Erin, I will miss your autobiography. May thngs work out for you and I look forward to your return.
Leeza
Our "Girl Autobiographies"
Moderators: KimberlyS, CathyAnn
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Leeza
- Miss Ruby Goddess
- Posts: 1745
- Joined: Tue Mar 18, 2008 4:46 pm
- Location: McCook, Nebraska
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Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi Sisters,
I especially will miss Erin. She's been a staunch friend and a wonderful contributor to this thread.
I began the thread not knowing quite what would come of it, and for a while couldn't find my own voice to tell my story. Erin was there, and in her warm and interesting way was not just the first to show what could be done, but the potential for this topic.
She's told us an extraordinary story. Now she's found she needs to step back for powerful reasons we all can empathize with. I wish her every felicity and every good thing in life, and may she find heart's desire in whatever shape, form and gender expression is most fitting.
Love, Robyn Katie
I especially will miss Erin. She's been a staunch friend and a wonderful contributor to this thread.
I began the thread not knowing quite what would come of it, and for a while couldn't find my own voice to tell my story. Erin was there, and in her warm and interesting way was not just the first to show what could be done, but the potential for this topic.
She's told us an extraordinary story. Now she's found she needs to step back for powerful reasons we all can empathize with. I wish her every felicity and every good thing in life, and may she find heart's desire in whatever shape, form and gender expression is most fitting.
Love, Robyn Katie
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Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi Sisters,
This is a call for contributors. I encourage you, yourself, to try imagining episodes in your life if you had been born female.
Erin's shoes are impossible to fill, we all know that. But what I suggest is much simpler. Even a brief paragraph or so is enough for a start. Please take a moment and think about it:
o What would your story be, if you'd been born a girl?
o What would you have done differently, what things the same?
o :How would you have felt, and thought, as a female person?
Sure, it's "only" fantasy. Yet it is a magical topic, an extension of our experiments with clothing and gender, with effects we all try out in our own lives. The number of views alone tells you this thread has touched a chord in many people.
So I hope you'll feel moved to try your hand at this. You'll be very welcome when you do, and as you've seen, this is a very warm and uncritical audience!
"Tell us a story!" we clamor. We await you with shining eyes and bated breaths. So why not pull up to the fireside and tell what *your* personal "girl life" might have been?
Love, Robyn Katie
This is a call for contributors. I encourage you, yourself, to try imagining episodes in your life if you had been born female.
Erin's shoes are impossible to fill, we all know that. But what I suggest is much simpler. Even a brief paragraph or so is enough for a start. Please take a moment and think about it:
o What would your story be, if you'd been born a girl?
o What would you have done differently, what things the same?
o :How would you have felt, and thought, as a female person?
Sure, it's "only" fantasy. Yet it is a magical topic, an extension of our experiments with clothing and gender, with effects we all try out in our own lives. The number of views alone tells you this thread has touched a chord in many people.
So I hope you'll feel moved to try your hand at this. You'll be very welcome when you do, and as you've seen, this is a very warm and uncritical audience!
"Tell us a story!" we clamor. We await you with shining eyes and bated breaths. So why not pull up to the fireside and tell what *your* personal "girl life" might have been?
Love, Robyn Katie
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Hi Sisters,
It’s been a while since posts … but here’s a nice long one to make up for it. Absaroka, I’m hoping you’ll soon post, too!
Love, Robyn Katie
***
From her perch on the top bunk Harriet, fey, thin, delicate, with long trailing dark hair and eerie black eyes, lustrous as if swollen by uncried tears, murmurs her strange thoughts through the cigarette smoke. “The sense of further walls beyond, that almost crumble … to reveal still more walls …”
“Ethereal,” I tease. “Glimmering. Practically nonexistent.”
“Well, if you insist on going all poetic on me.”
I sit a while staring through the trembling column of smoke. I consider asking her if she ever dates, but since I’ve never seen her with a boy it somehow seems rude to. My tongue moistens my lips. “Do you ever get, oh, lonely?”
Intent, she leans forward to stare down at me. “Always.”
“There are times I hunger so much for someone—”
“Well, after all it’s the human condition, isn’t it? Always alone, all of us. Born that way, die that way, pretty much that way in between.”
“Do you really think there’s no relief from loneliness?”
She is silent for a long time. “I suppose if I were willing to put myself at the whim of someone—but a man? Brrr. You said you’ve—”
“Been in love?” Reluctantly I emit the least possible information. “Well, you know. In high school.”
“No, I meant had sex.”
With a boy, I suppose she means, pry that she is. “Mm-hm,” a little shortly. “You?”
A sigh from Harriet. “But how could I, knowing men speak as if we’re silly creatures, weak, hardly a rational thought, driven by whim, perversity, can’t manage by ourselves … It’s they who’re at the mercy of whim! Aren’t we women the ones who must manage, plan, be strong, practical, think for ourselves?”
“I guess,” I shrug. I’m not sure I care one way or another, but it seems important to her.
“We’re the ones who always have to keep pointing them in the right direction. Men think they know what has to be done, but they don’t. Women have to. Not a role I relish, thanks anyway.”
I bow my head, my long hair falling either side of my face. It needs cutting. Wish we hadn’t gotten off on this topic. Harriet being all towering conceptions and airy fancies, it seems a crime to talk to her about anything mundane like men. Why can’t the words just stop?
The silence rouses me. I look up. From on high, in the top bunk, those eyes are gazing down into mine, so large they seem to swallow the world. “Thought for a second you’d gone to sleep,” she says.
Another long silence, her eyes never leaving mine. Softly she slips down. Needing to use the bathroom, or—? But she is leaning over me, this ratty old armchair creaking under her hands. Turning sideways she brushes a hand along my lap. “May I?”
“Oh—sure.” Scooting over, I make room for her to sit on the arm.
But she shakes her head. Our eyes dart questions. Oh. But— Primly keeping her skirt decent at the knees, she softly sits across my lap, our faces inches apart. “What is it about you?”
“What about me?”
“That makes a person want to kiss you. It’s very vexing.”
“Oh.” Gulp. “I—don’t think it’s anything I can help,” I replied involuntarily. I felt like I had no nerves left. I should tell her I don’t want this. Or do I?
Then we were kissing, her long thin arms wrapped around me. Staring earnestly into my eyes she took my hand. Stood up, pulling at me. Together we moved to the bed, tripping over each other. Automatically I started to get in the bottom bunk, the one that was Debby’s, thinking, did she try to seduce Debby too? Is that why Debby left?
Harriet’s eyes swept upward to the top bunk: hers. I hesitated. “Are you sure?” Sure about everything, the top bunk, me, all of this.
The ceiling was very near; we had just clearance for our heads. Kneeling up there felt very high, the bed wobbling to our movements, like a bird’s nest in a high wind. “What on earth are we doing?” I whispered, adding, “Don’t answer that.”
“Okay I won’t.”
Like maniacs we kissed, grappling wildly, trying to possess every inch of each other. Harriet put me on my back and made jello of me. Frenzied, I whimpered, moaned, arched to her touch. We were moving like ocean billows … Through it all I kept trying to tell myself, Stop it, Robyn, you’re not in love with her. But I’m such a fool! Do I even know how to distinguish sex from love?
“Oh fine, my period’s started,” Harriet said afterward. “Damn it, Robyn! You brought it on!—how could you?”
I flared, “Oh it’s my fault you’re suddenly having your monthlies?” Then, surprised at myself, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it like it sounded. But honestly, do you really think sex can make you menst—”
Harriet slid to the floor, barefooted to the tiny closet for a robe. “The Goddess Cyclea, her mighty majesty, makes her imperious appearance. Monthly reminder of woman’s shame for sneaking off to the tree, palling with the serpent, munching on the apple ... Don’t stir, Robyn, please? If I came back to find you missing it would be so gruesome …” snatching a tampon from the box on the tiny three-shelf bookcase. “Hang on, I won’t be a sec.” And flung out the door for the bathroom at the end of the hall. Stupefied I sat there in the upper air, wonderingly touching the sheets she and I had just wrinkled. Yipes, we didn’t even turn off the room lights first! Anyone could have walked in on us—!
Shuddering, a little sick, I crawl down off the top bunk, get into my skirt and blouse. This wasn’t like it had been with Lainey—this was a thunderstorm, all electricity nobody can stop. Why didn’t I see it coming? And now it’s over. The air is empty.
In comes Harriet damp and fresh, robe briskly shifting about her legs. With a gusty breath she says, “For one thing, this can’t change anything between us. You understand?”
Bewildered, I mumble, “No. S’pose not,” dropping onto the saggy third-hand couch she and Debby bought at the furniture exchange for three bucks and haulage.
“You needn’t sound so surprised. Of course; what else? I’m normal, don’t forget.”
“I don’t understand, I thought we were—”
“We’re not.”
My mouth opened but nothing came out, so it closed again.
“So what we’re looking at here,” she went on, pacing, “is just satisfying a simple need. A girl can’t be expected to go without, just because there aren’t any boys around, am I right? And everything’ll be just like it was before? Promise?”
Halfheartedly I say something that sounds vaguely like agreement. I’m seeing how big a mistake this was. There it is, like in a telescope: our future. Never able to meet each other’s eyes again, never soar in conversations with no limits.
“Good, ‘cause I wouldn’t want to lose our friendship.”
“Oh, no fear about that, honest.” I stumble away to my room, full of loss. Silent vow: from now on I will really try my hardest to want nothing but boys. Ever after and twice on Sundays, amen.
Not that boys abound in this nearly all-female college community! But local boys are around if you look. For instance in my weekly evening folk dance group are two older men in their thirties—one from the administration office, the other an acquaintance of our dance leader, Ellen Verner (she learned from the master, Dick Crum himself)—and three local boys more or less my age. They’re very clumsy at the complicated steps of a horos, czardas, seguidillas, ländler or kolo! But dancing with boys should do wonders to build up my character. For didn’t I promise myself I was going to try sincerely to be normal?
So, observe this exceedingly normal girl showing up in an empty third-floor classroom (chairs pushed back to the wall) on an early May evening in her prettiest white peasant blouse (pulled down off both shoulders as it’s warm in here) and wide voluminous plaid skirt with giant safety pin. Ellen plugs in her phonograph and puts on a 78 rpm horos. We take our positions, alternating men and women (or almost—there are only the five men to the eight of us women, counting Ellen), and as the needle hisses into the groove, begin to move, dipping and swaying.
My partner at the moment is Anthony Campbell. He’s a little young for me! a senior at Northampton High. But he’s very sweet and shy with me, except for half-embarrassed outbursts when he’s gallant and quirky. He makes me laugh, teasing me, “The Campbells are coming, yo ho, yo ho—” I suppose it’s nice once in a while to be with someone not terribly tempting, so as not to succumb to my worst temptations! At least a boy can’t reduce me to a quivering jelly as a girl can, and that’s worthy, don’t you feel?
After the dancing ends, he asks me to go walking now for the third time, so I finally give in. “But I have to be back at the dorm in one hour,” I warn.
“Plenty of time,” he says cheerily. His raggedy grin makes me smile, and off we go. The campus is bursting with green now, all the leaves out, the grass smelling rich and ripe, with woodsy clumps and copses everywhere you turn, and after dark you scarcely need to go far in any direction before you’re in a secluded place. It worries me, really. Now that I come to the point of actually carrying out my solemn vow to stick to boys, I’m all anxiety, and it makes me speak sharply. “Don’t you need to be home?”
“Not till after your curfew.”
“Oh, you probably think it’s silly, me having to be in at a stated time.”
“I don’t think anything you do is silly.”
“Oh, no, I can be very silly sometimes—”
But just then he bends his face down and kisses me. I feel all the nervousness in him run like a lightning bolt to my heels, and all at once it all comes out of me, all the waiting, the vowing, the need. Trying to fling my arms around his neck with at least a little graceful hesitance, I kiss him back.
For the next week, just as my Freshman Finals are starting, the two of us concoct every possible excuse to be together at every possible moment, during which we pack in an impossible number of kisses. This is awful, I feel myself sliding into a morass.
“I have to study. Don’t you have to study?”
“Sometime. Probably. Not this minute.”
“You mustn’t kiss me so much.”
“Why?”
“What if I suffocate?” I say in whimsical despair.
“You’re just afraid you’ll get addicted to it.”
The folk dance group laughs at us and has kind of taken us under its wing like a couple of mooncalves who need protecting. “I feel responsible,” Ellen says, clinging to the arm of her boyfriend, John someone-or-other, a fortyish man who affects a rawhide jacket, string tie and Stetson—here in the wilds of New England just a few miles from Emily Dickinson’s home town for heaven’s sake. “I brought you together. I feel I practically hatched you both.”
One of our group, Ann Cartwright, is a flamenco dancer with her husband Bob. Ann works as a cook at a diner where the students love to hang out because the food is cheap even if it isn’t very good, and especially now toward the end of the school year everyone’s hard-scrimped pennies are running low. Finding out that I play guitar, Ann and Bob have been wild to get me to play flamenco for them to dance to. In public. I’m scared at the prospect.
“Much better than dancing to records,” Ann says.
My most pixilated face opens its trap and says, “Yes, but I can barely play flamenco.”
“Nonsense,” Bob says in his keen-eyed, slightly raving way, “Wasn’t that a very pretty Malagueña I heard you tearing off the other day?”
“Oh that.” I try to explain it’s all noodling and fakery. Anybody who knows the chord progression can fiddle around pretending to play Malagueña, but it’s a long way from that to being the flamenco guitarist for a show. “And I don’t know anything else. I can’t play Malagueña over and over for two solid hours.”
“It won’t run that long. Less than an hour,” says Ann encouragingly. And thus I am wheedled into it. Here we are on the stage of the local grange hall, a hundred or so people out there expecting wonders, Bob in his black hat, tight pants and boots looking exceedingly Spanish with his slicked dark hair, knifelike good looks and eyes that cut through you. Ann, in her flamenco gown, looks the mousy blonde she is, but she really can dance! And here’s me in her second best flamenco gown, it’s cut down to here, she’s smaller-breasted so I’m bulging out of it, perched on my folding chair trying to hide behind the guitar.
A nod. I strike up the starting chord with all the authority I can, and am off on a Seguidillas that I can barely play. Give me E for effort, but Bob is plainly unhappy, and Ann keeps throwing me pained smiles. Thank goodness there are only six dances on the program, of which I cannot play even one with any fluency. We bow ourselves off, me to hide my head in shame. “I’m sorry I wasn’t very good.”
With false heartiness Bob says, “You were fine.”
I fling him a drowning glance. “Nice of you to say.”
In incomprehensible gratitude (consolation?) Bob and Ann invite Anthony and me parking on the high bank of the Connecticut River. The two of them neck in the front; in the back Anthony and I plaster ourselves to one another, trying to find all the ways to kiss each other because we haven’t progressed to doing anything else yet. We roll the windows down, as it’s hot in the car with all four of us doing this! But mosquitoes put an end to that. Up go the windows. We swelter, all the windows steam up, we’re all laughing breathless. In the end we say goodnight, drop Anthony at his house.
Tomorrow is summer vacation. Doggedly I walk back to the dorm, feeling mutilated, as if I’ve lost an arm, a leg, a head. A heart? Hope not. Wouldn’t that be stupid, me falling for a boy?
Home for the summer. What can I say of these three months? Separated from Anthony, I feel half alive. I make a brief effort to perform as a singing guitarist on a twin-engine diesel cruise boat off Beach Haven, New Jersey, living in a room by the week in the little shore town, which is all sand and bleak as Arabia. While the boat makes a twice-daily trip to Atlantic City and back, I try to entertain tourists on the open top. I try to be a strolling girl troubadour, but it’s no use, people can barely hear me over the sea wind and the engine thrum. Besides I’m so shy I can’t meet anyone’s eye. A few of the tourists take pity on me, sit with me, talk with me, but after one couple tries picking me up, I keep a safe distance. After a week of it I give up and go home. There I once more work at the flow control company, this time in the billing office. It’s paralyzingly dull, but it’s $1.25 an hour, the best hourly rate I’ve ever earned.
A radio host in Dolestown gets wind of me through the shop teacher at Gerrold School. So I appear on the local radio station about this oddball thing called folk singing that I do. The tape they make of the show sounds horribly amateurish and embarrassing to me afterward. Am I really that bad? I retreat into myself, singing solitary in my room. I mustn’t miss Anthony, it’s absurd! But I do.
Summer grinds toward its end, August days spent at Kennebunk Beach, then, northward, at Georgetown Island with my parents’ friends. The weather is unearthly pretty but there seems a glass wall between me and it. I read War and Peace and brood by the window, hardly bothering to go outdoors.
On the final day there, Daddy asks me tensely if I’d mind coming outside with him. Ever biddable, in that numb expectancy I’ve learned over the years, I follow him up the slope among the firs to the rounded granite outcrops that form the spine of the island.
“It’s not easy to say this,” he says as I stand dully, wind whipping my T-shirt and shorts. “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
Shouldn’t I at least act shocked? But I’m not. I’m glad, relieved. The atmosphere between my parents over the years has grown so stale and hateful with suppressed anger that I feel like shouting Hallelujah. But of course I can’t tell him that.
I could lie and say I’m sorry to hear it, but as I’m not sorry in the least, all I can say is “Okay …” and wait for him to let me go back. Sympathize? No one ever taught me to do that. I'm just glad I'll be back at college in two more days.
***
Next time: Banjo Pickin’ Girl
It’s been a while since posts … but here’s a nice long one to make up for it. Absaroka, I’m hoping you’ll soon post, too!
Love, Robyn Katie
***
From her perch on the top bunk Harriet, fey, thin, delicate, with long trailing dark hair and eerie black eyes, lustrous as if swollen by uncried tears, murmurs her strange thoughts through the cigarette smoke. “The sense of further walls beyond, that almost crumble … to reveal still more walls …”
“Ethereal,” I tease. “Glimmering. Practically nonexistent.”
“Well, if you insist on going all poetic on me.”
I sit a while staring through the trembling column of smoke. I consider asking her if she ever dates, but since I’ve never seen her with a boy it somehow seems rude to. My tongue moistens my lips. “Do you ever get, oh, lonely?”
Intent, she leans forward to stare down at me. “Always.”
“There are times I hunger so much for someone—”
“Well, after all it’s the human condition, isn’t it? Always alone, all of us. Born that way, die that way, pretty much that way in between.”
“Do you really think there’s no relief from loneliness?”
She is silent for a long time. “I suppose if I were willing to put myself at the whim of someone—but a man? Brrr. You said you’ve—”
“Been in love?” Reluctantly I emit the least possible information. “Well, you know. In high school.”
“No, I meant had sex.”
With a boy, I suppose she means, pry that she is. “Mm-hm,” a little shortly. “You?”
A sigh from Harriet. “But how could I, knowing men speak as if we’re silly creatures, weak, hardly a rational thought, driven by whim, perversity, can’t manage by ourselves … It’s they who’re at the mercy of whim! Aren’t we women the ones who must manage, plan, be strong, practical, think for ourselves?”
“I guess,” I shrug. I’m not sure I care one way or another, but it seems important to her.
“We’re the ones who always have to keep pointing them in the right direction. Men think they know what has to be done, but they don’t. Women have to. Not a role I relish, thanks anyway.”
