped the bass pedal twice and played a jazzy little riff on the snare drum.
“So,” I said as I tuned the E string, still nonchalant, “you think I could have the weekend off, Ed?”
Ed looked up from his own fretboard and clenched and unclenched his fist.
“Man, my hand’s bugging me again. Forty-two years old and I’m already getting arthritic.”
“You’re an old man,” said Kirk. Like a nightclub drummer accenting a joke, he played a quick ba-dum-dum.
“So you think I could?” I asked.
But it was Kirk who answered first. “First of all, Joe, why would you want to spend a weekend with my sister, and second, why would you want to spend a weekend with my sister?”
“Ben-Gay doesn’t even help,” said Ed, massaging his hand.
“Well, she invited me to go camping with her and a bunch of people,” I said, “and I…well, I used to go camping
all the time. And I haven’t been in a long time, so I thought this would be really fun.”
“Tim Gjerke always wants more hours…. Kirk, you want to pick upan extra shift or two?”
Kirk shrugged and twirled a drumstick. “I could.”
“I guess you’ve got a weekend off,” said Ed, and he played the heavy rift that begins “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”
The brook was babbling. Literally.
“Can’t you guys hear it?” I asked as we sat on the narrow strip of stony sand that lined the creek.
Kristi laughed. “What’s it saying, Joe?”
Gesturing for everyone to keep quiet, I cocked my head, one hand held behind my ear. I listened for a while, nodding.
“‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee,’” I translated, “‘by the shining Big-Sea-Water, stood the wigwam of Nokomis, daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.’”
The five people around me hooted and hollered.
“Wow,” said a girl named Pam, “that’s a poetic creek!”
“Shh!” said Kristi. “I want to hear that tree over there. It’s reciting Shakespeare!”
Thrilled at our collective wit, our laughter pushed us until we were couldn’t stand upright. It was my first acid trip, and like everyone else, I was one awestruck tourist.
A trap door had been opened to my mind and large truths jostled against one another in their haste to get through. I lay on my stomach, pressed against a million tender blades of grass who hummed a chant so primordial that I knew every living thing could be heard if I just understood how to listen. I listened closely, realizing that the grass with its greenness, its scent, its dandelions, its hidden clovers, was but the top layer, a ceiling covering Mother Nature’s rec room below. And who knew—maybe she was down there, underneath us all, right now, her hair long strands of the silver and gold men dug out of mines, her beating heart the slow pulse of volcanic lava…and what’s above? Quickly, I rolled over and looked up at the sky—the blue celestial roof of this crazy funhouse—just in time to watch angels wearing clouds do-si-do with one another. Birds who were magnified in size waved their wings in greeting and whistled the theme song of The Andy Griffith Show. The trees shook the maracas of their magic leaves as the wind blew by.
On the grass, I could feel every single bone in my body, and then it was as if my eyes turned inward and I could see my own skeleton, and all the activity that took place within it. “Oh, man,” I said, “I didn’t know there were little elves inside my leg who helped my broken bone to heal.”
“Nice elves,” said Pam.
“I’m wondering why my hand is strung with Christmas lights,” said a guy named Paul, fluttering his fingers in front of his face.
“They’re not Christmas lights,” said Kristi. “They’re dewdrops that crystallized.”
“Dewdrops that crystallized,” I said. “That’s the most beautiful thing I ever heard in my life.”
“But you’re not done ever hearing,” said a guy named Rob.
“I hope not,” I said. “Because I plan on hearing things that I never knew I could hear.”
“Right on,” said Pam.
“I plan on seeing things I never knew I could see,” said Kristi.
“Wow,” said Rob. “That’s the second most beautiful thing I ever heard.”
“Have you ever heard elephants cry?” I asked.
Kristi laughed. “Or bees yodel?”
“I would love to hear bees yodel,” said Pam. “I’m half Swiss.”
“Which half?” asked a guy named Steve. “The half that has the crystallized dewdrops around it?”
Pam patted her chest and thighs. “I don’t see any crystallized dewdrops.” She pushed herself up and looked across the creek. “I do see Elton John sitting on a buffalo, though.”
“Ask him to sing ‘Rocket Man,’” said Steve. “I love that song.”
And so it went. The day offered up one Technicolor, multi-orchestrated, perfume-saturated, light-showered, mind-blowing, high-flying moment after another, and when we had finally come down and were all in our sleeping bags under a balmy summer sky, I said that I was as wiped out as I’d ever been in my life.
Except for the sounds of deep breathing and light snoring, there was no response.
Finally Kristi giggled. “Me too,” she said. “Like a newborn baby who’s just worked her way out into the world.”
I thought for a moment, my fingers laced behind my head, looking up at the uncountable twinkle of stars.
“Exactly,” I whispered. “That’s it exactly.”
I saw Kristi only two more times that summer, and both times involved group camping and mind-altering drugs.
