Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

At least for the first two years of working with him, Michael believed everything Larry said. Larry was so confident it seemed unimaginable that any of this was the product of a fantasist. To Michael, Larry seemed to have the world by the tail (like a dog!). He had the easy charm of a precocious salesman, and Michael never saw the cockiness falter. Except once, and then it had nothing to do with girls.

  It was a hot weekday afternoon in August. The air-con back by the liquor counter was on high and the fans up front were revolving full-speed in a blur of blades. Everyone was at the beach, and Michael hadn’t rung up much more than five dollars in the past hour. ‘First you need enough sun,’ Alvin would say, ‘to get them to come to Stillriver in the first place. But then you want enough rain to drive them off the beach and into town.’

  A man came in, wearing soiled jeans, work boots, and a sweat-stained, grimy white T-shirt. He looked about fifty, slightly over average height, with hair cropped so short that Michael couldn’t tell if he was bald or not.

  He wanted cigarettes, and Larry served him, making his usual small talk, looking cool in a neatly pressed cotton shirt, with chinos and expensive loafers. While he searched for a new carton, the man stood silently, leaning against the counter with both arms. His biceps and forearms had muscles bunched like the knots of a sailing rope, grouped so asymmetrically they could not have come from any gym.

  Finally Larry stood up holding a carton. ‘Got ’em,’ he said. The man didn’t reply. As Larry rang up the transaction, his voice took on a folksier, back country tone. ‘Sure is hot today, ain’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, kind of hot today.’

  The man snorted. ‘Hot?’ he said, his voice rising. ‘You’re hot?’

  Larry stood back, startled, and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Poor baby. Poor baby’s hot.’ The man picked up his cigarettes. ‘If it gets any hotter, your mama’s going to have to iron you a new shirt.’ And he strode out of the store.

  Larry looked at Michael as he tried to regain his composure. ‘Did you hear that?’

  Michael nodded.

  ‘I should have told him to shove it up his ass.’ His voice was scornful. ‘He puts up pole barns for a living. No wonder he’s so cranky. Shit, anybody who puts up pole barns deserves to be hot.’

  For once Michael detected a false note.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll meet some nice girls.’ His mother, in between naps near the end. He would come home from school and peek into her bedroom, usually finding her dozing. That day she had been napping but must have heard him at the door. ‘Come in,’ she’d said, and smiled, though even her smile seemed weaker now, as if it were a strain to move her lips that much.

  He’d helped her sit up a little to take a drink of water from the glass on her bedside table, then sat at the end of her bed to talk. He had told her about school and how his day had been, and started talking about his next baseball game when suddenly she’d looked at him and interrupted: ‘I want you to promise me one thing.’ And he’d nodded and said, ‘What’s that?’ and his mother had said, ‘Promise me you’ll see more of this world than I ever did. Stillriver’s a nice town and I’m glad you’re growing up here. But don’t get seduced.’ He’d thought seduced? and he must have looked puzzled, for she’d chuckled, then made her remark about his meeting some nice girls. And then she’d added, ‘But be sure and take your time. I don’t want you getting stuck here because of some girl. Always remember that calf love never lasts.’

  There seemed little danger of anything failing to last when nothing had even begun. His relationships with girls were largely confined to his own fantasies, especially in summer when they trooped half-naked through the store. He had all the yearnings of boys his age but found girls a mystery, one deepened by living after his mother’s death in an all-male house. He found the prospect of intimacy with a girl completely shy-making; he could no more tell a girl about what he really felt than he could fly. Not that he was now altogether without sexual experience.

  There was a girl from Walkerville named Susie Mest, known of course as Susie Breast since she was well developed. Although she was a year older, he had found himself in the ghost train with her at the Fennville County fair only the year before, sitting side by side in an open-topped train car contraption as it entered a darkened, meant-to-be spooky world of plywood and tin. As soon as their rickety car went through the entrance flaps and into pitch dark, Susie Mest had opened her mouth over his, stuck her tongue halfway down his throat and put her hand right on the bulge in his blue jeans, oblivious to the dangling rubber masks that popped up in front of their racing railway car and the skeletons that waved bony, illuminated arms as they took a sharp corner. When – too soon, too soon – the train had emerged into the garish light of the nighttime fairground, she’d looked at him wide-eyed while he waited for his excitement to subside enough to allow him to stand up and leave the train car. He had to wait a long time.