I bow my head, my long hair falling either side of my face. It needs cutting. Wish we hadn’t gotten off on this topic. Harriet being all towering conceptions and airy fancies, it seems a crime to talk to her about anything mundane like men. Why can’t the words just stop?
The silence rouses me. I look up. From on high, in the top bunk, those eyes are gazing down into mine, so large they seem to swallow the world. “Thought for a second you’d gone to sleep,” she says.
Another long silence, her eyes never leaving mine. Softly she slips down. Needing to use the bathroom, or—? But she is leaning over me, this ratty old armchair creaking under her hands. Turning sideways she brushes a hand along my lap. “May I?”
“Oh—sure.” Scooting over, I make room for her to sit on the arm.
But she shakes her head. Our eyes dart questions. Oh. But— Primly keeping her skirt decent at the knees, she softly sits across my lap, our faces inches apart. “What is it about you?”
“What about me?”
“That makes a person want to kiss you. It’s very vexing.”
“Oh.” Gulp. “I—don’t think it’s anything I can help,” I replied involuntarily. I felt like I had no nerves left. I should tell her I don’t want this. Or do I?
Then we were kissing, her long thin arms wrapped around me. Staring earnestly into my eyes she took my hand. Stood up, pulling at me. Together we moved to the bed, tripping over each other. Automatically I started to get in the bottom bunk, the one that was Debby’s, thinking, did she try to seduce Debby too? Is that why Debby left?
Harriet’s eyes swept upward to the top bunk: hers. I hesitated. “Are you sure?” Sure about everything, the top bunk, me, all of this.
The ceiling was very near; we had just clearance for our heads. Kneeling up there felt very high, the bed wobbling to our movements, like a bird’s nest in a high wind. “What on earth are we doing?” I whispered, adding, “Don’t answer that.”
“Okay I won’t.”
Like maniacs we kissed, grappling wildly, trying to possess every inch of each other. Harriet put me on my back and made jello of me. Frenzied, I whimpered, moaned, arched to her touch. We were moving like ocean billows … Through it all I kept trying to tell myself, Stop it, Robyn, you’re not in love with her. But I’m such a fool! Do I even know how to distinguish sex from love?
“Oh fine, my period’s started,” Harriet said afterward. “Damn it, Robyn! You brought it on!—how could you?”
I flared, “Oh it’s my fault you’re suddenly having your monthlies?” Then, surprised at myself, “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it like it sounded. But honestly, do you really think sex can make you menst—”
Harriet slid to the floor, barefooted to the tiny closet for a robe. “The Goddess Cyclea, her mighty majesty, makes her imperious appearance. Monthly reminder of woman’s shame for sneaking off to the tree, palling with the serpent, munching on the apple ... Don’t stir, Robyn, please? If I came back to find you missing it would be so gruesome …” snatching a tampon from the box on the tiny three-shelf bookcase. “Hang on, I won’t be a sec.” And flung out the door for the bathroom at the end of the hall. Stupefied I sat there in the upper air, wonderingly touching the sheets she and I had just wrinkled. Yipes, we didn’t even turn off the room lights first! Anyone could have walked in on us—!
Shuddering, a little sick, I crawl down off the top bunk, get into my skirt and blouse. This wasn’t like it had been with Lainey—this was a thunderstorm, all electricity nobody can stop. Why didn’t I see it coming? And now it’s over. The air is empty.
In comes Harriet damp and fresh, robe briskly shifting about her legs. With a gusty breath she says, “For one thing, this can’t change anything between us. You understand?”
Bewildered, I mumble, “No. S’pose not,” dropping onto the saggy third-hand couch she and Debby bought at the furniture exchange for three bucks and haulage.
“You needn’t sound so surprised. Of course; what else? I’m normal, don’t forget.”
“I don’t understand, I thought we were—”
“We’re not.”
My mouth opened but nothing came out, so it closed again.
“So what we’re looking at here,” she went on, pacing, “is just satisfying a simple need. A girl can’t be expected to go without, just because there aren’t any boys around, am I right? And everything’ll be just like it was before? Promise?”
Halfheartedly I say something that sounds vaguely like agreement. I’m seeing how big a mistake this was. There it is, like in a telescope: our future. Never able to meet each other’s eyes again, never soar in conversations with no limits.
“Good, ‘cause I wouldn’t want to lose our friendship.”
“Oh, no fear about that, honest.” I stumble away to my room, full of loss. Silent vow: from now on I will really try my hardest to want nothing but boys. Ever after and twice on Sundays, amen.
Not that boys abound in this nearly all-female college community! But local boys are around if you look. For instance in my weekly evening folk dance group are two older men in their thirties—one from the administration office, the other an acquaintance of our dance leader, Ellen Verner (she learned from the master, Dick Crum himself)—and three local boys more or less my age. They’re very clumsy at the complicated steps of a horos, czardas, seguidillas, ländler or kolo! But dancing with boys should do wonders to build up my character. For didn’t I promise myself I was going to try sincerely to be normal?
So, observe this exceedingly normal girl showing up in an empty third-floor classroom (chairs pushed back to the wall) on an early May evening in her prettiest white peasant blouse (pulled down off both shoulders as it’s warm in here) and wide voluminous plaid skirt with giant safety pin. Ellen plugs in her phonograph and puts on a 78 rpm horos. We take our positions, alternating men and women (or almost—there are only the five men to the eight of us women, counting Ellen), and as the needle hisses into the groove, begin to move, dipping and swaying.
My partner at the moment is Anthony Campbell. He’s a little young for me! a senior at Northampton High. But he’s very sweet and shy with me, except for half-embarrassed outbursts when he’s gallant and quirky. He makes me laugh, teasing me, “The Campbells are coming, yo ho, yo ho—” I suppose it’s nice once in a while to be with someone not terribly tempting, so as not to succumb to my worst temptations! At least a boy can’t reduce me to a quivering jelly as a girl can, and that’s worthy, don’t you feel?
After the dancing ends, he asks me to go walking now for the third time, so I finally give in. “But I have to be back at the dorm in one hour,” I warn.
“Plenty of time,” he says cheerily. His raggedy grin makes me smile, and off we go. The campus is bursting with green now, all the leaves out, the grass smelling rich and ripe, with woodsy clumps and copses everywhere you turn, and after dark you scarcely need to go far in any direction before you’re in a secluded place. It worries me, really. Now that I come to the point of actually carrying out my solemn vow to stick to boys, I’m all anxiety, and it makes me speak sharply. “Don’t you need to be home?”
“Not till after your curfew.”
“Oh, you probably think it’s silly, me having to be in at a stated time.”
“I don’t think anything you do is silly.”
“Oh, no, I can be very silly sometimes—”
But just then he bends his face down and kisses me. I feel all the nervousness in him run like a lightning bolt to my heels, and all at once it all comes out of me, all the waiting, the vowing, the need. Trying to fling my arms around his neck with at least a little graceful hesitance, I kiss him back.
For the next week, just as my Freshman Finals are starting, the two of us concoct every possible excuse to be together at every possible moment, during which we pack in an impossible number of kisses. This is awful, I feel myself sliding into a morass.
“I have to study. Don’t you have to study?”
“Sometime. Probably. Not this minute.”
“You mustn’t kiss me so much.”
“Why?”
“What if I suffocate?” I say in whimsical despair.
“You’re just afraid you’ll get addicted to it.”
The folk dance group laughs at us and has kind of taken us under its wing like a couple of mooncalves who need protecting. “I feel responsible,” Ellen says, clinging to the arm of her boyfriend, John someone-or-other, a fortyish man who affects a rawhide jacket, string tie and Stetson—here in the wilds of New England just a few miles from Emily Dickinson’s home town for heaven’s sake. “I brought you together. I feel I practically hatched you both.”
One of our group, Ann Cartwright, is a flamenco dancer with her husband Bob. Ann works as a cook at a diner where the students love to hang out because the food is cheap even if it isn’t very good, and especially now toward the end of the school year everyone’s hard-scrimped pennies are running low. Finding out that I play guitar, Ann and Bob have been wild to get me to play flamenco for them to dance to. In public. I’m scared at the prospect.
“Much better than dancing to records,” Ann says.
My most pixilated face opens its trap and says, “Yes, but I can barely play flamenco.”
“Nonsense,” Bob says in his keen-eyed, slightly raving way, “Wasn’t that a very pretty Malagueña I heard you tearing off the other day?”
“Oh that.” I try to explain it’s all noodling and fakery. Anybody who knows the chord progression can fiddle around pretending to play Malagueña, but it’s a long way from that to being the flamenco guitarist for a show. “And I don’t know anything else. I can’t play Malagueña over and over for two solid hours.”
“It won’t run that long. Less than an hour,” says Ann encouragingly. And thus I am wheedled into it. Here we are on the stage of the local grange hall, a hundred or so people out there expecting wonders, Bob in his black hat, tight pants and boots looking exceedingly Spanish with his slicked dark hair, knifelike good looks and eyes that cut through you. Ann, in her flamenco gown, looks the mousy blonde she is, but she really can dance! And here’s me in her second best flamenco gown, it’s cut down to here, she’s smaller-breasted so I’m bulging out of it, perched on my folding chair trying to hide behind the guitar.
A nod. I strike up the starting chord with all the authority I can, and am off on a Seguidillas that I can barely play. Give me E for effort, but Bob is plainly unhappy, and Ann keeps throwing me pained smiles. Thank goodness there are only six dances on the program, of which I cannot play even one with any fluency. We bow ourselves off, me to hide my head in shame. “I’m sorry I wasn’t very good.”
With false heartiness Bob says, “You were fine.”
I fling him a drowning glance. “Nice of you to say.”
In incomprehensible gratitude (consolation?) Bob and Ann invite Anthony and me parking on the high bank of the Connecticut River. The two of them neck in the front; in the back Anthony and I plaster ourselves to one another, trying to find all the ways to kiss each other because we haven’t progressed to doing anything else yet. We roll the windows down, as it’s hot in the car with all four of us doing this! But mosquitoes put an end to that. Up go the windows. We swelter, all the windows steam up, we’re all laughing breathless. In the end we say goodnight, drop Anthony at his house.
Tomorrow is summer vacation. Doggedly I walk back to the dorm, feeling mutilated, as if I’ve lost an arm, a leg, a head. A heart? Hope not. Wouldn’t that be stupid, me falling for a boy?
Home for the summer. What can I say of these three months? Separated from Anthony, I feel half alive. I make a brief effort to perform as a singing guitarist on a twin-engine diesel cruise boat off Beach Haven, New Jersey, living in a room by the week in the little shore town, which is all sand and bleak as Arabia. While the boat makes a twice-daily trip to Atlantic City and back, I try to entertain tourists on the open top. I try to be a strolling girl troubadour, but it’s no use, people can barely hear me over the sea wind and the engine thrum. Besides I’m so shy I can’t meet anyone’s eye. A few of the tourists take pity on me, sit with me, talk with me, but after one couple tries picking me up, I keep a safe distance. After a week of it I give up and go home. There I once more work at the flow control company, this time in the billing office. It’s paralyzingly dull, but it’s $1.25 an hour, the best hourly rate I’ve ever earned.
A radio host in Dolestown gets wind of me through the shop teacher at Gerrold School. So I appear on the local radio station about this oddball thing called folk singing that I do. The tape they make of the show sounds horribly amateurish and embarrassing to me afterward. Am I really that bad? I retreat into myself, singing solitary in my room. I mustn’t miss Anthony, it’s absurd! But I do.
Summer grinds toward its end, August days spent at Kennebunk Beach, then, northward, at Georgetown Island with my parents’ friends. The weather is unearthly pretty but there seems a glass wall between me and it. I read War and Peace and brood by the window, hardly bothering to go outdoors.
On the final day there, Daddy asks me tensely if I’d mind coming outside with him. Ever biddable, in that numb expectancy I’ve learned over the years, I follow him up the slope among the firs to the rounded granite outcrops that form the spine of the island.
“It’s not easy to say this,” he says as I stand dully, wind whipping my T-shirt and shorts. “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”
Shouldn’t I at least act shocked? But I’m not. I’m glad, relieved. The atmosphere between my parents over the years has grown so stale and hateful with suppressed anger that I feel like shouting Hallelujah. But of course I can’t tell him that.
I could lie and say I’m sorry to hear it, but as I’m not sorry in the least, all I can say is “Okay …” and wait for him to let me go back. Sympathize? No one ever taught me to do that. I'm just glad I'll be back at college in two more days.
***
Next time: Banjo Pickin’ Girl
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Erin great last chapter, and I understand why this is on hold for a while. First things first. But if this was a song that could have been a great shout chorus.
Robyn, Harriet reminds me of my grandmother. Not sexually but in general attitude, especially towards men. Which explains some stuff about my mom.
Sorry I've been away. Next installment follows.
Absaroka
Robyn, Harriet reminds me of my grandmother. Not sexually but in general attitude, especially towards men. Which explains some stuff about my mom.
Sorry I've been away. Next installment follows.
Absaroka
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Here's the next chapter
The sex is here because I just didn't see how to write about these people without resolving it in some way. Remember that at some level this is just 3 sides of one person. I'd have liked to talked more about how Vickie goes from not wanting to be touched tenderly, only in play, to liking sex but this was long enough already so just chalk it up to hormones and aggression.
M.G.s talk with her dad is reminiscent, as are many things in this, of my relationship with my eldest daughter. I learned a lot about that relationship writing this story. I was also quite touched that she told me rather than her mom about her sex life when she became sexually active.
But what this chapter was really about was Hannah. The real Hannah was a very close friend for a long time and her friendship continues to be a gift from God even though she has left this level of existence. She had a lot of conflicts about herself and died of an accidental overdose in unclear circumstances. This was my way to say goodbye to her. If she was alive I'd have loved to have given her this book-there wouldn't be anything in it she didn't already know although I wouldn't have killed her in the book had she not died in real life.
The carnival was an attempt to imitate Kerouac.
"I want to tell you something else" she finally said. She thought she had sounded pretty casual about it. But looking into his face she could see she'd given something away. In fact she thought that he probably had a pretty good idea what she wanted to talk to him about. "We can sit on that tree over there. The one facing over the cliff" he told her. "I expect I'm going to need to pay close attention for a bit." At least he didn't seem angry. They sat and then she got up and stood behind a tree to pee for a moment. She wondered briefly why she needed the privacy of the tree with her father. But she did. When she was finished she went back to the fallen tree and sat for a while before speaking.
Andy’s parents had long ago had The Talk with him and then upon consideration took it upon themselves to attempt the same talk alone with Vickie since they doubted anyone else would. All the books about step kids and foster kids said that this was a situation that had to be considered and Vickie was at their house all the time now it seemed. And Zechariah had done the same with his daughter as best he could. And then the three of them had of course compared notes and had even all sat with Zechariah a couple of evenings and discussed things while he listened and ventured a word or two here and there. In the end without saying so they had all subscribed to most of the beliefs of Andy’s parents, if not to their hopes. But it was time for Mountain Girl to tell him about something more than beliefs.
It was Vickie of course who had felt it was time to find out what all the fuss was really about. She was sexy and confident or at least appeared that way to the rest of the world and there was any number of boys who would be happy to oblige her. Andy seemed like the obvious choice to her, just as his parents had feared, but there was something wrong with that picture. She didn’t know what but when she contemplated the idea she kept having a feeling that bothered her. She had talked to Mountain Girl about it one time when Andy wasn't there and Mountain Girl had just said that if it felt funny then she should listen to her feeling. So it wouldn’t be Andy.
Her brothers had left her with no desire to be dominated by any man ever and with the exception of her friends in her band that ruled out most of the boys who had the courage to talk to her. She thought of her guitar player, George, or even any of the other boys in her band, but she wasn’t going to risk any trouble with the band with her experimentation and all the entanglements she knew that this could produce. Finally she thought of a boy named Jeff in her class who was quiet and pleasant and who she knew had a tremendous crush on her. He reminded her of Andy. And suddenly she had a strange idea. Maybe it would be okay, she thought, to consider a boyfriend. A normal boyfriend, whatever that was.
She took to talking to him and flirting with him till one day she lost patience and just asked him out instead of waiting any longer. After their date she kissed him goodnight and told him to call her and as he drove away he thought he was in heaven. She told Andy all about it the next day and was full of plans to find him a girlfriend as well.
A few weeks later she was done waiting. She seduced Jeff with a minimum of effort but a fair amount of confusion on both their parts. Whatever else it was however it was fun, that was for sure. It happened a couple of days before they were planning to go on one of their visits to the mountain, and Vickie, who had kept Andy abreast of all the developments between her and Jeff, had kept mum about this, just saying that she wanted to talk with both of them about a surprise. When they got there the three of them had immediately secluded themselves and Vickie given them a moment by moment account of the whole thing. Andy had the thought that he should be jealous but somehow that feeling just wasn’t there; he knew that the telling of the story was the true intimacy. If anything it was Mountain Girl who was jealous. Who was there for her besides Andy? Ron and Kelly? She didn't know what to think about this. She didn't even know how to think about this.
She finished telling the story to her father. He was at a loss for words, which in spite of his habitual silence was something that seldom happened. Teenage girls were different from lonely older men, he knew that. But this was his daughter. If he couldn't provide some sort of guidance who would? And there was something she wasn't telling him. He hoped it wasn't what he hoped it wasn't.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't upset about Vickie. He was concerned however. He told her about taking care of her as a child. Was Vickie ready for that? Was Mountain Girl ready for that? And what wasn't she telling him?
She told him how she would see Andy looking at her and know what he was feeling. How Ron would look at her the same way. And Lee also, she thought. She wondered about that. There were words for this and she wasn't sure she should use them. He told her that by now she knew what was right. She was an adult in his eyes. She wondered exactly what he meant.
There was more silence and then together they rose and began walking home. The trees seemed greener somehow. A coyote in the distance sounded louder. It was odd to hear it at this time of day. She wondered if it meant something. She figured Andy had conversations with his parents like this sometimes. It must be nice to have a mother in addition to a father she thought. But one parent would do just fine.
After a little while she told him that she hoped Vickie was able to talk to Andy’s dad about these things.
It was only a few weeks later. Andy had come to visit her alone; Vickie had stayed at his house in the midst of a creative frenzy concerning music for her band. The two of them had been fishing when Andy suddenly thought that he had never seen Mountain Girl look quite so pretty. He had tickled her and while they were wrestling around had pretended to kiss her the way they did when they were playing their game but with Vickie not there neither of them could find a reason to stop and pretty soon they were gone. For both of them it felt like one giant all encompassing hug mixed up with adolescent passion but most of all it felt like what had been happening between them for years but just more so. They lay there together for a long time in the warm sunshine before thinking that they might as well get back with the fish and that they definitely had to do this again soon. Her father had told her to make up her own mind. She had, and there was no need to consult with him. Of course if he were to ask her questions that might be another matter. Maybe she should tell him. Vickie would call that giving respect. But she wasn't worried, in fact she was mighty pleased with herself.
