The Cranberry Hush: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  “Does it?” Griff said. “I guess sometimes. Right now I feel like I’ve still got the keys in my pocket.” He patted his thigh, but now there were no keys there at all. He let go of the fence and walked through the open gate and up to the front stoop. He said to the smoker, “You live here?”

  “Yeah?” the kid said, looking up slowly, smoke coming out his nose.

  “We used to live here,” Griff said, pointing at me. I came up the walk and stood beside him, feeling proud, as though living in this dorm had vested me with an authority over all its future occupants. “I’ll give you twenty bucks if you sign us in so we can look around.”

  I laughed. “You’ll what—?”

  “Vin—” Griff touched the back of his hand to my chest. “Roll with me.” He looked at the kid again. “Interested?”

  The kid took a slow drag on his cigarette, tapped it on the edge of the stone step. Ash fell by his foot. He was wearing slippers.

  “How do I know you’ll pay?” he said, smooth.

  I almost laughed. I wondered what Saturday matinee gangster flick this slippered kid thought he was starring in. Griff yanked out his wallet, fished out a ten. He folded it in half lengthwise and held it out between the tips of his fingers. I wondered what movie Griff thought he was in.

  “You get the rest when we’re done.”

  The kid examined the ten, held it up to the sun and squinted at it. Apparently convinced of its authenticity, he stood up and looked at his watch.

  “You get fifteen minutes,” he said, opening his coat and sliding the bill into the pocket of his jeans. “And I’m going to have to follow you around.” He took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt into the sand on top of the trash barrel.

  “That’s fine,” Griff said.

  “And no funny stuff,” the kid said, pulling open the heavy glass door whose handle for years had been covered with my own fingerprints.

  Griff mouthed it back to me, “No funny stuff,” and we went in.

  The grayed arches of the lobby were painted over light blue now, and the old and twinkling brass chandelier had been replaced with a boring glass bowl. Even with the improvements the dorm still looked run-down, but it had never been dirty or unwelcoming; rather, it was like my old baseball mitt—broken in, comfortable. We slapped our driver’s licenses down on the front desk.

  This was where I really graduated, I thought, looking around. This lobby was my stage. When I walked through here for the last time following the ceremony at the theatre, that had been the big event of the day. Away from the lights and the audience—it was just me and the sum total of college twisted up beautiful and sad inside me. When I left I expected never to return. This kind of thing was always happening to me. I was so intent on having endings and goodbyes, official life events recorded, that I almost always had them prematurely. There was almost always one last gasp.

  “Can I sign them in,” the kid in the army coat said to the girl behind the desk. She didn’t respond but took our licenses and began copying our info onto a doodled-on page in a loose-leaf binder.

  “I used to do this,” Griff told her, as though they shared membership in a secret desksitting society.

  “Fun, huh?” she said flatly. She asked the kid what room. He told her 812.

  “Do you know the people in 907?” Griff asked.

  The slippered kid nodded.

  “That’s our old room,” I explained.

  Griff reached across the counter and tapped the back side. “Is there an AGD carved here somewhere?”

  The girl stopped writing and checked, mildly unamused. “No.”

  He moved his fingers a couple inches to the left and tapped again. “Around here?”

  The girl looked and nodded. “OK. AGD. That you?”

  Griff just smiled.

  “Two girls live in 907 now,” the kid said and pushed the button for the elevator. The desksitter waved Griff and me through.

  “Are you an RA?” I asked him.

  “No, but I get around.”

  The elevator door banged open and we got on. The fluorescent light inside was blinking like a strobe.

  “You going to Nine?” the kid said.

  My eyes met Griff’s and I said yes. I didn’t even think of going to Five, where I lived my freshman year, or to Three or Six, where I spent my junior and senior years. Today this building was about one room on one floor. The kid pressed the button.

  “Elevator’s still a piece of shit, huh?” Griff said as it chugged its way up through the guts of the building.

