by Ann Packer
A guy was coming toward me with a cautiously friendly look on his face, as if he thought he knew me but wasn’t sure. He had light brown hair and wire-frame glasses, and he wore a retro shirt, burgundy and cream nylon in wide vertical stripes. “Carrie? Carrie Bell?”
I nodded, and he gave me a wide smile. “It’s Simon Rhodes. From Mrs. Eriksson’s French class, in twelfth grade?”
I clapped a hand to my mouth. “I’m so sorry. Simon, you look totally different. You look great,” I added, and he laughed before I had time to be embarrassed.
“I look human. I decided to sacrifice my beauteous locks for a more up-to-date look.”
At seventeen he’d hidden behind a curtain of hair. He sat a few rows over from me, spent whole class periods doodling in a notebook. Walking by his desk once on my way to conjugate some verbs on the blackboard, I glimpsed a caricature of Mrs. Eriksson that was so cuttingly accurate I could never really look at her in the same way afterward.
“What’s up?” I said to him now. “How are you? Do you still live in Madison?”
He shook his head. “New York. I’m visiting the ’rents.” He turned and watched a couple of middle-aged men trudge by with a canoe. “What exactly is going on here, anyway?”
I laughed. “Paddle ’n’ Portage, don’t you remember?”
“Paddle ’n’ what?”
“Portage.” I said it again, with a French accent: “Por-tahj.”
“Ah, por-tahj. As in carry.” He laughed a little. “So why aren’t you doing it?”
“Huh?”
“Well, you’re pretty much destined for it, aren’t you? Carrie—as in carry?”
I laughed, but I thought of Mike and Rooster’s name collection, then of Rooster at the picnic table with his head in his hands.
“So tell me,” he said. “What ever happened to Carrie Bell? Dites-moi ce que tu fais maintenant. Are you still in touch with Jamie Fletcher? I seem to recall a certain inseparableness.”
“She was just here,” I said. “Twenty minutes ago.”
“And Mike Mayer? Cutest couple in the senior class?”
I blushed: even then it had made me cringe. The yearbook staff had made us pose for a picture, and it was the only picture of the two of us I didn’t like—holding hands and looking moony. Mike thought it made us both look retarded.
“We’re engaged,” I told Simon.
“When’s the happy day?”
I looked at the lake. A last couple paddled their canoe along the shoreline, evidently just for fun. I watched them stroke, the guy in back, a black nylon tank shirt falling from his muscled shoulders.
“Carrie?”
I turned back. “Mike’s in the hospital. He was in a diving accident six weeks ago and he broke his neck.”
“Oh, my God,” Simon said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks.”
We stood there without saying any more for what seemed like an age. The park was emptying, the last spectators climbing the hill to watch the last competitors row on Lake Monona. Simon toed the grass with his shoe, a snazzy black fisherman’s sandal with a tire-tread sole. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I should get going.”
“Are you on foot?” He hesitated, the look on his face saying he didn’t want to intrude. “We could walk together.”
“OK,” I said, though I didn’t know where we’d go, or what we’d say, or why I was agreeing. I thought for a moment and then tipped my head in the direction of Mansion Hill. We started off, walking side by side, both of us silent. At North Pinckney we turned and headed up the hill. The mansions were mostly pretty shabby, huge brick or stucco structures cut into student apartments, but then we turned again and came upon the beautifully maintained one that was Madison’s swankiest small hotel—the place where Mike had always said we’d spend our wedding night, then get on a plane the next morning and fly to the Caribbean. Walking past, I thought of how nice it used to feel to hear him talk like that, and then about how he was probably watching the clock from his hospital bed, waiting for me to arrive.
We wound up walking down Langdon, past the Deltas and the Epsilons—Greek row. I couldn’t count the number of parties I’d been to there, the number of times I’d stood in one of those frats holding a plastic cup of beer, no way to move because there were so many people so close.
“So where’d you go to college?” I said.
