Cool's Ridge

by Perrin, Ursula;

  “She got thrown out of the store,” Shauna said.

  Alice gave me a fierce look over her shoulder. “The store went bust. I’m broke.”

  I said, “Can’t you go home?”

  “Home?” Alice asked. “You mean back with my mommy? Gee, sorry, I don’t have a nice mommy like you do.”

  “Alice,” Shauna said, “for pete’s sake, shut up. Look, Liz, she can’t go there because her mother’s living with someone. A guy.”

  “So?”

  “So he tried to put the make on her last time she went back.”

  “He’s a lush,” Alice said. “I can handle him, it’s my mother I can’t handle. She gets off on me all the time. But what the hell, she’s a lush, too.”

  “Can’t you get them to do A.A.?” I said.

  Alice laughed sharply. “A.A.? Oh Christ, that’s funny. A.A.! But what do you know? They like drinking. It’s not ruining their lives, it’s what they live for. Grow up! You’re like some little spoiled kid!”

  I thought I might hit her, but she had the knife so I turned and walked out.

  “Liz!” Shauna called. She came up behind me, wiping her hands on a striped dish towel. “Come on out front for a minute.”

  “Why?”

  “We need to talk.”

  We went out to the flagstone porch. Shauna closed the door behind us. “Look,” she said, “Alice is pregnant.”

  Oh, I thought, wonderful. “Shauna,” I said, “that’s really too bad. When you say she wants to come back, what are we talking about? A week? Two weeks? Forever? This isn’t just about me—there are others here who might object.”

  “Listen, Liz, did you hear me? I said, she’s pregnant. She’s going to have a baby, she’s got no money and no place to go. In my opinion, that makes what you think irrelevant.”

  “But still, we all have to get along. Can’t she get some money out of the baby’s father? Who is the baby’s father?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who the father is.”

  “Does she?”

  “Actually, I haven’t asked her. Practically, it hardly makes a difference, does it?”

  “Practically, it makes every difference. You’re acting as if she’s some poor little match girl out in the snow. I do think Alice has more resources than that.”

  “Can you just try putting yourself in her place?”

  “What about my place?”

  “What is your place?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that question. You see, there’s a lot going on in my family just now. And then there’s the question of Skip.” Why had I said that? I could feel myself flush.

  She looked at me shrewdly. “What about Skip?”

  I hesitated.

  She said, smiling complacently, “You think Skip is the father?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’m only saying that Alice is trouble.”

  “I don’t deny that. Alice is … seething. I’ve known her a long time. I can’t explain to you why you should have some charity for her.”

  “She has none for me.”

  “You’re not in her position.”

  “Are you going to tell Leonard she’s pregnant?”

  “She is.”

  “Marvelous.”

  “I imagine he’s the father.”

  I stared. “Leonard?”

  “They see each other occasionally.”

  “Really.”

  “Come on. Don’t be such a hard-liner. You’ve never had the occasional quick fuck?”

  “Not with someone I hated.”

  “She doesn’t hate Leonard. Look, I can’t explain their relationship, but then, I can’t even explain my own.”

  “You and Sal don’t beat each other’s brains out.”

  “Not yet. The day may come. Look, will you think about it?”

  “Twice in one day.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” A car came crunching down the drive and then swung into the parking area under the trees. Wayne and May, back from town. They had a yellow ’68 station wagon with dented wood-panelled sides and a definite starboard tilt.

  Shauna turned away and twisted the door handle. “Whatever, we’ll vote tonight,” she said.

  May got out of the wagon and waved.

  “Where’s Leonard?” I asked.

  “He’s coming in late, with Skip,” Shauna said. She went inside. I could hear May, at the other side of the house, calling out to Alice and shrieking, “Hiieeee.” I closed my eyes and leaned against a porch post. Preposterous. This was preposterous. I couldn’t live with Alice. I didn’t trust her, I didn’t like her. I asked myself why? Jealousy? I knew that in ’68 when I’d first met Skip, he’d been dating her. It hadn’t worked out. She’d married Leonard. Skip had married me. Maybe that was the real problem. That after almost a year of marriage I didn’t feel married at all.

