The Marriage of Sticks

by Jonathan Carroll

  Far more disturbing than any spook house at an amusement park is a ride through the old hometown if you’ve been away for years. What do you expect to see? What do you want to see? Having been away so long, you know it’ll be different. Still, seeing the inevitable changes makes quick deep slashes across your soul. Loss, loss. Where are all those places I once was?

  Iansiti’s Pizza Parlor was gone, replaced by a store with a postmodern facade that sold CDs. There were only records when I lived here. LPs, not CDs. I thought about all the slices of pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni we’d eaten in lansiti’s, all the dreams and teenage hormones that once filled that dumpy place with its stained menus and bunch of fat-bellied Italian cousins in T-shirts eyeing us from behind the counter.

  “Sometimes when I’m driving down these streets, looking at our old hangouts, I think I see myself inside them.” Zoe chuckled and slowed for a yellow light in front of the bank where James’s mother had worked.

  I turned to her. “But which you? The one you were, or the you now?”

  “Oh, the one I was! I always think of myself as seventeen here. I’ve never gotten over the fact I’m twice that age but still living in this town.”

  “Don’t you feel strange going by the old places? Like your parents’ house?”

  “Very. But when they died, so did it. A house is the people who live there, not the building. I just wish I hadn’t sold it when the market was so bad. The story of my life.”

  We drove by the high school, which despite some new buildings still looked as glum as ever. Past the town park, where, one fifteen-year-old summer night, I almost lost my virginity. Then down the Post Road to the Carvel ice cream stand where James and I sat on the hood of his old green Saab and ate vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t been able to get up the nerve to ask Zoe the question, but seeing that cherished Carvel stand was a sign it was time. As casually as possible I asked, “Is James coming to the reunion?”

  Zoe looked at her watch and dramatically blew out a breath like she’d been holding it for minutes. “Phew! You went a full hour without asking. I don’t know, Miranda. I asked around, but no one knew. I’m sure he knows about it.”

  “I didn’t realize till we started driving around that this whole town is haunted by him.” I turned to her. “I didn’t know how I’d react coming back, but more than anything it’s James everywhere! I keep seeing places where we were together. Where we were happy.”

  “Miranda, he was the love of your life.”

  “When I was eighteen! I have done other things since then.” The tone of my voice was stiff, prissy. I sounded too much on the defensive.

  “Not as much as you think.” She grinned and threw me a quick look. “High school is a terminal disease. It either kills you while you’re there, or waits inside your soul for years and then comes back to get you.”

  “Come on, Zoe, you don’t believe that! You had a wonderful time in high school.”

  “Exactly! And that’s what killed me. Nothing was ever better than high school.”

  “You sound so cheerful about it.”

  She chuckled. “Right now I’m looking forward to the reunion because in those people’s eyes, no matter what’s happened to me in the last fifteen years, I’ll always be Zoe the golden girl. The cheerleader with the great grades and the boyfriend who was captain of the football team. And you’ll always be Miranda Romanac, the good girl who shocked everyone senior year by going out with the baddest boy in school.” She slapped my knee.

  In a bad Irish accent I said, “Aye, and God bless the boy!”

  She raised a hand as if it held a glass and she was offering a toast. “And God bless Kevin. I’m also looking forward to this because I hope he’ll be there. And he’ll be absolutely wonderful, sweep me off my feet and save me from the rest of my life.”

  My heart filled so quickly that I couldn’t catch my breath. It was exactly the way I had been thinking for weeks.

  I met James Stillman in geometry class. God knows, I knew about him before; he had a reputation fifteen miles long. He mesmerized innocent girls into his bed. He’d once stolen a pair of skis from the town sport shop, then had the chutzpah to return there the next day to have the edges sharpened. He and his friends were reputed to have burned down the abandoned Brody house during one of their infamous parties there. All told, James was not interested in being a solid citizen.

  A group of typical thugs had usually slouched around our school halls wearing gaudy leather jackets and intricately piled hairdos that looked like hood ornaments, but James Stillman’s brand of bad was planets away from those human clichйs. What fascinated me was his great, singular style when I didn’t even really know what that word meant yet. Despite his reputation, he dressed like a preppy, in tweed jackets, khakis, and loafers. He listened to European rock groups—Spliff and Guesch Patti—and was even rumored to love cooking. When he was going out with Claudia Beechman, he had a bouquet of yellow roses delivered to her in gym class on her birthday. Like most of the girls in the high school, I watched him from afar, wondering if all the things said about him were true. What would it be like to know him, date, kiss him? But that was academic because I knew the thought of someone as colorless and well behaved as me would never even cross his mind.

  “What’d he say?”

  Only after a thud inside my brain did I realize that James Stillman had asked me a question. He sat behind me in geometry class but only because seating was alphabetical. Before I had a chance to digest what had happened, he repeated the question, this time adding my name to it.

  “Miranda? What’d he say?”

  He knew me. He knew who I was.

  The teacher had said the earth was an oblate spheroid, as I dutifully noted in my book. I turned and said, “He said the earth’s an oblate spheroid.”