  “Some guy and a chick got stuck in here for three hours a couple weeks ago,” the kid said.

  “That sucks.”

  “Eh, they’re dating now.”

  The doors parted on Nine and we got off. We were in a hall, at either end of which was a door. The tiled floor was glossy still only at the edges along the wall. A bulletin board decorated with construction paper cutouts displayed the names of each student living on the floor, along with major and a short list of likes (spaghetti, sex) and dislikes (mid-terms, war).

  We took a right to our side of the building, to what we’d called our suite—a cluster of five rooms and a bathroom off of a common area. The carpet was a lighter gray than I remembered but the couches were the same coarse blue. Griff and I both clocked a lot of hours draped on those cushions, when our suitemates gathered for late-night drinking games or Truth-or-Dare. Once, when the two games merged, Beth dared me to kiss Griff. He’d been willing, his eyes squeezed closed, lips puckered comically. It was me who refused. To everyone else it was just a game, even to Griff—something funny to see. But not to me.

  I remembered too how we gave each other haircuts here. And that this was where we had our Secret Santa party that Christmas. Gia threw up in the corner and the weird kid Brian used to lean in that doorway when everyone else filled up the couches.

  This was where we were roommates.

  The door of our old room was closed. More construction paper labels written in the same handwriting as those in the hall said Patrice and Stephanie. Our guide leaned against a column in the middle of the common area, his arms crossed and the hint of a smile on his lips. Did he know he had something valuable to us, I wondered—his age, his dorm—and that all we could do was reminisce? Were we pitiful?

  Griff knocked softly on the door with one knuckle.

  “Come in,” said a voice.

  He opened the door. A girl in a pink sweatsuit was sitting at a desk typing on a laptop, the screen of which was tiled with IM windows.

  “Hi,” Griff said, glancing around.

  Our guide said over Griff’s shoulder, “Hey Steph. Some former Shusterites—they used to live in this room or something.”

  “We just wanted a quick look around,” I said, fully embarrassed now and wanting to leave.

  “Um. All right?” she said. She was baffled. Of course to her it was just a room, just a space, and her thoughts of it hadn’t yet gained time’s sugarcoat of nostalgia and reverence.

  It was hard to say whether the desk she was sitting at was mine or Griff’s because the room was set up differently. On our first day as roommates we spent hours arranging and rearranging the furniture, trying to find the perfect fit for everything. (The room was an irregular shape, not completely rectangular.) Eventually, sweaty and exhausted and nearing the beginning of the second day, we struck gold. The girls’ arrangement was suitable but lacked the feng-shui appeal of ours.

  “We had the desks over here,” Griff said, stepping into the room and pointing to the wall against which a bed was now. Above the bed hung a poster of a model-turned-actor. “The beds opposite each other, here, here.”

  “We had a hard time arranging it,” the girl said.

  “We almost got in a fistfight that first day,” Griff said, looking at me, a glimmer of nostalgia in his eyes.

  “When did you live here?” the girl said. She typed something on her computer, clicked. She had multiple conversations going
on; the fact that Griff and I were there in person afforded us no higher priority.

  “Four, five years ago,” Griff said. “Long time.”

  “Did the hot water suck then?” she said after typing some more. “Because it sucks now.”

  “I remember it being OK,” Griff said, and I remembered it that way too.

  He stood in front of the window with his arms crossed, no doubt looking down at the angel statue. The sight of his silhouette against the skyline brought our room rushing back to me. It shimmered over the new arrangement, over the girly cuteness, over the posters and the pink paper lantern suspended from the ceiling. It was a two-fold feeling of having never left and of having only ever been there in a dream. I could see Griff’s U2 poster of the same joshua tree that was tattooed on his shoulder; a stack of my comics on the edge of my desk; the damp bathtowels hanging over armoire doors; the thirteen-inch TV, its screen fingerprinted and dusty, on the little fridge by the door. The wall Griff’s outstretched hand reached for when he cannon-balled onto my mattress.