He looked embarrassed. “Yale.”
“Excuse me.”
“At least I didn’t say ‘a little school in Connecticut,’ as certain of my acquaintances have been known to do.”
“At least there’s that.”
We both smiled, and he tipped his head toward the building we were passing. “You went here?”
“Alas.”
“Were you in a sorority?”
“Please—I would’ve had to have dyed my hair blond and had half my brain cells surgically removed. Actually, Mike rushed, but then at the last minute he pulled out. His dad was really into it, but Mike realized he’d be living with a bunch of guys out of Animal House and he decided no way. He lived at home all four years.”
“I’m always doing that,” Simon said. “Rushing around and then changing my mind about all kinds of guys.”
I studied him, his face still and serious. “Are you gay?”
He nodded.
“Are you out?”
“You mean with my parents?” He grinned. “I broke the news last summer, right after graduation. ‘Thanks for flying all the way out here, Mom and Dad. Oh, by the way—I’m gay.’ Actually it doesn’t seem to bother them much. I’m the youngest of six and I think they’re just glad to be done paying college tuition. They’re very mellow these days. My father says to me this morning, ‘Well, Simon, are you enjoying your social life?’ Which is about the closest he’s ever come to asking any of us if we were getting any.”
I smiled. “It sounds like you get along OK with them. Did you ever think of moving back here?”
He stopped walking. “Look at this.” He held his arms aloft and twitched them back and forth, shaking his head violently. “That’s me shuddering at the thought.”
We found a shady table on the Union terrace, and we sat and talked—through two cups of coffee each, and then sandwiches, and then ice cream cones. I found myself telling him more than I’d told anyone else: about my slow cooling toward Mike before the accident, my horrible numbness afterward, the despair I felt now.
“What are you going to do?” Simon said.
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I knew: Was I going to be strong and good? And devote myself to Mike? Or wasn’t I? A feeling of tightness in my chest that it was even a question. Of course it wasn’t a question! But it was. I thought of Rooster again, all the looks he’d given me: at the hospital, at Jamie’s, earlier today. He knew it was a question. I remembered the day the Mayers explained the accident to Mike and I went in afterward. Don’t worry, I’d told him. What had I promised? The tightness in my chest increased, and I exhaled hard to try to get rid of it.
“I don’t know,” I told Simon.
He shook his head. “I can’t even imagine. You must be in such pain.”
I nodded and tears stung at my eyes, but rather than look away he continued to look at me, his face full of compassion. We’d been at the same school for four years, but he was a stranger. So many people I hadn’t known, hadn’t bothered with. I’d gone through high school never thinking about other possibilities, other choices.
“I hope you won’t think this is weird,” he said, “but I’m really glad I ran into you today.”
“I am, too.”
We’d been sitting for hours and it was obviously time to leave. We pushed back from our table and strolled through the Union, then said goodbye out front. I felt open and elevated—more like the person I wanted to be than I’d felt in months.
I watched him cross the street, then called his name.
He turned and smiled, the sun glint
ing off his glasses.
“I like your shirt!” I yelled.
It was after three, past time for me to go to the hospital. I started toward home. I walked back up Langdon, back down Mansion Hill. James Madison Park looked trampled after the morning’s activity.
The sun had moved behind the highest branches of the sycamore outside my living room window, and my apartment was fairly cool. I drank a glass of ice water and then took off my shoes and settled on the couch. My feet were striped with dirt from the straps of my sandals, but I didn’t get up to wash them. On the coffee table a thick issue of Vogue sat waiting, and after a while I picked it up and opened it. I’d never really read the articles before, except the ones about movie stars, but now I turned to the beginning and decided to read instead of just looking at the pictures. There was an article about two women designing sportswear out of a loft in New York, another about a textile factory in Italy. I could read, take a shower, eat the watermelon I’d bought the day before. Sit outside when my porch fell into shade. The day would go by whether I went to the hospital or not.
