Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  “In a way I’m happy, I don’t understand why.”

  “You’re off the hook.”

  He looked at me sharply and said, “Yeah. I think you’re right.”

  “So it’s your life now. All yours. They’ll be too busy thinking about themselves.”

  “Yeah. It’s a funny feeling. Very … very freeing.”

  “It’s great to be poor?”

  He flashed me a smile—his chapped, rather thick lips, his big white teeth. “I didn’t say that.”

  We walked out of the diner with our arms around each other, walking pressed together down the diner’s cement steps. Next to his car in the bluish light of the diner’s neon sign, we stopped to kiss, wrapped up in each other.

  “Oh my,” Skip said into my ear. “Missed you. Missed you so much.” He moved his hands slowly down my hips. “Boy, do I have a yen. Let’s drive somewhere”—he nibbled the lobe of my ear—“let’s drive somewhere and, uh, you know. Not too far.”

  “Not go too far?”

  “Go too far, not drive too far.”

  We got into the car, sat jammed up tight, my hand on his knee.

  He started the car and sighed. “One thing,” he said. “Our little experimental community is great, but the room arrangement stinks. No privacy. I hate that, having everybody else in bed with us. We gotta do something about that.”

  “Yes.”

  We drove off Route 46 onto a bumpy uphill country road that wound around and around, climbing a little mountain in the twinkling, light-speckled night. After a few miles, Skip pulled off to the side of a narrow dirt road that had tall hedgerows of cedar trees. Insects ticked in the grass and the resinous scent of the cedars drifted into the car. We were both so hot, wanting it so much. I pulled up my skirt, pushed down my underpants and scrunched underneath him. He slipped in and came at once, so fast.

  “Uh,” he said. His head fell to my shoulder, his chin dug in. “Oh God,” he said. He sat up and laughed. “Lord.” He tucked himself back in and zipped up his pants. “Quick relief,” he said, “but not emotionally satisfying. I’d like something longer, a little slower.”

  I sat up too. These quick ones, they always made me feel so used. Well, it’s all right to be used, as long as it’s not all the time. “Something more metaphysical?” I asked.

  “Kantian,” he said.

  “Or Hegelian,” I said. “A little thesis and antithesis.”

  He put his arm around me, we put our heads together.

  “Love you,” he said, huskily.

  “I love you, too,” I said.

  We sat looking out into the darkness for a moment and then he gave a laugh.

  “What’s wrong,” I asked.

  “Get out,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just get out. Come on, just for a second. Get out of the car.”

  I got out and slowly moved around the car in the dark. He had walked a few feet away. We had parked in a grove of old trees, mostly spruce, but nearby stood a huge spreading linden and its gleaming white flowers perfumed the night with a honey smell. Skip had walked to the gate of a tall fence made of beautifully scrolled wrought iron. The gate was closed. He grasped the iron bars and peered in. There was no moonlight, but the stars were bright and the air was so clear that you could see at once what was inside the gate—white gleaming slabs, statues, urns on pedestals, a marble angel enclosed in its own folded wings, all of the tombstones crooked, falling down.

  “A cemetery,” I said.

  “How do you like that?” he said. “A cemetery. A fucking cemetery.”

  “Not funny,” I said.

  He didn’t reply. He stood with his hands on the bars, staring in, and it gave me the oddest feeling; he looked so wistful gazing in at the tombstones and memorials. It was as if he were locked out, as if the gate enclosed a still, somnolent, but utterly desirable world.

  “Skip!” I cried, out loud.

  He turned his head to me and blinked. “What?” he said.

  “I … what were you thinking about? You looked so strange.”

  He drew his thumb across his forehead, and shook his head. “Thinking? Who knows.” He frowned and dusted his fingertips together. “Rust,” he said, still slowly rubbing together the fingertips of one hand in the very same movement that people make to indicate “money.” “I was thinking … let’s see … I was thinking, I don’t mind not being rich, but I mind not having money. You see, I had so many projects I wanted to do. Here at the Ridge, for one thing.”

