Seeing as I had just finished, it wasn’t the most sensitive thing Kristi could have said, and something must have shown on my face, because she frowned and then came as close to blushing as Kristi Casey could come to blushing.
“Which I guess you just did.” She gave me her brilliant all-forgiveness-is-possible smile. “But what I meant was if you quit something—quit it! Move on to something new!”
With her pressed up against me, I found it easy to take her advice.
“Okay,” I said, as my hand slid up and down some of the most beautiful geography in the world: the slope and curves of a woman lying on her side.
I thought it was an April Fools’ joke. I got the call on the second, but I figured Kristi was still getting mileage out of the holiday that gave her license to be a prick.
“Joe,” she breathed, as if she’d just run a couple of laps. “Joe, I just wanted you to know that I’m pregnant.”
I admit to holding the phone away from my ear and looking at it as if I was some bad comic.
“April Fool,” I prompted, and then closed my eyes, willing her to repeat what I’d just said.
“Joe, I’m not kidding. I can’t really say if you’re the father or not, but I just thought you should know. Not that I’m going to keep it or anything…but I just thought you should know.”
Leaning back in my chair, I exhaled a great blast of air. “Do you…Maybe we should talk about this.”
Kristi barked a laugh. “What are we going to talk about, Joe? A marriage proposal? I doubt it. Like I said, I don’t even know if you’re the father.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, my voice soft.
“Hey, it’s not like we were going steady or anything. I do have a life here, you know.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what I said: I’m sure you do.”
“I don’t know if I like your tone, Joe.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Casey.” If she was going to talk to me like I was a kid, I’d answer like one.
“Well, thanks a lot for your concern.”
“Kristi, I’m concerned. It’s just that I wish—”
But Kristi didn’t care what I wished; she’d hung up.
I don’t know if I thought it was too proprietary to think of Kristi as a girlfriend—I don’t really know what I considered her other than a really good time every other week—but this news floored me on all sorts of levels. I immediately called her back, but if she was still home, she chose not to answer. This was in the days when people could choose not to pick up a ringing phone, the days before answering machines, before caller ID, before cell phones…the days when you weren’t so reachable, so accountable. I kept dialing her number and the only thing that dampened my growing anger was knowing that if she was home, the ringing and ringing must be really bugging her.
She showed up three weeks later, one rainy sloppy Friday afternoon, banging on my dorm door.
Having opened the door, I had expected to see the RA announcing a fire.
“Kristi!”
“I’m out front,” she said. “And double-parked. So grab some warm clothes and meet me out there—I’ve got a cabin for us up north.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “It’ll be another county we can check off.”
Ten minutes later we were on the freeway, on our way up past Duluth to Grand Marais.
“How’d you get into my dorm?”
“How’d I get into your dorm?” she said, her face showing that of all the questions I could ask her, this was one of the dumbest. “Some guy was walking in and I walked in with him.” She punched the radio buttons until Linda Ronstadt came on.
I nodded. “Whose car is this anyway?”
“My European history professor’s. It’s his cabin we’re staying at too.”
I looked around the brand-new Pontiac Firebird. “Is he rich or something?”
“He’s a professor. But his wife’s got money.”
“So why…why is he letting you use his car and his cabin?”
Kristi laughed. “Because I’ve been a very, very good student.”
“Considering everything,” I said as a pulse of anger surged through me, “that’s a pretty cavalier thing to say.”
Kristi’s laugh now was more like a guffaw.
“God, you should listen to yourself sometimes, Joe. You talk more like an old lady than any guy I know.”
“Yeah, well, you act more like a slut than anyone I know.”
I think I was just as shocked as she was—probably more—over my words.
“That’s a lousy thing to say,” she said, turning on the windshield wipers.
I agreed with her that it was a lousy thing to say, but I still stood by the truth of it.
“I mean, I thought you were Mr. Feminist. Jesus Christ, you’re the only guy I know who ever took a women’s studies class.”
“I told you, I took the class because I thought it’d be interesting to be surrounded by girls.”
“Yeah, right, Mr. Margaret Mead. Except I would have expected you to learn in a women’s studies class that slut is a sexist word. I mean, where’s the male equivalent?”
“You didn’t seem to care about the male equivalent when you used to call Sharon Winters a slut.”
“Well, she was one!”
I was too annoyed to laugh. “Just for my own benefit, define slut.”
Sleet splatted against the windshield and Kristi turned the wipers on faster.
“Well, a slut is someone who sleeps with a lot of guys.”
“And her doing that and you doing that is different because…”
“Because for a slut, it’s all about the guy. A slut sleeps with someone because she thinks it’s gonna make him like her better.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I said.
“Well, do you sleep with girls hoping they’ll like you better?”
I had two responses, but the first, You’re assuming I have a more active social life than I do, I didn’t say out loud. The second one I did. “I sleep with them because it’s fun.”
“Exactly,” said Kristi. “Bingo.”
She put in a new Grand Funk Railroad tape, and as nice as it would have been to sit and listen to music, I didn’t want it to be her decision. Besides, I wasn’t done talking.