Andy on the other hand was terribly upset with himself the next day. His parents had drummed into him that he did not want to get anyone pregnant or catch any of the horrible diseases that they had told him about. He figured that neither of them had any diseases to give each other but there was still that terrifying other possibility. Next time they would need to plan this out a bit better. When he got back he waited frantically for a letter and a week and a half later one came telling him that it would all be okay this time. He had told Vickie as soon as he got home. She had congratulated him but something in her voice was less than enthusiastic. A day later after school they had gone into the graveyard by the river for a long talk and she had told him all her concerns about where any of this could lead. She liked Jeff, but he was just a boyfriend. In spite of some of her earlier thoughts about this he was really not all that important. Andy and Mountain Girl were different. Where did this leave her? It was one more thing for Andy to worry about. One more potential catastrophe as far as he was concerned; all his fault and he hadn't even done anything wrong.
In the end it was something that Vickie and Mountain Girl figured out. It wasn’t anything that any of them felt like talking about to others and was all a bit of a surprise to them but their solution seemed to work. Andy was a bit horrified at their suggestion and didn’t want anything to do with the idea at first, thinking that it sounded all too much like something he would read in a magazine best kept from his family.
But then one night they drank more wine than they had planned on as they watched the sun set over Cat Ear Lake. They crawled into the lean to and all three of them quickly fell asleep. Andy woke out of a dream sometime in the middle of the night to discover that Mountain Girl was kissing him as she lay on top of him. The blanket was over both of them and she was naked. He lay there in an enjoyable confusion kissing her till he remembered where he was and paused to look around and assure himself that Vickie was still safely passed out. To his horror she was lying next to them, smiling at them both in the moonlight. He started to say something but Mountain Girl took his face in her hands to kiss him again and as she did Vickie reached over to tickle him. And then he couldn’t have said no to them even if he had wanted to, which he most definitely no longer did. As they fell back asleep later he thought that it wasn’t anything like the stories he had read. He could stop worrying.
Jeff fell by the wayside a little later with Vickie explaining to him that with the way he had treated her that he should have no trouble at all finding a new girlfriend. She made sure that the other girls knew she would not be upset if he got some attention from them and even encouraged a couple of them to flirt with him. He was to have fond memories of her for a long time along with more than a touch of relief that she had done this before he did. He had discovered that she was a great fantasy but not really who he wanted and with her reputation for enjoying a good fight he had been wondering how to extricate himself from the situation he had so eagerly gotten. It was okay. She had Andy and she didn't have to worry as long as she had Mountain Girl to share him with.
Fall came and as the weather became cooler she saw her new friends less and less. One afternoon she lay sleeping in the sun after a solitary swim and Ron and Kelly appeared over her. They were full of questions. How was she? Why had she not been in school? What was up with her anyway that they only ever saw her in this one place? It was a small town, she must be somewhere sometime………They were going to meet Lee and Hannah later. Did she want to come with them? Taken unaware she replied that she had told her father she would be home before dark that day and now they knew something about her, that she had some sort of family. They offered to walk with her back into town, just wanting to visit and now she had to think of a way out of this situation that she had so easily gotten herself into. Well, she thought, there was still a few hours of light left. She started down the way they always came to the falls with them. She actually knew the way pretty well; understanding every possible route to any given destination was something she automatically made sure that she did and she had actually followed the trail down to the town a few times alone anyway. Just before they reached the road the path crossed an old wood road. She extracted a promise to see them next week and to accompany them into the town itself and then she paused for a moment, looked at the abandoned road and said “Well I go this way” and disappeared as quickly as she had with Andy and his family a couple of years ago. But a visit into town with her friends sounded enticing. She would have to find a way to have her father understand that this would be okay. He was so accepting of her independence in the mountains but seemed to have a complete horror of her having anything to do with civilization. It was as if he feared the rest of the world would take his daughter from him she thought as she tried to think of a way to reassure him that one visit to town did not constitute her abandonment of him.
The next weekend Andy and Vickie came to visit. She explained to everyone concerned what she wanted to do and Zechariah thought that this might be some sort of a turning point. He thought of how he'd thought of telling her it would be okay to have Lee come see where she lived and had been unable to do this; unable to tell her this. Andy and Vickie lived a few hours away. Lee lived only a half days walk away. It would be far better not to risk it. Mountain Girl watched her fathers face as she told him. There wasn't a solitary flicker of emotion but she could see every thought he was having anyway. The occasion didn't call for any sort of a good bye but she went over and hugged him. "I love you daddy." She laughed, a Vickie laugh. "But you know that" And then to the astonishment of all three of them Vickie hugged him and kissed his cheek. "Don't worry about us" she said in a voice he seldom heard her use. He thought of her words as she left. "Don't worry about us" Not don't worry about your daughter. Don't worry about any of the three of us. Us. That was the word she had used. He thought of that word the rest of the evening.
The three of them went out to the ledges which she had taken them to a couple of other times already and on the way she told them again of her concerns about Hannah. When to her disappointment her other friends weren’t there Andy suggested that they go down the trail and into the town and try to find them. Mountain Girl knew their names and it was a small town, it couldn’t be that hard. But to everyone’s relief half way down the trail they ran Ron, Kelly and a couple of other boys, Jimmy and Ricky, that Mountain Girl recognized from the summer. They were astonished to see Mystery Girl, as they still referred to her sometimes, with other people. But everything they ever learned about her seemed to be another surprise so introductions were made and they all continued back into town.
They told her that Hannah was at Lee’s house and led Mountain Girl and her friends through the small town. Mountain Girl could feel her excitement fading, replaced with a strange fear as they walked through the dusky streets. She tried to think of what it was that she was afraid of but she couldn’t think of anything. Her friends in the town were all nice people and she trusted them. She had the absurd thought that they were trying to take something away from her, but what did she have that they could take? It couldn’t be anything to do with them. Perhaps it was being in the town. But no, she went to the town below her home regularly now and it was reasonably comfortable. That couldn’t be it. She gave up trying to figure it out. Thinking about it just made her more anxious and made her stomach hurt. It would be okay she told herself. She had Andy and Vickie with her. Nothing could happen to the three of them here. She repeated that to herself until she felt a little calmer and then they were at Lee’s house. Lee and Hannah were sitting on the porch, lazy and excited all at the same time, and started exclaiming lets go when they saw them, running down off the porch and leading them back the way they had just come towards some unknown excitement that Mountain Girl had noticed in the distance and had been wondering about.
The excitement was some sort of a carnival going on that weekend and they all went to it, with Andy treating Mountain Girl. She loved all the overpriced food, hamburgers and hot dogs and French fires with extravagant gobs of ketchup and mustard and cotton candy and popcorn and a host of other things she had never eaten before, all helped on their way to her stomach with two secret bottles of wine that Ron and Hannah had brought. The wine and the food relaxed Mountain Girl enough that her stomach stopped hurting and she began to enjoy herself. They rode on the rides with a childish enthusiasm and wasted money on games they weren't going to win but they didn't care and she could see Vickie trying hard to talk to Hannah and hoped that her idea was working. Then suddenly they were tired of the carnival so they walked around the town for awhile again, omnipotent teenagers ruling their little world but with none of the menace that accompanied Vickie’s friends when they did this; just a bunch of kids showing off a little bit and generally minding their own business. The wine was gone so they descended on the house of a friend of Kelly's, a guy named Craig. He was home alone with his sister Tina and they commandeered some of his parents booze and set out wandering around the town again. As they walked through streets that were already growing deserted and quiet she wondered what it must be like for her friends to live here. Maybe she could come see them another time. But when she thought about that her stomach started to hurt again.
She took the last bottle from Tina and finished what was left of it, which wasn’t very much. Then without any warning she threw it against a wall as hard as she could, feeling like she was about to lose something infinitely precious to her. Tina stepped away from her and everyone stared for a moment till Andy put his arm around her and the feeling faded. But it was time to go.
They said happy goodbyes to everyone except Lee who walked with them to where the little stream ran under a bridge at the edge of town and then the three of them said goodbye to Lee too. Lee was talking about how much fun it had been and hugging them and then she hugged Mountain Girl really hard and kissed her on the cheek and said she loved her and it just made Mountain Girl's stomach hurt again. And then like someone had turned a page in a book Lee was gone and they were walking up the trail to the ledges. It was easy enough to follow in the moonlight and within a few minutes she felt normal again. The three of them sat by the waterfall smoking one and then a second joint, the only ones they had brought and something that they hadn’t wanted to share with the others.
The evening was suddenly a distant unreal memory while Mountain Girl showed them the little statues she had made and they stared at them for awhile as if wondering if they would come to life. Then they stretched out by the water and fell asleep for awhile with some blankets they had left there. Just before dawn they rose and walked through the fog shrouded awakening forest back to the cabin where Zechariah was already gone for the morning. The fear of the night before was gone, all was right with the world in the mountain mists.
She would see her friends only a couple of more times before it was too cold for them to consider going for what for them was just an afternoon by the river. The first time was a week later when the usual foursome appeared and they exchanged a pleasant afternoon that now felt warm and comfortable to Mountain Girl with none of the shyness she had felt in the beginning or the fear she had felt in her foray into their world of the town below. As she listened to them talk she thought about how this had seemed to start the same way that her friendship with Andy had but that somehow it never got past a certain point. They were nice people and she supposed that she could trust them with some of the details of her life here. She thought about going to visit them in their town another time. It had been fun the first time once she got used to the idea, why not a second time? Or maybe she could even let them know who she was, who’s daughter she was. It seemed like it ought to be an okay idea too.
But there was something that felt wrong again. A sort of secret guilt, a shame for wanting to do it. It just wouldn’t be right, she thought and wondered why the whole idea seemed to make her feel like she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have. She guessed it was because only a few people in life were supposed to know who you really were. She had three, that was enough. It was time to think about something else, so she tried to listen to what they were talking about again. Stuff about school was coming soon and the teachers and who they hoped wouldn't be there this year. The same things Vickie and Andy sometimes talked about. She had a few dim memories of school. It hadn't seemed like a good idea then and didn't seem any better now, but she listened to her friends because she liked the sound of their voices.
The last time she saw anyone there before the cold weather really set in was a very different experience. One afternoon as she walked out of the woods onto the rocks she saw a solitary figure hunched over as if trying to protect itself from existence itself. It was Hannah. Mountain Girl watched her for a moment and then spoke. Hannah turned to her with tear streaked eyes and Mountain Girl thought that this was what crying looked like, something that was only a dim memory for her. They talked about a situation that sounded pretty much insoluble to both of them and then sat in silence till long after dark, Mountain Girl unwilling to leave her friend here alone and Hannah seemingly unable to leave. Finally with the aid of the marijuana that Hannah always seemed to have they fell asleep lying on the rocks staring up at the stars the way Mountain Girl liked to when she was alone here and in the morning she had walked with Hannah all the way down the trail wondering what would happen to her friend. As they neared the town once more she began to feel uneasy. She forced herself to ignore it. Hannah needed her. She walked her all the way home and then hurried back up to the waterfall. She sat for a while more, overwhelmed with something, she wasn't quite sure what. Something to do with Hannah's pain but something else as well.
She decided to talk to Andy and Vickie about it as soon as she saw them but they had no ideas either. When she would see Lee, Ron, and Kelly next summer they would explain that Hannah was in some sort of a rehab and Vickie would tell her that this was probably not going to help anything at all but they could always hope. She would see her other friends from time to time over the summer but would not see Hannah again. The snow came and went while she wondered what had become of the girl she attempted to comfort that strange night and then Lee would find at the rocks one day and tell her that Hannah was gone. She knew little of the details and the circumstances of her departure from this life would forever be unclear to Mountain Girl but Vickie said that this was just the way these things seemed to happen and she accepted that opinion. Sometimes. But Hannah's departure meant something. She didn't know what, and didn't like to think about how it made her feel. Missing her friend, sadness at her loss and her pain; she could feel that and it just hurt. But there was something else amid all of what her father and Andy said was normal grief. Something dark, ominous, mysterious, and un-namable. Not the rage that Vickie greeting this sort of thing. Rather it was something that when it crept into her awareness she summoned up every ounce of courage and strength she had just not to think or feel about.
Hannah had died in town. Not in the mountains. Had she been in the mountains with Mountain Girl none of this would have happened. She believed that. She even let herself think about it once in a while, even if she sometimes had to throw up if she thought about it very long.
The sex is here because I just didn't see how to write about these people without resolving it in some way. Remember that at some level this is just 3 sides of one person. I'd have liked to talked more about how Vickie goes from not wanting to be touched tenderly, only in play, to liking sex but this was long enough already so just chalk it up to hormones and aggression.
M.G.s talk with her dad is reminiscent, as are many things in this, of my relationship with my eldest daughter. I learned a lot about that relationship writing this story. I was also quite touched that she told me rather than her mom about her sex life when she became sexually active.
But what this chapter was really about was Hannah. The real Hannah was a very close friend for a long time and her friendship continues to be a gift from God even though she has left this level of existence. She had a lot of conflicts about herself and died of an accidental overdose in unclear circumstances. This was my way to say goodbye to her. If she was alive I'd have loved to have given her this book-there wouldn't be anything in it she didn't already know although I wouldn't have killed her in the book had she not died in real life.
The carnival was an attempt to imitate Kerouac.
"I want to tell you something else" she finally said. She thought she had sounded pretty casual about it. But looking into his face she could see she'd given something away. In fact she thought that he probably had a pretty good idea what she wanted to talk to him about. "We can sit on that tree over there. The one facing over the cliff" he told her. "I expect I'm going to need to pay close attention for a bit." At least he didn't seem angry. They sat and then she got up and stood behind a tree to pee for a moment. She wondered briefly why she needed the privacy of the tree with her father. But she did. When she was finished she went back to the fallen tree and sat for a while before speaking.
Andy’s parents had long ago had The Talk with him and then upon consideration took it upon themselves to attempt the same talk alone with Vickie since they doubted anyone else would. All the books about step kids and foster kids said that this was a situation that had to be considered and Vickie was at their house all the time now it seemed. And Zechariah had done the same with his daughter as best he could. And then the three of them had of course compared notes and had even all sat with Zechariah a couple of evenings and discussed things while he listened and ventured a word or two here and there. In the end without saying so they had all subscribed to most of the beliefs of Andy’s parents, if not to their hopes. But it was time for Mountain Girl to tell him about something more than beliefs.
It was Vickie of course who had felt it was time to find out what all the fuss was really about. She was sexy and confident or at least appeared that way to the rest of the world and there was any number of boys who would be happy to oblige her. Andy seemed like the obvious choice to her, just as his parents had feared, but there was something wrong with that picture. She didn’t know what but when she contemplated the idea she kept having a feeling that bothered her. She had talked to Mountain Girl about it one time when Andy wasn't there and Mountain Girl had just said that if it felt funny then she should listen to her feeling. So it wouldn’t be Andy.
Her brothers had left her with no desire to be dominated by any man ever and with the exception of her friends in her band that ruled out most of the boys who had the courage to talk to her. She thought of her guitar player, George, or even any of the other boys in her band, but she wasn’t going to risk any trouble with the band with her experimentation and all the entanglements she knew that this could produce. Finally she thought of a boy named Jeff in her class who was quiet and pleasant and who she knew had a tremendous crush on her. He reminded her of Andy. And suddenly she had a strange idea. Maybe it would be okay, she thought, to consider a boyfriend. A normal boyfriend, whatever that was.
She took to talking to him and flirting with him till one day she lost patience and just asked him out instead of waiting any longer. After their date she kissed him goodnight and told him to call her and as he drove away he thought he was in heaven. She told Andy all about it the next day and was full of plans to find him a girlfriend as well.
A few weeks later she was done waiting. She seduced Jeff with a minimum of effort but a fair amount of confusion on both their parts. Whatever else it was however it was fun, that was for sure. It happened a couple of days before they were planning to go on one of their visits to the mountain, and Vickie, who had kept Andy abreast of all the developments between her and Jeff, had kept mum about this, just saying that she wanted to talk with both of them about a surprise. When they got there the three of them had immediately secluded themselves and Vickie given them a moment by moment account of the whole thing. Andy had the thought that he should be jealous but somehow that feeling just wasn’t there; he knew that the telling of the story was the true intimacy. If anything it was Mountain Girl who was jealous. Who was there for her besides Andy? Ron and Kelly? She didn't know what to think about this. She didn't even know how to think about this.
She finished telling the story to her father. He was at a loss for words, which in spite of his habitual silence was something that seldom happened. Teenage girls were different from lonely older men, he knew that. But this was his daughter. If he couldn't provide some sort of guidance who would? And there was something she wasn't telling him. He hoped it wasn't what he hoped it wasn't.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't upset about Vickie. He was concerned however. He told her about taking care of her as a child. Was Vickie ready for that? Was Mountain Girl ready for that? And what wasn't she telling him?
She told him how she would see Andy looking at her and know what he was feeling. How Ron would look at her the same way. And Lee also, she thought. She wondered about that. There were words for this and she wasn't sure she should use them. He told her that by now she knew what was right. She was an adult in his eyes. She wondered exactly what he meant.
There was more silence and then together they rose and began walking home. The trees seemed greener somehow. A coyote in the distance sounded louder. It was odd to hear it at this time of day. She wondered if it meant something. She figured Andy had conversations with his parents like this sometimes. It must be nice to have a mother in addition to a father she thought. But one parent would do just fine.
After a little while she told him that she hoped Vickie was able to talk to Andy’s dad about these things.
It was only a few weeks later. Andy had come to visit her alone; Vickie had stayed at his house in the midst of a creative frenzy concerning music for her band. The two of them had been fishing when Andy suddenly thought that he had never seen Mountain Girl look quite so pretty. He had tickled her and while they were wrestling around had pretended to kiss her the way they did when they were playing their game but with Vickie not there neither of them could find a reason to stop and pretty soon they were gone. For both of them it felt like one giant all encompassing hug mixed up with adolescent passion but most of all it felt like what had been happening between them for years but just more so. They lay there together for a long time in the warm sunshine before thinking that they might as well get back with the fish and that they definitely had to do this again soon. Her father had told her to make up her own mind. She had, and there was no need to consult with him. Of course if he were to ask her questions that might be another matter. Maybe she should tell him. Vickie would call that giving respect. But she wasn't worried, in fact she was mighty pleased with herself.
Andy on the other hand was terribly upset with himself the next day. His parents had drummed into him that he did not want to get anyone pregnant or catch any of the horrible diseases that they had told him about. He figured that neither of them had any diseases to give each other but there was still that terrifying other possibility. Next time they would need to plan this out a bit better. When he got back he waited frantically for a letter and a week and a half later one came telling him that it would all be okay this time. He had told Vickie as soon as he got home. She had congratulated him but something in her voice was less than enthusiastic. A day later after school they had gone into the graveyard by the river for a long talk and she had told him all her concerns about where any of this could lead. She liked Jeff, but he was just a boyfriend. In spite of some of her earlier thoughts about this he was really not all that important. Andy and Mountain Girl were different. Where did this leave her? It was one more thing for Andy to worry about. One more potential catastrophe as far as he was concerned; all his fault and he hadn't even done anything wrong.
In the end it was something that Vickie and Mountain Girl figured out. It wasn’t anything that any of them felt like talking about to others and was all a bit of a surprise to them but their solution seemed to work. Andy was a bit horrified at their suggestion and didn’t want anything to do with the idea at first, thinking that it sounded all too much like something he would read in a magazine best kept from his family.
