The View from Mount Joy

  She dabbed at her eyes—the hanky finally serving its intended purpose—and the thought crossed my mind that she was mourning time’s march more than her brother.

  I had never set out to be more than an employee/friend/jamming partner to Ed Haugland, but his illness and resulting reliance on me had forged a deeper relationship—so deep that one day as I was wheeling him through the aisles of the store he said, in a voice barely a whisper, “You’ve been like a son to me, Joe.”

  I gripped the wheelchair handles, feeling my knees go a little weak. His aide brought him to the store two or three times a week, and Ed liked to tour his former domain aisle by aisle. He usually saved his commentary to harp about a particular product placement or sales display.

  I didn’t mind his criticism; I knew how much it meant to him to feel like he was still the boss of something.

  “That’s the worst part,” he said when he’d made the sad transfer from walker to wheelchair, “when your own body gives up on you.”

  For a while his remissions would make us not so much hopeful as blithe; when he was healthy we assumed he’d stay that way, and we’d forget all about how he’d fallen in the cooler and practically frozen before a bag boy found him, or how his hands would grow so numb he couldn’t hold on to a guitar pick, let alone groceries. (How many times had I mopped up a bottle of milk or a carton of eggs that had fallen out of his grasp, as if his fingers were oiled?)

  After Kirk left for school, our jam sessions continued, our schedule set increasingly by his ability to play. As the months passed into years, the disease became the norm and the remissions the exception.

  “It’s the second time I’ve given up my music,” said Ed when he became so weakened he couldn’t even open the clasps on his guitar case. “This time hurts even more.”

  I was able to witness firsthand his slow demise because at age twenty-eight, instead of scoring goals for the North Stars or filing war reports from the Falklands, I was still working at Haugland Foods. Hell, not just working, I was the manager and now, upon Ed’s death, I was not just the manager but the fucking owner.

  “I’m leaving you the store,” whispered Ed several weeks before he went into the hospital for the last time.

  “What?” I said, my scalp prickling with heat.

  “You heard me,” said Ed, which was presumption on his part because he talked so softly now most people had to ask him to repeat what he said.

  The thing is, I had heard him; with regard to Ed, it was as if my ears had been fine-tuned to understand his barest whisper.

  “Ed,” I said, kneeling down so I could be eye level with him. “Ed, please. I do not need the store.”

  “Well,” he said, closing his eyes as he made a face, “I need to give it to you.”

  “Ed—”

  “Remember when I told you you were like a son to me? I wasn’t exactly lying—I mean, more than anything I considered you a friend, even my best friend—but there wasn’t a word for ‘friend who feels like family,’ so that’s why I said son, even though I would have only been about fourteen when you were born.”

  “Eighteen,” I said. “You’re like an old movie star—always trying to pass yourself off as younger than you are.”

  Ed smiled weakly. He’d once said that one of the downers of getting sick was that no one dared joke around with him—“especially at my expense.” Then he closed his eyes briefly, as if the smile had tired him.

  “I’ve seen a lawyer and had all the papers taken care of.”

  “But I don’t want a grocery store!” I said.

  “Neither did I. But I got one. Trouble is, I kept it. But you, you can sell it. It’ll give you a nice nest egg—a couple of nest eggs.” He tried to smile again, but it turned into a wince. Pain was now a relentless predator with a ravenous appetite.

  “I’m giving a couple of my favorite employees some money,” he continued, “and Kirk a couple of grand to help him with his boat. But other than that, everything’ll be yours.”

  “This stinks, Ed,” I said, patting his leg. “You should be touring the Midwest in some bar band and I should—”

  “Bar band? I should be jamming with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page.” Ed shook his head, or tried to, but it seemed too big a job for his neck muscles. “But life rarely makes the same plans you do.”

  “Aw, send it to Reader’s Digest. They pay big money for quotes like that.”

  “You’d never forgive me if I published before you did.”

  “Ha-ha. You’re so pitiful I forget how funny you are.”