  “You’ve been financing it, haven’t you?”

  “Not exactly. Not completely. Helping out when we’re short. Other projects too. But that’s all over. It makes me feel useless.”

  “You can do now, can’t you? Instead of just pay? I mean, isn’t paying just buying power?”

  He put his arm around me. “Don’t knock power. Nothing gets done without it. Oh my. You still gonna love me ’though I’m broke?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to see.” I leaned toward him, and placed my lips near his and whispered, “You funny person.”

  “Do we still get married? Hey. You know what we should do? We should get married on the anniversary of the Munich Pact.”

  “We should?” I said. “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. We were walking toward the car with our arms around each other. “It’s appropriate—we’re getting along better. We’ll have a non-aggression pact.”

  I said, “What made you think of that?”

  He said, “Eileen’s father was talking about it. You know, Conant Marshall. God, he’s wonderful. He was great with Dad. He asked me—Jesus, I was flattered out of my mind—he asked me to call him ‘Coney.’”

  We got in the car. He said, “I feel sad. I really wanted a big wedding. I know that’s unusual, guys aren’t supposed to care. But I wanted to have the world’s biggest blast. Bridesmaids, ushers, all that kind of thing. Now, with this stuff going on,” he laughed morosely, “it would be somewhat tackless.”

  “Small weddings can be nice,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I don’t know. When Leonard got married …”

  “Was it nice?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t. Of course it’s what’s after that counts.”

  “That hasn’t been so nice. They had a terrible fight. She left on Tuesday.”

  He winced. “She did? What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He started the car, and we slowly rolled onto the road that was densely black because of the rows of tall cedars.

  “While I was away, I had this crazy thought.”

  The car was bumping along picking up speed. We were descending the mountain in a down-winding spiral, and whenever we hit a curve the tires squealed. It was a bad habit he had, driving too fast, and the car flung itself down the dirt road as if it had a will of its own, falling toward death or oblivion.

  “Slow down,” I said, and put a hand on his arm.

  “It’s a crazy thought,” he said. “I thought you were fucking Leonard.”

  I sat straight up. “Really,” I said, “you’ve got to be kidding.”

  He smiled.

  We didn’t talk again until we were back at the house. He switched off the ignition and turned his face to me, his smile barely discernible in the dark (the faint yellowish glint of his teeth), a smile both simple and sad that reminded me of something about Skip I’d too often forgotten—how acute he was, how observant, how fast to gauge and understand reactions. He laughed and pinched my knee. “Hey, don’t be mad. The truth is, I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”

  We got out of the car. He came around and took my arm. “It’s funny,” he said, “I’ve always envied Leonard and never known why.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said

  I didn’t reply.

  “Aw, come on,” he said. “Okay, it was dumb to say. No doubt it isn’t even Leonard
I’ve been worried about. Probably all these weeks I’ve been stewing about the other thing.”

  I looked up at him, puzzled. “What other thing?”

  He ran his hand over his hair. “Oh, the bankruptcy thing.” We were on the deck. He slid open the screen door and we stepped in. They were all on the porch sitting around drinking iced tea. Skip slapped Leonard on the back and grinned, pulling at the tuft of black hair that stuck up through the bandages.

  I went upstairs and locked myself into the bathroom. I wanted to take a bath but instead stood on the bath mat, distracted. All these weeks? How long had he known? Why hadn’t he told me? Had he known when he’d bought me the ring?

  Someone knocked on the door. “In the tub,” I said automatically, and began unbuttoning my shirt. Well he knew it wouldn’t matter to me, wouldn’t make a difference in my marrying him.

  But it mattered to him.

  And I thought, So he knew when he bought the ring. It was why he bought the ring.

  IV

  1973

  1.

  “Guess who called me last week,” my mother said.