  James watched me intently, as if whatever I said he’d been waiting all morning to hear.

  “A what?”

  “Uh, an oblate spheroid.”

  “What’s that?”

  I was about to say, “Like an egg that’s been leaned on,” but something inside said shut up. I shrugged instead.

  A small slow grin moved his mouth up. “You know, but you’re not admitting it.”

  I panicked. Did he know I was playing dumb just for him?

  “It’s okay to know things. I just know different stuff.” He smiled mysteriously, looked away.

  After class I kept my eyes down and gathered my books as slowly as possible. That way there would be no chance of walking out of the room at the same time he did.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I stood still and closed my eyes. He was behind me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t need to because he came around and stood in front of me.

  “Sorry about what?” I couldn’t look at him.

  “About what I said. Do you think you’d ever want to go out with me?”

  All I remember about that moment was I could actually feel fate’s wheels turning inside me. In the split second before I answered, I knew everything would now change, no matter what.

  “You want to go out with me?” I tried to make it light and sarcastic so I would be in on his joke if there were one.

  His face was expressionless. “Yes. You don’t know how much I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

  We were inseparable for the rest of the year. He was everything I wasn’t. For the first time in my life, I learned with increasing joy that different could be complementary. We had worlds we wanted the other to see. Somehow those very different worlds fit together.

  Remarkably, we never slept together, which was one of the great mistakes of my life. James was the first man I ever loved with an adult heart. To this day I still wish he’d been my first lover instead of a handsome forgettable goof I said yes to a month after I got to college.

  I never asked about other girls before me, but contrary to his reputation, James never did anything I didn’t
want. He was gentle, loving, and respectful. A sheep in wolf’s clothes. On top of that, he was a wickedly good kisser. Don’t get me wrong—just because we never did it doesn’t preclude a few thousand delicious hours horizontal, hot, and hungry.

  Because we were such different souls, he seemed delighted by my prim, skirt-down-over-the-knee worldview. He knew I wanted to be a virgin when I married and never tried to force the issue or change my mind. Maybe because he was so used to girls saying yes to everything he wanted, I was like an alien to him—something peculiar, worth studying.

  As is so often the case, our relationship ended when we went off to different colleges in different states. Those first months apart, I wrote him furious, impassioned letters. He responded with only stupid two-line postcards now and then, which was perfectly in keeping with his bad-James part. Gradually college and its different faces, as well as the rest of my new life’s diversions, slowed my letters to a trickle. When we saw each other again that first Christmas vacation home, it was warm and tender, but both of us had new lives elsewhere. Our reunion was more nostalgia than building toward any kind of future.

  Over the next years I’d heard things about James from different sources, but never knew which were true and which third-hand information. Someone said he worked in a boatyard, another that he’d finished college and gone to law school. If the last was true, he became a very different J. Stillman from the one I had known. They said he lived in Colorado, then Philadelphia; he was married, he wasn’t. Sometimes when I was restless in bed at night, or low, or just dreaming about what might have been, I thought about my old love and wondered what had happened to him. The first thing that came to mind on reading the invitation to our class reunion was James Stillman.

  For old times’ sake, Zoe and I had dinner at Chuck’s Steak House. We’d worked there together as waitresses one summer and walked home late all those warm nights with nice tips in our pockets, feeling very adult. Chuck had died years before, but his son took over and kept the place looking exactly the same.

  Earlier, Zoe had said she had many things to tell me, but since that afternoon a kind of delicious time warp had set in. Both of us were content inside it talking mostly about then and little about now. A half hour sufficed for catching up on where we were in our lives. This was to be a weekend for memories, photo albums, “Whatever happened to…?” and the sighs that come with remembering who you were. At dinner neither of us expressed much interest in talking about what we’d become or where we hoped to go with our lives. Perhaps that would have come after the reunion—a natural summing up after seeing old classmates and putting the weekend and the experiences into context. But as things turned out, that summing up was done for us.

  After Chuck’s, we returned to Zoe’s house. Both of us were dying to get into the tent, our old mood, those times. We hurriedly washed, changed into our pajamas, and by the hissing light of the Coleman lamp, talked until two.

  The next morning she got up before I did. The first thing I remember about that momentous day was a violent tugging on my arm. Not knowing what was happening, I tried to clear my head and sit up at the same time. I forgot I wasn’t in a bed but wrapped in the cocoon of a sleeping bag. Held on all sides, I started thrashing around, which only tightened the bag around me. By the time I extricated myself, my hair was standing out from my head, my face was heated to two hundred degrees, my pajama top was wide open.

  “Miranda!”

  “What? What’s the matter?”

  “Are you all right?”

  Early as it was, I went instantly on the defensive. “What do you mean?”

  “You know exactly what I mean. The way you were thrashing around. And everything you talked about last night, the way you see things now… You have such a good life. You’re successful and you said it yourself; things’ve worked out. But you’re not happy. The way you talk—”

  “How do I talk, Zoe?”