  All his muscles worked hard to produce a smile that was one of pure enjoyment.

  “I’ve got a good reason to be pitiful,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  It was Saturday night and I’d wager there were millions of guys my age dancing at clubs, picking up girls, driving fast cars. How many twenty-eight-year-olds were wearing a white apron, sitting in the office that overlooked a dark grocery store, crying for his friends and other things he’d lost?

  What had happened to me? The dreams that I’d had as a kid were as dead and brittle as a houseplant left outside in the middle of January. The guy I was now was not the guy I’d thought I would be when I made my first goal for the Gophers, when my first story for the university paper had been published. The map I had thought I’d follow—the one showing me on a fast-track career as a bold reporter or a professional hockey player—had long ago been crumpled up and tossed aside, in recognition of its fantasy destinations. Other people were capable of big plans, grand gestures, surprises, but not me.

  Kirk had graduated with a degree in oceanography and lived in Florida, working with an exploratory team that was doing something with mollusks in the Caribbean. He was the tan pallbearer who was approached by all the girls at Ed’s funeral reception.

  Greg Hoppe lived in California and covered the state capitol for the Sacramento Bee. I asked him to send me his clippings, which I read with a mixture of envy (70 percent) and pride (30 percent).

  Shannon Saxon was pregnant with her second child. She and her husband, a chiropractor from Dubuque, came into the store every now and then, and there was something about her husband and the proprietary way he held the small of her back (as if showing off both his wife and his profession) that pissed me off, so much so that once, as they inspected fruit in the produce section, I scolded him to not squeeze the melons. Shannon’s face reddened, but the chiropractor thought I was riffing on the popular commercial and said, “Or the Charmin either.”

  Darva was in Paris, finishing an art degree (“For every year at school, I take one off to paint,” she wrote me). And Kristi—I didn’t exactly know what Kristi was up to, but based on a postcard I’d gotten a year ago from Mexico City (the only words I could decipher were “far out,” “easy,” and “honest woman”) I didn’t need a codebreaker to figure out she was having a good time.

  My own mother was living a life of adventure ten times more exciting than her son’s. She and Len, after having visited my uncle Roger in Sweden (he had settled down, marrying a potter whose work, he said, was much admired by the royal family), were inspired to take a yearlong sabbatical and were now traveling through Europe.

  “Even you and Linda,” I complained when I was invited to my aunt’s for dinner, “are living the wild lesbian life.”

  “And a wild life ’tis,” said Beth in a serviceable Irish accent. “Divvying up chores, arguing about who didn’t fill the gas tank—”

  “And who forgot to plug in the Crock-Pot,” said Linda.

  “That’s why we’re having take-out,” said Beth, passing me a carton of moo goo gai pan. “Plus both of us are working way too much. Did I tell you that Linda got a commission to design Ray Pryor’s house?”

  “Really?” I asked, willing to be distracted by some gossip about the Vikings quarterback. “What’s he like?”

  Linda shrugged. “I think he may have gotten tackled one too many times. He can’t comprehend the specs, no matter how man
y times we go over them.” She nodded toward the carton of ginger chicken and I passed it to her. “But really, Joe, your time will come.”

  “I have no doubt,” said Beth, “that you’ll do something amazing with your life.”

  “Yeah, right,” I snorted. “Maybe I’ll honor expired coupons.”

  Like a referee, the teakettle whistled, and for a while we respected the time-out, choosing our tea from the tins Beth kept (bagged tea was not allowed in her kitchen), filling our individual strainers with it, and then stirring in milk or sugar.

  “To Ed,” said Beth, holding up her teacup in a toast. She cringed as I clanked the bone china cups a little too forcefully. “Joe,” she scolded, “these aren’t beer steins.”

  “And how about his sister?” said Linda. “What a piece of work. Did you see her light up at the gravesite?”

  “Well, at least she came to the funeral,” I said. “Ed told me he wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t.”