  3.

  We had been married in August—August 19, 1972. My parents came up for the wedding, Skip’s family sent us a telegram of congratulations from Martha’s Vineyard, whither they had fled in order to rest up for the onerous events of the fall, et cetera.

  The wedding ceremony was performed in the little Presbyterian Church in Tomsboro, a country church of stunning white-painted simplicity. Outside the church doors, kept open for ventilation that hot dusty summer afternoon, a cluster of village children, some straddling bikes, kept peeping in and nervously snickering. The organ was old and its voice was cracked. We had filled the church chancel with vases of Queen Anne’s lace. I, too, wore a gown of stiff white lace, a Mexican wedding dress that came just to the ankles. Later, transported up the steep back road by horse and wagon (along with picnic baskets full of chicken sandwiches and champagne and foldup tables and chairs from Taylors’ Rental), we had a wedding feast at the top of Cool’s Ridge.

  The sun shone, the sky was clear, but the constant ridgetop breeze was a nuisance. I wore a large white straw hat, a cartwheel with white streamers at the back, and it fluttered and flapped so that I had to hold tightly onto the brim. At last, when my arm got too tired I simply let go and the hat took off, sailing up into the sky, turning over and over, until, backlit, it passed across the face of the sun like a small spinning planet; and then it whirled away, growing smaller until it disappeared completely, fell into nothingness over the mountainside.

  Skip and I had spent the two weeks before the wedding working on our “space,” our two bedrooms which we’d decided to combine. Because Wayne and May were sick of sleeping in separate rooms and because Shauna and Sal had fallen in love, what happened that August was three weeks of intensive room remodeling. We took down interior partitions and papered or painted until the third floor achieved the look of a home instead of a cell-block or a hospital—at the end we had three large bedrooms and two (Leonard, Alice EXOFFICIO) small ones.

  It was fun. Everything about those hot black summer nights seemed to me hopeful, charming and funny. I liked watching Skip work shirtless, in his chino pants, with the puckered band of his undershorts showing, and reddish tufts of hair in his armpits, a dribble of auburn hair on his chest, his big freckled shoulders sweatily gleaming, and his long back, with its damp shaded hollow, and his ribs, as he bent to his work, articulated by slender-cupped fingers of shade. I found this so sensuously stirring that every night while the work went on I waited for ten p.m. and quitting time with a lump in my throat and a beating heart, waiting, waiting to lead him to bed.

  That, I guess, was the honeymoon. We didn’t go anywhere after the wedding—there was Skip’s new job, and there was my work at The Monitor.

  The new room, all our own, was like an entire house to us. We bought a double bed frame and mattress—the bed had to go right up against the now redundant second door. We picked up some odd pieces of furniture at local garage sales, a rocking chair, an old trunk, a rag rug in shades of blue. Skip built some simple bookcases; we had everything we needed.

  But as the year went on, nothing seemed to m
e to come up to the excitement and anticipation of those three weeks in August, when sweaty and half-dressed and smelling vividly of body odor in the stuffy uninsulated spaces of the third floor, we had worked so hopefully on our own space. After that, it was jobs every day, all week long, and for Skip many evenings as well. We had the night, but it seemed to me that whenever we turned to each other on our new double bed, someone down the hall slammed a door, or Wayne, in the room next to ours, turned on his blasted radio.

  And it wasn’t just the lack of privacy for sex. When you went downstairs, into the kitchen, the porch, or one of the parlors, there were always terrific discussions going on—the war, Watergate, McGovern, Nixon, Kissinger. It was exciting and interesting, in the same way college had been interesting, but if you let something personal drop, it became group property, subject to analysis at every moment, trotted out when you least expected, emerging (finally) as tattered and worn a subject as the top sweater on the front hall coat-rack, the big old sweater that everybody grabbed, going out the door in a hurry. And then there you were, stuck with six different solutions for your problem, which didn’t even feel like your problem anymore.

