Sixteen
“I saw you heading out to ski this morning,” Harp says. “Great day for it.”
I nod. I told the other waitresses to go on home and I’m filling the salt and pepper shakers, getting the tables ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. He’s been taking the clean wine glasses out of the dishwasher, hanging them upside-down on the rack above the bar. Now he stops, leans forward, and folds his arms on the bar expectantly.
I wasn’t going to tell him—or anyone—about the mosquito and its cosmic message. But I look at Harp and have this weird idea he knows it anyway, like he knew about the tip money the night before. Which makes me think, why not?
So I say, “I saw this mosquito while I was skiing. A live mosquito! Huge! It flew out from under some dead leaves on a log and landed on my glove. It was—I don’t even know what it was. The way the woods felt, that mosquito. I was so happy. So there. And I know it sounds totally insane, but when I went back out on the trail, it was like it wasn’t even me skiing. Like it wasn’t anyone at all.”
He doesn’t laugh. He looks—interested. “There’s a word for that,” he says. “Shunyata. It means emptiness, as in emptiness of yourself. It’s a Buddhist idea.”
“You’re a Buddhist?”
“Nah. I don’t buy into the religious thing. I’m interested in some Buddhist ideas, though.”
I think he’ll say more, but he stands and puts away the last of the glasses. I go around with a box of Sweet’N Low packets, refilling the little ceramic holder on each table. I glance at him when I’m through, but I guess he’s decided to ignore me. So is this shunyata a bad thing? Yet another clue that I’m a person to avoid?
“Well,” I grab my jacket. “See you tomorrow.”
He raises his hand in a salute. But when I’m halfway across the parking lot, he opens the door and calls out to me. “Hey, Emma! Want to come over to my place and play some pool?”
I stop. But I can’t help thinking, wouldn’t it be a little crazy to go off into the woods in the middle of the night with a guy I barely know? Then he catches up with me, throws his arm around my shoulder in a friendly way.
“Come on,” he says. “You’re lonely.”
The way he says it, like it’s just a fact of life—nothing to be embarrassed by or ashamed of, nothing that can actually be fixed by a game of pool—tells me he understands loneliness. He’s inviting me be lonely with him, which is better than being lonely alone. And so I go with him.
It’s nice, crunching along the snowy path not feeling like I have to think of something smart or witty to say, and when his house appears, strung with twinkling white lights, it seems right to be there. Harp opens the door, and his big, furry St. Bernard lumbers up from where she’s been dozing in front of the fireplace. He bends and ruffles her fur.
“Lani,” he says. “Short for Thulani. It means ‘peace.’”
He gestures me toward an old flowered couch. Lani follows to sniff me, then curls up and falls asleep at my feet. I feel so comfortable here. Everything in the house is simple and worn: another couch, a couple of easy chairs—nothing matching. These are gathered randomly around the stone fireplace. The pool table takes up the other half of the room. The floors are wood, with faded braid rugs here and there.
Harp goes into the kitchen and brings back a couple of beers. It’s another thing I need to do if I’m ever going to get a social life: learn to like beer. I pull the tab on mine, take a sip. If Harp notices me wrinkle my nose at the bitterness, he’s nice enough not to mention it.
“Nice place, huh? My uncle’s.” He smiles wryly. “He’s letting me use it this winter, so I can get my shit together.”
“Join the club,” I say. “So what got you out of whack?”
“If I am out of whack,” he says.
“Meaning?”
He shrugs. “My parents think there’s something wrong with me because I don’t want to be stressed out all the time over some high-power job I don’t give a fuck about. I don’t want to spend my life pleasing a bunch of greedy assholes who don’t give a shit about anything but grabbing all the power they can. Not to mention all the people you have to step on or rip off if you want to get ahead.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I ask.
“Nothing, in my mind. Now. The problem is, at one point I was all set up and gung ho to do it their way. Business degree from Michigan, accepted into law school there. Funny thing is, it’s my dad’s fault I changed. Always the good liberal, he says, ‘What you need is a few years in the Peace Corps, son. It’ll broaden your horizons. Look great on the resume.’”