  That knocked over the fragile dam, and emotion flooded over. Suddenly I was crying, covering my eyes with the oblong napkin that read, “Lee’s Chow Mein—Good ’n’ Tasty.”

  With my paper blindfold, I couldn’t see them, but I felt my aunt Beth on one side of me and Linda on the other, hugging and patting me. The tears I had cried the night before in the store’s office were just the overture when compared to the full orchestral movement that was unleashed now, and when I was done, the napkin I had originally cried into had been replaced by two others.

  “Why don’t you spend the night, Joe?” asked Beth when the water-works had been finally turned off. “You shouldn’t be alone.”

  It was a fancy “guest suite” now, my old room, and even though it was sparkling clean, there was a sense of mustiness, as if all the dreams and plans I had made in it had turned to dust that hung invisible in the air and unseen under the bed.

  Although the human reproductive system is about the only part of high school biology that truly engaged me (I loved the pictures), I do seem to remember that a person’s cells regenerate every seven years. It sounds like a big deal—like a person would get a whole new lease on life—but in my limited experience, I can’t say that turning seven felt a whole lot different from eight, or fourteen from fifteen or sixteen. Eighteen was a big deal, of course, because I was officially an adult, but I didn’t feel more renewed at twenty-eight than I had in the years preceding. In truth, with Ed’s death and my failure to launch the life I thought I was supposed to live, twenty-eight was stacking up to be a pretty depressing year. But suddenly the dead-end street I thought I was on changed into an expressway with all kinds of interesting on and off ramps, and all I could do was hang on for the ride. And man oh man, a lot more than my cells were regenerated.

  “Excusez-moi, I would please like to know where are the haricots verts.”

  “The what?” I said, turning around. A second later, I was knocked back a step, upending the little pyramid of grapefruit I had been arranging.

  “Darva!” I said, my surprise pushed aside by astonishment. “And…?”

  “Flora,” said Darva, tilting her head to look at the baby lashed to her chest in a patterned scarf.

  “Flora,” I repeated.

  Darva laughed. “You sound a little…taken aback.”

  “I think I am. Is she yours?”

  Darva cradled the baby in her arms. “My one and only.”

  “Do you have time for some coffee?”

  “I’ve got time for anything with you, Joe.”

  Trying to translate the meaning of that, I led her to my office.

  If I wasn’t prepared for Darva to show up at Haugland Foods on a chilly fall day, I sure wasn’t prepared for Darva to show up with a baby, and I really wasn’t prepared for her lifting her breast out of her gauzy shirt and declaring, “Déjeuner, Flora!”

  She got a big charge out of my discomfort, laughing so much that the baby was jiggled and peered up at her mother with a look that said, Ma, cool it—I’m trying to eat lunch here!

  “Joe, I’m sorry,” she said, and her apology made me redden even more. “It’s just that…Well, you looked so startled.”

  “I am startled,” I said. “And not just by your breast.” I made a swooping gesture with my hand. “By all of you.”

  “I know. It was kind of mean of me, I guess. I should have warned you I was coming, and should have warned you I was coming with Flora.”

  “When…when did this happen? When did you get back?”

  Those were only two of the questions I fired at her, and Darva answered every one and more.

  “I know I hadn’t written you lately,” she said as the baby nursed. She had covered herself with a cloth from her diaper bag so I didn’t have to concentrate so hard on not looking at her breast. “But I had a lot going on.”

  I thought it redundant to say “obviously,” so I busied myself at the coffeemaker.

  “I was so swamped last year. I had this project going—it’s basically an arborist explaining his love affair with trees, of all things, and not only did I illustrate the whole thing, I translated it! So when this opportunity for a holiday in Spain opened up, I jumped at it. It was going to be a long weekend of fun in the sun, and it was. But the fun included too much sangria and a very attentive Portuguese man and, well…” She looked down at the baby and smiled. “Well, that’s how Flora got here.”

  The coffee machine clunked and made a hissing noise.

  “Is the…is the father here too?”

  “Oh, God, no. I hardly knew him. Don’t even know his last name, although I do remember his first: Raoul.”

