Crossing the Bridge

by Michael Baron

  A pair of geese flew across the river and I looked up at them.

  “Do you think Chase would have figured out what to focus on by now?” she said.

  I watched the geese recede into the distance. “I’m sure he would have, Aunt Rita.”

  She stood up. “I’m sure he would have, too.”

  She walked away while I continued to look out on the river. I was as alien to this environment as a komodo dragon. The lizard, however, would be regarded as a curiosity and at least generate some fascination. I seemed only to generate contempt, disappointment, and a modicum of unwanted pity.

  A ball came toward my bench and a young boy raced after it. When I looked at him, he offered me a nervous smile and then ran back to his playmates. A short while later, without saying good-bye to my parents or my aunt, or any of the cousins, I left the party.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Still Alive

  The New Year’s Eve after Chase and Iris started dating, the three of us went to Jim Krieger’s house for a party. Jim went to high school with me, and his brother was a classmate of Chase’s. About forty of our peers were there as well. Jim’s parents were in the Caribbean until January third and it was his intention to keep the party rolling in some fashion or other until the evening of the second. The three of us had committed to hanging on until New Year’s morning, but we wouldn’t agree to anything more than that in advance. While Jim had a great reputation for his taste in exotic beers and unusual spirits, and while his parents’ huge home was an expensively appointed playground, the notion of spending nearly three days in this high-ticket frat house felt a great deal like overkill.

  I had expected to be there with Thalia Merritt. We’d gone to high school together and hooked up again at the beginning of the winter break. But by our fourth date, we were straining for conversation and I was beginning to lose interest. Which was just as well, because the day after Christmas she told me that she was heading down to Florida with some of her friends for the New Year and that she didn’t think it was a good idea for us to get together again when she got back.

  I was surprised that I didn’t mind being at this party without a date. Most of the other people there were paired off (with a notable exception being Jim himself, who “didn’t do the couples thing”) and when I’d been in situations like this before I’d felt conspicuous. But with Chase and Iris as companions, I was fine. I’d spent a great deal of time with them since returning from Boston and, as we drove to the party, I felt a little like I would be “sharing” Iris with Chase, at least until the point when they went off to bed, if any of us were going to get much sleep during this bacchanal.

  When we arrived, there were fewer than a dozen people there, though you wouldn’t know from the volume. The house was a center hall Colonial and Jim informed us that the living room was the “alternative rock room” while the den was the “punk room.” Stone Temple Pilots was bursting from the speakers in the former while the Sex Pistols blared from the latter, and they converged in a three-chord train wreck in the foyer. We chose the living room, where there was an enormous buffet of alcohol along with a bowl of Doritos. As soon as he got into the room and before he’d even poured himself a drink, Chase started slam dancing with some guy he knew.

  “I don’t suppose you want to . . .” I said to Iris, nodding in their direction.

  “Hmm, maybe later,” she said as we walked over to the bar.

  “If he’s going to do that, he really should be in the punk room, you know.”

  “Oh, you know Chase, always spitting in the face of convention.”

  I watched my brother in action. Even throwing his muscular body against the doughy shape of his friend, there was a certain grace to his actions. I couldn’t recall a single time when Chase looked clumsy to me, even when he was at his most incautious. I found some pride in the fact that when the two slammed together, the friend bounced backward even though he had to be forty pounds heavier than Chase.

  Within the hour, partiers filled both the alt-rock room and the punk room and were spreading to the kitchen, the sunroom, and the screened in porch. Some were outside building an anatomically correct snowman while others were wandering off to one of the bedrooms. I’d decided to make ouzo my drink of choice, and by the third I felt like a bit of slam-dancing myself, though I managed to resist the temptation. I spent some time talking with a woman named Christine who told me that she was “with Steve, but not with Steve.” Since I didn’t know who Steve was, this hardly mattered to me and it registered that there might be some advantages to coming to this party unattached.

  Chase had been drinking with abandon and he was quite obviously feeling the effects. He ping-ponged around the room, doing his Harpo Marx imitation, singing – for reasons known only to him – a ludicrously dramatic version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” during a break in the music, and dropping into the conversations of others, only to leave in midsentence. Iris watched this amusedly, making laughing side-comments, inaudible to me, to a pair of female friends.

  Around 10:30, there was a roar from the foyer and Chase broke away from what he was doing to see what was happening. Intrigued to see what could cause him to shift gears so quickly, I walked out after him. He was performing an elaborate hand-shaking routine (complete with the bellowing of nonsense syllables) with four guys I recognized as lacrosse teammates. The five blasted into the living room and a palpable shock wave accompanied them. They descended upon the bar and, as they did, one of the group shouted yet another nonsense syllable. This caused all five to reach for various bottles and carry them to a corner of the room.

  I watched Chase curiously. In the past couple of years, he had become fond of drinking whenever he found the opportunity, but I’d never before seen him take to alcohol with this much fervor. With his four teammates, he embarked on some elaborate drinking game, the rules of which eluded me. It seemed to entail the performance of a variety of stunts (saying things backward, balancing in awkward positions, lifting things) and the seemingly random mixing of the various forms of liquor in one glass. One of the contestants regularly drained this glass, though it wasn’t clear to me whether this person had won or lost the previous competition.

