by Lucy Ives
Loudermilk doesn’t say anything.
“Come—! Easy—pie!”
“What?” Loudermilk yells.
“NAME!”
Loudermilk, who never remembers anything, says something about Mrs. Hillary.
“Shit!” Lizzie is laughing maniacally, and at the highest point in her journey she launches herself from the seat of the swing, screaming, “I SO KNEW!”
There is a thud, then silence.
Loudermilk and Harry disengage from the equipment. They stumble over the black grass and find Lizzie in a ball. Her shoulders move rhythmically.
Harry hears himself say, “You all right?” His voice breaks on the second word, and it comes out as an unintelligible croak.
Loudermilk translates. “He’s asking if you’re OK.”
Lizzie peers up at her interrogators.
Harry can taste blood in his mouth.
“They don’t love each other anymore, by the way, in case that’s what you were wondering? They actually talk about it in front of me, like I don’t exist.”
Fifteen
The Reason
Everyone knows it’s hard being a writer, but what they don’t know is that it’s hard being a writer most of all because inevitably you have a past. As a writer, you will have used this past to write things and now, in the present, it’s difficult not to think about what you’ve done. The unfortunate things you wrote silence you, but, unfortunately, the successful things can do the same. Not that any of this matters for Clare, who can’t write at all, at least not in the present. Clare’s prize-winning short story, composed approximately three years ago, published in late 2000, and officially lauded in the spring of 2001, is titled “The Lift.” She submitted it as her writing sample with her application to the Seminars.
Clare wrote this in a single night, in one sitting. It was a magic event, and she still does not fully understand what she was writing. She does not, for example, know anyone in the story in real life. Or, she used to not know anyone in the story. Now, of course, for whatever reason, given the existence of the small man who seems to teach poetry, she does.
Clare calls up the Word document for the draft she turned in to the undergraduate literary magazine where the fiction editor was an ex-boyfriend. He had ended the relationship summarily but said he would like to “keep reading [her].” Clare is basically glad she obliged, though the two of them don’t keep in touch. Then again, Clare doesn’t really keep in touch with anyone.
She tries thinking now about what this ex-boyfriend, the editor, might have seen in these words, which is to say, what anyone might have seen; who she had been to all of them, then, at school. The sentences feel so odd under her eyes, because she will never write something like this again, and also because it is extremely unlikely that she will write anything at all, ever again:
The Lift
By Clare Elwil
This woman his wife gave him two daughters, Amy with thick hair and Jenny who has been slightly bald all her life. Both of them smart, both of them in college now. His wife was squatting to get under the sink and find him the Joy. He was overweight, and he was a cardiologist. He caressed his belly.
He was supposed to wash a dish, but instead he set down the Joy and picked up an apple. We did it last night, he thought at the moment he bit. He wandered into the living room where he could see the field that stretched from their deck to the trees and what was going to be a highway on the other side of the trees. It was October, and during this month it always felt like riding in an airplane to stand in the living room of their summer home. He had never done this before. He wasn’t living in New York anymore, and he was not a cardiologist. The sale of the apartment had gone through. Massachusetts was full-time.
Except for Florida in the winter. The phone rang.
“Richard, sweetheart,” his wife calls him.
The phone is still ringing. She has not picked it up, and this house might be a universe long. Why did they decide that the living room needed to be two stories tall? The fireplace is holding up the ceiling, but something seems to be making the room rock as Richard goes to the phone. He is wearing sock slippers with pasted-on treads. The socks are too small. They are for children. “Hello?” he asks.
“Hello?” says a girl with a voice like dust.
“Hello, who is this, please?” Richard keeps his distance. Quiet now, it is Eloise.
“It’s Eloise. Is Jen there?”
“No, Eloise. She’s at school.”
“Oh. Is Amy there?”
“No, she’s not.”
“Can I leave a message?”
“Do you expect them to be coming here soon?”
“I didn’t know.”
“What?”
“Well, actually I thought they might.”
“No, they’re not here.” Richard is trying to decide if something is wrong with Eloise. “I think that the best thing to do would be to call them at school.” A triumphant hunter-green plaid flashes before his eyes. The pattern of the upholstery on his chair.
“I need to talk.”
“Oh. I’m not sure I understand.”
“That’s a long-distance phone call. I’m calling from work now.”
“Oh. And where is that, Eloise?”
“At the basin.”
Richard has the extra flesh that covers his right haunch in one hand. When he is idle, he will sometimes attempt to manually measure whether or not he has gained weight in the past few days. His wife is washing a dish. She has her face down over the sink. He can see the dark star along her scalp where her dyed hair parts. It might be that she is pretending not to listen to him, smiling, with the water on hard. But she is probably just not listening. She has always had the idea that because he loves comfort he can do no wrong.
“Well, gee, Eloise, I don’t suppose I can interest you in making this phone call from our house?”
“Well, you might.”
“Because, you see, we also have to communicate with our children sometime. Is it Jen you’re interested in speaking to? That would be good, because it’s been a few days since we’ve talked to her.”
“Yeah, well, it really doesn’t matter that much.”
“Yeah, well, OK then.” He can’t quite place what’s in her voice.
