It’s freezing cold, and windy; my face burns. But I never want to leave. Harp and I stand at the edge of the water for a long time, watching some ice balls caught in a scoop of shoreline. They’re all sizes, from snowball size to the size of a snowman’s torso, but none of them quite round—which is probably why they roll in the water so crazily, bobbing like drunks, bumping against the thick curve of ice that stops a few yards short of the beach. I’m hypnotized by them. A wave comes in and soaks them brown. Then it recedes, sucking the water away with it, and the ice balls are white again. It makes me think of sucking all the juice from a snow cone.
I can’t help it. I throw my arms around Harp and say, “This is so wonderful. In my whole, whole life I’ve never seen anything like this. Thank you so much for bringing me.”
And he hugs me back a long time. We just stand there in the freezing cold, the two of us, like lovers. It feels strange when I have that thought. Sure, I’ve had some fantasies about Harp. But because he’s older, because he knows so much more than I do, because he’s been such a help to me, it’s never occurred to me that Harp might think of me as someone he could love. The more I think of it, though, the more it seems to me that these past few weeks together have been moving toward this moment. And I feel my heart open to what might happen next between us.
Eighteen
I wake up early the next morning, full of energy. There’s new snow on the ground, and when I open the window I can hear the distant rumble of the big ski cats already out grooming the slopes. I pop in a can of cinnamon rolls, put on my ski clothes while they bake. I smile at myself in the mirror, thinking about how I’ll drag Harp out of bed, feed him breakfast, and make him go skiing with me.
But when I get to his house, he’s gone. Gone. I know because the door is locked; Harp never locks the door. I sit down on the porch steps, as if the wind’s been knocked out of me, the stupid cinnamon rolls cooling in my lap.
“Fuck!” I say, over and over. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Going back and forth between feeling furious, mortified, and heartbroken. How could he do this? What’s the matter with me that guys can’t even stand to be my friend?
I don’t know how long I sit there before throwing the cinnamon rolls into the woods and heading back to my Jeep. I’m freezing by the time I get home, though. Shaking from the cold. I can’t cry. I can’t do anything but make a fire in the wood stove and huddle up to it, shivering.
All I can think of is that in a few hours I’m going to have to go to work, where everyone will feel sorry for me. I can’t wimp out, I have to go. I’ll just have act like Harp leaving is no surprise to me. No big deal. Like I knew he was going all along.
Right. As soon as I see Craig standing at the door, looking as worried about me as if I’m one of his own daughters, I start crying. “I’m really sorry about this, Emma,” he says, ushering me into his office, closing the door.
“Really, we were just friends,” I say.
Craig nods.
“Well, I thought we were friends, anyhow. I guess I should have listened to you.”
He gives a little shrug. “Hey, you live and learn. Thing is, the guy’s FUBAR, Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. You’re a nice girl, Emma,” he says kindly. “You’ll find someone a lot better than that.”
Out on the floor, the other waitresses hover over me. Like Craig, they all assume there was more going on between Harp and me than there actually was. Sex, that is. God. Would they feel more or less sorry for me if they knew that the idea of having sex with me is probably what made Harp bolt?
I get through the weekend okay; then Monday and Tuesday nights I call in sick. I am sick by then. Sick at heart. I lie in bed for three days straight, just lie there. I don’t read or even listen to music. It’s a bad kind of nothing, though. Not shunyata, because I can’t stop thinking. Isn’t there one person in the entire world who wants to be with me?
Then, after three days of feeling like I want to die, I wake up and a voice inside my head says, clear as anything, “Simplify your life.”
I don’t know why I do what I do next. It’s not exactly like I decide. But I get up and shower, gather every stitch of clothing I brought with me from home except the jeans and sweatshirt I’m wearing, put them in plastic trash bags, and haul them out to my Jeep. Then I drive to Traverse City, dump the bags at Good Will, and go shopping. I buy black jeans, black combat boots, black turtlenecks and sweaters, a black ski jacket and pants, a black-and-white gypsy-looking dress, all new socks and underwear—everything black or white.