But then one night they drank more wine than they had planned on as they watched the sun set over Cat Ear Lake. They crawled into the lean to and all three of them quickly fell asleep. Andy woke out of a dream sometime in the middle of the night to discover that Mountain Girl was kissing him as she lay on top of him. The blanket was over both of them and she was naked. He lay there in an enjoyable confusion kissing her till he remembered where he was and paused to look around and assure himself that Vickie was still safely passed out. To his horror she was lying next to them, smiling at them both in the moonlight. He started to say something but Mountain Girl took his face in her hands to kiss him again and as she did Vickie reached over to tickle him. And then he couldn’t have said no to them even if he had wanted to, which he most definitely no longer did. As they fell back asleep later he thought that it wasn’t anything like the stories he had read. He could stop worrying.
Jeff fell by the wayside a little later with Vickie explaining to him that with the way he had treated her that he should have no trouble at all finding a new girlfriend. She made sure that the other girls knew she would not be upset if he got some attention from them and even encouraged a couple of them to flirt with him. He was to have fond memories of her for a long time along with more than a touch of relief that she had done this before he did. He had discovered that she was a great fantasy but not really who he wanted and with her reputation for enjoying a good fight he had been wondering how to extricate himself from the situation he had so eagerly gotten. It was okay. She had Andy and she didn't have to worry as long as she had Mountain Girl to share him with.
Fall came and as the weather became cooler she saw her new friends less and less. One afternoon she lay sleeping in the sun after a solitary swim and Ron and Kelly appeared over her. They were full of questions. How was she? Why had she not been in school? What was up with her anyway that they only ever saw her in this one place? It was a small town, she must be somewhere sometime………They were going to meet Lee and Hannah later. Did she want to come with them? Taken unaware she replied that she had told her father she would be home before dark that day and now they knew something about her, that she had some sort of family. They offered to walk with her back into town, just wanting to visit and now she had to think of a way out of this situation that she had so easily gotten herself into. Well, she thought, there was still a few hours of light left. She started down the way they always came to the falls with them. She actually knew the way pretty well; understanding every possible route to any given destination was something she automatically made sure that she did and she had actually followed the trail down to the town a few times alone anyway. Just before they reached the road the path crossed an old wood road. She extracted a promise to see them next week and to accompany them into the town itself and then she paused for a moment, looked at the abandoned road and said “Well I go this way” and disappeared as quickly as she had with Andy and his family a couple of years ago. But a visit into town with her friends sounded enticing. She would have to find a way to have her father understand that this would be okay. He was so accepting of her independence in the mountains but seemed to have a complete horror of her having anything to do with civilization. It was as if he feared the rest of the world would take his daughter from him she thought as she tried to think of a way to reassure him that one visit to town did not constitute her abandonment of him.
The next weekend Andy and Vickie came to visit. She explained to everyone concerned what she wanted to do and Zechariah thought that this might be some sort of a turning point. He thought of how he'd thought of telling her it would be okay to have Lee come see where she lived and had been unable to do this; unable to tell her this. Andy and Vickie lived a few hours away. Lee lived only a half days walk away. It would be far better not to risk it. Mountain Girl watched her fathers face as she told him. There wasn't a solitary flicker of emotion but she could see every thought he was having anyway. The occasion didn't call for any sort of a good bye but she went over and hugged him. "I love you daddy." She laughed, a Vickie laugh. "But you know that" And then to the astonishment of all three of them Vickie hugged him and kissed his cheek. "Don't worry about us" she said in a voice he seldom heard her use. He thought of her words as she left. "Don't worry about us" Not don't worry about your daughter. Don't worry about any of the three of us. Us. That was the word she had used. He thought of that word the rest of the evening.
The three of them went out to the ledges which she had taken them to a couple of other times already and on the way she told them again of her concerns about Hannah. When to her disappointment her other friends weren’t there Andy suggested that they go down the trail and into the town and try to find them. Mountain Girl knew their names and it was a small town, it couldn’t be that hard. But to everyone’s relief half way down the trail they ran Ron, Kelly and a couple of other boys, Jimmy and Ricky, that Mountain Girl recognized from the summer. They were astonished to see Mystery Girl, as they still referred to her sometimes, with other people. But everything they ever learned about her seemed to be another surprise so introductions were made and they all continued back into town.
They told her that Hannah was at Lee’s house and led Mountain Girl and her friends through the small town. Mountain Girl could feel her excitement fading, replaced with a strange fear as they walked through the dusky streets. She tried to think of what it was that she was afraid of but she couldn’t think of anything. Her friends in the town were all nice people and she trusted them. She had the absurd thought that they were trying to take something away from her, but what did she have that they could take? It couldn’t be anything to do with them. Perhaps it was being in the town. But no, she went to the town below her home regularly now and it was reasonably comfortable. That couldn’t be it. She gave up trying to figure it out. Thinking about it just made her more anxious and made her stomach hurt. It would be okay she told herself. She had Andy and Vickie with her. Nothing could happen to the three of them here. She repeated that to herself until she felt a little calmer and then they were at Lee’s house. Lee and Hannah were sitting on the porch, lazy and excited all at the same time, and started exclaiming lets go when they saw them, running down off the porch and leading them back the way they had just come towards some unknown excitement that Mountain Girl had noticed in the distance and had been wondering about.
The excitement was some sort of a carnival going on that weekend and they all went to it, with Andy treating Mountain Girl. She loved all the overpriced food, hamburgers and hot dogs and French fires with extravagant gobs of ketchup and mustard and cotton candy and popcorn and a host of other things she had never eaten before, all helped on their way to her stomach with two secret bottles of wine that Ron and Hannah had brought. The wine and the food relaxed Mountain Girl enough that her stomach stopped hurting and she began to enjoy herself. They rode on the rides with a childish enthusiasm and wasted money on games they weren't going to win but they didn't care and she could see Vickie trying hard to talk to Hannah and hoped that her idea was working. Then suddenly they were tired of the carnival so they walked around the town for awhile again, omnipotent teenagers ruling their little world but with none of the menace that accompanied Vickie’s friends when they did this; just a bunch of kids showing off a little bit and generally minding their own business. The wine was gone so they descended on the house of a friend of Kelly's, a guy named Craig. He was home alone with his sister Tina and they commandeered some of his parents booze and set out wandering around the town again. As they walked through streets that were already growing deserted and quiet she wondered what it must be like for her friends to live here. Maybe she could come see them another time. But when she thought about that her stomach started to hurt again.
She took the last bottle from Tina and finished what was left of it, which wasn’t very much. Then without any warning she threw it against a wall as hard as she could, feeling like she was about to lose something infinitely precious to her. Tina stepped away from her and everyone stared for a moment till Andy put his arm around her and the feeling faded. But it was time to go.
They said happy goodbyes to everyone except Lee who walked with them to where the little stream ran under a bridge at the edge of town and then the three of them said goodbye to Lee too. Lee was talking about how much fun it had been and hugging them and then she hugged Mountain Girl really hard and kissed her on the cheek and said she loved her and it just made Mountain Girl's stomach hurt again. And then like someone had turned a page in a book Lee was gone and they were walking up the trail to the ledges. It was easy enough to follow in the moonlight and within a few minutes she felt normal again. The three of them sat by the waterfall smoking one and then a second joint, the only ones they had brought and something that they hadn’t wanted to share with the others.
The evening was suddenly a distant unreal memory while Mountain Girl showed them the little statues she had made and they stared at them for awhile as if wondering if they would come to life. Then they stretched out by the water and fell asleep for awhile with some blankets they had left there. Just before dawn they rose and walked through the fog shrouded awakening forest back to the cabin where Zechariah was already gone for the morning. The fear of the night before was gone, all was right with the world in the mountain mists.
She would see her friends only a couple of more times before it was too cold for them to consider going for what for them was just an afternoon by the river. The first time was a week later when the usual foursome appeared and they exchanged a pleasant afternoon that now felt warm and comfortable to Mountain Girl with none of the shyness she had felt in the beginning or the fear she had felt in her foray into their world of the town below. As she listened to them talk she thought about how this had seemed to start the same way that her friendship with Andy had but that somehow it never got past a certain point. They were nice people and she supposed that she could trust them with some of the details of her life here. She thought about going to visit them in their town another time. It had been fun the first time once she got used to the idea, why not a second time? Or maybe she could even let them know who she was, who’s daughter she was. It seemed like it ought to be an okay idea too.
But there was something that felt wrong again. A sort of secret guilt, a shame for wanting to do it. It just wouldn’t be right, she thought and wondered why the whole idea seemed to make her feel like she’d eaten something she shouldn’t have. She guessed it was because only a few people in life were supposed to know who you really were. She had three, that was enough. It was time to think about something else, so she tried to listen to what they were talking about again. Stuff about school was coming soon and the teachers and who they hoped wouldn't be there this year. The same things Vickie and Andy sometimes talked about. She had a few dim memories of school. It hadn't seemed like a good idea then and didn't seem any better now, but she listened to her friends because she liked the sound of their voices.
The last time she saw anyone there before the cold weather really set in was a very different experience. One afternoon as she walked out of the woods onto the rocks she saw a solitary figure hunched over as if trying to protect itself from existence itself. It was Hannah. Mountain Girl watched her for a moment and then spoke. Hannah turned to her with tear streaked eyes and Mountain Girl thought that this was what crying looked like, something that was only a dim memory for her. They talked about a situation that sounded pretty much insoluble to both of them and then sat in silence till long after dark, Mountain Girl unwilling to leave her friend here alone and Hannah seemingly unable to leave. Finally with the aid of the marijuana that Hannah always seemed to have they fell asleep lying on the rocks staring up at the stars the way Mountain Girl liked to when she was alone here and in the morning she had walked with Hannah all the way down the trail wondering what would happen to her friend. As they neared the town once more she began to feel uneasy. She forced herself to ignore it. Hannah needed her. She walked her all the way home and then hurried back up to the waterfall. She sat for a while more, overwhelmed with something, she wasn't quite sure what. Something to do with Hannah's pain but something else as well.
She decided to talk to Andy and Vickie about it as soon as she saw them but they had no ideas either. When she would see Lee, Ron, and Kelly next summer they would explain that Hannah was in some sort of a rehab and Vickie would tell her that this was probably not going to help anything at all but they could always hope. She would see her other friends from time to time over the summer but would not see Hannah again. The snow came and went while she wondered what had become of the girl she attempted to comfort that strange night and then Lee would find at the rocks one day and tell her that Hannah was gone. She knew little of the details and the circumstances of her departure from this life would forever be unclear to Mountain Girl but Vickie said that this was just the way these things seemed to happen and she accepted that opinion. Sometimes. But Hannah's departure meant something. She didn't know what, and didn't like to think about how it made her feel. Missing her friend, sadness at her loss and her pain; she could feel that and it just hurt. But there was something else amid all of what her father and Andy said was normal grief. Something dark, ominous, mysterious, and un-namable. Not the rage that Vickie greeting this sort of thing. Rather it was something that when it crept into her awareness she summoned up every ounce of courage and strength she had just not to think or feel about.
Hannah had died in town. Not in the mountains. Had she been in the mountains with Mountain Girl none of this would have happened. She believed that. She even let herself think about it once in a while, even if she sometimes had to throw up if she thought about it very long.
Last edited by Absaroka on Fri Jul 17, 2009 7:48 am, edited 1 time in total.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
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Staci
- Miss Crystal Goddess
- Posts: 12
- Joined: Sat Jul 11, 2009 5:22 pm
This is interesting and got me thinking. Growing up my mother was totally in beauty and fashion and being a real girly girl. I have no doubt that my mother would have me in the prettiest dresses, make up, hair dyed red, nails done, biweeky visit to beauty salon, I would not be allow to play outside and get dirt because I would always be in a pretty dress with perfect hair. As soon as I came home from school my mother would set my hair in rollers everyday. If I want to see a friend after school or get ice cream I would have to go out in public with my hair in rollers. Bedtime mom would place a net around my rollers and have me put on my nightgown. She would teach me to cook, and be a good housewife. She would push me to find a good man instead of going to college and developing a careeer. Her influnce would most likely get marry early and likely divorce early and would become very indelpentant and develop a career and live alone, but would still be a very girly girl who mostly wears dresses and skirts with heels and pumps with perfect long red hair and each night I would still put my hair in rollers and go to bed. Some days when I am do housework and /or garden work and I want my hair perfect to go out later that day I would leave my hair in rollers and if the neighors or postman sees me, so what.
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Okay this is it. For a long time this was the last chapter in my story, and it has always been one of my favorites.
It's also easily the most personal. I found while I was writing the description of the music at the dance I was tempted to stop and delete it all for fear someone would read it. I had to remind myself that this was after all a fantasy, and that I was writing it to tell people something personal about me. Fortunatly most people really like it, especially the musicians who have read it.
Most of the musicians are based on people I've known and often played with. The descriptions of Gary, Joe, and Frank in particular are very much true to the peoplen I based them on. As is Denise, who is really Dennis's alter ego. As for the songs, I've yet to meet anyone who recognizes all of them, but they are all songs that I needed to tell someone about.
The imagery all stems from a short story I read about jazz in high school. I don't remember the name or writer. For years I wondered what in the world the writer was talking about and how he could hear the things he described when I couldn't. Eventually I realized he was talking about images to describe feelings.
My wife and I have a short hand to describe our opinion of other musicians. Did we believe them? This can apply to a classical pianist as easily as a blues singer. Believe every note played in the following chapter, even if you can't hear them, and enjoy!!!!!!!
Red Hot Blues
In the midst of all their adolescent turmoil Vickie’s band had kept practicing. Thoughts of it were a constant companion for her now and they had begun to find small cheap gigs to play. She had assembled what she thought was an incredible amount of talent from the surrounding towns and the band seemed to be growing musically by leaps and bounds as they learned from each other. There were now three other trumpet players and she considered them all brilliant. Two of them were guys who had been with the band for quite a while now, Joe and Gary. Both of them were emotional soloists and great lead players. Gary had high notes that were like multicolored fireworks bursting over the landscape of the bands harmonies while other times he would play with an anguish that reminded her of an Italian opera singer dying in the last act. Joe on the other hand had an effervescent introspection about his playing and was the rock who held all the other trumpet players together when they sometimes seemed to be about to wander too far into their own worlds. The third trumpeter was a new addition, a quiet girl named Lynn who roared when she had the horn to her lips and who seemed to let her music be the outlet for some sort of questioning of the entire world. She could do all sorts of things with a plunger in addition to playing with the simplicity of a good blues guitar and Vickie often thought that it was Lynn who really rounded out the trumpet section and made it complete.
Andy of course was still playing the trombone and although he still had trouble speaking for himself he gave the bones a depth that was hard to describe. There was another newcomer in the trombones, a girl named Cris who had only started to play recently, more or less just picking up the horn one day and blowing into it and surprising everyone by playing something. She was going to be wonderful if she kept at it but Vickie suspected that she was going to give it all up and go to art school pretty soon. In the meantime she had a straightforward bluesy style that was a great complement to Gordon and the entire band enjoyed their tussling as they traded solos back and forth. Gordon was still playing lead bone on the harder charts. Gordon who she could never seem to really get to know. He could stand in front of the band for half a set if she let him, holding forth and sounding like a preacher in a Pentecostal church calling forth all the spirits and demons in creation. Listening to Gordon play Vickie thought about the time she had read that in all jazz if you listened carefully you could hear the anguish of slaves being brought to America in chains. That was something that she didn’t pretend to understand and wasn’t sure she would agree with if she did, but when she listened to Gordon she believed it completely. She felt the same way listening to Denise sing even if Denise seemed to always have an unspoken hint of gratitude in her voice. Vickie thought it probably came courtesy of the gospel music she sang in church and it was there even when Denise sang the most despair filled blues imaginable.
There were four saxes, including Lynn’s sister Anne who played lead alto and did some really pretty ballads. Frank was still playing tenor. He had a tone like the Hawk and when he stood up for a solo his small frame suddenly looked powerful before he even played a note. She really thought that in many ways he rather than Anne led the sax section even though the alto played all the lead parts. Anne was a lively girl and who's personality made it's way into her playing, into the entire band sometimes, but Frank's tenor had a presence that was there even when he was just listening. The other tenor was a guy named Bruce who played beautifully intricate flute parts as well as tenor solos every bit as good as Frank’s but in a more cosmic, less muscular vein. The bari sax was the only weak link, they hadn’t found someone yet who was able to make their own statement and instead had someone from the school band who contented himself with playing the right notes. Which wasn't so bad; they all had times when the right notes couldn't be found anywhere.
Her drummer was the band member who had most surprised her. They had started using Rich a while ago as a last resort when their other drummer quit and he had been terrible at first, playing too loud and acting like this was some juvenile rock band. They had actually all sat down with him one night and said that if something didn’t change they would go with no drums at all and just use a conga player Gordon knew named Jesse. But the music had meant everything to Rich and he had been trying so hard that they kept him anyway. Her trumpet teacher, Henry, had hooked him up with a friend for drum lessons and in the space of a year he had gone from the bands biggest liability to someone that she wasn’t quite sure they could do without.
They actually did bring Jesse in anyway and have him play with Rich sometimes but you never knew when Jesse was going to show up. They had a guitar player named George who was Denise’s half brother. He could switch in a note from heavy metal to Latin to progressive jazz even if he did make some truly stupendous mistakes while he was doing it and he also occasionally played the violin with the band. They had actually composed a couple of songs based on his mistakes, and although Vickie liked everyone in her band he had become her best friend in the band besides Andy, with the three of them often going to Andy’s house to hang out and also to continue the adventures she had introduced Andy to as a child. The bass player was a girl named Kim who would alternately leap with abandon through her part and then when the mood called for it could produce a feel that had the finality of the last nail being driven into someone’s coffin. Someday she was probably going to be an incredible singer and was already giving Denise a real challenge. But they couldn’t get rid of Denise and they desperately needed Kim on bass so it stayed the way it was. Lastly they had replaced their old piano player, a girl named Donna who was really more of a Broadway show type pianist with a friend of Kim’s named Valerie who didn’t actually read music all that well but could fake her way through anything and had a knack for playing things that would have seemed to be the province of the horns. She had a great voice too and the band had several new things in the works to take advantage of her voice.
They played wherever someone would listen, free stuff, school dances, church dances, and similar things. Alan was long gone but David, Dennis and her other friends from her neighborhood had taken pride in the fact that she was making a bit of a splash and often came en masse to some of their gigs, and friends of other band members had been supportive also to the point that they now usually knew a number of the people at many of their performances. Vickie’s old friends sometimes caused trouble and she had found herself pleading with them to behave themselves which had surprised everyone involved. They had begun to stay away but surprisingly when they did appear they had tried terribly hard to respect her wishes, probably thanks to Dennis and David. She thought about this a lot and still felt confused. She still loved a good fight but the second time she lost a tooth and had to leave her trumpet alone until her mouth healed Henry had told her that it was definitely time to know where to draw a line. Andy had said nothing, which was probably the worst thing he could have said. She hadn’t even wanted to think about what Mountain Girl would say but when it came up she had merely said that if you were going hunting you needed to remember that you were after food, which made no sense at all to Vickie till far later.