  When he next saw Susie Mest, selling squash at her daddy’s roadside stand, she was seven months pregnant and three months married, and he thanked God for the brevity of the ghost train ride at the fair.

  Then there had been Tina, a half-Mexican girl, who had kissed him and let him feel her left breast (why only one? he often wondered subsequently) in the back seat of her brother’s car in the parking lot of Custer Dance Hall, while Kenny Williams was talking his way out of a fight with a farmer’s son by the club’s front door, with Donny standing by protectively in case Kenny’s mouth made things worse.

  But these were encounters; anything that involved knowing a girl as a person seemed impossible. ‘Thank you,’ he could just manage to say when they paid for their candy or ice-cream or sun tan lotion. How he dreaded it when a girl would try and engage him in conversation, finding himself tongue-tied and blushing if she asked so much as the price of a postcard.

  It was so much easier to see girls in groups, and in the next year he started to see the same gang of kids more or less every weekend and sometimes after school. There was Donny Washington, his closest friend (at the age of seven they had tried the Indian blood exchange, but the jack-knife proved too dull), whose mother fed Michael supper almost once a week. Donny had shot up in the last twelve months, and was suddenly over six feet tall and getting broader. Donny liked Nancy Sheringham, partly (Michael felt) because she was big, with powerful shoulders but good legs, and partly because she had a self-confidence Donny lacked.

  Ricky Fell was the doctor’s son and made Nancy seem modest, so happy was he with himself. For he was good-looking and knew it, and had great success with girls. ‘I shot a deer with that rifle,’ he’d declared to an impressionable brown-haired summer girl one June night while a bunch of them drank beer in Doctor Fell’s living room (the Fells were in Traverse for the weekend). Despite Michael and Donny’s incredulity at the hokeyness of this pick-up line, it had worked – half an hour later Ricky was doing the deed with the girl from Evanston in his father’s outboard, which was moored to the dock outside on Stillriver Lake.

  Then there was Kenny Williams, a year behind them all at school, which nobody minded because he was so outrageous and so funny. Unusually articulate, he had Ricky Fell’s success with girls, but it rarely lasted once they discovered he had just turned fifteen (though Anthea Heaton hadn’t seemed to mind). Anthea was pretty, but stuck up and occasionally pretentious – she would drop the group at a moment’s notice for a better invitation. Her snobbishness was kept in check by teasing, especially after she unwisely confided in Kenny that she never ate asparagus because it made her pee smell – an admission Kenny was never going to keep to himself.

  What did they do together? Hang out, which in a town the size of Stillriver was, for nine months of the year, mostly all there was to do. The boys played sports, and the girls did too, and they all had jobs of one sort or another. By tacit agreement they did not sleep together, although there was the hilarity of Kenny’s partial seduction and complete disrobing of Anthea Heaton
on her own swing porch – that occurred before Kenny really became a member of the group. They managed to resist teasing Anthea about it. Managed, in fact, in an untypical kindness for adolescents, never to let on to her they knew at all. The asparagus issue was a different matter altogether and not subject to immunity.

  They drank some, mostly beer, although for heavy drinking the boys would go off on their own. The summer before, Donny had pitched a pup tent at the State Park and drank a bottle of Seagram’s Seven in four and a half hours, then been embarrassed half to death when Nancy had shown up and found him retching in the sand. They smoked dope on occasion – Nancy in particular liked it and always promised to grow it on her father’s farm, though she never did. Once Kenny tried acid, but acted so weird that it put everyone else off and kept him from doing it again, in their presence at any rate. No one had a car, and though Donny and Nancy were able to borrow their parents’ on occasion (pickup trucks for both), Michael’s father almost never let him use his – he acted as if his own aversion to driving should be shared by his son. This general lack of wheels meant that recreation after school was limited in terms of venue; usually they spent it downtown by the bandstand, or making one lemon Coke last two hours at the drugstore soda fountain (Alvin Simpson and Marilyn were very patient).