  “Do you know what this is?” I asked Iris, who had come to stand next to me to watch.

  “Pahzoo,” she said.

  I’d heard that word exclaimed as the group approached the bar, though it meant nothing to me at the time (which is not to say that it meant much to me now).

  “Pahzoo?”

  “Don’t ask me to explain the rules. I’m not sure there are any. The object seems to be to get totally wasted in record time.”

  “You’ve seen Chase play this game before?”

  “With those guys at the end-of-season party. I drove home. He moaned.”

  The boys were babbling even more incoherently now, which suggested that they were reaching their goal. After one last trick, which none of them could perform, they collapsed on the floor laughing. Slowly, Chase got up, searched aimlessly around the room, and then stumbled in our direction. When I asked him if he had won, he looked at me as though he didn’t understand the question. He then put his hands on both my shoulder and Iris’ and, without another word, turned back to lie down with his buddies. After a while, it became clear that he wasn’t going to move.

  I’d never seen Chase quite like this before and was in fact a little disappointed that he’d succumbed to drink like a mere mortal. I didn’t care whether we left the other guys passed out on the floor, but I wasn’t going to have people stepping around my brother for the rest of the night. With Jim’s help, I carried him to one of the bedrooms and threw a blanket over him.

  “I don’t think we’ll be seeing Chase for the rest of the year,” I said to Iris when I returned to the living room.

  “I’m sure he’ll be okay,” she said.

  “Yeah, he’ll wake up in the morning wanting a dozen eggs for breakfast. Chase doesn’t get hung over. He gets ravenous.�
��

  I expected Iris to go back to her friends, but she stayed by my side. I liked having her there and the entire party took on a more human scale when she was next to me. About a half hour after I put him to bed, Iris asked me to check on Chase “just to make sure he’s breathing.” He hadn’t moved, but he looked utterly comfortable.

  Ultimately, Iris and I left the living room for the relative quiet of the sunroom. When it was nearly midnight, we counted down the final seconds together, and then she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, the first time she had done either. It caught me by surprise and I’m sure I looked as dumbfounded as I did at the end of ninth grade when Ellen Aspen did a similar thing on the last day of school.

  The party started to thin out not long after this. Some people went home. Several others found sleeping arrangements on the second floor. I never found out if anyone shared a room with Chase. By 3:00, the music was off and Iris and I sat on a couch talking with Jim, a girl he had his arm around, and a couple of other people. Both of us had continued to drink, though hardly with the avidity of the early evening. I was definitely drunk, but it was the kind of six-inches-off-the-ground drunk one gets from maintaining a steady high.

  “The new year is off to an interesting start,” Iris said to me as things quieted down further. Jim and the girl said good night and two of the other three people curled up on pillows on the floor. “Chase dropped before the ball in Times Square did.”

  “Not likely to happen often,” I said.

  “True. He’ll make it his mission to outlast it next time.”

  I nodded and Iris leaned back farther, listing in my direction. A couple of minutes later, she leaned a bit more and put her head on my shoulder. I craned my neck to find that she was asleep. A short while after this, I rested my head on hers and fell asleep as well.

  The vision of Iris in a sleeveless top and shorts was as arresting as it was transporting. I wondered if she remembered the first time I saw her wearing clothes similar to these and even if she might have worn them now in honor of that moment. It was difficult to stop thinking that way, even as I warned myself against it.

  I’d asked her to meet me at the store because I had a few things to discuss with the carpenters before I could disappear. As a result, I gave Tyler the opportunity to whisper upon her arrival, “This is the friend you’re spending the day with?” which also meant that I was going to have to deflect questions about her from him later. I wasn’t sure how I was going to react to that interrogation, as I hadn’t spoken with anyone about Iris ever.

  “Gee, love what you’ve done with the place,” she said as she gestured toward the back.

  “If you like that, wait till you see what I have planned if we don’t sell it in another month.”

  She walked over and kissed me on the cheek. This had become such a casual gesture between us, not at all like the first time on that New Year’s Eve more than ten years ago. When I kissed her, I put my hand on her shoulder as I always did, but this time that shoulder was bare and I almost pulled back, not wanting her to think I was crossing a line.

  Iris looked around at the slumbering store and asked, “Are you sure they can spare you today?”

  “The A-team is on duty. They’ll persevere.”

  We walked around the block to my car. It was a radiant day. One of those ideal early June days when you could enjoy the increasing warmth without the oppressive humidity that usually accompanied it by the solstice. I’d been feeling off my game since Aunt Rita’s party, but the combination of the weather and the promise of a full day with Iris encouraged me.

  “What are we doing, anyway?” I said when we settled into the car. We’d made no plans.

  “Let’s just go,” Iris said.

  “Just go?”

  “Just go. Something will come to us.”

  “Care to pick a direction?”

  “Northwest,” Iris said without a moment’s hesitation. I was certain that if I’d asked her four seconds later, she would have offered a different answer.