I can’t give myself full credit for the idea to do the black-and-white thing. I got it from reading a book about Georgia O’Keeffe, whose clothes were all either black or white because she didn’t like to have to think about what to wear. I thought it was cool when it read it, and it seems like a good plan to me now. I go one step further than Georgia, though. I walk into a beauty shop and say, “Anyone have time to buzz my hair?”
Every single person in the shop turns to look at me. Even the ladies under the dryers lift up the hoods and offer their opinions. “But, honey, your long hair is so pretty,” they say. “Are you sure you want to do something that drastic?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “I’m tired of thinking about hair. I’m tired of thinking about anything.”
I love the chop, chop, chop of the scissors. I love watching long strands of my hair fall to the floor, I love watching my face—a whole new face—appear. Why didn’t I do this sooner, I wonder? Hair is stupid. What’s the point in having hair? For whom? I feel light and free when I leave the beauty shop. For days afterwards I glance in the mirror, totally shocked to realize that the person I see there is myself.
Once again, I am a human dynamo. This time it’s different, I tell myself. This time it’s real. I get up early, cross-country ski so fast that, ten minutes onto the trail, I’m soaked through with sweat. All dressed in black, I feel sleek and dangerous, like a James Bond girl. Then pretty soon, it gets even better than that and I feel nothing at all.
After skiing, I go inside and study my French the rest of the morning—a promise to myself that, in time, I will live in a world wider than the one I’m living in now. I make myself think in French all day, which turns out to be a stroke of genius because, to translate my thoughts, I have to make myself think slowly. I can’t indulge myself in that awful spiraling of dark thoughts that always lead me to the same place: I’m so lonely. Will there ever be a time I won’t be lonely?
Sometimes those thoughts come anyway; and when that happens, I make my mind take a right-angle turn into something simple. A childhood memory, clear as a snapshot: La petite jeune fille en skis descende la montagne très rapidement. Or I run through the various steps to do something I’ve done a hundred times, like tuning my skis. If controlling my thoughts doesn’t work, I just start naming the things all around me. Le table, le livre, la lampe, la fenêtre. La porte, la neige, le ciel, les arbres.
Le restaurant. There, I’m usually too busy to think. If there’s dead time, I concentrate on describing the customers. La famille bonheur avec deux enfants charmante. La grosse femme avec la lipstick très rouge. Les yuppie skiers d’enfer.
I carry a little French dictionary in the pocket of my apron so I can look up words I don’t know. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and say things like, “Les sheeseboorgeres sont très, très sublime!” The other waitresses think it’s hilarious. We all get to saying, “Sacre bleu!” when something goes wrong. And “Au revoir, mes amis,” every night when we leave.
Je vais bien, I tell myself. J’ai une vie.
I’m doing fine. I have a life.
Then Mom calls and says, “Emma, Mary Clark called and said there’s a beige Honda Civic in our driveway at home. Do you know anything about that?”
At which point, everything comes crashing in on me, and I burst into tears and tell her everything.
>
“You’re where?” she says. “You’re what?”
Before I know it, she’s made arrangements for me to fly to Steamboat Springs the next day. I feel horrible giving zero notice, just like Harp did. It’s an awful thing to do, and I apologize to Craig about a million times when I go over to tell him.
“It’s okay, Emma,” he says. “Really. It’ll be good for you to be with your parents.”
He’s so nice about my going that he even takes me into town the next morning so I can catch the limo to Traverse City instead of parking my Jeep for who-knows-how-long in the airport parking lot. In fact, he says, if I pay his expenses, he’ll drive it to Indy for me and come back on the Greyhound; he has a friend there he’d like to see.