  “So your baby doesn’t have a father?”

  Darva’s look held surprise and hurt.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, ashamed. “I didn’t mean for that to sound so harsh. I just meant…” I shrugged helplessly.

  “I know,” she said, lifting the baby onto her shoulder and patting her back. “It’s a lot to throw at you out of the blue.”

  The baby burped with more robustness than I would have thought her capable of, and Darva laughed, praising her.

  “Is that coffee ready?” she asked.

  “Just about.”

  “Well, then, here,” she said, standing up. “You hold Flora and I’ll get the coffee.”

  Before I had time to protest, the baby was passed off to me in a move as smooth as a quarterback makes with a running back, but this was no football, and I sat down gingerly in my office chair, scared of fumbling.

  The baby gazed up at me with curiosity. Her eyes were brown and shiny, fringed with black lashes that matched the black curls on her head.

  “She’s so pretty,” I said.

  “Thanks,” said Darva, tenderness making her word almost a plea. She set two cups of coffee on my desk.

  “I drink it black.” I nodded toward the window that overlooked the store. “But I’ve got cream and sugar. And cookies if you’d like, or donuts—we just put in a bakery section—or—”

  “I’m good,” said Darva, and looking at her, I could only agree.

  She was still tall and thin, still sharp-featured, although there was a softness to her face and manner that I attributed to motherhood. From her ears dangled the elaborate, many-tiered earrings she liked to wear, and at least seven fingers were decorated with rings. But her long, straight hair was gone now, cut so short it looked like a black cap.

  She sat in the chair on the other side of my desk, holding the coffee cup near her face, but not drinking from it.

  “It is so good to see you, Joe,” she said. “You’re more handsome than ever.”

  “Your mother flatters me,” I whispered to the baby, whose eyes were getting heavy. “Learn from her.”

  “Oh yes, that’s big on my list of what to teach my daughter: how to use your feminine wiles to entrap and control men.”

  We sat there quietly, me using my office chair for a purpose it had never before been used for—to rock a baby to sleep—and Darva drinking her
coffee and watching us.

  “How old is she?” I whispered, sort of floored by how nice a baby in my arms felt.

  “She’ll be seven months tomorrow,” said Darva and as her eyes welled up, she used the pads of her fingers as tear blotters. “Sorry.”

  As much as I enjoyed the weight of the baby in my arms, I realized then the real weight.

  “It’s hard, huh?”

  Darva looked at me for a moment and then laughed. “Oh, Joe, not hard. Wonderful’s more like it. I’m just…blown away by her.”

  The baby slept for two hours, and I would have held her the whole time, but when my assistant manager couldn’t answer a question my meat supplier had, I had to surrender Flora to her mother for a few minutes to attend to business.

  “Can I hold her again when I get back?” I asked.

  “If you bring me back one of those donuts you were talking about.”

  I brought her back a chocolate donut and a glazed cruller, and she handed me the baby again, which I thought was more than a fair trade.

  The afternoon was like a hot bath, one I settled back in and said, “Ahhh.” It had been ten years since I shared a lunch or art table with Darva, yet it seemed only last week that I’d traded her my apple for her chocolate milk or asked if the nose I was drawing was shaded right. I was so comfortable, so relieved to be in the company of such a good old friend.

  “So how long are you staying?” I asked, and her answer heartened me more than I could say.

  “I don’t know. I gave up my apartment in Paris—that is, I told my roommates they could rent out my room if they wanted to. I don’t know; I just thought I’d see how it goes here for a while.”

  “Here in Minneapolis?”

  Darva shrugged. “My family’s not doing too well—I’d like them to get to know Flora while they can.”

  In high school, Darva had described herself as a “P.S. in the letter of my parents’ marriage,” telling me that her mother had been forty-seven when she was born, her dad twelve years older. She had one brother twenty-three years older than her and a sister twenty years her senior. “The beauty part is that my parents are pretty tired and sort of let me do what I want.”