“When are you going to call her?”
“Whenever you want. I don’t think she leaves her dorm room except late, late at night.”
Eloise does not react. There is no further acknowledgment of either Amy or Jen. “So I don’t know if you’re really busy or what, but if you wouldn’t mind driving over here, I’d really appreciate it. Something happened to my car two weeks ago, and now I’m basically stranded except for when my brother can spare his. It would be a big, um, really help, Dr. Lehren.”
She’s not working very hard at persuading him, but Richard would like to go for a drive, so he pretends that he is somebody’s father. “Sure then, Eloise. Where shall I pick you up?”
“I can stand in the lower lot.”
“Sounds good to me. See you in twenty minutes?”
“Yeah, you should know I also changed my hair. It’s short and I darkened it.”
“Well, then I’ll know which one you are.”
“Yeah, well, the place is pretty much empty today, but I just thought I’d let you know.”
“Well, OK. I’ll see you in a little while, Eloise.”
“Bye, Dr. Lehren.”
“Goodbye, Eloise.”
They both hang up, and Richard is sure now that he’s put on some weight. His wife shuts off the water. Perhaps she has washed some of her own dishes as well. They look at each other for a minute, smiling, heads tilted to the same side.
Richard put on shoes; he stepped into his loafers; he tucked in his shirt. “Hey, so Eloise is coming over. I hope you don’t mind.”
His wife is moving dishes around in the sink and then comes to the door of their bedroom. “I’m sorry, did you say something?” Her hands are wet. Sh
e is holding them away from her body. Her shoulders are raised.
“I said Eloise is coming over and I hoped you didn’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind.” She turns back to the kitchen. “Everything’s all right?”
“I have no idea.”
“Oh?”
“She wants to use our phone.”
“What was wrong with the one she was calling you from?”
“I think she wants to talk to Jen.”
“Glad to be of service, I guess.”
“Apparently she can’t call from work.”
“Right. Well, you don’t have anything in particular to do.” She isn’t only trying to tease him. She is giving him permission, and Richard moves after her into the kitchen. He likes how she dries her hands on a towel before putting them back in the sink and turning the water back on and washing more. “I’ll see you in a little while,” she says.
“Bye.”
He goes into the garage. The cave smell makes him start whistling. He knows it will be close to rain outside. He likes the weather when it is like this, unpleasant. He believes he can be happy in a dull climate. He swings himself into the Jeep and powers down all the windows before backing out.
The basin, the tiny ski resort where both of his daughters worked on the weekends during the winter when they turned fifteen, is less than twenty minutes away. The sky is a sheet. At the other house across the road they are moving boxes. A woman comes after two men, carrying a vacuum cleaner across her shoulders like a big gun. Richard opens his mouth and waves his arm at them. The woman turns toward him and watches him as his car gets up to thirty-five and goes around the bend. The men, he sees in the rearview mirror, do not pause and are putting their boxes in the bed of a truck. Lots of brown trees shoot into his line of sight.
There was one year when he drove Amy to work on Saturday mornings, and then sometimes on Sundays, when they needed her. His wife and Jenny would come along, and they would ski together when Amy got off work. They would shout things up and down the mountain. His wife is very slow. She favors one-piece suits, makes perfect turns. The custom is to line up at the bottom of a run and comment as she comes down. And then Amy had her license, and she drove herself alone early in the mornings, and he knew that sometimes she was skiing at seven before the slopes were open, and that she had friends who also worked. He and his wife got another car for Amy to drive, because soon she was driving Jen, too, and the girls had friends who were locals, and they went to parties. Eloise was a local. He did not know whether she was Amy’s friend or if she was Jen’s friend. She was probably a little younger than Amy, but she was definitely not as young as Jenny. She was around their house often, and she called often, and when she called, she would ask for Amy, and when she was over, he always saw her talking to Jen. But she was part of a group of kids who came to his house and were attractive and polite and sometimes ate a meal with them. He never met her parents, but once she told a story about how they had let her brother name her when she was a baby, which he remembered, so he knew that they existed. The other thing that he can think of is that one time he saw Eloise kissing a boy on their deck under the light. The boy was leaving early; she had gone out with him to say goodbye. It had been a surprise to see that kids did that, the way she was formal with him, and he saw her mouth, “Good night,” after.
He turned into the huge muddy lot, past the pond that never froze, dug for skating, and the green cross-country trails. A small blue car with white racing stripes and rust hooding one of its taillights, a gray van, and a black truck were lined up at the fence at the end of the lot. This is really part-time, thought Richard, and he pulled in next to the blue car. There was an empty box of Ritz crackers torn open in the back and a white T-shirt pulled over the passenger-side front seat of the blue car. He turned off his engine but kept looking inside the blue car. Eloise wasn’t waiting for him. Richard got out into the mud, locked the Jeep, and walked toward the lifts through one of the ticket booths.
Around the lifts there was still some grass. The mountain started the second you passed the ticket booth: the ground shot up, no trees except between trails. There were rocks Richard had not been able to see in winter, when they made snow. The main chairlift was running. Yellow benches sailed up and down and swung out around the giant engine in a metal house at the base. There was a man in a red shirt on the roof of the engine. He had his head down and was adjusting something Richard could not see. The lift made more noise now than in the winter.