“Yes!” I say, and hug him hard. Then I get on the bus and promptly start to cry again. I cry the whole way to the airport. Then I cry again when the plane lifts off and I look out the window and see the snowy forests and meadows I loved so much as a little girl. The plane banks and turns westward. The shoreline of Lake Michigan with its long white stripe of beach seems like the shoreline of my childhood. We’re flying away from it so fast. In moments, it’s no more than a pencil line along the horizon. Then it’s gone completely. Everywhere I look there’s either cold blue water or hard blue winter sky.
Nineteen
When I come through the gate at the airport both Mom and Dad look right through me, their eyes peeled for the person I used to be. I have on my black clothes, of course. Jeans and a big turtleneck, combat boots. Not to mention my haircut.
Then Mom does a double take. “Your hair,” she says, faintly.
“Jesus!” Dad says. “Emma.”
If they’re still pissed off at me, the shock makes them forget it—at least for the moment. Or maybe talking about what a disaster I am is just more than they can handle right now, considering how quickly it becomes obvious that they’re not doing so great either. They bicker the whole way back from the airport, which they hardly ever do. About where we should have dinner, whether snow is forecast for tomorrow, what kind of ski pass I should buy.
Who cares? I want to say.
The condo they’ve rented is all stone and glass, with high-beamed ceilings. The walls are white, hung with Navajo weavings. The carpet’s white. Butter-colored leather couches and easy chairs are gathered around the stone fireplace, or slanted toward the big antique armoire that hides the TV and stereo system. There’s a tall silk plant in one corner of the room, silk flower arrangements on the end tables, baskets full of magazines like Architectural Digest, Town and Country, GQ. Things Mom and Dad would never read. In fact, the only clue they’re living here at all is the clutter of books on the coffee table—Mom’s art books, Dad’s detective novels—and Mom’s easel set up on the sun porch.
When they’ve given me the tour and agreed on a plan for dinner, Dad goes off skiing and Mom settles me into the extra room, with its king-size bed and full bath, its own TV and little balcony. Then she fixes some hot chocolate and we sit down by the fire in the living room.
I can see her easel from where we sit, and ask what she’s been working on.
“Oh, this and that—” She waves her hand vaguely. “But still nothing I can really care about. Mostly I sit and draw. Anything. Just to be moving my hand. But I’ll hit on something in time. I will. The thing is,” she says, “in a whole new place, a new life, really, you don’t realize what you’re seeing, what’s important, until later. Then suddenly you know what to do with it. You know where it belongs.”
But she doesn’t sound like she believes it.
“Mom, I’m sorry about—” I begin.
“Emma, I’m sorry,” she says. “We’re sorry—your dad and I, for not … ” She waves vaguely again. “Honey, I’m just glad you’re here. This stupid money. Really. It’s got us all out of whack.”
“It’s not the money,” I say. “I was miserable at school before the money.”
“You’d have stayed, though,” she said. “You’d have adjusted.”
“Maybe.” I shrug.
“You withdrew, right? Before … ”
Before I’d have failed all the classes I’d signed up for, she means—and is afraid to ask. I nod.
“Well, then … ” she says.
Oh boy. I see in her face that she’s going to go chirpy on me, which makes me feel worse than I already do because it means she’s wracked her brain and come up clueless about how to deal with the fact that dropping out of school is just the tip of the iceberg of what a wreck I am.
She smiles, takes a sip of her hot chocolate. “You’ve got plenty of time to decide what you want to do. You can go back to IU in the fall; you could transfer—out here, maybe. You could take some time off; maybe travel.” She reaches over, gives my arm a squeeze. “We’ll get this money stuff sorted out. All of us.”
I ought to feel relieved that she’s giving me a pass, at least for the time being. I mean, did I really want her to grill me about what I plan to do with my life when I have no plan and can’t even imagine anything other than holing up here, safe, for as long as I can get away with it? So why is it that her being so reasonable makes me feel even worse than I did before?