After that Dennis one night in a stoned haze had articulated the thoughts that she had begun to have recently, that her friends were fighting the wrong enemy altogether and that life itself seemed to be truly beating the crap out of an awful lot of the people they knew. But it would be Zechariah of all people who would finally get her attention in the most profound way.
She had been cooking breakfast in the cabin while everyone was out doing morning chores when he returned alone. He had stood watching her for a minute and commented that he hoped she wasn’t going to burn their home down and she wondered at both his choice of words and what she was doing wrong. Then completely out of any character she had ever seen in him he stepped towards her and touched a scar running through her hairline. She stiffened and he withdrew his hand as he spoke. “I heard you had to put your trumpet away for awhile again.” He paused as he let her awareness of his knowledge sink in. When he spoke he used an expression that she knew meant he was trying to demonstrate his awareness of his infinitesimally small place in the universe. “This child knows that the scar you carry on your heart is far bigger than all the scars you’ve got on the rest of you put together. It can grow a lot more and I’m afraid it probably has to grow at least a small piece but what you don’t know is how big it can grow. You can’t possibly know that and every time I pray I ask that you never find out.” Vickie felt her insides tie themselves up in a knot like she hadn’t felt in years. Zechariah was never, ever this intrusive. For a moment she had been incredulously terrified that something sexual was on his mind but he had just let her know that his next few words would be far more frightening than that. She hoped desperately he would shut up and go away as she spilled some of what she was cooking onto the stove. He looked at the stove, letting her defeat his gaze as he looked at the mess she had made, trying to make it easier for her to hear whatever he was going to say next. “You’re a fighter and I don’t think you’ll ever not be so you’ve got that. But you have no idea at all who the enemy is. All I can tell you is that it’s not some violent child.”
He stood for a moment as if thinking of something else to say and then turned around and went back outside. When she thought he was gone she hurled the pot and all it’s contents out the door as far as she possibly could. She stood immobile for a long moment while her rage followed the pot on an impossibly long trajectory out the door and then as she remembered exactly where she was she went outside to retrieve the pot and resume cooking breakfast. As she finished cleaning up the mess she saw Zechariah. He’d been sitting watching her the entire time in the silence that was his most effective means of communication in matters of only moderate importance. She walked back into the cabin and had a sudden vision of Denise at the stove. She was about to sing something and Vickie was telling her that she hadn’t been able to write it yet, that it was a melody that she just couldn’t feel. And then because she was Vickie she began to cook breakfast again as she promised herself that she would discuss all of this with her two friends sometime today, all day if necessary, letting Mountain Girl be cryptically blunt and Andy ramble until she could somehow feel the rhythm and harmony of Zechariah’s words.
Because they were a cheap big band they played a lot of stuff for older groups also, people who were nostalgic for the big band swing era and for who they had to tone down some of their rock arrangements, even some of the subject matter and language in a few vocals. But this dance was a big deal for them and they weren’t going to tone anything down in any way. It was a dance for the school Vickie, Andy and about a third of the other band members attended. They had all been terribly excited that after their name came up discussion of which band to hire had abruptly ended. They had a lot of new songs they had worked out, many of them popular rock tunes and the rest relatively lesser known jazz and blues pieces. By now several members of the band had begun to try to arranging songs that they liked themselves and she was realizing that they each had their own style and that depending on who’s chart she played the band could sound very different. Henry had been to hear them several times and several of the other members were taking lessons with him now. In return the band members had composed several songs purportedly about him. At least his name was in the titles: Henry’s Blues, Henry’s Boogie, Henry’s Eighty Eight, Henry’s Rocket. He had been amused by the last one because he didn’t particularly care for rock music. But it was still fun to have the song named after him.
Mountain Girl had been hearing about the band for years now. As in the beginning, Vickie would confide in her all her fears and frustrations about it, wondering if it was worth the effort. Mountain Girls response had always been the same: “If you want to do it and are good at it then do it. What else are you going to do?” Vickie had gotten herself a new trumpet and now kept the second hand one Andy had gotten her on the mountain where she would practice new ideas, seating herself on a little cliff overlooking a valley a discrete distance from Zechariah and his love of quiet and completely unaware that he once in a while sought her out to listen to her. She would play to the wilderness with not a single harmonic in return echoing from the vast spaces, feeling like Joshua in the mountains and wondering if she could make the mountains fall with some of her mistakes.
And she had made some log drums for them to play on together, not very good ones at all but it was still fun to fool around with their little drum circle. She was learning a lot from that experience she thought, with perhaps the biggest lesson being that sometimes being good was not the most important thing. But none of this was the band and Mountain Girl’s friends had decided that it was time for her to hear for herself what that sounded like. They had gone up to the mountain and brought her back-it helped so much that Andy could drive now. They had cleaned her up, bought her a dress and told her that she would be Andy’s date. She would sit with the friends of the band.
And there she sat. Although she had gotten to know a few other people over the years nothing like this had ever happened to her. With the exception of her trip to the carnival she had never seen so many people in her life and that at least had been outdoors. This was unnerving to her in a way that she had never experienced before but with her two friends there she hoped that she would be okay. There had been a few attempts at conversation initiated by the others which had gone no where. She sat quietly watching while the rest of the people she was sitting with sort of forgot she was there. And then the band began to play and none of this mattered anyway.
She and her father both sang to themselves from time to time. She'd listened to Vickie practice innumerable times and they had had fun playing with the drums Vickie had made. On her infrequent trips to town she occasionally heard music coming from a radio. And Vickie had told her that some of the noises that filled her life, the wind or the calling of animals to each other, was a form of music. None of this had prepared her in anyway for what her ears were suddenly telling her. She sat stunned at the realization of what she hadn't know a few minutes before. And then half ways through the 2nd song she understood. She understood why no matter how much she talked Vickie always seemed to think she'd left something unsaid. Several couples walked out into the open space on the floor in front of the band and began to move around to the music. Dancing; she knew that must be what they were doing, and it looked like fun. But when one of the boys she was sitting with asked her to dance she decided that she'd rather keep to herself. He smiled at her and offered to ask her again later and she smiled back and told him okay. She turned her attention back to the band and was obliviously grateful when the rest of the table left her for the dance floor.
Vickie wasn’t as oblivious as the friends they had selected for Mountain Girl to sit with. By now as long as she was in front of her band she comfortable with being the focus of positive attention, and quite enjoyed the chance to talk about the songs they were doing for a moment before actually performing them. It was funny she thought, but the excitement and adrenaline of performing allowed her to talk about things that she might not have been able to say otherwise. Or maybe it was just that the music would correct anything she said wrong. Who knew? In any case halfway through the first set she decided that now was a good time to have a little fun and at the same time try to publicly acknowledge just how important Mountain Girl had been to Vickie‘s music. Maybe it would calm Mountain Girl down. She hoped.
They pulled up a chart that she had written about a year ago. It was an unusual one that started like a love song but then became an infectiously happy blues. It was one of the favorites for most of the dances they played and when the mood came on them they sometimes played it two or three times during the night. It was different also in that with the exception of a brief solo by Andy that she had written out for him Vickie’s was the only solo in it. Usually any number of musicians would trade solos but not on this one. It had a name that puzzled everyone but Andy also.
Vickie started her opening rap for the song. “Well good evening again everyone. The band would like to thank you again for having us here tonight. We’re just thrilled to be playing here tonight, it’s a kind of homecoming dance for some of us you know, and we’re going to make sure that you have a night that you’ll always remember.” She thought of something Henry had said to her several times over the time she’d known him. “You know, someone once told me that music should tell the truth. Especially jazz. That is of course if you can figure out what the truth is. But you know sometimes you might know the truth in a musical sense even if your mouth can’t find the words or perhaps even your heart can’t admit it. Tonight we’re going to do our best though, and we’re going to have a lot of fun while we do. Right now I’d like to introduce someone to you. I’d like you to meet the person who taught me how to play the trumpet. Now this chick can’t blow a note and thinks an ax is something to chop wood with but she taught me what I needed to know so that I could play. This is a true sister in the very depths of my soul, and without her the band wouldn’t be playing here tonight. And we’re going to do a song I wrote about her. We’ve been playing this song for a while and I guess a lot of you know it. It’s called Cat Ear Moon. So lets all give a hand to ------”she stopped. What could she call her? Mountain Girl wasn’t going to cut it as a name tonight and she never ever went by her original name. She wandered around in her own words trying to think of what to say before she gave up. “What the hell. Just listen to the song” she concluded. And suddenly the musicians at least, from playing the song so many times, had an inkling of what had happened that night and where it had happened.
Mountain Girl turned red as everyone looked at her and applauded on Vickie’s command. Then the song began and she turned even more red at the thought of a song about her. Andy finished his solo and climbed down off the band stand and led her to the floor where she tried to follow his instructions about how to dance. At least she had a gracefulness that made her mistakes not too awful. They wandered around the floor under the blue lights and Andy realized that the song hadn’t speeded up as it usually did. Vickie had kept it slow in the hopes of them actually enjoying their dance, and as she talked about that long ago night with her horn, her words floating out into the gym, they melted into each others arms and Mountain Girl felt something leaving her.
It set the mood for the night. During the break Mountain Girl’s two friends took turns hovering over her and eventually she relaxed enough to talk with some of the other people. Everyone seemed to think a great icebreaker was to ask what the song was about, why was it written, how had they become friends and so on. She just smiled and enigmatically said that she thought the song told the whole story. There wasn’t really much that she could discuss with any of these people but she began a listening strategy and played right into everyone's desire to talk about themselves. By the end of the evening she knew a lot more about the people there than anyone would have expected. While the band was playing it didn’t really matter anyway. Andy excused himself to dance with her a few times but mostly she listened to this side of her friends that she had nurtured but never experienced. Vickie had become a bit of a ham, launching into a diatribe every few songs. Midway into the second set she hit her stride.
They had just finished their version of No Matter What You Are, Mountain Girl watching Vickie stare at her as she played even though Vickie’s eyes were closed. Vickie had said that it was really a pretty insipid song but Gary had come up with a dramatic arrangement of it and Denise had put enough conviction into the song that it almost sounded like a gospel song about Jesus instead of a top forty pop hit. As loud and powerful as the band was it still had the intimacy of someone whispering in your ear. Vickie thought that if they were going to talk about loyalty they might as well talk about loss too. “We’re going to do a song about drugs now.” She paused for effect and looked at the faces of the principal and chaperones. They looked concerned. “You know the song we just finished, a lot of people feel like that about drugs, but that’s not what the song is about at all. Let me ask you all something. How many of you out there like to party? I know you do, so do I. Don’t be shy now, raise your hands.” She had them pretty well conditioned by now. Raise your hands if you think your date is cute, raise your hand if you’ve ever had the blues and so on. Obediently hands went up. “Well you better listen to this next song. It’s a song by a man named Luther Allison and it’s about someone who liked to party a little too much. A lot too much………Waaaaaaaay too much. I’ve got another question. How many people here have seen someone you love try to drink themselves to death? Come on. I know this is a personal question but I know there should be a lot of hands up. How about your friends? Who here has a friend they worry about? Look around you. I know enough of the people here to know there ought to be a hell of a lot of hands up. Well here’s a song about this whole thing and we’re going to dedicate it to all of you who were afraid to raise your hands. It’s called Cherry Red Wine and it’s one of our favorite songs.” The band started and as she began her introductory solo, pacing frantically about the changes like an animal trapped in a cage of grief and anguish. Then George’s guitar talked about it for a while with Lynn and Gordon agreeing with him. And then finally a vocal by Denise, as if anything more even needed to be said and a duet between Vickie and Denise leading up to the end where Denise described what is was going to be like to visit this person’s grave, which Vickie thought might have the best last line to a song that she had ever heard. It was time for a new song.
They launched into one of her favorite revenge fantasies, The Pusher, with Denise singing about people looking as if they had already died and no one had remembered to tell them about it and the dreadful fate she would inflict on those she considered to responsible for this, with this time Joe and Bruce expressing their opinions on the subject. And then Vickie thought about something and felt a little funny. No more drug songs for now she thought. As they finished she told the band to get one of the new charts, something called Jingo by a guy from Africa. She started another introduction, explaining a bit where this song came from and what it seemed to her to be about. It was a song from Africa, a song from the birthplace of humanity. A song about the ancestors. It’s not nice to disrespect the ancestors she went on as the drums began. And then she blew the introduction into the audience, a prophet hurling down curses from the mountain top. The band came in and there was a drum solo, angry, warning that mankind will gets it’s due. Then the band again and the bass solo by Kimmy, still angry. And finally another trumpet, Joe again, this time arguing for reconciliation. They finished it out on a happy note and she decided it was time for something simpler. The dance floor was filled and this was supposed to be fun, not a lecture.
They had worked out an arrangement of a Chuck Berry song and they launched into that with everyone getting a chance to talk about what they hoped the future might hold and how good the dancers looked and how great it was to be young. Everyone thought of this as guitar music but they had given a long piano solo to Valerie and she was having a fine old time with it along with Frank and George. But still there was that feeling. She felt great. The whole band felt great. But couldn’t there be something just a little more?
They played another blues but it was a happy and indignant blues that half the band had helped write after hearing Willie Mae Thornton do something called Bumblebee Blues. They called their song The Spider And The Bee and like most of the songs they had composed was somewhat reminiscent of another artists work. Henry had said that if they kept at it they would find their own voices and that was the general plan in their efforts. It was filled with a lot of double entendres while Denise danced around describing the spiders efforts to catch the bee as it tried to sting the spider, debating whether the spider web was really such a bad place and besides maybe the bee’s stringer would actually feel kind of nice and no one at all thought that she was talking about a couple of insects. There was room for a half a dozen solos while Denise considered the next verse and it really was a bit of nonsense but who cared and it seemed like every time they performed it the song had new verses and a different ending. Vickie realized that the set had gone by in no time and that it would be best to end a set with a slow one, something to calm people down a bit. They pulled out another chart, slow and romantic. Lynn talked about love from afar, a love that was tireless and ageless as if preserved silently, Love In Silent Amber it was called, written by a guy named Alan Broadbent. Lynn told everyone there what she would do if she only had the chance. There was something that she was waiting for just like in the song, something that Vickie was waiting for as well, and it might not ever get here, even with her two friends to help her wait, forever if need be. Lynn had a way of playing this song so that Vickie could never decide whether she was as sad as this song sometimes seemed to be but tonight Lynn was saying that whatever the feeling was it would be okay. And just in case Vickie had a plan for after the gig anyway.
The break went by with Mountain Girl holding her own now listening to all the people trying to talk to her while Andy, Vickie, and the rest of the band floated around in a haze of adrenaline and love. Somehow they all had wandered back to the bandstand well before the break was over.
She thought of how the dance had gone and considered what to play next. There was something she'd left out and she thought it might finally, tonight, be time. Gary had done an arrangement of a song by Linda Jones called Hypnotized which was tailored to what Andy could and could not do. Linda Jones, the woman singers like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin said was their favorite singer. It was hard to imagine Andy playing anything of hers convincinly, but Gary had a way of knowing just what to write and at it's worst the song still sounded pretty good. They'd take a chance, she decided. She told the band this would be the next chart and Andy gave her a smile. A smile of some sort of gratitude that surprised her. And then Andy was blowing an impassioned love story over the soft pillows of the sax harmonies and Vickie felt herself swirling around in its melody and Andy was really letting go, feeling the song like he never did. Vickie stared at him in amazement.
This was a love song, but something else as well. And suddenly, just this once, she heard something in the voice of Andy's trombone. It wasn't a love song anymore. It was a song about the desperation Vickie felt, the almost hopeless struggle not to let her life to be what it seemed predestined to be. All the things she tried to tell Andy but always felt like she left something out. All the things she knew that he knew even if she couldn't admit them to himself. There it was, for all to hear. They said that when you listened to Linda Jones you could hear her knowledge of the early death that awaited her in her voice. And tonight this was a love song, yes it still was. But not a love song for some man, some woman. A love song for life, wanting it to last. Wanting it just to be. And then the notes were over.
The band was still playing, finishing up with the out chorus, but it was suddenly just a very special love song again. And then it was too good to be over so they did another one, one that really was just a love song, with the pretty alto sax player Anne discussing how she might not have anything to offer except her song but still she too was in love and when Andy put his bone on it's stand and asked Mountain Girl to dance again she gave him a huge smile and said “No, dance with Vickie now”. He took her by the hand and she was in such a daze that she hardly noticed as he led her down off the bandstand and onto the dance floor but as they moved their feet around and she listened to Anne she felt something dissolve inside her. The shadows and lights played down from the ceiling and they sang to themselves about la-la-la-la means I love you and the song was like a satin womb holding the dancers. Before she could get back to the band they started in next with Daydream, Anne taking right up where she left off with Valerie on the piano again. Andy retrieved Mountain Girl so that all three of them were dancing, slowly moving their feet around as they held each other like it was a cold mountain night and they needed each other to stay warm except this was a spiritual warmth as much as anything so that when Vickie looked around the whole floor was into it and into each other and no one thought it was at all weird but just fine when the daydream took hold of them and they were in their own world till the song was over and then Vickie knew she had to stop and be a bandleader which after all was what she was.
Three songs like that in a row was enough to have the chaperones worrying about teenage pregnancy but a mood definitely needed to be maintained and nourished, not a mood of all slow love songs but a mood of abandonment the way they had all just been abandoned to the haven of their own dreams but with a little more excitement now. Time for some religious fervor so the drums started on a long solo, the drums being the heartbeat of humanity and when the drums were swinging without even thinking about it and everyone was drawn into them it was time to be ready. You’ve Got To Be Ready was the name of the song and it was another one of her absolute favorites. Sometimes she thought that it summed up a lot of her confusion about so many things. She thought about how it all seemed to be so simple for Andy. It wasn’t really she knew, but you had to know him as well as she did to realize that. Well the music was telling the truth again, even if she still wasn’t sure what it was. Denise’s voice came screaming in over the horns like a plane landing at top speed, all about how you’ve got to be ready, something she sang in the church choir also which was where Vickie had heard it and gotten the idea for this arrangement, but they weren’t going to tell anyone yet what to be ready for, just you’ve got to be ready. They calmed down a little bit while Valerie had a good long outing on the piano, thinking about it a bit now rather than just mad anticipation as she lead them into a duet between Denise and the drums and then the drums playing fours with anyone who wanted to take a turn for four to say that they were getting ready like Gene Krupa playing the gospel till the brass all started to shout that they were just about ready and the saxes had their say almost as loud till they were all done and in the last few beats the band told them Who they had to be ready for. Vickie thought that maybe she had been premature because that was a hard idea to top but there were a lot of dimensions to life and so they decided to speak now about someone who just didn’t care, a long electric kool aid acid introduction but evil and ending in a clatter like someone pushed down the stairs and Vickie all of a sudden angry, really outraged at this nasty person who went around breaking hearts without any feeling at all, not even a perverse enjoyment: You Just Don’t Care was the name of the song and the meaning of the notes hurled into the room on her horn and now there was a vocal from Valerie with actual words almost fighting with Kim’s bass leading into George’s guitar playing the same lick over and over as starkly implacable as a hungry great white shark on cruise control, not mysterious like the theme from Jaws but this was a fish’s eye view of it, seeing everything and in all it’s unstoppable hunger and might. He kept at it forever until the whole band was shouting at the top of its lungs about this; time to bring them back to the actual song and the story as it wound it’s way on to it’s inescapable end. Time now for the sequel which was an old blues song with the quiet slow bass playing descending chromatic scales which always made her think of death climbing up a stair in the night to get to her room, death climbing one step at a time so slowly but never stopping or resting, death coming knocking on the door while her trumpet and George’s guitar were cats fighting in the night in an alley under your window.