“So you had the…the…”
“Abortion,” said Kristi. “Yeah, I did.”
“And how do you feel about it?”
“I feel like it’s none of your business, that’s how I feel about it.”
“It is my business,” I sputtered, “considering it might have been my baby.”
“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t,” said Kristi. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“Well, I do.”
“Go ahead,” she said. “It doesn’t mean I have to listen.” She turned up the volume so the car vibrated under the weight of the bass.
My impulse was to jump out of the car, but that wasn’t the most practical idea, considering the rate of speed at which it was traveling. I could have turned down the volume, but I knew Kristi would have turned it up again, so I braced myself against the loud music, against the hate I felt for the driver, and looked out the window at the gray, wet world.
“Oh, bummer!” said Kristi, searching through her knapsack. “I left my stash in my other purse! Have you got anything?”
I indulged in a little pot at school but didn’t make an effort to hunt down anything else because I knew Kristi always brought a supply of some upper, downer, psychedelic, or mood alterer.
“One dinky little joint,” she said, holding up exactly what she described.
“Well, let’s fire it up now,” I said. “No time like the present.”
I think it was stubbornness that had kept Kristi driving north and stubbornness that kept me from ordering her to turn around and take me back to my dorm. It was a five-hour drive that was spent in mostly sulky silence, but once we had passed G
rand Marais, it was obvious Kristi needed a co-navigator to find the cabin. The windshield wipers were moving in frantic arcs trying to part the curtain of unrelenting rain.
“We’re looking for a sign that says ‘Hoffer’s Hideaway,’” I’d said, reading from the directions Kristi had written on a lined piece of paper.
“If they’d use streetlights up here,” Kristi had replied, her voice tense, “it might be a little easier to find the goddamned signs.”
It was only six o’clock, but the rainstorm had darkened the skies, and since we had turned off Highway 61, we had missed two turnoffs and had spent nearly a half hour backtracking.
Finally, through the rain and darkness, I’d spotted a cockeyed sign nailed to a tree.
“There it is! Take a right, here, Kristi!”
She’d nearly gone into the ditch, taking the turn too wide, and after following a long road so narrow that evergreen branches brushed against the passenger side of the car, we came to the cabin. Both of us were so relieved to have reached our destination alive that all tension and acrimony was washed away by the rain as we raced to the cabin door.
“Aha!” Kristi had announced, peeling back the welcome mat on the lone step and finding a key. “Right where he said it’d be!”
Rain beat on us as she tried to fit the key into the lock, and when the door opened, we plunged through it, soaked to the skin, laughing hysterically.
Kristi had turned on a lamp on a side table by the door, and the contrast between the cozy interior and the wet exterior couldn’t have been greater.
“Oh, it’s darling!” she’d exclaimed. It was a rustic log cabin softened with frilled curtains on the windows, needlepoint pillows on the log-framed couch, and a table covered with a red gingham cloth. It was at the table we chose to sit, dropping our backpacks on the rag rug beneath it.
“Should I make some coffee?” Kristi had asked. “I’m freezing.”
“We should really get out of these wet clothes,” I’d said, and even though she could have accused me of talking like an old lady now, she didn’t.
Instead, Kristi had wiggled her eyebrows. “Well, I guess we have made up.”
After we had dressed in the robes hanging on the back of the bathroom door, we gathered at the table again, and it was there Kristi made her fruitless drug search.
The joint we smoked was weak, but our own good moods made it seem stronger and as we raided the cupboards and the old squat refrigerator, we laughed as if were high on the best sinsemilla.
“Is it okay to eat all this?” I asked, eating a second bowl of Cap’n Crunch.
“He said to help ourselves to anything,” said Kristi, dipping a knife into a jar of peanut butter. She slathered it on a piece of toast with the care of a master bricklayer. “They hire a lady to come in and stock the kitchen before and after guests.”
“Wow,” I said, and even though I considered the guy a rival, I had to like him.
It rained through the night and half the next day, and we entertained ourselves by staying in the professor and his wife’s very comfortable king-sized log bed. The appearance of the sun was no lure to me at all, but Kristi insisted we get out and take advantage of our surroundings.
“I mean, come on,” she said, throwing me a T-shirt. “It’s supposed to be beautiful up here.”
“It is,” I said, gazing at her as she wiggled into her jeans.
We drove a ways up the Gunflint Trail and took a long hike in the woods, the firs a brilliant green from their long shower. Kristi was not one to find the nearest rock and admire the view; I imagine her idea of a hike was very similar to a boot camp sergeant’s, and I struggled behind her, silently cursing her speed and lung power.
We didn’t get back until dark. Ravenous, we built a fire and roasted wieners and warmed a can of beans. The cabin was on a crest that overlooked Lake Superior, and as we ate we listened to the gentle slap of waves against the rocky shore. There were no marshmallows to roast for dessert (“I’m going to have to talk to my professor about that!” joked Kristi), but we found a bag of bridge mix in the cupboard, and as we drank coffee and ate chocolate-covered raisens and peanuts and malted-milk balls, I said, “Now, this is the life.”
