Off Course

by Michelle Huneven

  The next morning, hanging up the velvet coat, Cress saw, on the back, flattened spots of resin with bits of pine needles and grit ground in, small dirty galaxies. She never could get them off and had to throw the coat away.

  Two

  Cress’s sister, Sharon, was thirteen when Carl Abajanian, a pale, skinny boy with black hair, asked her to go steady and gave her a Saint Christopher medal. What awoke embarrassed pleasure in Sharon changed the family’s life forever. “Nobody is going on a date, let alone going steady until they are at least sixteen,” Sylvia Hartley declared. “If then.” The cheap white enameled disk was returned, and weekly camping trips commenced in a steady rotation of mountains, desert, and beach. The Chevy wagon was soon replaced by a black-and-red VW van, outfitted—to save money—by Sam himself with a tiny fridge and a hip-bruising table-with-benches that folded into beds. Every Friday afternoon, Sylvia stowed duffels and groceries in the van and ordered the girls in after; they drove for hours, pitching camp in darkness and waking up to Joshua trees, pines, or thundering surf. Sylvia Hartley had a small inheritance from her mother and wherever they went—Arrowhead, Anza-Borrego, Gaviota—she and Sam looked at vacation property. Cress learned to read and to draw in a moving car, and how to pull in deep, so time would pass in a blip.

  On a Sunday morning in early June, they were breaking camp on the banks of the Kern River when Sylvia, always fond of a map, spotted a little-known pass over the Sierras. They took it east to west, switchbacking through red-limbed manzanita and white-flowering elderberry. The only vehicles they met were logging trucks that downshifted with terrible roars, their hydraulic brakes gasping and spitting. Mosaics of bark on the transported logs smeared past the van’s windows only a few feet from Cress’s face.

  After an hour of climbing, the road straightened out along a high ridge with tall pines and granite boulders. In a few miles, just where the road began its westerly descent, a large new log building stood on the left, its pale wood still raw and shiny with shellac. A banner hung from the rafters: THE MEADOWS LODGE GRAND OPENING. Below that, stuck in the dirt at a jaunty angle, a red-and-white placard: LOTS FOR SALE. “What do you think?” said Sam.

  “No harm in looking,” said Sylvia.

  “You girls want to come in?”

  The sisters did not glance up from their books. The parents climbed out, smoothed themselves, and disappeared into the log building.

  Cress put down Hawaii and, wobbly from the drive, stepped squinting into the sun. The air was clean and thin. The parking lot, recently scraped from the woods, had high clumps of churned mud and brush at its edges. Windshields, car chrome, mica in stones bristled with sharp white slivers of light. A mean little headache began pulsing behind her eyes. Her parents emerged from the lodge with a small, bandy-legged man. “Girls!” they called. “Let’s go!”

  Reggie Thornton, land developer and lodge owner, wore blue jeans with a crisp white Western shirt. He had a meaty pink face, a spaniel’s woozy brown eyes, and a sculptural, milk-white pompadour. “Sam and Sylvia, you’re in front with me,” he said, pointing to a mud-spattered yellow Coupe de Ville. “Girls, in the back. That’s it, that’s it. Watch your head there, Sylvia.”

  He drove through the development with one hand; the other held a cigarette outside the car window. He was the first man Cress had ever met who wore a bracelet! A thick gold one. “You a skier, Sylvia?” he said. “We’re surveying for a rope lift, Syl, just across the road there.”

  “You play tennis, Sam? Clay courts are what we have in mind—what do you think, Sam? We’re afraid concrete will crack.”

  A few glass-faced A-frames hid amid the trees, and one modernist box of stained wood and Thermopane, but the sprawling, ranch-style log home was most popular. Three of these log ranchers were spec homes and for sale, but Cress’s parents demurred, preferring a buildable lot. Reggie Thornton duly drove them first to a buggy hollow where a cabin might be tucked, then to a hillside view lot, and finally to a flat half-acre of scrub brush.

  “Got mostly retired folks so far, Sylvia, but once the ski slope and tennis courts go in, families’ll be on this mountain like a rash. Best get in early, Sam, before land prices skyrocket and all the prime lots sell.”