  It was June again. We were sitting outside on my mother’s concrete patio, drinking glasses of iced tea in the shade of a large table umbrella. On three sides of the patio, instead of a dug-in border, she had created a low hedge of flower boxes whose strict geometry was modified by accumulations here and there of mossy-sided clay pots. The effect was whimsical—lavender delphiniums leaned against tomato plants, pink petunias drooped into the miniature roses. I adjusted her umbrella (it was striped lemon-yellow and white) so that she lay in a slice of blue shade. Next to her garden chaise sat a large wicker basket with a sturdy handle, overflowing with letters, leaflets, periodicals, pocket books, magazines, stationery, clippings, stamps—and this traveling companion she lugged to the three points of her compass: from her bed to the living room sofa, to this chaise, back to the sofa, from whence like a faithful dog it followed her into her bedroom at night where it loyally lay at the ready, should she be stricken, as she often was, with an attack of early-morning insomnia. Since she’d stopped work, she wrote letters constantly, as if the Devil himself were prodding her with his pitchfork, letters to the Mothers Alliance for Mental Health, the Mothers Peace Collective, Mothers Against the War in Vietnam, Mothers Against Nuclear Weapons. I do not know why she, whose motherhood had been only one aspect of a busy and diverse life, had so fixed upon the moral weight of motherhood except, I suppose, that her son’s long intractable illness made her feel in late middle age more, not less, a mother. I felt now that she was racing, pedaling furiously with every ounce of energy she possessed. Although she had lost twenty-five pounds, so that the flesh hung from her bones in ripples and drapes, and her eyes looked bigger, but sunken and starker, her spirit seemed to be growing brighter, as if this flame she contained, this invisible, but ardent flame, were growing stronger and stronger; and while the skin of her face grew opaque, with the dead-white translucency of fine bone china, her spirit burned, sang, rejoiced, consuming her.

  But of course that wasn’t it. The disease was consuming her. Her spirit burned, in spite of … because of? … it. But her cotton blouse, with its wide green stripes, was so ugly, a prisoner’s garb; it covered her bones like a sack. Sackcloth and ashes, sackcloth and ashes.

  “Who called you?” I asked. I sat in sunglasses and white shorts on an aluminum lawn chair of yellow and white webbing. Because it was June and humid and hot, I had pulled another chair up under my legs. They ached. In fact, my entire body felt dull, lumpish, underused. I wasn’t getting enough exercise.

  “Emily Gannet,” she said.

  “How strange,” I said. “Or are you two in touch?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “At least not since last year. We kept meaning to get together, but there was one thing, and then another … Her husband had a heart attack. I suppose you heard?”

  “Thanksgiving, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. But he’s all right now. Or as right as one can be with a crippled heart.” She smiled wearily. Her own diagnosis. The “bad cold” she’d had two years ago had led to a bacterial infection of the heart, a heart already damaged by a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. She’d fought the infection in her usual way—went on working twice as hard, ate more apricots and raisins and started drinking orange juice by the quart. She was taken to the hospital after she fainted in municipal court, went home almost immediately, and didn’t go to the doctor again until July of last year, after she’d been up to the Farm on the Fourth. The cardiologist had been incredulous. He was an old friend, who told her, shaking his head, “Good God, Cassie, according to this you ought to have died years ago.” She said now, “How is Leonard?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t really know. We drive to work together and back, but he never says much. So it’s …” I shrugged. Last summer, Alice had come back to the Ridge in the pumpkin-colored Volkswagen just long enough to stuff it full of her possessions. She’d moved into Stanton, where she lived in two rooms over her crafts shop on Main Street. “I think he’s doing all right. He’s a moody person, but he’s not as angry as he was when I first met him.”

  “She drove him crazy?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they drove each other crazy.”

  My mother sighed. She had on cotton bellbottoms of a horrid pea green that fought with the green in her shirt. I glanced at my watch. It was past noon and I should have been at work. Early that morning I’d been woken up by a knocking at our bedroom door. It was Leonard, in his short gray terry bathrobe and thin hairy legs. “What’s the matter?” I’d croaked, in my morning voice, opening the door a wedge and looking out at him, with my bathrobe clutched together at the bosom.

  “It’s your mother. She wants you to call her back. She says it’s important.”