He laughs, sort of. “So I spent two years in this tiny village in Niger, teaching the people basic farming skills. News to me: they didn’t even know our country existed. How could they want to be like us? It blew me away how much they didn’t want or need.
“I don’t mean to romanticize how they live,” he adds. “Or to say I want to live that way myself. I don’t even know if I could hack it. But it shocked the hell out of me. It made me think. And the more I thought, the more I wanted—” He shakes his head. “I wanted not to want, if that makes any sense at all. To just be.”
“Like I was, skiing this morning. That Buddhist thing.”
“Yeah,” he says. “The problem is, unless you’re a Zen master, you can’t be like that all the time. Plus, you’ve got to eat, which means you have to make some kind of living. So I’m trying to figure out two things. How to get to that place in my head more often, and how to make enough money to keep from having to ask my parents for anything.”
“So, do you meditate?”
“Too squirrelly. I turn on the Tibetan chant CD, get in the lotus position, and immediately start itching. I smoke a little weed sometimes, but that seems like cheating. The need thing, you know? I don’t want to need weed to get there.
“So what about you?” he asks. “You’ve got the money problem beat—unless your parents are setting up a lot of bullshit rules about how you ought to be.”
“My parents are wonderful,” I say, blinking back the sudden tears that burn my eyes.
He raises an eyebrow. “No rules?”
“No unreasonable rules. There’s nothing wrong with rules if they’re reasonable, you know. There’s no such thing as living with no rules.”
He raises his eyebrow again, but doesn’t comment.
I know what he’s thinking, though. Once, he believed his parents’ rules were reasonable. There’s no point in arguing that my parents’ rules really are reasonable, so why wouldn’t I want to live by them? Though it strikes me, suddenly, that if Mom and Dad’s rules and expectations had been unreasonable, I’d have been glad to go off to college. If they’d given me something really serious to rebel against, it would feel good to leave them behind and make my own way.
Which gives me that old familiar plunging-elevator feeling. I mean, I must be even more fucked up than I realized to even consider that it might be a bad thing for me to love Mom and Dad the way I do. But it’s the kernel of truth I see in the thought that really scares me. I do have to separate myself from them to make my own life—and not in this chickenshit way I’m doing it now. Somehow, I have to figure out which parts of them I’m not.
“Another beer?” Harp asks.
“No thanks, I still have some.”
“You don’t like beer,” he says. Just like, earlier, he said, “You’re lonely.”
He takes my can, still half-full, and disappears into the kitchen again. When he comes back he’s got a mug of hot chocolate, whipped cream piled high on the top. It’s wonderful, creamy and sweet, and the two of us sit quietly, Harp having another beer, me savoring my hot chocolate.
“Listen,” he says after a while. “I really don’t know shit about anything. You want to keep that in mind about me. So—” He grins and lea
ns over to wipe the whipped cream moustache from above my lip. “Want to play some pool?”
We rack the balls again and again, concentrating so hard on the game that I’m surprised to glance at the clock and see it’s well past three in the morning. Even more surprised to realize that, all that time, I didn’t think about anything but the balls on the table, how to position myself for the best shot. I didn’t once feel stupid or self-conscious. I didn’t feel anything. I just was.
I like this idea that you can learn to be empty of yourself. That when you’re empty in the right way, it doesn’t make you feel lonely or sad. In fact, when you surface, reenter your skin, what you feel is this weird, pure, clean happiness. Amorphous happiness that really isn’t about anything at all. When I wake up the next day, near noon, I make a list of the moments in my life when I was really, really happy. Reading them over, I realize that in almost every one of them I was empty in exactly the same way I was empty while skiing and playing pool with Harp.
Craig, my boss at the restaurant, gestures me into his office when I clock in for my evening shift, nods toward the chair beside his desk. I sit down. He’s a nice guy, overworked, always worrying about his wife and kids and how he’s going to give them everything they want and need.