The first time was a pot-infused trip to the Apple River in Wisconsin, where we rode inner tubes down the rapids and laughed like we were on a day pass from the funny farm, and on the second we camped at Gooseberry Falls, where we took a nice trip aboard a mushroom train, a speedy, slightly psychedelic little dash that included glimpses of fir trees that appeared to be dancing the Pony, and a jumping frog who I was sure was the fifth Beatle.
“Isn’t Pete Best the fifth Beatle?” asked Steve, who again was part of this drug-taking, camping cabal. He had watched with me the frog’s leap across the path and into the grass and heard my pronouncement as to the frog’s true identity.
“If he is, he’s a pretender to the throne,” I said. “That little leaping amphibian knows more about Paul and John and George and Ringo than anyone.”
“We should have caught him, then,” said Steve. “That little bugger’s probably worth a lot of money.”
Everyone else decided to stay another day at the campsite—Steve was intent on finding that frog and seeing if it would harmonize to “Eleanor Rigby” with him—but Kristi and I had to head back.
“Stupid work,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, disappointment darkening my voice, while inside I thanked Ed Haugland for scheduling me to work the evening shift, handing me the gift of a three-hour drive with Kristi.
She pushed in a Long John Baldry tape as soon as we got into the van, and turned it up loud enough to wipe out the possibility of conversation. As we drove for an hour listening to tapes of her choice, at the volume of her choice, I felt little jabs of resentment, remembering how things were in Kristi World.
When a Jefferson Airplane tape finished and before she put in another one, I remarked, half under my breath, “She reminds me of you.”
“Who?” said Kristi, her antennae always out for any mention of herself.
“Grace Slick.”
Kristi looked at me, interested. “Why?”
I shrugged. “She always sounds so bossy when she sings.”
There was a pause and then, tipping her head back, she let out a big laugh.
“How do you know I sound bossy when I sing?”
“You sound bossy when you breathe,” I said, and she laughed again.
She didn’t put another cassette in for the rest of the ride, and we had a long conversation that covered a dozen topics, including why Kristi hadn’t continued her relationship with Blake once she got into college. “What attracts you in high school isn’t necessarily what attracts you in college. Plus you wouldn’t believe what dud letters he wrote! I thought, Who is this boring dork who sends me football and hockey scores? Like I care!”
“Well, maybe because you were a cheerleader he thought you were still interested in sports.”
Kristi rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
She talked about her roommate. “I told you about her, Joe—she’s the one who eats in bed. I mean, forget about the freshman fifteen—she put on the freshman forty! Her name is Betsy, but it should really be Buttsy—I’m not kidding, her ass is getting so big her parents are going to have to pay double tuition!”
“Nice,” I said, shaking my head.
“What’s the matter with you?”
I changed lanes to give the Camaro that was practically kissing my fender the whole lane to itself.
“Geez, Joe—when Buttsy makes her bed, it rains crumbs! I’ve got to dodge orange Cheetos crumbs!”
I switched back to the lane the Camaro was flying down, and wished a speeding ticket on a guy I’d never even met before.
“So are you mad at me?” asked Kristi.
“The more you talk I am,” I said, bugged by her baiting tone of voice.
“When did you lose your sense of humor?”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault that I don’t think you’re funny.”
“Most people think I’m extremely funny.”
“You can be very funny,” I agreed. “You can also be very mean.”
Kristi blew out a dismissive burst of air. “You sound just like a girl.”
“Better than sounding like an asshole.”
She breathed in a quick gasp of air and turned, looking out the window. Silence filled the van like a bad gas, and I was about to break it by pushing in the Exile on Main Street tape when Kristi spoke again.
“Sorry.”
This—Kristi apologizing—was big. Still, I wasn’t in the mood to let her off the hook.
“It’s not me you should apologize to, it’s your roommate.”
“Ha! That girl wouldn’t accept an apology unless she could eat it!”
I shoved the tape in then and cranked up the volume, letting Mick Jagger sing “Tumbling Dice.” We didn’t speak for the rest of the ride home, although occasionally Kristi offered commentary by leaning forward to beat out an angry rhythm on the glove compartment, and after I dropped her off, she disappeared off my radar for the rest of the summer.
I still get a hollow feeling in my stomach, like I’ve missed dinner by a couple hours, when I think of my second hockey game as a sophomore. I had been training hard in the preseason, lifting weights and running sprints, and physically I knew I was in as good shape as I’d ever been. I got the assist on the game-winning goal in our opening game against Duluth, and I was gearing up for another great season when in the second period of game two a goon high-sticked me and I fell to the ice. When I got up, blood splattered on the rink, and I realized that the vision in my right eye was blurred. The captain skated over and escorted me off the ice, and for the second time in my Gopher hockey career, I took a little field trip to the emergency room.
The View from Mount Joy Page 13