  Was he happy now? Well, with his life widened by the job in the drugstore and a circle of friends, he was less miserable. And he was no longer quite so scared, particularly of Alvin, whom increasingly he enjoyed talking with and increasingly admired. Alvin was a businessman with principles. When Michael asked him why he hiked up prices for the summer people, Alvin said, ‘I price in winter for need, in summer for desire.’

  And so he got through his freshman and sophomore years of high school. He knew now that he would see his time through, graduate from high school, then obey his mother’s words and go. Though now, at the beginning of his junior year, he found Alvin taking an interest in him.

  ‘You started thinking about college yet?’

  Michael shook his head. I’m just a junior, he thought, why’s he talking about college? ‘Maybe U of M,’ he said, just to be saying something. ‘If I can get in.’ He’d have to go to a state school, he knew that, for there was no money to go to a private college. U of M was good, anyway.

  Alvin nodded. ‘Good school,’ he said, but then added, ‘you should think about Ferris. You’ve got the grades.’

  Michael was mystified by this; Ferris was a dump in the dreary middle of the state. The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor was Arcadia by comparison, and a famous university. Puzzled, he told his father about Alvin’s remark.

  ‘Ah,’ said his father with a knowing smile. ‘Ferris, the pharmacist’s friend. It’s famous for it.’

  ‘But what’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘I’ve never seen a pharmacist go hungry. People will always need medicine.’

  So that’s what this is about. ‘I’m supposed to become a pharmacist? What, and take over from Alvin when he retires?’ He remembered what his mother had said – don’t be seduced.

  ‘There could be worse fates. Alvin does real well.’ His father’s voice turned slightly sarcastic. ‘Or are you itching to get out of here? You’d prefer Grand Rapids, I suppose. Or the beauty of Detroit.’

  ‘What’s so bad about Detroit?’

  His father looked at him without sympathy. ‘Son, you have many virtues, yet a sense of irony is not among them. Having clawed my way out of that shithouse, it would be pretty peculiar to have a son of mine try to claw his way back.’

  2

  THE DAY AFTER Nancy cornered him he looked at Cassie Gilbert in math class and she smiled at him. After school he walked home and ran into the twins, all excited about some TV show they’d watched that morning. He paid little attention, being so preoccupied himself. Sticking his head into his father’s study, he found his father reading the paper. ‘I got to go out for a while. I’ll be back before supper.’

  Lowering the paper, his father looked at him with slight surprise. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Helping somebody with math. There’s an exam.’

  ‘Donny struggling again?’

  ‘No.’

  His father smiled to himself and put up the Chronicle again. From behind the spread he said mildly, ‘She must be pretty.’

  He half-ran to Cassie’s house, since he was already late. He rang the bell and heard a soft, distinctive two-tone note inside. Dee-dah, dee-dah. (Years later ringing a doorbell at a foreman’s house in Stockholm he heard exactly the same dee-dah, and could hardly speak as the foreman’s wife opened the door.) After a minute, he heard feet running down the stairs, the door opened and Cassie stood in front of him, a little breathless. ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘come on in.’

  She’d changed from school clothes – those knee socks – and was wearing blue jeans, white sneakers and a red flannel hunter’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. When she smiled there was the faintest hint of an overbite, and a slight imperfection to one front tooth that sometimes caught the light. To his mind these just made her prettier, and he liked the little point to her jaw, and the small straight nose between the startling high cheekbones (almost American Indian). And then the eyes – big, round and cornflower blue – he had never realized a pair of eyes could make such a difference, turn something pretty enough into a face of extraordinary beauty. With her black hair tied back in a pigtail, the eyes seemed even larger.