  And on Saturday nights, after pizza and beer or a couple of glasses of wine, I’d lie next to Skip in our big new bed listening to him sleep and think how all week long we had exchanged not one simple intimate word.

  “Wonderful,” I said to Skip that night in our bedroom. “So she’s back.” Next door, Wayne’s radio went on. Turned up loud to rock and roll, the radio wrapped around them like a rug, made a wall of sound between us. For the same reason, I’d covered our side of the wall with a large blue and white pieced quilt. I’d gotten it for twenty dollars at a barn sale, a cheap price even for the country. The quilt had a flaw: in its center was a splotch of rust-brown, a blood spot of some kind, and you wondered uneasily when you looked at it if this were menstrual blood, or the coughed-up blood of a tubercular or the sign of some terrible deed, a lover knifed to death out of jealousy, greed, or paranoia.

  “Huh?” Skip said, pulling off his tie. He slung it over the door knob and went on unbuttoning his shirt. He looked tired, blue under the eyes. “What’s wonderful?” he asked.

  “Her coming back like this.”

  “Well,” he said evenly, “we can’t exactly throw her out.”

  “She threw herself out.”

  “Still …” He slid out of his shirt, and let it drop to the floor. I sat down on the rocker and gripped my hands together. “What’s wrong?” he asked vaguely.

  “Can’t you guess? Alice and I don’t get along, we never have. I don’t know why that is, but it’s so. I mean, I’ve tried, it just doesn’t work. She seems so bent on being awful.”

  “You’re being too sensitive. Don’t take it personally, she’s that way with everybody. She’s one of these people who get angry a lot and when they do they just let it out.”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t want to be around her.”

  “So stay away from her.”

  “Skip! She’s going to live there, next door. She’s practically in bed with us.”

  “Okay, so what are the options? Do you really want to move? If we hang in for just a while more we’ll be able to buy a place we really like. Anyway,” he yawned, “think of it as a challenge. It’ll be good for you.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “Morally. It’ll build character.” He winked at me.

  “Very funny.”

  “I think you’re making too much of the whole thing. First of all, we’re hardly ever here. And in other ways, so many ways, it’s working out really well. We’re doing what we set out to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Living our own lives, being able to live without a hassle. The whole thing had gotten so difficult. Didn’t you feel it? How all of them out there would just as soon have killed us, or put us in jail. I think of the Ridge as our asylum. Our safe place.” He yawned again. “God, I’m tired. I’ve got to go to court tomorrow.”

  “For what?”

  “Three kids arrested for disorderly conduct and loitering. Mainly the cops objected to the long hair. They knocked ’em around a little. ‘Resisting arrest.’”

  “Were they looking for pot?”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t find any. Coming to bed?”

  “In a minute.”

  Skip slid in under the covers and shut off the bedside table lamp, turned on his side and closed his eyes. I shut off the bridge lamp next to the rocker and eased off my sandals, sat back and looked out of the window into the black night. The white tieback curtains glimmered, a thin coat of moonlight glistened on the pond. Fireflies, hundreds of them, blinked and swooped at the pond’s verge. I sighed, pulled off my tee shirt and unfastened my bra. Tired. I was tired. What I wanted was a week with Skip, all alone, sleep, and sex, and eating alone together, and no more talk of the war or politics.

  The window was up a few inches and through the screen came the deep bass strums of a bullfrog and the rhythmic croak of the cicadas, that old nighttime castanet-like clicking. A little splash came from the pond and when I peered down, I saw a thin shadowy figure standing at the pond’s edge. I thought it might be Leonard, but it was thinner, smaller, a sliver of black shadow. Perhaps it was Erroll, although how he’d gotten there I didn’t know. He’d told me that Coral locked him in at night. The figure glided away into the darkness. In the room next door the radio went off. I lifted my head.

  “Skip?” I said. “I saw my mother today. She looks so bad.”

  From the bed came a sound like “ahuh,” and then another: “huh … huh.” Not agreement, only the soft exhalations of sleep.