Late that afternoon, I sit out on my balcony with my laptop, reading e-mail after e-mail from the intrepid Tiffany, who kept being my friend, kept sending me e-mails at least once a week even though I hadn’t answered a single one of them—or even known they were there, waiting to be answered, until now.
I can’t help being cheered up a little by her familiar, over-excited voice reporting every bit of gossip she’s heard since I left. I miss you so much, one of the early e-mails concludes. Our room seems so empty without you. You left your Pink Try This CD behind, and I play it all the time. I know I should send it back (especially since I STILL don’t like it all that much and Matt REALLY, REALLY hates it), but I’m not because when it’s playing, it’s like you’re here. Plus, I figure if I keep it you’ll have to come back and get it. You’re too poor to buy a new one, right? (Ha, ha.) Matt says hi, by the way. Love, Tiff.
There’s nothing about Gabe Parker in any I’ve read so far. She’s getting smarter, I guess. Or she’s just gone underground on the issue, biding her time. But her e-mails make me think about him anyway. I see him in my mind’s eye, sitting in the booth at the Daily Grind that day, waiting for me. The way he looked up and smiled at the sight of me. “Emma?” he said.
Oh, for God’s sake, he was not smiling at the sight of you, I remind myself. He was smiling because he thought you were going to give him a great story. No, let’s be totally honest here. He was smiling because he’s a nice person. Didn’t he follow you out to the street, trying to be nice even after you made a total fool of yourself in the café? Didn’t he even try to be nice during the Winnebago debacle?
Which, naturally, makes me think that Josh was nice that day, too. I remember how he followed us all up the steps, into the Winnebago, rather than hurt Gramps’ feelings. How he tried to call me when I left Bloomington and I deleted the message without even listening to it—not to mention the six e-mails he’d sent in that first week I was gone, which I deleted when I opened up my laptop an hour ago and saw them there. Probably, in one of them, he told me he’d brought the car back to Indianapolis and left it in the driveway, since he didn’t feel right about keeping it after what happened.
I put my laptop aside, partly because I’m afraid that if I keep reading Tiff’s e-mails there will be something about Gabe or Josh, partly because I just can’t face the fact that I can’t really go forward until I go back and figure out how to think about … everything. I was dumb to think I could. Even if things with Harp hadn’t worked out so badly, even if I had been able to make my own life in Michigan, all those bad feelings about Josh would still be there, inside me. Every single stupid thing I said or did when I was with Gabe Parker
would still be looping through my mind.
I sit back, breathe in cold, sharp mountain air. The condo is slope-side, within easy walking distance of the main chair lift; and watching the skiers drift down the mountain like bright bits of confetti, I remember our first trip here, when I was six. The mountains seemed like a fairyland to me, as if I’d awakened into them from a dream; and it occurs to me that, even then, long before I knew how large and awkward the real world would ultimately make me feel, their vastness was a comfort to me, a promise of belonging. Now I sit in the last warmth of the winter sun and wait for that feeling to overtake me again.
The sun goes in, and it grows cold. But I stay out anyway, watching the twinkly white lights blink on along the walkways lined with shops and restaurants, and the skiers coming down from the mountain tired and content. The little balcony seems like the right place for me. Not on the slopes or in the bars or restaurants, where happy people entertain themselves; not inside the glitzy condo, one more place I don’t belong.
Twenty
As the days pass, the only thing that makes me feel grounded is skiing with Dad. He wakes me in the early morning, just like he did on Michigan Saturdays when I was a child; and for a little while each day there’s only the shush of the snow beneath my skis, the smell of pines, the feeling that any second I might lift off and soar into the bright blue sky. We ski tirelessly, like we used to, stopping only to grab a bite at lunchtime, maybe for hot chocolate if we get cold. In the afternoons, we race—NASTAR, the amateur racing program we did every winter weekend when Jules and I were kids. We don’t talk, except about skiing: the run we just took, our race times, whether the snow that’s starting to come down in big, fat flakes all around us is light enough to ensure powder in the morning.
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