There was a pause and Vickie took a deep breath, stood motionless with the silence and then screamed a high note cadenza through the plunger. Any other night it would have had the best notes of the entire gig; a scream like a mother coming home to discover all her children lying dead, twisting and turning it’s way through the contortions of the mute down the octaves and suddenly it was another song entirely about a man who went to see his old lady at the hospital, a place named after Saint James, bringing her flowers and thinking of the love he would get when she got home but when they let him finally see her there was no arguing with the finality of what happens to us all, and Lynn with an anguished plunger mute had an awful lot to say about that till Vickie chimed in again and it was two chicks with their horns going wah-wah and yah-yah and growling and shaking till there was nothing left to be said about that either while the band held them, embraced them but the set was only half over and please lets get a little lighter even though it feels so good to spill your guts to a whole ballroom.
They did a song called One Fine Morning, a song about someday when they would finally wake up and know all would be right with the world. The song made Vickie think of an innocent little girl with the wistful harmonies of the brass seeming to yearn for that day, wondering if it would actually ever get here or if perhaps it was already long gone. A song for the little girl she had once told Andy and Mountain Girl about and the person that only they seemed to be able to know. It was a song she often felt frustrated with. Gary and George usually had the solos and they did a wonderful job with them. Sometimes she tried to play one also but the song did something to her and trying to play what she really felt seemed to take the song somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go. So she let others speak their mind on this song and contented herself with soaking it all up, reveling in the joy that the song gave her and everyone else. The song ended in a long outing from George and she found herself starting at him feeling like he was trying to tell her something very important about herself. About himself. She wished she could understand whatever it was he was trying to say. He finished, something still unsaid. She didn’t know what in the world they should play next.
But there was still a lot of time in the set so when they were finished they launched into a long jam on one of their head charts starting out feeling just grand about it all with every single musician getting a solo, long ones for Vickie, Bruce, Gary, Joe, and Gordon and short ones for Andy and the bari player till finally they slowed it down into a brief embrace goodbye by Anne on the alto for the dancers. Vickie let out an exhausted sigh as they finished and this time the band really did need a rest.
When they got back onto the bandstand for the last set she wanted to make sure they still had everyone’s attention so the very first thing she did was blow what was really a bugle call out into the room, calling everyone back to the frenzied passion they had needed to rest from. The other trumpet players joined her and then the rest of the band for something called Bugle Call Rag. It was another song that had started out as a record copy and then turned into something quite different, first because the trumpet solo was so hard that all the trumpets needed to take turns playing what Cootie Williams had made sound so easy and then because she thought that ragtime didn’t really sound that different from rock and roll so they had changed the beat just a tiny bit so that the kids who didn’t know any better thought that it was a modern song. Henry had acted like this was some sort of sacrilege, playing jazz with a rock beat, but they had learned the song the older way also and played it as a swing thing for older audiences. Sometimes Vickie found herself agreeing with Henry but other times she would watch her friends dancing around and remember that Duke had said that jazz needed to be danced to in order to be understood and figured it was all okay. It was funny how little things like this could seem to make such a difference, as if people defined themselves by the music they thought they should like. The song finished and the band sounded so good that she thought of trying to play Koko next but even tonight she didn’t think they had that in them. They’d worked at it for years now and still weren’t even sure how it really went in spite of it’s apparent simplicity.
Instead there was terribly loud guitar ripping through the room with the trumpets helping out too and suddenly no one could talk at all as the saxes let everyone know that they were born to be wild which was really meant for a vocal but the trouble was that all the singer’s voices were actually a little too good for the song. Everyone knew the words anyway and Mountain Girl thought it sounded like someone sliding down a whole mountain without stopping or maybe more like a leap off of the ledges where she liked to impress her other friends screaming happily all the way down to the water. Vickie thought that they would stay in a contemporary vehicular theme though or so she said and they would stay with the idea of being carried away by someone, by life, by love, by wonder like a star struck twelve year old with more horns and now it was time for Kim to sing a little bit again about how she would be a Vehicle for all this, taking them away with her to wherever they wanted to go with a little help from the guitar.
She wanted to hear Gordon hold forth at least once more tonight so when George was finished for the moment she pointed to Gordon; it's your turn now; have your way with the song and the audience and the evening, and she sat down on the steps to the bandstand to listen and learn. Trombone Moses. She's read a story once with a character in it by that name. God's trombone. Another expression she'd read somewhere. Gabriel played the trumpet but when a point really needed to be made the trombone was the instrument to be used. She listened to him for a long time while the band amused themselves by making up back ground riffs for him. Then just listening to him Cris knew and she got up, stood in front of the band with him, chiming in, arguing with him and echoing him, fighting and loving like brother and sister till they ended the song with a little unison statement which let the band know it was time to stop even if there was a whole last page of notes they didn’t get to play that night.
They were going to run out of time; each song was lasting longer than she planned and she still had so many songs she wanted to play tonight. She decided what she wanted most to tell them about was the nights when she and Andy were so much younger lying by the river in the cemetery watching the trains, so it was time for more jazz. Lynn screeched out the trains whistle with her plunger introducing Anne again; one more time for Anne to be the sweet little altogirl playing a song called Rock A Bye River, she was graceful and passionate and eternal and sleepy all at once; a river of peaceful moonlight and slow graceful currents, a river grown old and fat with age and then there was another train with it’s screaming plunger whistle by Vickie this time fading into the distance. She could smell the warm green smell of a summer river as Anne talked about lying there all peaceful, watching the moons reflection in the water and feeling like she was home at last and then they moved into another very different song, a rock piece, but it was still about all the talks they had as they sat on the forgotten tombstones and all the memories, memories of what they talked about and of the time and of their childhood and of discovering love and it was a long, long chart with lengthy discourses by half the band, especially George who got out his violin because for him every time they played this song was a special occaision and Valerie took off into a flight of fancy about an old wonderful friend she remembered and all about everything she had wanted to tell people about him; well now she did and after all even the tombstone they had sat on said it had a memory of someone named Elizabeth Reed while Vickie thought again that the stories about that song were so silly, that any fool with an ear could tell that the song was about remembering intimacy no matter if all they did was talk all night. The song ended with a brief sweet goodbye from Anne on her alto and then the dance was over. Vickie told the dancers and listeners to give themselves a hand for being the worlds best audience and almost immediately no one in the band or Mountain Girl either could hardly even remember what had happened but they all thought it had been one of the most intimate and passionate nights they could ever have imagined.
They were way too high when it was over to even think of being done for the night. Most of the band went out for breakfast and as they drove to the diner Vickie produced what had been nibbling at her mind during the evening. A big bottle of Guinea Red which the 3 of them drank half of before they got to the diner. After an hour of reliving the evening so far the three of them and George went to Andy’s home because Vickie certainly wasn’t going to risk ruining a perfect evening by going to her parents house and they sat on the front porch finishing the wine. Andy thought it felt a little funny having George there with them, almost like it was some sort of double date or something, but it was all okay anyway with them talking and talking, even letting George know some of the secrets the three of them had shared. And then George looked at Vickie and drunkenly began to laugh. She asked him what was so funny and he replied. “You’re trying to tell me these things, but Vickie, tonight you said everything you ever wanted to say on that bandstand. Well, knowing you, probably almost everything you ever wanted to say. I’ve never known you not to think you didn’t leave something out. But even so, you know, everybody there believed every note you played. We all did.
Andy, I know something about you now too that I didn’t know before. And you, Mountain Girl. I don’t know if you knew all this about them before but now you know me. And I love all of you.” Andy wanted to talk about this some more but George seemed to think he’d said enough and Vickie and Mountain Girl didn’t seem to think he’d pointed out anything they didn’t already know. They talked aimlessly for a little bit longer till they were finally ready to fall asleep. As they had known she would, Mountain Girl said that no matter how wonderful an evening it had been she wasn’t about to spend any more time indoors if she could possibly help it. It was a truly beautiful late autumn evening with the wine making the cold more sensual than ever, but George didn’t really feel up to sleeping outdoors and said he really had to get home. He hugged all three of them, kissed Mountain Girl briefly on the mouth and then gave Vickie a kiss that left everyone wondering if he might not change his mind and stay with them for the rest of the night. But then Vickie stopped him and the moment was over, the decision made. Andy left a note for his parents so they wouldn’t worry in the morning and they all rolled up in blankets under one of the pine trees where Andy and Vickie had made a hideout when they were little. The November moon shone down on them and intoxicated in a thousand different ways they finally fell asleep.
The clouds had come in while they slept and the warmth that made the earlier night so inviting began to deposit it’s calling cards. They lay in a pile with a gentle wind slipping snowflakes onto them from between the branches and the fresh cold smell of snow mixed with the warm smell of pine wrapping themselves around each other in their nostrils. There was a faint set of footprints in the snow leading to the tree and back to the house where Andy’s dad had come out to check and had spread another blanket over all three of them. One by one they awoke to the music of the night before, now inaudible except to the three of them and when they eventually realized that they were all awake but not trying to disturb the two others there was a laugh followed by admiration for the snow and after a minute of collective thought they climbed out from under and walked towards the house for a breakfast with Andy’s family as they tried to retell what had happened the night before.
It's also easily the most personal. I found while I was writing the description of the music at the dance I was tempted to stop and delete it all for fear someone would read it. I had to remind myself that this was after all a fantasy, and that I was writing it to tell people something personal about me. Fortunatly most people really like it, especially the musicians who have read it.
Most of the musicians are based on people I've known and often played with. The descriptions of Gary, Joe, and Frank in particular are very much true to the peoplen I based them on. As is Denise, who is really Dennis's alter ego. As for the songs, I've yet to meet anyone who recognizes all of them, but they are all songs that I needed to tell someone about.
The imagery all stems from a short story I read about jazz in high school. I don't remember the name or writer. For years I wondered what in the world the writer was talking about and how he could hear the things he described when I couldn't. Eventually I realized he was talking about images to describe feelings.
My wife and I have a short hand to describe our opinion of other musicians. Did we believe them? This can apply to a classical pianist as easily as a blues singer. Believe every note played in the following chapter, even if you can't hear them, and enjoy!!!!!!!
Red Hot Blues
In the midst of all their adolescent turmoil Vickie’s band had kept practicing. Thoughts of it were a constant companion for her now and they had begun to find small cheap gigs to play. She had assembled what she thought was an incredible amount of talent from the surrounding towns and the band seemed to be growing musically by leaps and bounds as they learned from each other. There were now three other trumpet players and she considered them all brilliant. Two of them were guys who had been with the band for quite a while now, Joe and Gary. Both of them were emotional soloists and great lead players. Gary had high notes that were like multicolored fireworks bursting over the landscape of the bands harmonies while other times he would play with an anguish that reminded her of an Italian opera singer dying in the last act. Joe on the other hand had an effervescent introspection about his playing and was the rock who held all the other trumpet players together when they sometimes seemed to be about to wander too far into their own worlds. The third trumpeter was a new addition, a quiet girl named Lynn who roared when she had the horn to her lips and who seemed to let her music be the outlet for some sort of questioning of the entire world. She could do all sorts of things with a plunger in addition to playing with the simplicity of a good blues guitar and Vickie often thought that it was Lynn who really rounded out the trumpet section and made it complete.
Andy of course was still playing the trombone and although he still had trouble speaking for himself he gave the bones a depth that was hard to describe. There was another newcomer in the trombones, a girl named Cris who had only started to play recently, more or less just picking up the horn one day and blowing into it and surprising everyone by playing something. She was going to be wonderful if she kept at it but Vickie suspected that she was going to give it all up and go to art school pretty soon. In the meantime she had a straightforward bluesy style that was a great complement to Gordon and the entire band enjoyed their tussling as they traded solos back and forth. Gordon was still playing lead bone on the harder charts. Gordon who she could never seem to really get to know. He could stand in front of the band for half a set if she let him, holding forth and sounding like a preacher in a Pentecostal church calling forth all the spirits and demons in creation. Listening to Gordon play Vickie thought about the time she had read that in all jazz if you listened carefully you could hear the anguish of slaves being brought to America in chains. That was something that she didn’t pretend to understand and wasn’t sure she would agree with if she did, but when she listened to Gordon she believed it completely. She felt the same way listening to Denise sing even if Denise seemed to always have an unspoken hint of gratitude in her voice. Vickie thought it probably came courtesy of the gospel music she sang in church and it was there even when Denise sang the most despair filled blues imaginable.
There were four saxes, including Lynn’s sister Anne who played lead alto and did some really pretty ballads. Frank was still playing tenor. He had a tone like the Hawk and when he stood up for a solo his small frame suddenly looked powerful before he even played a note. She really thought that in many ways he rather than Anne led the sax section even though the alto played all the lead parts. Anne was a lively girl and who's personality made it's way into her playing, into the entire band sometimes, but Frank's tenor had a presence that was there even when he was just listening. The other tenor was a guy named Bruce who played beautifully intricate flute parts as well as tenor solos every bit as good as Frank’s but in a more cosmic, less muscular vein. The bari sax was the only weak link, they hadn’t found someone yet who was able to make their own statement and instead had someone from the school band who contented himself with playing the right notes. Which wasn't so bad; they all had times when the right notes couldn't be found anywhere.
Her drummer was the band member who had most surprised her. They had started using Rich a while ago as a last resort when their other drummer quit and he had been terrible at first, playing too loud and acting like this was some juvenile rock band. They had actually all sat down with him one night and said that if something didn’t change they would go with no drums at all and just use a conga player Gordon knew named Jesse. But the music had meant everything to Rich and he had been trying so hard that they kept him anyway. Her trumpet teacher, Henry, had hooked him up with a friend for drum lessons and in the space of a year he had gone from the bands biggest liability to someone that she wasn’t quite sure they could do without.
They actually did bring Jesse in anyway and have him play with Rich sometimes but you never knew when Jesse was going to show up. They had a guitar player named George who was Denise’s half brother. He could switch in a note from heavy metal to Latin to progressive jazz even if he did make some truly stupendous mistakes while he was doing it and he also occasionally played the violin with the band. They had actually composed a couple of songs based on his mistakes, and although Vickie liked everyone in her band he had become her best friend in the band besides Andy, with the three of them often going to Andy’s house to hang out and also to continue the adventures she had introduced Andy to as a child. The bass player was a girl named Kim who would alternately leap with abandon through her part and then when the mood called for it could produce a feel that had the finality of the last nail being driven into someone’s coffin. Someday she was probably going to be an incredible singer and was already giving Denise a real challenge. But they couldn’t get rid of Denise and they desperately needed Kim on bass so it stayed the way it was. Lastly they had replaced their old piano player, a girl named Donna who was really more of a Broadway show type pianist with a friend of Kim’s named Valerie who didn’t actually read music all that well but could fake her way through anything and had a knack for playing things that would have seemed to be the province of the horns. She had a great voice too and the band had several new things in the works to take advantage of her voice.
They played wherever someone would listen, free stuff, school dances, church dances, and similar things. Alan was long gone but David, Dennis and her other friends from her neighborhood had taken pride in the fact that she was making a bit of a splash and often came en masse to some of their gigs, and friends of other band members had been supportive also to the point that they now usually knew a number of the people at many of their performances. Vickie’s old friends sometimes caused trouble and she had found herself pleading with them to behave themselves which had surprised everyone involved. They had begun to stay away but surprisingly when they did appear they had tried terribly hard to respect her wishes, probably thanks to Dennis and David. She thought about this a lot and still felt confused. She still loved a good fight but the second time she lost a tooth and had to leave her trumpet alone until her mouth healed Henry had told her that it was definitely time to know where to draw a line. Andy had said nothing, which was probably the worst thing he could have said. She hadn’t even wanted to think about what Mountain Girl would say but when it came up she had merely said that if you were going hunting you needed to remember that you were after food, which made no sense at all to Vickie till far later.
After that Dennis one night in a stoned haze had articulated the thoughts that she had begun to have recently, that her friends were fighting the wrong enemy altogether and that life itself seemed to be truly beating the crap out of an awful lot of the people they knew. But it would be Zechariah of all people who would finally get her attention in the most profound way.
She had been cooking breakfast in the cabin while everyone was out doing morning chores when he returned alone. He had stood watching her for a minute and commented that he hoped she wasn’t going to burn their home down and she wondered at both his choice of words and what she was doing wrong. Then completely out of any character she had ever seen in him he stepped towards her and touched a scar running through her hairline. She stiffened and he withdrew his hand as he spoke. “I heard you had to put your trumpet away for awhile again.” He paused as he let her awareness of his knowledge sink in. When he spoke he used an expression that she knew meant he was trying to demonstrate his awareness of his infinitesimally small place in the universe. “This child knows that the scar you carry on your heart is far bigger than all the scars you’ve got on the rest of you put together. It can grow a lot more and I’m afraid it probably has to grow at least a small piece but what you don’t know is how big it can grow. You can’t possibly know that and every time I pray I ask that you never find out.” Vickie felt her insides tie themselves up in a knot like she hadn’t felt in years. Zechariah was never, ever this intrusive. For a moment she had been incredulously terrified that something sexual was on his mind but he had just let her know that his next few words would be far more frightening than that. She hoped desperately he would shut up and go away as she spilled some of what she was cooking onto the stove. He looked at the stove, letting her defeat his gaze as he looked at the mess she had made, trying to make it easier for her to hear whatever he was going to say next. “You’re a fighter and I don’t think you’ll ever not be so you’ve got that. But you have no idea at all who the enemy is. All I can tell you is that it’s not some violent child.”
He stood for a moment as if thinking of something else to say and then turned around and went back outside. When she thought he was gone she hurled the pot and all it’s contents out the door as far as she possibly could. She stood immobile for a long moment while her rage followed the pot on an impossibly long trajectory out the door and then as she remembered exactly where she was she went outside to retrieve the pot and resume cooking breakfast. As she finished cleaning up the mess she saw Zechariah. He’d been sitting watching her the entire time in the silence that was his most effective means of communication in matters of only moderate importance. She walked back into the cabin and had a sudden vision of Denise at the stove. She was about to sing something and Vickie was telling her that she hadn’t been able to write it yet, that it was a melody that she just couldn’t feel. And then because she was Vickie she began to cook breakfast again as she promised herself that she would discuss all of this with her two friends sometime today, all day if necessary, letting Mountain Girl be cryptically blunt and Andy ramble until she could somehow feel the rhythm and harmony of Zechariah’s words.