“Emma.” He clears his throat. Then clears it again. “Uh. I hope you won’t take this wrong, but, well…” Again. “I need to talk to you about Harp.”
“Harp?” I sound like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Yeah,” he says. “Listen, I know this is none of my business. And Harp is an interesting guy. Smart. No question about that! He’s got a real good heart. I can see why you’d—” He blows his breath out through his lips.
“Emma,” he says. “Jimmy, the night guy, mentioned he saw the two of you leave together last night. He was a little worried when he looked out and saw your car still in the parking lot—pretty late. And, well, I’m a little worried about that myself. Harp’s quite a bit older than you, Emma. And he’s, well, he’s not—”
“He has a pool table at his house,” I interrupt. “I went over to shoot a few games with him. That’s all.”
Craig doesn’t look convinced.
“We’re just friends. Really.” I stand up, smooth my black waitress pants. “I need to get out on the floor,” I say. “There’s a group of ten coming in any minute. Thanks, though. I appreciate your being concerned.”
But I don’t, really. The tight band of anxiety that settled itself across my chest when Craig called me into his office bursts into rage that makes me feel light-headed and dangerous. What’s with him anyway, I think. Trying to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed about a perfectly innocent relationship. What’s with me, letting him sucker me into feeling that way?
“Are you okay?” one of the waitresses asks.
“Fine,” I say. “Why?”
“You look upset. Did Craig say something to upset you?”
I shake my head, pick up the Specials sheet, and pretend to study it until she goes away.
Harp’s not here tonight, and I’m glad. Whatever happiness I had felt this afternoon, thinking about how our time together had made me discover something that might help me change my life, collapsed with Craig’s words. I’m right back to where I always am when there’s a male involved: second-guessing myself about every little thing, scrambling for a plan to make him think I’m cool, trying to convince myself that I don’t care if he likes me or not.
Seventeen
Then there he is, leaning on my Jeep, when I come out of the lodge. Lani’s lying beside him, her head between her stretched-out paws, and she lumbers up and comes toward me, tail wagging. When I ruffle her neck she leans toward me for more, so I drop to my knees in the snow, put my arms around her and nuzzle against her big face.
“We’re going for a walk,” he says. “Night’s good. I don’t have to keep her on a leash.” He smiles. “She gets twice the walk I do that way. Anyway, I thought maybe you might want to walk with us.”
I glance back toward the lodge, and there’s Jimmy, the night guy, standing at the door.
“If you’re too tired, that’s okay,” Harp says. “We can do it another time.”
“No.” I stand up. “I’m fine. I’m not tired.”
We walk out to the end of the road, Lani disappearing into the woods—sometimes reappearing ahead of us, sometimes loping to catch up with us from behind. She stops and barks now and then. Once, she throws herself into an untouched patch of snow and rolls around on her back, her big front paws limp with pleasure. She looks so sweet I can’t resist falling backwards beside her, waving my arms and legs in an arc to make a snow angel. I lie there a long time, looking up at the full moon, feeling like—if I wanted to—I could float right up into the stars.
I don’t want to, though. I want to stay right here on earth, breathe in the cold, crisp air, hear the snow crunch beneath my feet as Harp and I walk back toward the lodge together. Halfway there, he stops, puts his hand on my arm to stop me, too. He points, and I see three deer, caught in moonlight, at the edge of the forest. They seem frozen there, not quite real. Then Lani makes a funny little sound in her throat, not quite a bark, and the deer bolt, leaping across the meadow on their impossibly thin legs, graceful as dancers.
I suddenly think of Jules in the middle of New York City, and, at least right now, I wouldn’t trade places with her. I’m happy to be who I am, where I am. I’m over being mad at Craig, who was just trying to be helpful. Grateful for the happiness bubbling up inside me again, allowing me to believe that last night with Harp was real. He is my friend, because here he is beside me. I don’t want or need him to be anything more than that.