  His cologne fed Cress’s headache. She disdained, as her parents normally would, the inflated hair and 14-karat curb links, the pimply ostrich cowboy boots. She willed her parents to exchange that look, her father’s cue to say, Thank you, sir, we’ve seen enough, and liberate them from the Caddy’s stiff upholstery. But neither parent displayed impatience: apparently home sites in the big pines for under 5K eclipsed all their usual snobberies.

  Sam and Sylvia, whispering, settled on the view lot, Sylvia insisting, although it cost five hundred dollars more. The three-quarters acre of decomposed granite and car-sized boulders had seven tall pines, clusters of young spruce, and a long switchbacked driveway. The house site was graded, an electric pole already planted and strung.

  “You’ve got a real eye for property, Sylvia—you know the best.”

  Solemn, and in palpable terror, her parents wrote a check for the deposit.

  “Fully refundable, Syl, don’t you worry.

  “Sylvia, Sam, girls. A pleasure.”

  Then came the rest of the road. On the map it was only thirty miles downhill to the tiny town of Sawyer, but the red squiggle glossed the steepness and tightness of the curves hugging the Hapsaw’s ravine. This road was far slower and more perilous than the way up from the Kern. Her father braked, downshifted, swung them back and forth. A pencil and a plastic cup rolled from one side of the van to the other. Halfway, Sharon roared for him to stop and burst from the van to vomit on the shoulder. Far below, the foam-white Hapsaw gushed with spring runoff. It took them an hour and fifteen minutes to reach Sawyer and a straightaway. Surely, Cress thought, the drive would chill their ardor: Would her parents really want to drive it every weekend? (Yes. Yes, they would. They would happily drive it forty, fifty times a year, up and back.)

  Their check cleared instantly. When Reggie Thornton didn’t return her father’s calls for three weeks, her parents grew frantic, certain they’d been swindled. But Reggie Thornton was not a con man or a thief; he was a garden-variety drunk. He sobered up, resurfaced, and called back as if nothing had happened. Eventually, despite several such lapses, inspections took place, the title cleared, more money changed hands, and escrow closed.

  Thus, their fates were sealed: Sharon and Cress Hartley would not go to parties or school dances or spend Saturdays at the beach or at the movies with friends. All sleepovers and make-out sessions would take place without them. They would not have boyfriends or be the popular girls. They would be at the cabin.

  * * *

  Sam Hartley built the A-frame’s shell from a kit he found on sale in a catalogue, 40 percent off. Sylvia and Cress both lobbied for something more rustic and charming, a board-and-batten redwood cottage with shutters, say, or a modest log cabin stained dark; Sam insisted that the A-frame would give them more room and a panoramic view—for significantly less. Having been a union carpenter when younger, he managed the nailing, plumbing, electrical, and finish work by himself, to his own relaxed standards. For paneling, flooring, and fixtures, he haunted salvage yards and a warehouse by the Los Angeles railyards that sold unclaimed and damaged freight.

  Friday afternoons, when Cress and her sister got home from school, anxiety shivered their mother’s voice. “Get your coat, Sharon, your parka … Cressida, where are those new snow boots I bought you?… Sam, I told you we needed ice for the cooler!”

  Sylvia exhorted her friends, colleagues, even her students to come up to the cabin. Her closest friends were under steady pressure. Cress heard her mother on the phone: You haven’t been up for a year, Barbara. That’s right. More than a year. Nope, nope. I’m sure. I have my calendar right here.

  All Cress wanted was to stay home with her friends—Tillie and Rochelle Boyer and the Ellis twins—and loll in each other’s bed
room or take the bus downtown in a gang. That was her real life, and it was forbidden to her. When she was fourteen, Cress called the A-frame Auschwitz to her mother’s face. And was slapped across the mouth.

  Tillie had once tried to intervene on Cress’s behalf. “Please, Mrs. Hartley, can’t Cress stay home a couple weekends and do stuff with us? These are her high-school years! She should have fun!”

  For days afterward, Cress heard her mother on the phone: Cressida’s friend thinks I’m a terrible mother because I won’t let her run wild every weekend.

  Cressida’s friend informed me that Cress should be able to do whatever she wants.

  Apparently, our having a beautiful vacation home has ruined Cressida’s whole high-school experience. So I’ve been told.