  4.

  For the longest time, I thought it was my brother John and his difficulties that changed everything at the Ridge for me. Later, I saw the change as simple chemistry: when Alice came back she (and her corrosive anger) caused a series of inevitable reactions. Soon the spirit of the endeavor declined; the desire to be patient, tolerant and humorous, so essential when you live together at close quarters, was lost. Once domestic harmony went, the vision went, too. How can you believe in “doing some good” when you feel so bad? The truth was, in a couple of important ways, we’d all been married to each other, and after Alice’s return, the essential team ingredient—trust—evaporated. In peculiarly individual ways, we reverted to the loners I suspect we’d all been anyhow.

  Leonard, for example, seemed the same, but I felt him implacably sinking into himself. Wherever he was, sitting, standing, leaning, he held a book in front of his face like a shield. He was so immersed in it, found it so deep, intricate and compelling, that you knew the book had magically expanded from shield to encircling wall, and that he sat at its center as if at the bottom of a well.

  Shauna, on the other hand, usually so physically passive (except when she sang), began smoking and talking more, seemed edgy and irritable, and the stoical calm of her square freckled face was not enhanced by the tic she’d acquired—behind her lime—green eyeglass frames her little blue eyes erratically blinked.

  Sal was friendlier to me (I don’t think he liked Alice either), but a couple of times when he and I were exchanging quips I saw Shauna glaring at me. If she’d been a horse, her tail would have been ominously swinging.

  Wayne and May did the same comic pas de deux they’d always done, only now a little more outrageously clinging together, the two of them making up one complete world. Like Leonard, Skip did exactly what he’d done before, only more so—he was hearty and aggressively cheerful when at home, which, to tell the truth, wasn’t often.

  As for me, that summer I uneasily felt myself becoming isolated, first from the people at the Ridge and then, for totally different reasons, from my family. I was worried and depressed about my mother. She seemed bent on tidying up her affairs for an embarkation, while I struggled to interest her in staying alive. I took to calling her three times a day. I’d ask if she’d taken her medication, eaten her breakfast, had her lunch. I sent h
er cards and newspaper clippings and floral arrangements. I ordered books for her and had the local fancy grocery delivery fresh raspberries and peaches and expensive canned soups. I showered her with good, beautiful, tasty things, as if to remind her of all there was to live for. She serenely went on with her plans to set sail.

  I dreamed of her that way—dressed in white robes like the leader of the Presbyterian Women’s Choir, she stepped down into a rocking barge and stood with her back turned to me as the boat moved away. “Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me!”

  I dreamed she was climbing a mountain in sandals and a nun’s white habit, and when she reached the rocky pinnacle, she smiled into the blue sky before stepping off into nothingness.

  In a pale, gauzy blue dance dress touched with light at the sleeves and hem, I dreamed she was doing the two-step, but her partner, a dim shape weaving in front of her, I finally made out to be a giant snake, a serpent who had coiled around her, its geometric markings of black and silver as stylized and elegant as the onyx and silver Art Deco bracelet my father had given her when they were engaged. Dancing, struggling, my mother continued to smile at me reassuringly, but she couldn’t escape the serpent’s embrace. I watched in horror as the snake’s muscular sides contracted, and my mother smiled at me and nodded, and with her fingertips (painted a dainty pink) she tried to loosen the coiled serpent’s grip.

  And then it was me—she was me—and I was the one being crushed.

  I didn’t dream of John at all, maybe because I never stopped thinking of him. He was like a stone in my shoe—a pebble in the brain. I could walk, run, laugh, but he always occupied one corner of my upper story, a place where he talked in the fanciful language he now used, a language so rich in puns, rhymes, and associations it had become (this language of schizophrenia) the absolute inversion of language, a barrier of words, a puddingstone wall without windows. Yet here and there, if you listened hard enough, a painful and desperate meaning would sift through a crack in the mortar and trickle down, as if the entombed prisoner were hopelessly scratching at the wall from inside.