  I suddenly missed it, all of it, very much, in a terrible, aching way I feared I would never really get over. I could understand getting used to someone I loved dying and not being part of my life anymore, but how could I ever adjust to the fact that a part of me was forever in the past? That a whole part of my life was over and done and now just a memory? Just photos in an album and words on a page?

  I wasn’t sure I could get over it, but it didn’t feel like I was stuck in the past. I wasn’t like those paunchy, middle-aged men sitting around a barbeque in moth-eaten high school letter jackets, recalling the glory days. There was rarely anything glorious about college, but it was me. And it filled every single second with ready-made life. At the tips of my fingers, on the other side of my door, all around me, whenever I wanted it. In college I could breathe deep and say, This is where I belong. Even when it was bad. And even when it was confusing, it made sense.

  What hurt most was that I rushed through it, took it for granted. I was anxious to graduate, eager to mark the goodbye and move on to something else; to escape and to start again. But I’d never felt quite right afterward.

  No, I wasn’t stuck in my glory days. I was homesick.

  When we walked out through the glass doors it was like being rejected by the dorm, a transplant that didn’t take. My eyes welled up but the cold air whisked the moisture away.

  “How do you feel?” I asked Griff as we passed for the last time through the old iron gates.

  “Blue,” he said.

  “Sad?”

  “No, blue. Actually more of an indigo. Like remembering.” His words were so much less specific than his colors. “You have four years of memories in that building. I really just have ours.”

  We crossed into the street and walked down the block to the car, where Zane and the plant were guarding Griff’s stuff.

  “Did they let you go inside?” Zane said. The arms of the aloe sitting between his thighs waved as the Jeep settled with our added weight.

  “He greased some palms and got us a tour,” I said.

  Griff kissed the tips of his bunched fingers, splayed them into the air. “It’s the Dean charm.”

  We got a couple of blocks down Beacon Street and stopped for a red light. When it turned green and I drove through the intersection there was a clang under the hood, and then a fwoop fwoop like a sock stuck in a fan. I had an idea of what it was.

  “Shit.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Griff said.

  “It’s not.”

  “Eh, just ignore it.”

  I pulled up beside a hydrant and got out, lifted the hood. One end of a broken fan belt sprang up like a cobra and then fell back upon the engine, flat and defeated. I ran my finger along the end and asked for Griff’s phone.

  A few minutes later we were sitting beside the hydrant waiting for a tow truck to come and haul my Jeep away to some Brighton garage.

  “And so their trip took a tragic turn...” Zane narrated, kicking his heel into a clump of frozen sand.

  “This is where we met, you know,” Griff said to me, jabbing his thumb at the brownstone behind us.

  I turned around. The windows of the brownstone had curtains and snow-covered flowerboxes. “This isn’t Shuster,” I said.

  “Not anymore. They sold it. It’s condos now.”

  “No shit. Really?” I stood up and walked to the front steps. Through the glass window in the door I could see the hallway (nicely wallpapered now in a dark floral pattern), at the end of which was the room where Rebellion in Lit had met.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Rich people play pinochle in our classroom.” I sat back down between Griff and Zane and pulled my coat down over my knees.

  “Is that what rich people do?” Griff said. “Play pinochle?”

  “I don’t know, Griff. You’d know better than me.”

  He was still grinning when someone behind us said, “Car trouble?” It was the kid, our slippered guide, walking hand in hand with a girl far taller and cuter than he was.

  “Apparently,” Griff said.

  “For another twenty bucks I can get it going for you,” the kid said.

  “Not unless you’ve got a spare fan belt hidden in that magic coat of yours,” I said.

  He laughed and he and his girlfriend kept walking. “We’re going out for lunch,” he said to us over his shoulder, raising his hand and rubbing his fingers together in the universal sign for cash.

  “I’m kind of hungry myself,” Zane said.