  Once at the cabin, the sisters could come and go as they pleased, as long as they were home by dark. Sharon stuffed a backpack with books and food and disappeared until dinner. Cress stayed in bed, exhausted, her head throbbing, until her father started hammering or her mother put a Mahler symphony on the stereo. Taking a book, Cress wandered down to the eponymous meadows, alluring green expanses that were deceptively boggy; she hopped hummock to hummock; a misstep and she sank to her shins in muck. A narrow, deep trout stream meandered through the middle and led to a slumping, shuttered log cabin. The Bauer family, who had owned the whole private parcel before the Meadows was developed, had held on to this ancient cabin and the two meadows. (In fact, there were no meadows in The Meadows, Inc.) Cress spent weekend afternoons on the cabin’s shady porch, technically trespassing, but she never ran into any Bauer—or anyone at all. She stretched out on a waney-edged wooden bench to read and daydream and doze until the bugs or the rising cold or the sinking sun sent her home. Such was her teenage wilderness experience: hours alone on a bench.

  Sylvia Hartley’s strategy to keep her girls away from boys, booze, and drugs so easily could have backfired. For all the attention Sylvia and Sam actually paid to their daughters up in the Meadows, Cress and Sharon might have spent their days joyriding on borrowed snowmobiles, smoking pot, losing their virginities on the warm smooth granite slabs by Spearmint Creek. Had there been any Meadows boys, or even naughty girls. But the Meadows never prospered as Reggie Thornton predicted. Rope tow and clubhouse, tennis courts and skating rink never materialized; families never swarmed the mountain, nor did land prices skyrocket. Around the time Cress started college, Reggie Thornton was forced to sell the Meadows Lodge and Land Company. Cress was in grad school when her mother reported that Reggie was in prison for killing a young couple in a head-on collision while driving drunk.

  * * *

  Jakey Yates came over on Saturday afternoon and left the A-frame once that night for thirty minutes, when he went to check on the lodge. They ate and drank in bed. He brought steaks and a stack of LPs and sang along with George Jones and Lefty Frizzell, clamping her under his hot arm.

  He rolled his big overheated body right on top of her, and she gasped with laughter, then for breath.

  The next day, she and Jakey hiked to the fire lookout on Camel Crags; he’d packed sandwiches and wine, and he gave the firewatcher twenty bucks to go for a shower and a beer at the lodge while they borrowed his bed, with its three-hundred-degree view. They laughed and grabbed their clothes when they heard hikers clomping up the wooden stairs from below.

  He had been single now for two years, Jakey told her in that tiny glass hut. His wife had waited until the day their youngest graduated from high school to move out. In fact, they were driving between the graduation ceremony in Sparkville and the celebratory dinner at the Sawyer Inn when his wife said that she was filing for divorce, and even as they spoke, a moving company was in their home taking everything she’d tagged. He’d noticed that morning yellow confetti dots on a lamp, the back of the rocking chair, a pillow. Vaguely, he’d blamed the grandkids and in the flurry and excitement of the day forgot about it.

  “She hated it up here,” Jakey told Cress.

  From where they reclined, looking out on ridge after ridge, to the far escarpments and white glaciers of the Sierra Nevada, not one squiggle of smoke drifted upward. Jakey admitted that he had played the field some since his wife left, but he was losing his taste for it. “Enough diversion,” he said, and added, thrillingly, “I’m ready for some real company.”

  * * *

  They took long drives in his battered green truck down logging and fire roads deep into backcountry to check for grouse or deer or cougar, whatever was on his mind. (Cougar. Who knew she’d ever track cougar?) They drank hard liquor and talked. They used beds in various cabins whose owners had entrusted their keys to Jakey, and sometimes the cool banks of streams. One night, he took her to a canvas tent alongside Spearmint Creek, just outside the campground limits; the inside was furnished with a small woodstove, Persian carpets (fake, but still charming), and a real bed on a frame, with a tufted chenille spread that left stripe marks on Cress’s backside, as if she’d been tied up or caned.

  Jakey wasn’t keen to have her at his place; although he lived alone, his two youngest sons lived nearby and often dropped in without warning. A few times, Jakey took the risk anyway, showing Cress where to park in the aspen grove, where her old Saab couldn’t be seen.