  “Like you’re old. Like you don’t expect anything better to happen because you’ve lived too long and seen too much to have any more hope. I’m luckier than you. I don’t think life’s very friendly either, but I know we can control hope. You can turn it on and off like a spigot. I try to keep mine on full blast.”

  “That sounds good, but what happens when things go wrong? What happens when you’re disappointed time after time?”

  “It kills you! But you go on and when you’ve got the strength, you start hoping again. It’s our choice.” She reached over and took my hand. It made me very uncomfortable.

  “Maybe I’ve just learned to be careful.”

  “Would careful you have the guts to fall in love with a James Stillman today?”

  The question was so accurate, so right into my bull’s-eye, that I started crying. Zoe squeezed my hand tighter but didn’t move.

  “I saw a woman last week in a wheelchair by the side of a road. Right there on the side of the L. A. freeway with all these cars zooming by. I was so frightened for her. Out in the middle of nowhere. What was she doing? How did it happen? I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her and I didn’t know why until right now.

  “It was me, Zoe.”

  “You? How?”

  “I don’t know. Her helplessness, the danger, the wrongness of her being there. The longer I live, the more careful I get. It’s like you stop using certain limbs because you don’t need them, or because you only used them as a kid to swing on trees. Then one day you realize you can’t even move that leg anymore—”

  “And you end up in a wheelchair.”

  “Right, but even that’s okay because everyone else around you is in one too. Nobody we know climbs trees anymore. But sooner or later we come to the freeway and we’re alone; no one to help and we’ve got to get to the other side. We’re stuck, and it’s dangerous.”

  “So you’re stuck?”

  “Worse; I’m careful and I don’t know how to stop it. I wouldn’t fall in love with James now. I’d get one sniff of what he’s like and run away. Or push my wheelchair as fast as I could to get out of there. He’s too dangerous.”

  “’Cause he has legs?”

  “And arms and… a tail! He could swing from trees with it. That’s what was so wonderful about him, what was so wonderful about those days—I was using all my arms and legs and loved it. Today I’d be too scared of the risk. I wish I knew the flavor of my happiness.”

  She looked at me while I continued to cry. Life had come to a stop on a nice summer’s day in my oldest friend’s backyard. I had no desire to go to the reunion now, even if James was there. Seeing him would only make things worse.

  2. What the Dead Talk About

  “DO YOU EVER wonder what the dead talk about?”

  We stood elbow to elbow in front of the mirror in her tiny bathroom, putting the final touches on our makeup.

  “What do you mean?”

  She turned to me. One of her eyes was perfectly done, the other bare and young-looking. Made up or not, her eyes were too small to contain the amount of life behind them. In a corner of the room a small radio played Billy Idol’s “White Wedding.”

  “I was just thinking about my parents—”

  “No, go back to what you said: what the dead talk about.”

  She pointed her mascara stick at me. “Well, I believe in an afterlife. I don’t know what kind, but I’m sure something’s waiting. So if there is, is it one big place? Do you get to be with people you knew? Assume for a minute that you do. I was thinking about my parents. What if they could see us now, getting ready to go out tonight? What would they say?”

  “They’d say it was cute.”

  “Maybe. But now they know so much more than we do. Whenever I see a hearse go by or hear someone’s died, that’s the first thing that comes to mind: Now they know. Always, the first thing. Now they know.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Even the smallest, most forgettable little… termite of a person. Some guy who sat on the street in Calcutta all his life, begging, die
s and suddenly knows the biggest answer of all.”

  “A lot of good it does him when he’s dead. Why are we having this conversation, Zoe? Are you trying to get us in the mood for the reunion?”

  “I’m thinking out loud to my oldest friend.”

  It was my turn to stop. “Do you have a lot of friends? The kind you can really talk to, cover a lot of ground with?”

  “No. It gets harder the older you get. You’re less patient. You need so much patience for a good friendship.”

  “All right, you’re the optimist: What does get better as we get older? You get wrinkles, you’re less patient, you’re supposed to know more, but that’s not true. At least not as far as important things are concerned.”

  She didn’t hesitate a second. “Appreciation. I appreciate things much more. My kids when they’re around. Or sitting with Hector in a bar that smells musty and old… things like that. I was never aware of what things smelled like when we were kids, you know? Too busy wondering if I looked right or what was going to happen next. Now I’m just happy if the minute is right. When there’s peace in the air and I don’t want to be anywhere else in the world. I always wanted to be somewhere else—even when I was having a good time. I was always sure there had to be better.”

  We looked at each other and, as if on cue, slowly shook our heads.

  “Don’t you wish you could go back and tell yourself what you know now? Say, ‘Zoe, it doesn’t get any better than this so enjoy it, for God’s sake.’”

  “It wouldn’t make any difference. I tell that to my kids all the time but they look at me like I’m nuts.”

  Finished with the makeup, we carefully looked each other up and down.

  “Why are we so worried about how we look?” she asked. “All the men will be wearing plaid pants and white loafers.”

  In as deep a Lauren Bacall voice as I could find, I said, “James Stillman would never wear white shoes.” Then I added, “I’m not worried about tonight: twelfth-grade me is.”