  We all were hungry by the time the tow truck pulled up in front of the Jeep and a big-bellied man in a Red Sox cap climbed out. Mason’s Garage was stenciled in white on the back of his brown jacket. A clipboard under his arm dangled a pen on the end of a shoelace.

  “It’s the fan belt,” I told him, poking the guts of my car as he peered inside.

  He pinched the broken end of the belt between his fingers. “What are these, staples?”

  “It broke once before and I stapled it back together.”

  The guy laughed. “How many miles that get you?”

  “I did it last fall, so... quite a few.”

  “Last fall, huh? Not bad. You’re not looking for a job, are you?” He laughed again.

  “No, no thanks, I sell comic books.”

  “Comics. Like Superman?” It sounded like Soopah-man.

  “That’s right.”

  “You can close her up.” He put his foot on my bumper and rested the clipboard on his knee, jotting notes in little boxes. “Should be painless,” he said. “We’ll have a look at her tomorrow and get a new belt in there. If you could fill this out.” He poked the form with a wide finger and walked back to his truck. Towing apparatus began to unfold off the back.

  “That’s not something you can get to today?” I said, scribbling my name and address on the forms.

  He shook his head. “It’s Sunday. Shop’s closed. Pop it in neutral for me?” I did, and handed him the keys. He pressed another button on his truck; the front of the Jeep lifted off the ground as though in a sling.

  “So should we come with you or what?” I said.

  “There’s nowhere for you to wait there. Like I said, shop’s closed. Don’t live around here?” He glanced down at my address on the form.

  “No, the Cape.”

  He nodded. “I say get a room, go on a Duck Tour or something, come to the garage in the morning. It’s the Washington Street stop on the B Line. Call ahead if you want, but it’ll be done by noon.” He ripped off the pink copy of the form and handed it to me. “Address is on there.”

  Griff stood beside me and poked my elbow. “I don’t know how I feel about sending all my stuff off with some random dude,” he whispered.

  “I’m not gonna steal any of your stuff, bro, relax,” the guy said. He hiked up his pants and opened the door of his truck.

  “I know, of course, just... let me just cover up some things first.”

  He ope
ned the door and unzipped his duffel bag, pulled out a few sweatshirts and tossed them over the more valuable and obvious of his possessions. Zane reached past Griff and grabbed the aloe plant off the seat.

  “You can leave that in the car, dude,” Griff said.

  “It’ll freeze,” Zane said. And responding to our dubious smirks he added, “It’s mostly water.”

  I folded the pink copy of the form I’d signed, stuffed it in my coat pocket and watched my Jeep get towed away down the street.

  “Didn’t that guy make you think of Bibbo?” Zane said, holding the plant in the crook of his arm like a football or an infant.

  “Ha. Yeah, kind of,” I said and then added, in what I imagined Bibbo’s voice sounded like, “Sooperman’s my fav-rite.”

  “Who’s Bibbo?” Griff said.

  “He’s a character who shows up in the Superman comics from time to time. Retired boxer, lottery winner, owner of a famous bar...”

  “You guys are such nerds,” Griff said. “Let’s go get something to eat, shall we?”

  We walked to a cheap bar and grill on Boylston Street and were shown to a booth by a young guy with thick glasses and too-short pants that revealed blue argyle socks. Griff slid into one side and Zane the other, leaving me to make a quick decision.

  I told Zane to push over.

  The dorky host splayed three menus on the table and tripped over something walking back to the little podium by the door.

  “That’s got to be a cover,” Zane said.

  “What?”

  “That guy. The nerdiness. That’s totally his secret identity.”

  “What’s his superpower?” said Griff.

  “I don’t know, maybe a willy of steel?”

  “No condom can hold him,” Griff said.

  The aloe sat on the table between the napkins and a bottle of ketchup. I opened my menu. Griff started to open his, left it and said he was going to the restroom. He slid out of the booth.

  Zane perused his menu and without looking up, said in a goofy tone that resembled my impression of Bibbo, “Now it’s like a date.”

  A date. My pulse quickened.