  Skip had raised his head from the pillow. “What?” he asked groggily.

  “Nothing,” I whispered, “go back to sleep.”

  I readjusted my robe and went downstairs to the kitchen. Leonard was standing at the counter, drinking black coffee and reading Monday’s paper. It was Tuesday. In this remote corner of New Jersey we were always a day behind on world events. When I started dialing, he went out to the porch. After I’d hung up, he came back in. “Well?” he asked brusquely.

  I stood at the telephone sleepily looking out. “She wants me to come see her, today.”

  He poured me a mug full of coffee and put milk in it. “Is she all right?”

  “She sounds all right. Just some business, she said.”

  “What are you covering today?”

  “The Lenowitz trial, only I probably should be excused anyhow, since Skip is his new attorney. Better if Shauna does it.”

  “Yeah.” He lifted his black brows. In the year past, he’d acquired a permanent frown, a vertical clench between his eyes. “Does Skip say what he thinks about it?”

  “We haven’t discussed it.”

  “Good for Skip,” Leonard said heartily.

  Yes, I thought. For the past eleven months he’d worked for the law firm of Glynn, Rosoff, Crane and Lender, in Stanton. Everybody liked this amiable and earnest young man. We had had dinner with each partner in turn and each wife, over frying the peppers, basting the roast, dressing the salad or whipping the cream, had told me what a fine young man Skip was, and what a credit to the firm. I was proud of Skip but I never saw him. I left the Ridge at 7:30 am with Leonard and got home at five. Skip left at eight, and came home at nine or ten, or maybe, in a rush at six, and then out again. Through the influence of Glen Rosoff, he’d been appointed township attorney for a neighboring township. He was zoning board attorney for two townships and sat on the planning board of another. When these boards didn’t meet he saw clients or went to freeholder meetings. Evelyn Glynn said that Skip was a rising star. “I see him,” she pronounced, holding my hand in hers at the door, “as our next Congressman.”

  “She’s coming to see me,” my mother said.

 
; “Who?” I said. “Emily? What for?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a little surprised. I suppose because I’m an invalid, or some such thing. I despise duty visits. Should I tell her?”

  “Maybe it’s not a duty visit.”

  “Maybe not. She’s got a friend in Basking Ridge, I’m on the route. Do you want lunch? I made us some tuna fish sandwiches. They’re in the fridge under a tea towel. There’s more tea in the glass pitcher and some chocolate chip cookies. They’re good. The mayor’s wife baked them.”

  We were, I knew, slowly chopping our way through this thicket of pleasantries into the fibrous heart of the matter. Since my mother was most often brisk and clear, I could tell from the elaborate prologue that the news was important and probably not good.

  I brought out the sandwiches, the iced tea, the cookies on a tray, and we ate from her white china plates set on flowered napkins on our laps.

  “I haven’t seen your husband since—let’s see, it’s June? February. You both came for my birthday.”

  “He’s horribly busy, Ma.”

  “Is he. Do you see him?”

  “Not much.”

  “What’s he so busy at?”

  “That’s a strange question for a fellow practitioner. He’s building up his law practice.”

  “He’s into politics, I’ll bet.”

  “A little bit, yes. He likes politics. He’s got the temperament for it. He’s patient and moderate and he’s always wanted to do something like that. You know. Get stuff done.”

  “Mmm,” my mother said, chewing and wiping her fingertips on the napkin. “A real do-gooder.”

  “He has some ideas,” I said, defensively. Her tone was ironic.

  “Is your father-in-law going to jail? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet he pulls enough D.C. strings to get off.”

  “Is that your idea of a NON-SEQUITUR? Skip and his father are totally different people.”

  “True, very true,” my mother said in the same ironic tone.

  I had eaten everything on my plate. The tuna fish salad sandwich with lettuce on white bread, the sliced hard-boiled egg, the two tomato slices, the three slices of sweet pickle and the five ridged potato chips. Do I get a star, or what? I took the dishes and glasses into the kitchen feeling apprehensive. When I came back out I said, “Okay. What’s up?”