Because they were a cheap big band they played a lot of stuff for older groups also, people who were nostalgic for the big band swing era and for who they had to tone down some of their rock arrangements, even some of the subject matter and language in a few vocals. But this dance was a big deal for them and they weren’t going to tone anything down in any way. It was a dance for the school Vickie, Andy and about a third of the other band members attended. They had all been terribly excited that after their name came up discussion of which band to hire had abruptly ended. They had a lot of new songs they had worked out, many of them popular rock tunes and the rest relatively lesser known jazz and blues pieces. By now several members of the band had begun to try to arranging songs that they liked themselves and she was realizing that they each had their own style and that depending on who’s chart she played the band could sound very different. Henry had been to hear them several times and several of the other members were taking lessons with him now. In return the band members had composed several songs purportedly about him. At least his name was in the titles: Henry’s Blues, Henry’s Boogie, Henry’s Eighty Eight, Henry’s Rocket. He had been amused by the last one because he didn’t particularly care for rock music. But it was still fun to have the song named after him.
Mountain Girl had been hearing about the band for years now. As in the beginning, Vickie would confide in her all her fears and frustrations about it, wondering if it was worth the effort. Mountain Girls response had always been the same: “If you want to do it and are good at it then do it. What else are you going to do?” Vickie had gotten herself a new trumpet and now kept the second hand one Andy had gotten her on the mountain where she would practice new ideas, seating herself on a little cliff overlooking a valley a discrete distance from Zechariah and his love of quiet and completely unaware that he once in a while sought her out to listen to her. She would play to the wilderness with not a single harmonic in return echoing from the vast spaces, feeling like Joshua in the mountains and wondering if she could make the mountains fall with some of her mistakes.
And she had made some log drums for them to play on together, not very good ones at all but it was still fun to fool around with their little drum circle. She was learning a lot from that experience she thought, with perhaps the biggest lesson being that sometimes being good was not the most important thing. But none of this was the band and Mountain Girl’s friends had decided that it was time for her to hear for herself what that sounded like. They had gone up to the mountain and brought her back-it helped so much that Andy could drive now. They had cleaned her up, bought her a dress and told her that she would be Andy’s date. She would sit with the friends of the band.
And there she sat. Although she had gotten to know a few other people over the years nothing like this had ever happened to her. With the exception of her trip to the carnival she had never seen so many people in her life and that at least had been outdoors. This was unnerving to her in a way that she had never experienced before but with her two friends there she hoped that she would be okay. There had been a few attempts at conversation initiated by the others which had gone no where. She sat quietly watching while the rest of the people she was sitting with sort of forgot she was there. And then the band began to play and none of this mattered anyway.
She and her father both sang to themselves from time to time. She'd listened to Vickie practice innumerable times and they had had fun playing with the drums Vickie had made. On her infrequent trips to town she occasionally heard music coming from a radio. And Vickie had told her that some of the noises that filled her life, the wind or the calling of animals to each other, was a form of music. None of this had prepared her in anyway for what her ears were suddenly telling her. She sat stunned at the realization of what she hadn't know a few minutes before. And then half ways through the 2nd song she understood. She understood why no matter how much she talked Vickie always seemed to think she'd left something unsaid. Several couples walked out into the open space on the floor in front of the band and began to move around to the music. Dancing; she knew that must be what they were doing, and it looked like fun. But when one of the boys she was sitting with asked her to dance she decided that she'd rather keep to herself. He smiled at her and offered to ask her again later and she smiled back and told him okay. She turned her attention back to the band and was obliviously grateful when the rest of the table left her for the dance floor.
Vickie wasn’t as oblivious as the friends they had selected for Mountain Girl to sit with. By now as long as she was in front of her band she comfortable with being the focus of positive attention, and quite enjoyed the chance to talk about the songs they were doing for a moment before actually performing them. It was funny she thought, but the excitement and adrenaline of performing allowed her to talk about things that she might not have been able to say otherwise. Or maybe it was just that the music would correct anything she said wrong. Who knew? In any case halfway through the first set she decided that now was a good time to have a little fun and at the same time try to publicly acknowledge just how important Mountain Girl had been to Vickie‘s music. Maybe it would calm Mountain Girl down. She hoped.
They pulled up a chart that she had written about a year ago. It was an unusual one that started like a love song but then became an infectiously happy blues. It was one of the favorites for most of the dances they played and when the mood came on them they sometimes played it two or three times during the night. It was different also in that with the exception of a brief solo by Andy that she had written out for him Vickie’s was the only solo in it. Usually any number of musicians would trade solos but not on this one. It had a name that puzzled everyone but Andy also.
Vickie started her opening rap for the song. “Well good evening again everyone. The band would like to thank you again for having us here tonight. We’re just thrilled to be playing here tonight, it’s a kind of homecoming dance for some of us you know, and we’re going to make sure that you have a night that you’ll always remember.” She thought of something Henry had said to her several times over the time she’d known him. “You know, someone once told me that music should tell the truth. Especially jazz. That is of course if you can figure out what the truth is. But you know sometimes you might know the truth in a musical sense even if your mouth can’t find the words or perhaps even your heart can’t admit it. Tonight we’re going to do our best though, and we’re going to have a lot of fun while we do. Right now I’d like to introduce someone to you. I’d like you to meet the person who taught me how to play the trumpet. Now this chick can’t blow a note and thinks an ax is something to chop wood with but she taught me what I needed to know so that I could play. This is a true sister in the very depths of my soul, and without her the band wouldn’t be playing here tonight. And we’re going to do a song I wrote about her. We’ve been playing this song for a while and I guess a lot of you know it. It’s called Cat Ear Moon. So lets all give a hand to ------”she stopped. What could she call her? Mountain Girl wasn’t going to cut it as a name tonight and she never ever went by her original name. She wandered around in her own words trying to think of what to say before she gave up. “What the hell. Just listen to the song” she concluded. And suddenly the musicians at least, from playing the song so many times, had an inkling of what had happened that night and where it had happened.
Mountain Girl turned red as everyone looked at her and applauded on Vickie’s command. Then the song began and she turned even more red at the thought of a song about her. Andy finished his solo and climbed down off the band stand and led her to the floor where she tried to follow his instructions about how to dance. At least she had a gracefulness that made her mistakes not too awful. They wandered around the floor under the blue lights and Andy realized that the song hadn’t speeded up as it usually did. Vickie had kept it slow in the hopes of them actually enjoying their dance, and as she talked about that long ago night with her horn, her words floating out into the gym, they melted into each others arms and Mountain Girl felt something leaving her.
It set the mood for the night. During the break Mountain Girl’s two friends took turns hovering over her and eventually she relaxed enough to talk with some of the other people. Everyone seemed to think a great icebreaker was to ask what the song was about, why was it written, how had they become friends and so on. She just smiled and enigmatically said that she thought the song told the whole story. There wasn’t really much that she could discuss with any of these people but she began a listening strategy and played right into everyone's desire to talk about themselves. By the end of the evening she knew a lot more about the people there than anyone would have expected. While the band was playing it didn’t really matter anyway. Andy excused himself to dance with her a few times but mostly she listened to this side of her friends that she had nurtured but never experienced. Vickie had become a bit of a ham, launching into a diatribe every few songs. Midway into the second set she hit her stride.
They had just finished their version of No Matter What You Are, Mountain Girl watching Vickie stare at her as she played even though Vickie’s eyes were closed. Vickie had said that it was really a pretty insipid song but Gary had come up with a dramatic arrangement of it and Denise had put enough conviction into the song that it almost sounded like a gospel song about Jesus instead of a top forty pop hit. As loud and powerful as the band was it still had the intimacy of someone whispering in your ear. Vickie thought that if they were going to talk about loyalty they might as well talk about loss too. “We’re going to do a song about drugs now.” She paused for effect and looked at the faces of the principal and chaperones. They looked concerned. “You know the song we just finished, a lot of people feel like that about drugs, but that’s not what the song is about at all. Let me ask you all something. How many of you out there like to party? I know you do, so do I. Don’t be shy now, raise your hands.” She had them pretty well conditioned by now. Raise your hands if you think your date is cute, raise your hand if you’ve ever had the blues and so on. Obediently hands went up. “Well you better listen to this next song. It’s a song by a man named Luther Allison and it’s about someone who liked to party a little too much. A lot too much………Waaaaaaaay too much. I’ve got another question. How many people here have seen someone you love try to drink themselves to death? Come on. I know this is a personal question but I know there should be a lot of hands up. How about your friends? Who here has a friend they worry about? Look around you. I know enough of the people here to know there ought to be a hell of a lot of hands up. Well here’s a song about this whole thing and we’re going to dedicate it to all of you who were afraid to raise your hands. It’s called Cherry Red Wine and it’s one of our favorite songs.” The band started and as she began her introductory solo, pacing frantically about the changes like an animal trapped in a cage of grief and anguish. Then George’s guitar talked about it for a while with Lynn and Gordon agreeing with him. And then finally a vocal by Denise, as if anything more even needed to be said and a duet between Vickie and Denise leading up to the end where Denise described what is was going to be like to visit this person’s grave, which Vickie thought might have the best last line to a song that she had ever heard. It was time for a new song.
They launched into one of her favorite revenge fantasies, The Pusher, with Denise singing about people looking as if they had already died and no one had remembered to tell them about it and the dreadful fate she would inflict on those she considered to responsible for this, with this time Joe and Bruce expressing their opinions on the subject. And then Vickie thought about something and felt a little funny. No more drug songs for now she thought. As they finished she told the band to get one of the new charts, something called Jingo by a guy from Africa. She started another introduction, explaining a bit where this song came from and what it seemed to her to be about. It was a song from Africa, a song from the birthplace of humanity. A song about the ancestors. It’s not nice to disrespect the ancestors she went on as the drums began. And then she blew the introduction into the audience, a prophet hurling down curses from the mountain top. The band came in and there was a drum solo, angry, warning that mankind will gets it’s due. Then the band again and the bass solo by Kimmy, still angry. And finally another trumpet, Joe again, this time arguing for reconciliation. They finished it out on a happy note and she decided it was time for something simpler. The dance floor was filled and this was supposed to be fun, not a lecture.
They had worked out an arrangement of a Chuck Berry song and they launched into that with everyone getting a chance to talk about what they hoped the future might hold and how good the dancers looked and how great it was to be young. Everyone thought of this as guitar music but they had given a long piano solo to Valerie and she was having a fine old time with it along with Frank and George. But still there was that feeling. She felt great. The whole band felt great. But couldn’t there be something just a little more?
They played another blues but it was a happy and indignant blues that half the band had helped write after hearing Willie Mae Thornton do something called Bumblebee Blues. They called their song The Spider And The Bee and like most of the songs they had composed was somewhat reminiscent of another artists work. Henry had said that if they kept at it they would find their own voices and that was the general plan in their efforts. It was filled with a lot of double entendres while Denise danced around describing the spiders efforts to catch the bee as it tried to sting the spider, debating whether the spider web was really such a bad place and besides maybe the bee’s stringer would actually feel kind of nice and no one at all thought that she was talking about a couple of insects. There was room for a half a dozen solos while Denise considered the next verse and it really was a bit of nonsense but who cared and it seemed like every time they performed it the song had new verses and a different ending. Vickie realized that the set had gone by in no time and that it would be best to end a set with a slow one, something to calm people down a bit. They pulled out another chart, slow and romantic. Lynn talked about love from afar, a love that was tireless and ageless as if preserved silently, Love In Silent Amber it was called, written by a guy named Alan Broadbent. Lynn told everyone there what she would do if she only had the chance. There was something that she was waiting for just like in the song, something that Vickie was waiting for as well, and it might not ever get here, even with her two friends to help her wait, forever if need be. Lynn had a way of playing this song so that Vickie could never decide whether she was as sad as this song sometimes seemed to be but tonight Lynn was saying that whatever the feeling was it would be okay. And just in case Vickie had a plan for after the gig anyway.
The break went by with Mountain Girl holding her own now listening to all the people trying to talk to her while Andy, Vickie, and the rest of the band floated around in a haze of adrenaline and love. Somehow they all had wandered back to the bandstand well before the break was over.
She thought of how the dance had gone and considered what to play next. There was something she'd left out and she thought it might finally, tonight, be time. Gary had done an arrangement of a song by Linda Jones called Hypnotized which was tailored to what Andy could and could not do. Linda Jones, the woman singers like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin said was their favorite singer. It was hard to imagine Andy playing anything of hers convincinly, but Gary had a way of knowing just what to write and at it's worst the song still sounded pretty good. They'd take a chance, she decided. She told the band this would be the next chart and Andy gave her a smile. A smile of some sort of gratitude that surprised her. And then Andy was blowing an impassioned love story over the soft pillows of the sax harmonies and Vickie felt herself swirling around in its melody and Andy was really letting go, feeling the song like he never did. Vickie stared at him in amazement.
This was a love song, but something else as well. And suddenly, just this once, she heard something in the voice of Andy's trombone. It wasn't a love song anymore. It was a song about the desperation Vickie felt, the almost hopeless struggle not to let her life to be what it seemed predestined to be. All the things she tried to tell Andy but always felt like she left something out. All the things she knew that he knew even if she couldn't admit them to himself. There it was, for all to hear. They said that when you listened to Linda Jones you could hear her knowledge of the early death that awaited her in her voice. And tonight this was a love song, yes it still was. But not a love song for some man, some woman. A love song for life, wanting it to last. Wanting it just to be. And then the notes were over.
The band was still playing, finishing up with the out chorus, but it was suddenly just a very special love song again. And then it was too good to be over so they did another one, one that really was just a love song, with the pretty alto sax player Anne discussing how she might not have anything to offer except her song but still she too was in love and when Andy put his bone on it's stand and asked Mountain Girl to dance again she gave him a huge smile and said “No, dance with Vickie now”. He took her by the hand and she was in such a daze that she hardly noticed as he led her down off the bandstand and onto the dance floor but as they moved their feet around and she listened to Anne she felt something dissolve inside her. The shadows and lights played down from the ceiling and they sang to themselves about la-la-la-la means I love you and the song was like a satin womb holding the dancers. Before she could get back to the band they started in next with Daydream, Anne taking right up where she left off with Valerie on the piano again. Andy retrieved Mountain Girl so that all three of them were dancing, slowly moving their feet around as they held each other like it was a cold mountain night and they needed each other to stay warm except this was a spiritual warmth as much as anything so that when Vickie looked around the whole floor was into it and into each other and no one thought it was at all weird but just fine when the daydream took hold of them and they were in their own world till the song was over and then Vickie knew she had to stop and be a bandleader which after all was what she was.
Three songs like that in a row was enough to have the chaperones worrying about teenage pregnancy but a mood definitely needed to be maintained and nourished, not a mood of all slow love songs but a mood of abandonment the way they had all just been abandoned to the haven of their own dreams but with a little more excitement now. Time for some religious fervor so the drums started on a long solo, the drums being the heartbeat of humanity and when the drums were swinging without even thinking about it and everyone was drawn into them it was time to be ready. You’ve Got To Be Ready was the name of the song and it was another one of her absolute favorites. Sometimes she thought that it summed up a lot of her confusion about so many things. She thought about how it all seemed to be so simple for Andy. It wasn’t really she knew, but you had to know him as well as she did to realize that. Well the music was telling the truth again, even if she still wasn’t sure what it was. Denise’s voice came screaming in over the horns like a plane landing at top speed, all about how you’ve got to be ready, something she sang in the church choir also which was where Vickie had heard it and gotten the idea for this arrangement, but they weren’t going to tell anyone yet what to be ready for, just you’ve got to be ready. They calmed down a little bit while Valerie had a good long outing on the piano, thinking about it a bit now rather than just mad anticipation as she lead them into a duet between Denise and the drums and then the drums playing fours with anyone who wanted to take a turn for four to say that they were getting ready like Gene Krupa playing the gospel till the brass all started to shout that they were just about ready and the saxes had their say almost as loud till they were all done and in the last few beats the band told them Who they had to be ready for. Vickie thought that maybe she had been premature because that was a hard idea to top but there were a lot of dimensions to life and so they decided to speak now about someone who just didn’t care, a long electric kool aid acid introduction but evil and ending in a clatter like someone pushed down the stairs and Vickie all of a sudden angry, really outraged at this nasty person who went around breaking hearts without any feeling at all, not even a perverse enjoyment: You Just Don’t Care was the name of the song and the meaning of the notes hurled into the room on her horn and now there was a vocal from Valerie with actual words almost fighting with Kim’s bass leading into George’s guitar playing the same lick over and over as starkly implacable as a hungry great white shark on cruise control, not mysterious like the theme from Jaws but this was a fish’s eye view of it, seeing everything and in all it’s unstoppable hunger and might. He kept at it forever until the whole band was shouting at the top of its lungs about this; time to bring them back to the actual song and the story as it wound it’s way on to it’s inescapable end. Time now for the sequel which was an old blues song with the quiet slow bass playing descending chromatic scales which always made her think of death climbing up a stair in the night to get to her room, death climbing one step at a time so slowly but never stopping or resting, death coming knocking on the door while her trumpet and George’s guitar were cats fighting in the night in an alley under your window.
There was a pause and Vickie took a deep breath, stood motionless with the silence and then screamed a high note cadenza through the plunger. Any other night it would have had the best notes of the entire gig; a scream like a mother coming home to discover all her children lying dead, twisting and turning it’s way through the contortions of the mute down the octaves and suddenly it was another song entirely about a man who went to see his old lady at the hospital, a place named after Saint James, bringing her flowers and thinking of the love he would get when she got home but when they let him finally see her there was no arguing with the finality of what happens to us all, and Lynn with an anguished plunger mute had an awful lot to say about that till Vickie chimed in again and it was two chicks with their horns going wah-wah and yah-yah and growling and shaking till there was nothing left to be said about that either while the band held them, embraced them but the set was only half over and please lets get a little lighter even though it feels so good to spill your guts to a whole ballroom.
They did a song called One Fine Morning, a song about someday when they would finally wake up and know all would be right with the world. The song made Vickie think of an innocent little girl with the wistful harmonies of the brass seeming to yearn for that day, wondering if it would actually ever get here or if perhaps it was already long gone. A song for the little girl she had once told Andy and Mountain Girl about and the person that only they seemed to be able to know. It was a song she often felt frustrated with. Gary and George usually had the solos and they did a wonderful job with them. Sometimes she tried to play one also but the song did something to her and trying to play what she really felt seemed to take the song somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go. So she let others speak their mind on this song and contented herself with soaking it all up, reveling in the joy that the song gave her and everyone else. The song ended in a long outing from George and she found herself starting at him feeling like he was trying to tell her something very important about herself. About himself. She wished she could understand whatever it was he was trying to say. He finished, something still unsaid. She didn’t know what in the world they should play next.
But there was still a lot of time in the set so when they were finished they launched into a long jam on one of their head charts starting out feeling just grand about it all with every single musician getting a solo, long ones for Vickie, Bruce, Gary, Joe, and Gordon and short ones for Andy and the bari player till finally they slowed it down into a brief embrace goodbye by Anne on the alto for the dancers. Vickie let out an exhausted sigh as they finished and this time the band really did need a rest.