“How many times do you think people say that in front of a campfire?”
I stared up at the hazy night sky. “Billions. Maybe trillions.”
“This is so nice,” said Kristi, licking chocolate off her fingers before she snuggled up next to me, pulling the blanket up over our laps.
“It is,” I agreed.
We leaned against the backrest fashioned out of wide splayed planks that faced the fire pit (other than the marshmallows, what hadn’t the professor thought of?), and another cliché came to mind: It doesn’t get any better than this. But it did.
I was staring at the shifting reds and oranges of the fire when Kristi gasped as if she had gotten stung by a nocturnal wasp.
She wasn’t rubbing a swelling bite, but instead was staring up at the sky. I looked up and gasped myself.
“Oh!” cried Kristi. “Look at that!”
The sky was alive with a white light. Its western pulse was answered by one in the east, and then light jumped from all directions.
We reclined against our makeshift chairs, yelping with delight as a green light and then a pink one zigzagged across the white.
“It’s the northern lights!” said Kristi. “I’ve wanted to see the northern lights all my life!”
“I saw them once as a kid,” I said. “I was scared—I thought aliens were coming.”
“I can see why you’d think that,” said Kristi, her voice soft. “It’s so…unearthly.”
Like spectators watching fireworks, we expressed our delight by cries of “Wow!” or “Ooh!” but unlike fireworks, this display wasn’t over in ten minutes. Just when it seemed the show was fading, another section of the sky would throb with a light that would ignite another pulse, a streak of purple, of green.
It was spectacular and humbling at the same time—there was nothing on TV, no movie, no Fourth of July extravaganza that could compete with the show in the skies above us.
“I feel like we’re on top of the world,” whispered Kristi. “On top of the world watching the sky explode.”
“But in a good way,” I added.
“You’re right,” said Kristi as a flame of pink licked across the white pulsations. “Explode is too…violent a word, and this sky means no violence—just wonder.”
I had to kiss her after saying something like that, but it wasn’t a lingering kiss; neither one of us wanted to miss what was happening in the sky.
Putting a hand on my knee, Kristi boosted herself to her feet and held her arms up to the sky. I joined her; it seemed an appropriate way to thank the sky.
“Here we are,” said Kristi, “at…”
I filled in her pause. “At Hoffer’s Hideaway.”
Kristi laughed, her arms still outstretched. “No, we’re somewhere else, Joe. Some magical place where the sky dances.”
Okay, now she was getting poetic. I couldn’t offer another pedestrian “wow” or “ooh”—if she wanted me to tell her where we were, I’d tell her.
“Here we are,” I began, speaking slowly to give the wheels in my head time to turn, “on a hillside—”
“Not a hillside, Joe—a hillside is too small for where we’re at.”
Kristi was spinning around as if in slow motion, her arms still extended, and I turned around at the same rate, taking in the lavender flush the sky had added to its repertoire.
“Here we are,” I began again, “on a mountaintop, on…”
The lavender deepened into purple and skipped like a rock on a river across the sky. We both yelped our approval, and I looked at Kristi. In her beaming face, I found my inspiration.
“Here we are,” I said, “on beautiful, wondrous Mount Joy—”
“Yes!” shouted Kristi. “Yes—here we are on Mount Joy!”
“Mount Joy, where t
he skies dance—”
“And the humans do the funky chicken!”
We flapped our arms and hopped around in a circle, like crazed hillbillies. Then our dance was stopped by a great light pulsation that filled the sky like a fireworks finale, pounding, pounding in its whiteness, and if noise had accompanied the lights in the sky, it would be the thundering noise of Kristi playing the bass drum.
“Oh God!” she said, and it sounded more like an address than an exclamation.
Thirteen
“I’ve stocked the freezer—that mint chip ice cream is really selling, by the way—so can I go now?”
I nodded. “Thanks, Birk. See you tomorrow.”
After the teenager left, I sat in my swivel chair, rocking from side to side. Most of the tears that ran down my face were for Ed, but some were for me.
We had buried him yesterday. I say we because Ed’s grocery store staff was more his family than Marian, the weathered platinum blonde who flew in from Del Mar, California, seemingly more aggrieved over missing a golf tournament than Ed.
“Our foursome came in second last year, thanks to my bogey on the seventeenth hole,” she said in a deep smoker’s voice. “Believe me, they were not happy to lose me this year.”
“We weren’t happy to lose Ed this year either,” said Kirk from the backseat.
“Well, I don’t mean…what I meant…,” stammered Marian.
I was glad Kirk had offered to come with me to the airport to pick up Ed’s sister and glad he had called her on her stupid comment. I watched the road ahead of me but peripherally was aware of Marian wadding up a hanky and then smoothing it out on the surface of her purse.
“I…I know I could have been a better sister,” she said, and I looked in the rearview mirror to see Kirk roll his eyes. “It’s just that…well, I’m ten years older than Eddie and I’ve lived in California since I graduated from college and—” She crumpled her hanky up again. “And that was a long time ago!”