  He cooked dinner at the lodge, then came to the A-frame smelling of wood and cigarette smoke, alcohol, grilled meat. He held an ice pack to her temples, snuggled against her, a fleshy furnace, comfort incarnate.

  “It’s a shame I’m so damn old,” he said. But Cress didn’t miss the athletics, often tedious, of her former, younger lovers.

  * * *

  “Cressida.” His voice was graveled after sex. “What kind of name is that?”

  Well. Her mother had come to Los Angeles as a young actress and landed a role in an equity waiver production of Troilus and Cressida. “By Shakespeare?” said Cress. “Not his best. It’s long and draws these obscure parallels between Elizabethan England and the Trojan Wars.” But her mother had received wonderful reviews: Sylvia Hartley plays Cressida with crackling hauteur. “So basically, I’m named for her best role. Her finest hour.”

  “That’s unique.” Jakey bit her arm. “Kind of sweet.”

  “Except Cressida is this scheming nympho who flirts with everyone and sleeps with the enemy. Even in Shakespeare’s time, her name was synonymous with prostitute. So thanks a lot, Mom. Why not just name me Whore Hartley?”

  “Oh now.” Jakey rolled all his weight on top of her. “I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way.”

  * * *

  Cress ducked into the lodge for milk or eggs, which Jakey sold to her for pennies. He poured her coffee or drinks, made her lunch, no charge. He sat her in a booth where he could see her as he cooked.

  He’d loose a roar when someone he knew came through the door, and he knew legions: the Meadows’ full-time and part-time residents, of course, but also the campers, hikers, hunters, fishermen, cross-country skiers, and snowmobilers who returned year after year—and the camp rangers, loggers, fire crews, and Cal Trans workers who cycled through in shifts. Men jockeyed for Jakey’s attention, became heartier, gruffer in his presence. Jakey bought drinks for friends, and to woo strangers; he cozied up to the shy, the elderly, the disapproving, the worshipful; he plied them with Yukon Jack (his liquor salesman left a promotional case); he spiked their hot chocolate, no charge. He nudged with knee, forearm, and shoulder, until his subject relaxed, capitulated, fell under his spell.

  “Now you, Hartley—you I can talk to,” he said. “You’re a good listener.”

  * * *

  “He’s how old, again?” said Tillie.

  “But I like that,” said Cress. “He’s the first real grown-up I’ve been with.”

  “And the diss?”

  “I’ve opened the boxes. That’s more than I did at Braithway.”

  Braithway Court in Pasadena was a pretty, U-shaped complex of ham-pink tourist cottages from the Arts and Crafts era. Cress had stayed there with Tillie an
d Edgar for three months after her orals, with the idea that she would move into the next available one-bedroom unit—Tillie was the manager. While Cress was in college and graduate school, Tillie had wandered through Europe, India, and the Middle East, then come home to Pasadena, where she found the Braithway job in the classifieds. The position came with a large second-floor apartment that had a commanding view of the court. It happened that Edgar Copperud from Karachi, post-doc in climate physics at Caltech, lived in #6. Three with one blow, Tillie liked to say: Home, job, and husband landed in a day.

  Before Cress saw Braithway for the first time, she had planned to move to Minneapolis with her grad-school boyfriend, John Bird. She and John both had internships at the Fed that would turn into real jobs once their dissertations were done. But after visiting Tillie’s architecturally beguiling pink home over Christmas break (when the daytime temperature stayed steady in the high sixties/low seventies), Cress found the Midwestern winter intolerable. Why live where the temperature did not rise above freezing for six weeks straight? Why not return to her sunny hometown and dwell among the very friends off-limits to her in high school? John Bird took her defection well enough; he moped, but never tried to talk her out of it. Who can argue with homesickness?

  Only then she had to find work. She took a CETA job in a university art gallery, but her boss kept forgetting to file the necessary paperwork to pay her. She finally quit to be a waitress at the Dinner Plate, an upscale coffee shop in South Pasadena. But waitressing took so much energy, she had little left for the diss. Writing on her own—without her advisor’s prompts, without John Bird modeling discipline in the same room, and without a firm deadline—was like doing jumping jacks at home: in aerobics class, jumping jacks were as easy as skipping; at home, her arms felt leaden and she soon lost all bounce.