“Hey.” A man in a black windbreaker with wet hair walks toward Richard. The man has a very broad face, so Richard sees his features before he is near. This is a man Richard has seen working the lifts before. The man says, “Can I do something for you?”
“Yes.” Richard’s voice is raised. “I’m looking for a young woman. Her name is Eloise. She works here.”
“Yeah. El is at the top right now.”
“Do you know when she’ll be down?”
“Hold this.” The man gives Richard the car battery he was carrying. His thumb in a thick glove presses the button of a walkie-talkie he has produced. He brings the device to his mouth. His eyes roll up to get the words. “Yeah, can you get me Eloise.” There is a crack and a whir. Someone says, “Sure,” and then there are scratches. Eloise says, “Hey.”
“Here,” the man says, passing Richard the walkie-talkie. Richard puts the battery on the ground and takes the walkie-talkie in both hands. “You press that,” says the man, indicating.
“Thank you,” Richard tells him, and patiently puts the lower half of the walkie-talkie near his mouth. “Eloise?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Dr. Lehren. I just came in my car.”
“Yeah?”
“You still want to use the phone?” Richard feels like he is in a storm. The man in gloves has squatted down to do something with the battery on the ground, and the man on the roof begins motioning for Richard to come toward the lift.
“Yeah, I do. Things just got kind of busy around here.”
“Oh yes?” Richard shouts. “There’s a guy on the roof of the lift motioning to me. I’m going to walk over there now. Are you at the top of the main lift?”
“Yeah.”
Richard is standing underneath the lift now, and the man on the roof comes to the edge and leans off.
“Do you want to come up?” Eloise asks him.
The man on the roof has a brown beard. He is young and smiling, and it seems to Richard that one of the man’s eyes might be slow, but he can’t really tell from this angle. “Are you gonna ride?” the man asks him, one finger indicating the chairs running underneath the eaves.
“Yeah, Eloise? I’ll come up.” Richard takes his right hand off the button. “Just a second,” he says to the man on the roof. The other man in the gloves is still crouching over his battery. Richard hurries back to him and touches his shoulder. When the man turns, Richard holds out the walkie-talkie and says, “Thank you.”
“No problem,” the man tells him. “You going up?”
“If that’s all right. I don’t want to get in the way of your repairs.”
“No, no, nothing’s broke. We’re just making some adjustments. Yeah, really my car’s fucked and no one needs what’s in the sheds out here. It’s supposed to be for the ski patrol. We’re just, well, Wallace is fine-tuning it, but yeah, you should ride up there. See Eloise.”
“You’re sure?”
“It’s a great view. Oh hey.” Now the man is concerned, looking at Richard’s chest. “You’re gonna be cold. Here, you take this.” The man pulls his windbreaker over his head and sticks his arm out to Richard. The windbreaker is in his first, and it swings from side to side, and the man’s comb-over rolls away from his head. “C’mon. Take it. I’m going inside.”
Richard takes the windbreaker from the man in the gloves. It is much thicker than he had expected, almost like rubber. Richard gathers it into a doughnut and sticks it over his head. “Thanks again. Whe
re can I give this back to you?”
“You leave it with Wallace when you come back down. Have a good ride.”
“I will,” says Richard. The man looks down at his battery, and Richard begins the process of convincing the windbreaker over his upper body. It is an anorak. It cannot be parted in the front. Then Wallace starts calling him, “Hey, hey!” Wallace stops the lift and smiles and waits for Richard.
The ground bobbed, and the sky was white. When Richard reached mid-station, rain began to fall. Whatever Wallace was doing to the motor, it was not making things run more smoothly. Over the birch trees, on the trail to the left of the trail below his feet, Richard espied the yellow body of the old school bus they had dragged out of the woods for the kids who rode snowboards. In the winter he had seen them sitting on the roof, boys and girls, some asleep and some eating and laughing. And then there were laurels under his legs. He thought he was breathing a lake. Water fell from the sky, and it fell from the crossbar over his head, and it fell from the cables that were slinging his chair up the mountain. The laurel covered the steepest place, where there was no trail, and Richard seemed to be face-to-face with the hillside. And he could see the top, with a cabin and a metal house, partner to the one at the base where Wallace was changing things. Then the lift stopped.
Richard sat in the rain. He was trying to imagine what he would say to Eloise when he got to the top. He could not say why he had left his house, or why he had gotten on the chairlift. The black jacket the man had given him was cutting off his circulation at the wrists. His glasses had fogged up. He swung and wondered, Does Eloise know that once I saw her give a kiss under our deck light? Then the cables gasped, and the chair started again.
Eloise was outside the cabin. She had on her instructor’s coat, which was dark purple, nearly black with rain, and came down to her knees. You bought these coats from the owners of the resort if they offered you a job as an instructor. He had paid for two of them: two hundred and fifty dollars each. And Eloise did have short dark hair. She looked strange, her face not more complete now than it had been when he was trying to picture her. “Hey, Dr. Lehren.”