  He followed her into the living room. It was simply furnished with a brown, thinly-cushioned sofa no one would ever want to get kissed on, a mahogany coffee table, and two handsome but uncomfortable looking Windsor chairs. The one concession to comfort was a leather recliner chair, sitting next to a standing lamp by the now-unused fireplace. Presumably her father sat there, for on the table next to the chair was a book about biblical excavations in the Middle East.

  He followed Cassie into the kitchen, which was light and cheerful, where the living room was just this side of dour. White canisters with stencilled flower patterns of blue lined the counter below the sideboard cupboards. In the middle of the room there was an oval pine table and wooden kitchen chairs, and Cassie stopped at the fridge and pointed to them. ‘We can sit there,’ she said. ‘Would you like something to drink?’

  ‘No thanks,’ he said, and sat down, carefully moving aside a large arrangement of dried flowers, then opened the geometry textbook he’d brought. ‘We better get started.’

  She was nice, she was pretty (and, since opening the door, beautiful), so he somehow expected that she would have to be dumb. And at first she didn’t disappoint him. What he liked about geometry most was its interconnection of the visual with the logical and verbal. You saw the symmetry, say, of two triangles superficially unalike, then set about to prove their congruence through a verbal reasoning. This kind of proof would be a large part of the exam, and he quickly drew two triangles on a piece of paper, using a table knife as a straight edge for his pencil. By the third step of the proof he could tell that he had lost her. ‘Confused?’

  She nodded and blushed. ‘I don’t mean to be so stupid.’

  ‘That can’t be helped,’ he said automatically, then tried to apologize. Thank God, she is laughing. He tried to explain away his outburst, but she cut him off.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘you’re probably right. I think I was born with a spatial deficit disorder.’

  ‘A what?’ he said.

  ‘You know how some people can put things together,’ she said, ‘even without the instructions?’ He nodded. ‘Well, I can’t do it even with the instructions right in front of me. My father’s even worse, which means I’m the one who gets to try. He bought a barbecue in Burlington when we moved up here and I spent a whole weekend this summer putting it together. It’s still not right.’

  ‘Show me,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix it for you.’

  ‘Not now. It’s out in the garage. Besides, I’ve got to get through geometry. First thi
ngs first, though with me it looks like first things third.’

  So they ploughed on, and after half an hour he felt that though she didn’t understand noticeably better, she was quick enough to memorize the moves for what he was confident would appear on their exam. As they continued, he did almost all the talking, and he found that once his slight self-consciousness had gone, he enjoyed it. But he also wanted her to talk, though not about geometry.

  Finally they finished. There was no reasonable way he could prolong the lesson. He looked up and was astonished to see the kitchen clock read 5.15; it hadn’t seemed half that long.

  ‘Nancy says you’re a good basketball player.’

  ‘I like it,’ she said.

  ‘You must be good. She said you were all-county down south.’

  ‘Just reserve,’ she said quickly. ‘I wasn’t trying to brag.’

  ‘I know,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Nancy can get anything out of anybody. Kenny Williams, do you know him?’ and she nodded. ‘Well, he calls Nancy “the dentist”. He says she gets secrets out of people like a dentist extracts teeth. Gently if possible, but with brute force if she has to. Like the dentist in Marathon Man.’

  They were both laughing at this image of Nancy when suddenly Cassie stopped and looked at the doorway. When Michael turned he found a slightly-built man in his sixties standing in the doorway, frowning. ‘Doesn’t sound to me like much geometry’s going on.’

  Michael stood up. Cassie said, ‘This is Michael Wolf, Daddy.’

  ‘I’m Parson Gilbert,’ said the man, staying in the doorway while Michael stayed awkwardly standing by his chair.

  ‘We’re almost finished, Daddy,’ Cassie said. ‘I’ll be up in a minute.’

  ‘Take your time, my dear,’ her father said, and Michael could tell both that the man didn’t mean this and that he didn’t like the man. He wasn’t sure which thought came first. As her father turned and walked away, Michael noticed he was wearing bedroom slippers. ‘Pleased to meet you, sir,’ he called after him, realizing he didn’t mean this either. Cassie’s father turned his head and nodded, then walked away.