  We drove out of town and onto Highway 9. As we did, Iris reached for the iPod. Hendrix was in the middle of a seven-minute solo on “Red House.”

  “Wrong music,” she said. “Okay if I change it?”

  “Be my guest. There are more than five thousand songs on there.”

  Iris studiously scanned as I drove. “You don’t really listen to Enrique Iglesias, do you?” she asked.

  “I was curious. My curiosity lasted until the third cut.”

  “Good thing. I almost asked you to drop me off by the side of the road. Ooh, Fountains of Wayne,” she said, switching from Hendrix. “Great summer drive music.”

  For most of the next half hour, we did little talking. An update about the play. A modified description of what I did on Memorial Day. Other than that, some singing and a great deal of wind in our hair. As we drove down the highway, Iris pointed to a sign for Asa’s Berry Farm and shouted, “That’s it.”

  I shrugged.

  “Berry picking at the next exit,” she said.

  “This is what you want to do?”

  “Of course, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  Asa’s was a mile or so off the highway, a large shed set on dozens of acres. Asa himself wasn’t available (Iris asked), but a middle-aged guy told us that we could pick all the strawberries we wanted for a dollar a pint. Iris seemed to find this exciting and grabbed two oversized buckets for us to fill. The guy told us where the ripest berries were located and we headed off in that direction.

  The first thing Iris did when we set our buckets down was pick a huge strawberry and eat it.

  “I just love strawberries, don’t you?” she said.

  “Are you planning to tell Asa that you ate that berry? It’s stealing if you don’t, you know.”

  Iris laughed. “It’s not stealing. It’s expected. They wouldn’t want anyone out here picking their berries who didn’t just have to have a few.”

  I set to the task of filling my bucket. It was a bit daunting to realize that a half hour later the bottom of the bucket was barely full. Of course, I still had more in mine than Iris had in hers, though it was likely that she wouldn’t be needing lunch.

  “Don’t they have machines that normally pick these things?” I said.

  “Yes, a special kind of machine called a migrant worker.”

  “They use those in Connecticut?”

  “Did you think they hired college kids at twelve dollars an hour?”

  “I can honestly say I’ve never thought about it at all.”

  Iris looked down into my basket and said, “You’re way ahead of me. I’m going to have to work faster.” She started pulling berries off the vines with increased efficiency until she accidentally picked a rotten fruit, which bled all over her hand. I looked over at her and laughed, and she looked at her hand, confused for a moment over what to do – until she decided to clean herself on my shirt.

  For an instant, this act stunned me. Iris had never done anything like this to me before. She thought it was very funny and she probably thought it was especially funny that I reacted the way I did. I remembered her doing this kind of thing with Chase several times: electric blue paint in his hair, snow melting inside the seat of his pants, cotton candy suctioned to his five o’clock shadow. As much as I always thought of her as the more serious and cerebral of the two, my memories of her were dotted with these acts of complete silliness and of Chase responding in kind.

  I searched the bushes for another overripe berry but couldn’t find one. I decided to do the next best thing, crushing a fruit between my hands and then moving to wipe them on her bare arms. She wriggled away from me and ran off, but I caught her from behind and smudged the juice into her shoulders.

  “Not fair, I’m all sticky,” she said.

  “And I have a huge red stain on my sleeve.”

  “But you’re not sticky – yet.” Seemingly from nowhere, she produced another strawberry and drove it int
o my cheek. She ran away again and I ran after her. But when I realized that I wasn’t sure what I would do if I caught her, I slowed down, feigning exhaustion and calling, “Truce.”

  She turned back and approached me tentatively. “Real truce?”

  “Real truce.”

  “I can go back to picking berries without fear of retaliation?”

  “At least for the rest of the day. I make no promises about the future.”

  She leaned over and kissed me on my spattered cheek.

  “Mmm, delicious,” she said, before returning to her bucket.

  We stayed together until late in the evening. The entire time, Iris retained a girlish buoyancy that I hadn’t seen from her – and only then on occasion – in a decade. Even when she fell asleep in the car on the way back, she seemed younger. It was such a marked contrast to how she appeared during her opening night and I wondered if in some ways it wasn’t a response to it. Was she trying to show me that she could be as loose and carefree as she had been intense and world-weary after the show? Regardless, I was glad to have this Iris with me. I was glad that this Iris was still alive.

  I woke her when we got back to her car. She sleepily apologized for leaving me alone on the ride back. Then she hugged me and held me tightly while she rested her head on my shoulder.

  “This was fun,” she said.

  “It was. I’m glad you came down.”

  “When are you coming back to Lenox?”

  “When do you want me?”

  “Soon, okay?”

  “Definitely soon. I’ll call you after you get back.” She kissed me on the shoulder and got out of the car. “And clean up a little,” she said. “You’re a mess.”

  The next morning, I awoke ahead of the alarm. While I showered, I decided I’d take myself out to breakfast before going to the store. I thought about calling Iris to see if she wanted to join me, but I didn’t want this visit to end with a brief coda and I certainly didn’t want to take the chance that things would be different in any way from the day before.