CHAPTER 8
I had desk duty at the library on Monday. It was the most boring part of my job, and I usually had a crossword puzzle to work on when no one was looking, or a magazine tucked into a partly closed drawer. Today it was a magazine. I was reading covertly, and keeping an eye on the closed door behind which Miss Grafton sat, when Rooster came in at a little after twelve-thirty, his suitcoat in a bundle under his arm. He stood just inside the double doors until he saw me at the desk, then he marched over and said, “We have to talk.”
I glanced around and put a finger to my lips.
“Don’t shush me,” he said evenly. “I drove all the way up here, I had to park on the top level of the ramp, I have exactly twenty-six minutes to eat and get back—so please don’t shush me.”
Everyone in the rare books room was looking at us. “I’m working,” I said. “My break’s not till three. I’m sorry.”
“Ten minutes,” he said. “Five—just walk out into the hall with me.”
Miss Grafton had opened her door at the first sound of his voice, and now she walked across the room, her heels clicking on the linoleum. “You may go,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll sit here until you return.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “This’ll never happen again.”
I got my purse from the staff room and headed for the door, looking back just in time to see Miss Grafton pull open the desk drawer and withdraw my Harper’s Bazaar—not, alas, one of the periodicals housed on the shelves of the rare books room.
“Great,” I said to Rooster when the double doors had swung shut behind us. “There goes my job.”
But he didn’t respond. Several paces ahead of me, he led the way down to the ground floor and out of the library, not looking back once. Finally he stopped and leaned against the building. We were on a wide, empty plaza, the sun blazing down and reflecting off the concrete. Across the way, a woman sat behind a blanket arrayed with Guatemalan goods, pants and hats and bracelets woven from colorful yarns. There was no one else in sight.
“Listen, Carrie,” he began. “We go way back, and we’ve always got along pretty good, right? I mean, none of this my-best-friend’s-girlfriend shit, right?”
I nodded, although I had no idea what he meant.
“So excuse me when I say you have to try harder.”
“What are you talking about?”
His eyes widened. “What am I talking about? What am I talking about? I’m talking about Mike. Jesus fucking Christ, Carrie.” He threw up his hands in disgust. “You’re failing here, do you understand that? You’re like, Oh, poor me, my boyfriend’s in the hospital but I’m the one suffering. It’s like you’re the one this is hard on, forget anyone else. His own mother feels like she’s gotta act like it’s not so bad in case you take it into your head to walk. She does—she told me so.”
“No,” I said. “No what?”
“No, I won’t excuse you.” I turned to leave and he grabbed my arm and held it tightly, his fingers digging into my flesh. “Carrie, Christ,” he said. “This is Mike.”
“Don’t you think I know that? Let go of me.”
He dropped my arm roughly. Then his expression softened. “He needs you to be there for him, Carrie. I don’t care what was going on before, you just have to forget all of that and be there for him.”
I bowed my head.
“Look, I’m sorry about Saturday. I shouldn’t have said what I did, especially in front of Stu and Jamie. I blew it, OK? But—”
“Did he tell you about it?” I said.
“Of course! What do you think?”
I was crushed. The idea that it had been real enough for Mike to have told Rooster, real enough so that he’d had to—it was too awful. I could just imagine Mike, the slow, halting way he would have begun, avoiding Rooster’s eyes. I wondered when he’d first mentioned it, how many times they’d talked about it. “What did he tell you?”
“I don’t know, he didn’t go into any details—he just let me know you were having troubles.”
I stared at him, and all at once I despised him for knowing, for being the good friend to Mike that he was. “ ‘Be there for him,’ ” I said. “I hate that expression.”
Rooster crossed his arms over his chest. “When was the last time you were at the hospital?”
The answer was Friday: after skipping Saturday, it had been all too what?—easy, maybe, or inevitable—to skip yesterday, too.
“I know when,” he said. “Why didn’t you go yesterday? Why didn’t you go Saturday—because Chicago sounded like fun?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t go to Chicago.”