And, over the next few weeks, being with him, things begin to seem possible. We spend every night after work hanging out at his house, playing pool, watching movies, talking about everything under the sun. At the restaurant, I hang out at the bar between customers, continuing whatever conversation we started hours before. I tell him funny stories about my awful semester at college. My Friday night dates with Freud, Matt and Tiffany constantly making out in our dorm room, and how Tiffany was determined to jump-start my love life. The mortifying coffee date with Gabe Parker.
“You liked him, though, didn’t you?” Harp says.
I shrug, blushing.
He laughs, but doesn’t press me, which only makes me like him more. I’m happy when I’m with him. I never worry about what or what not to say, or feel embarrassed by what I just said; it’s exactly the way I used to feel when I was with Josh.
I even tell Harp about Josh. Everything. Even seeing him with Heather right before I bolted for Michigan and how bad it hurt, even though I knew Josh and I would never be anything but friends. I was happy to be friends with him again. It was enough. I thought I’d accepted that. But maybe not. Maybe I never could.
“Well,” Harp says. “The way I figure it, you never fall out of love with that first person. It’s like a scar, you know? It heals over after a while. You can live with it, cover it up if you don’t want someone to see it. But it never goes away.
“Things end,” he says. “It’s the way life is. The guy’s nuts for not loving you, Emma. But it’s nothing you did. Most guys never know who the really cool girls are. You need to quit running that trip on yourself and move on.”
“But how?” I ask.
“Tell me one thing you want,” he says. “Don’t think. Say the first thing that comes to mind.”
“A dog,” I say. “A big, slobbery yellow dog that loves me.”
“Then get one,” Harp says. “That’s moving forward.”
“But I can’t get a dog. My mom’s totally not a dog person. If the idea of any kind of pet comes up she always says she can’t stand the idea of being responsible for one more living being. There’s no way she’ll—”
“So?” Ha
rp says. “Get your own life, then. Put a dog in it. What’s so hard about that?”
I’d never thought about life that way before, like it’s a big box into which you put everything you want. I could start small, I guess. Get an apartment, get a big yellow dog to live there with me. I imagine running with it, playing Frisbee, rolling around in the grass. I see it in the passenger seat of my Jeep, its big head stuck out the window to catch the wind.
“There’s that girl with the great dog,” people would say as I drove past.
Who knows? Maybe getting a life really is that simple: making a place of your own, living day-to-day in it surrounded by what you love. Maybe it’s also true that I’m cool, like Harp assures me I am. Also pretty, funny, and smart. The day we road-trip to Traverse City to buy me a pool cue, I actually begin to believe it. To believe that, in time, I might even be happy.
And, duh. It occurs to me for the first time that I don’t have to be happy at IU before I can be happy somewhere else. Getting it together there is not some kind of test. It didn’t work: so move on. As for the Gabe thing, whatever it was. Yeah, I liked him. So what. It only matters in that place, and if I’m not in that place, ever again, eventually it will just be one small thing that happened to me along the path of becoming who I am. I mean, what’s wrong with not going back? Staying in Michigan—maybe forever?
Harp helps me pick out the cue and a tooled leather case to carry it in. After we try it out in a bar for a couple of hours, he says, “Hey, let’s go to the beach.” It’s a gorgeous day, cold and crisp, blue sky and sunshine. He says, “Why think of the beach as a place to go to only in the summer?”
“Really!” I say, though until that second I had.
We drive over to Sleeping Bear Dunes, a place I love. Mom called it “Ocean Michigan” when we were little, and I still think of it that way. Lake Michigan is like an ocean: so big you can’t see across it, and those wonderful white sand beaches. Today, there’s nobody but Harp and me. All I hear is the sound of the waves breaking and receding and the sound our boots make cracking the thin crust of ice. I love the way the snow is swirled in patterns on the sand, making the beach all tan and white, like a huge animal hide. In some places the wind’s blown the sand into ridges, and where the snow’s crusted on them, cracking and melting here and there, the sand beneath shows through in mysterious, stick-like patterns. Hieroglyphs, I think. Secrets left here for me to decipher.
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