“Then why?”
“Because I didn’t feel like it.”
His mouth tightened. “You think I felt like it? You think Mrs. Mayer felt like seeing her son with his head in a fucking cage? No one feels like it. You go anyway. That’s what love means.”
“Oh, really,” I said. “I thought it meant never having to say you’re sorry.”
He turned and slammed the edge of his fist against the wall. “I can’t get through to you! Not at all! You know, I liked you for about five minutes back in ninth grade, did you know that? I sort of thought maybe it would be me and you, and Mike and Jamie.” He laughed. “Hah. You’re some cold woman, Carrie Bell. You’re ice. Mike’s well clear of you, that’s what I think. Well clear of you. Just do it, OK? Don’t keep him hanging.”
I stood against the library and watched him walk away, his red hair bright in the midday sun. You don’t know a thing about me, I imagined calling after him. Then I remembered wanting to call the very same words at Dr. Spelman’s back, and I covered my face with my hands: Rooster did.
“Oh, my God,” I said out loud. “Oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please, oh please.”
I went straight to the hospital after that, and for the next four days I spoke to no one but Mike and Mrs. Mayer, skipping work without so much as calling in sick. Visiting hours were much looser in rehab, and I just hung out during the day, before Mike’s other visitors arrived—hung out, watched his sessions, stayed out of the way when I had to, kept him company when he was back in bed. I brought bags of supplies with me: books and newspapers and magazines, anything I could read aloud from. He liked to hear baseball scores and political stories, but his favorites were movie reviews, and whenever I read a review of a movie that sounded good, he would sigh a little and say he guessed we’d have to wait for the video. We, he’d say—hesitantly, hopefully—and I’d nod, thinking it sounded right. Renting movies had always been one of my favorite things to do with him anyway, because of how he got into them, laughing so hard he’d be falling out of his chair, or sniffing loudly enough for me to hear when something was sad, when most guys would have been saying, Those raw onions from the chili must be bothering me, babe, or whatever.
When he asked what had happened, why I wasn’t at the library, I brushed him of
f. “I worked this morning,” I said, or, “I traded with Viktor,” but what had really happened was that Rooster was right, I did have to be there for him. The question was not a question. Mike needed me. Mike needed me—so here I was.
At home I let my answering machine do all the work. Jamie called, my mother, Viktor, Miss Grafton—even Rooster once, his voice high and strained as he apologized, begging me to call him. I left the volume up so I could listen, but I never picked up. I was across the room, at the table where I sat sewing and sewing—my refuge after the hospital, my antidote. I made two skirts that week and decided this: that my next project would be something silk, I didn’t know what. I had savings, I’d been sewing for eleven years, and it was about time I made something silk.
On Friday night, the unneeded skirts finished, I put away my sewing machine for the first time in over a week. The table seemed vast. I sat down with an old Elle and flipped through it, studying the fashions more carefully than usual, thinking that I wanted to learn to design my own patterns, break free of the confines of Simplicity and Butterick, even Vogue. How to do that, though? Invent a silhouette, break it down to parts, put it together again with fabric. I sat there thinking for a while, then I got a pencil and a piece of paper, sat down again, and started to draw a dress.
The phone rang and I heard the machine click on. After the beep, I heard a male voice it took me a moment to recognize as Simon Rhodes’s.
“Hi, Carrie,” he said. “I’m leaving tomorrow and I was hoping maybe you’d be free for a drink. Uh, this is Simon. Well, if you get home before too late, give me a call.” He started to give the number, and I crossed the room and picked up the phone.
“You’re there,” he said. “Great. Can you go out for a drink?”
I half wanted to, but I didn’t feel like running into anyone. I told him about my week, explaining it to him more satisfying than I would have dreamed. We talked for ten or fifteen minutes, and finally I suggested we have the drink at my place so we could keep talking without my having to brave the world again. I gave him the address and hung up, and the phone rang again instantly.