When they got back onto the bandstand for the last set she wanted to make sure they still had everyone’s attention so the very first thing she did was blow what was really a bugle call out into the room, calling everyone back to the frenzied passion they had needed to rest from. The other trumpet players joined her and then the rest of the band for something called Bugle Call Rag. It was another song that had started out as a record copy and then turned into something quite different, first because the trumpet solo was so hard that all the trumpets needed to take turns playing what Cootie Williams had made sound so easy and then because she thought that ragtime didn’t really sound that different from rock and roll so they had changed the beat just a tiny bit so that the kids who didn’t know any better thought that it was a modern song. Henry had acted like this was some sort of sacrilege, playing jazz with a rock beat, but they had learned the song the older way also and played it as a swing thing for older audiences. Sometimes Vickie found herself agreeing with Henry but other times she would watch her friends dancing around and remember that Duke had said that jazz needed to be danced to in order to be understood and figured it was all okay. It was funny how little things like this could seem to make such a difference, as if people defined themselves by the music they thought they should like. The song finished and the band sounded so good that she thought of trying to play Koko next but even tonight she didn’t think they had that in them. They’d worked at it for years now and still weren’t even sure how it really went in spite of it’s apparent simplicity.
Instead there was terribly loud guitar ripping through the room with the trumpets helping out too and suddenly no one could talk at all as the saxes let everyone know that they were born to be wild which was really meant for a vocal but the trouble was that all the singer’s voices were actually a little too good for the song. Everyone knew the words anyway and Mountain Girl thought it sounded like someone sliding down a whole mountain without stopping or maybe more like a leap off of the ledges where she liked to impress her other friends screaming happily all the way down to the water. Vickie thought that they would stay in a contemporary vehicular theme though or so she said and they would stay with the idea of being carried away by someone, by life, by love, by wonder like a star struck twelve year old with more horns and now it was time for Kim to sing a little bit again about how she would be a Vehicle for all this, taking them away with her to wherever they wanted to go with a little help from the guitar.
She wanted to hear Gordon hold forth at least once more tonight so when George was finished for the moment she pointed to Gordon; it's your turn now; have your way with the song and the audience and the evening, and she sat down on the steps to the bandstand to listen and learn. Trombone Moses. She's read a story once with a character in it by that name. God's trombone. Another expression she'd read somewhere. Gabriel played the trumpet but when a point really needed to be made the trombone was the instrument to be used. She listened to him for a long time while the band amused themselves by making up back ground riffs for him. Then just listening to him Cris knew and she got up, stood in front of the band with him, chiming in, arguing with him and echoing him, fighting and loving like brother and sister till they ended the song with a little unison statement which let the band know it was time to stop even if there was a whole last page of notes they didn’t get to play that night.
They were going to run out of time; each song was lasting longer than she planned and she still had so many songs she wanted to play tonight. She decided what she wanted most to tell them about was the nights when she and Andy were so much younger lying by the river in the cemetery watching the trains, so it was time for more jazz. Lynn screeched out the trains whistle with her plunger introducing Anne again; one more time for Anne to be the sweet little altogirl playing a song called Rock A Bye River, she was graceful and passionate and eternal and sleepy all at once; a river of peaceful moonlight and slow graceful currents, a river grown old and fat with age and then there was another train with it’s screaming plunger whistle by Vickie this time fading into the distance. She could smell the warm green smell of a summer river as Anne talked about lying there all peaceful, watching the moons reflection in the water and feeling like she was home at last and then they moved into another very different song, a rock piece, but it was still about all the talks they had as they sat on the forgotten tombstones and all the memories, memories of what they talked about and of the time and of their childhood and of discovering love and it was a long, long chart with lengthy discourses by half the band, especially George who got out his violin because for him every time they played this song was a special occaision and Valerie took off into a flight of fancy about an old wonderful friend she remembered and all about everything she had wanted to tell people about him; well now she did and after all even the tombstone they had sat on said it had a memory of someone named Elizabeth Reed while Vickie thought again that the stories about that song were so silly, that any fool with an ear could tell that the song was about remembering intimacy no matter if all they did was talk all night. The song ended with a brief sweet goodbye from Anne on her alto and then the dance was over. Vickie told the dancers and listeners to give themselves a hand for being the worlds best audience and almost immediately no one in the band or Mountain Girl either could hardly even remember what had happened but they all thought it had been one of the most intimate and passionate nights they could ever have imagined.
They were way too high when it was over to even think of being done for the night. Most of the band went out for breakfast and as they drove to the diner Vickie produced what had been nibbling at her mind during the evening. A big bottle of Guinea Red which the 3 of them drank half of before they got to the diner. After an hour of reliving the evening so far the three of them and George went to Andy’s home because Vickie certainly wasn’t going to risk ruining a perfect evening by going to her parents house and they sat on the front porch finishing the wine. Andy thought it felt a little funny having George there with them, almost like it was some sort of double date or something, but it was all okay anyway with them talking and talking, even letting George know some of the secrets the three of them had shared. And then George looked at Vickie and drunkenly began to laugh. She asked him what was so funny and he replied. “You’re trying to tell me these things, but Vickie, tonight you said everything you ever wanted to say on that bandstand. Well, knowing you, probably almost everything you ever wanted to say. I’ve never known you not to think you didn’t leave something out. But even so, you know, everybody there believed every note you played. We all did.
Andy, I know something about you now too that I didn’t know before. And you, Mountain Girl. I don’t know if you knew all this about them before but now you know me. And I love all of you.” Andy wanted to talk about this some more but George seemed to think he’d said enough and Vickie and Mountain Girl didn’t seem to think he’d pointed out anything they didn’t already know. They talked aimlessly for a little bit longer till they were finally ready to fall asleep. As they had known she would, Mountain Girl said that no matter how wonderful an evening it had been she wasn’t about to spend any more time indoors if she could possibly help it. It was a truly beautiful late autumn evening with the wine making the cold more sensual than ever, but George didn’t really feel up to sleeping outdoors and said he really had to get home. He hugged all three of them, kissed Mountain Girl briefly on the mouth and then gave Vickie a kiss that left everyone wondering if he might not change his mind and stay with them for the rest of the night. But then Vickie stopped him and the moment was over, the decision made. Andy left a note for his parents so they wouldn’t worry in the morning and they all rolled up in blankets under one of the pine trees where Andy and Vickie had made a hideout when they were little. The November moon shone down on them and intoxicated in a thousand different ways they finally fell asleep.
The clouds had come in while they slept and the warmth that made the earlier night so inviting began to deposit it’s calling cards. They lay in a pile with a gentle wind slipping snowflakes onto them from between the branches and the fresh cold smell of snow mixed with the warm smell of pine wrapping themselves around each other in their nostrils. There was a faint set of footprints in the snow leading to the tree and back to the house where Andy’s dad had come out to check and had spread another blanket over all three of them. One by one they awoke to the music of the night before, now inaudible except to the three of them and when they eventually realized that they were all awake but not trying to disturb the two others there was a laugh followed by admiration for the snow and after a minute of collective thought they climbed out from under and walked towards the house for a breakfast with Andy’s family as they tried to retell what had happened the night before.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Bending forward to gather my hair, I comb it straight down toward the floor, then rising, flip it up and back. Giving myself a shake to make my dress hang straight, I peer at my reflection.
The mirror can be unkind, specially at this time in the morning, when the light shows every bad feature. My eyes, I think, a little too heavy? … I dab away a grain of mascara that’s caught on a lash. I feel like a statue that’s been bewitched by the Bad Fairy and has to be re-carved every morning. Is my lipstick on straight? Now do I look all right?
Wish I could be reliably pretty without all this work!
It’s a relief, though, to be back at Holyoke, away from home where all things are grim and tense. Unsettlingly, some of the grimness and tension seems to have traveled back to college with me. Can’t I leave it behind? I don’t want to be a sad girl! I want to be happy, I will be happy. I am happy—there.
The hall is full of trilling and chirping like a birdcage, girls sounding heedless, larky, goofy with delight. How do they manage that? I feel out of it, as if I have somehow lost a year or two when I wasn’t noticing, and am now older and more worried than everyone else.
They say sophomore year can be a bad year for many students—full of pitfalls, false steps, mistaken moves. I hope mine won’t be!
I know I can never be perfect enough. Daddy let me know that before I left home, sitting me down to one of his pep talks. He went through every one of the things he loves to insist I do: developing my character, learning determination, taking responsibility, having foresight, making an effort, currying influence, cultivating an impression, putting your best foot forward … But if I force myself to do them, they leave a feeling like death inside me. With all that hanging over my head, what are my chances of ever getting anything right?
Class is too risky to talk in, for fear of making myself more of a fool than I already am. The other girls sound so self-assured, they seem to know far more than I do. I’ve become so silent now! I wasn’t always this way. Where’s the chatterbox of yore?
I used to think I would grow up to feel like a heroine. Instead I feel like a cardboard cutout.
Debby, Harriet’s roommate last year, lasted less than two months before she had to go home because, Harriet says, she couldn’t take school.
Can I take school?
There are moments when a pair of arms around me would be very heartening.
Life seems to have come down pretty quickly to a routine. Wake up. Throw on clothes. Get to the dining room for breakfast (if you woke up in time). Go to classes. Stuff lunch. More classes. Afternoon activities like art and sports and dance—I’m still trying to dance, though it’s clear I am hardly Martha Graham. Finish sweaty, change, shower, dress again for supper. Evenings: book it in the library—or risk trying to study in the room where everyone on the hall sooner or later breezes in.
“Hey! Robyn, you going to the sing?” We five or six guitar players on campus (most are Outing Club girls who sing raucous silly songs from their days and nights on the Appalachian Trail) seem to have started a trend. Now twice a month in some convenient nook or lounge we hold a songfest, and magically people show up. Most are girls from Holyoke or Smith, but boys seem to cluster wherever we do, like flies, and some of them play and sing as well.
“Have to finish this French first.” Six years of French now, and I still speak it like a klutz. Conversation class is embarrassing.
“Aw, come on, what are you, some kind of straight arrow?”
“’Course not.”
“Take a break then!”
I seem not to have any friends to speak of. The other girls are mostly nice to me, but it’s as if a glass wall stands between us. There’s no one I can confide in. I feel rattled much of the time, embattled inside, my head in turmoil and I can barely concentrate. It’s like there are two souls in me fighting endlessly so I can never have any peace and I’m exhausted a lot of the time. I can be glad and full of daring and then suddenly mad, or crying so hard my chest aches.
Robyn, what is the matter with you? Normal people aren’t like this, are they?
Daddy’s voice on the phone makes me sick to my stomach, possessing me all over again. “You’ll need to develop closer relationships with your professors.”
“I know, Daddy.”
Hanging like a greasy umbrella over it all is the ownership in his voice. “The worst thing you can do is fall in with a bunch of slackers and never develop your full academic potential.”
“I will, I promise.”
Putting the phone down I feel dirtied. In a robe and my backless sheepskin flip-flop slippers I flap down to the showers, sit naked, forlorn, defiant on the septic floor with four showers beating on my head. I feel I must be the only girl in the world this has happened to, and it is somehow my fault. Really the only remedy is to put it out of my mind. Mostly I am able to do that.
I go through the motions. Here I am in class, opening my notebook for my Comparative Lit course. We’re studying Crime and Punishment. It seems to be a little too much about me. Or here, in my Geology course, struggling with the formula for flow in a streambed, ambushed by math in disguise. Or I’m at one of the biweekly sings, playing blues guitar, voice croaking hard because there’s nothing nice about this song I learned off an ancient 78 rpm record:
Moon going down, babe, stars about to shine,
Oh, moon going down, you know, stars about to shine,
And my rider told me, I don’t want you hangin’ round.
or, in my best old mountainy voice, a ballad hundreds of years old about a lovers’ murder (cheerful, huh?):
As they were talking by the garden gate, a-taking kisses sweet,
With a little penknife held in her hand, she stabbed him so deep,
Lie there, lie there, loving Henry Lee, till the flesh drops from your bone,
The girl you love in that merry Greenland will await your coming home.
Or poised in the dance studio in my baggy black leotard, one arm extended, balance, dissonant modern music shuddering through me, trying not to forget the choreographed figures. Later in my nice dress, dining among other girls with Mrs. Freed our literature professor I’ll be blinking prettily, talking about Jonathan Swift and Fenimore Cooper—ice locked in a cube that used to be nice free flowing water, yet now, cold set in hard, stony, slippery, freezing, temperatures dropping, dropping—
“And what do you plan to do with yourself after graduation?”
“I haven’t decided yet …” Will I ever?
Suddenly I am writing poetry. But it didn’t come about as any outpouring from the heart. A class assignment started it all.
“You are to write a sonnet,” said our American Lit prof, midway in our studies of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville & Co. Over the ensuing moan she explained, “It may be about anything you please, but ladies, I’ll expect you to follow the sonnet form correctly.”
Alto and soprano groans quaver floorward. Scattered girls among us bat their hair, twist about, kick their ankles, chew their lips. A hand shoots up. “Does that mean, well, you know, rhyming and everything?”
“Naturally. Intricate rhyme is the hallmark of the sonnet.”
The bell rings. Dainty feet beat a retreat, girls shaking their heads. “I can’t, can you?”
“I don’t think it’s fair. This was supposed to be a reading course, not a writing one.”
My heart’s in my shoes. I couldn’t write a sonnet if my life depended on it—could I? I’ve fiddled around writing since I was nine: funny stories, even a few serious ones,. I’ve even written a tiny bit of poetry (when I was feeling really down in the dumps), but it was free verse, of course. Me, rhyme? Are you kidding? I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to start. What would I …? How would I …?
Well, there’s “moon” and June.”
Oh well, it’s a game. I tackle it and hours later, with a headache, it’s done. Pretty awful, but it’s technically a sonnet, rhymes in all the right places. I hand it in and get a B minus with her usual comments in red ink like blood all over the page. Luckily I’m never going to write another sonnet in my life!
Yet the experience jars loose something in my brain (I guess that was the general idea). I start writing poems, unrhymed ones, even rhymed ones. It becomes an absorbing evening activity to see how many poems I can write at a stretch. Soon I am writing scads of them, and can’t stop. I put my head down to go to sleep and I get a poem idea and have to put the light back on.
Then I start writing a story. In fact several stories. Suddenly I’m a writing maniac. I start keeping a clipboard and ballpoint pen by my bed to scribble down my ideas.
Cecily thinks I’m a nut. “Are you going to write songs too?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. “Why? I’ve already got more songs than I can sing.”
“Suit yourself. Remember, though, in New York lots of folksingers write songs.”
“Write? Traditional songs aren’t things you write, they’ve been handed down from long ago …”
“Pooh. Where’d you think all the songs came from, if somebody didn’t make them up to begin with?”
Cecily sounds distracted, though. She’s restless here, unhappy, her classes aren’t going well. Lately she’s been letting her homework slide, and everything else too. Her boyfriend’s at Columbia, she never gets to see him unless she goes home, and now he’s sent this letter she broods over, reading between the lines.
“He’s got somebody else, in my opinion—just doesn’t want to say so.”
“That’s bad.”
“I’m sure he’d like to keep both of us on the string and hope we never end up together with him, all three in the same place.”
“You would let him do that?”
Amid the tousle of her brown hair her dark brows knit in her straight-featured face. “That's what I'm not sure of. He does mean a lot to me, but if he’s going to play me like a fish—”
I comfort her. “Maybe you should write him a Dear John letter,” referring to the Ferlin Husky song that was all over the radio a couple of years ago.
She stands bolt upright, all nervy. “Maybe I should go see him. Right now.”
“Huh? You can’t very well, not in the middle of the semester—”
Cecily releases a long breath. “I can, though, if I quit.”
“Quit what?”
“School.”
“Oh come on.”
“No, face it, I haven’t been happy here for so long, I’m going nowhere, now this—”
Bewildered, I’m still trying to come up with arguments why this good friend and fellow banjo player shouldn’t give up and leave college (after all, wasn’t it her dream that we’d play banjo duets together till the end of time?) while she packs her one bag—she never had much in the way of clothes. Nine at night, and she’s in her winter coat and dress and stockings heading out onto Route 5 to, of all things, hitchhike her way south to New York!
“Hitchhike? It’s not safe. Take a bus at least.”
“Waste of money. I’ll be all right.”
For days I watch the papers, expecting to see a headline COLLEGE DROPOUT SLAIN HITCHHIKING. But she must have made it all right—that is, if no news really is good news. She promised to write when she got to New York, but she hasn’t. Only when it was too late did I realize I hadn’t gotten her home address.
The college didn’t leave her bunk empty long. Yesterday evening a large, bluff, baffled-looking Junior girl wandered in. “Um, I’m Rickie Shaddock. This the right room? They told me to move in here.”
Which she does. And talks my ear off about her woeful love life. Worse yet, she's in love with a girl.
As I walked into her room, Mara Schott regarded me like a rug sample. “Well, if it isn’t! I wondered when you’d get around to me again. Tired of all banjos all the time?”
“No—o,” I retort. For it’s true, I can take infinite banjos.
“What then?”
“Cecily left school.”
“Your roommate? For where?”
“New York,” I say, stricken. “She’s not coming back.”
“Oh.” Mara digests this. In her sprightly way she exclaims, “So this means the rest of us can finally get some sleep?”
“Oh no.” Hard to fall into the teasing mode at the moment, but I do. “I’m still here, and I play louder than she did. No one is going to get any sleep if I can help it.”
Mara beams. “So she cruelly left you roommateless?”
“Seems as if.”
“Poow wittle Wobyn, aw by ooself.”
“Actually no. This other girl Rickie Shaddock’s moved in.” To Mara’s questioning look, I explain. “She was in a room downstairs, no roommate, they needed to consolidate. She’s from Maine.”
“Uh-oh. Far be it from me to say anything the least uncomplimentary about our valued northeasternmost state—”
“Yes yes yes yes,” I say, for Mara can be nastily uncomplimentary when she gets a bee in her bonnet. “Anyway, not to play psychoanalyst, but I think Rickie’s sort of sad. Her scholarship is lapsing, she said, because she hasn’t getting any work done. But that’s because she has this girlfriend—or rather she hasn’t got her—” I realize I might have said too much. Mara makes no secret of her distaste for other people’s sexual shenanigans.
“Girlfriend?”
“It’s just her taste,” I squirm, feeling the familiar panic. “She can’t help it, any more than—” I stop myself short.
Mara’s scoffs, “Doesn’t anyone around here have boyfriends?”
I shrug. Holyoke isn’t a hotbed of sin and she knows it.
“So who’s the lucky girl she’s laid her perverted affections on? Anyone I know?”
I sigh, wishing Mara weren’t quite this heartless. “Barbara Noone. Faculty brat, I think. She’s driving Rickie—”
“—Out of her wooly little mind. Familiar story. She mopes, she sulks, she glums. Accurate to within five percent? And what is our poor Rickie doing about it?”
“At the moment she’s sitting at my desk moaning and writing Barbara long letters that cost the earth to mail, since this Barbara person is in Switzerland—”
“Skiing?” she inquires sweetly.
“Schooling.”
“Oo la la.”
“Anyway it’s so sad in my room now, I had to get away.”
“Well, while you’re here …” Mara reaches for her guitar. “Want to work on some duets?”
I hesitate. “Sure.”
After this Mara and I fall into the habit of singing together fairly often. We concentrate on soft songs because that’s the kind she mostly does. Singing with her lacks the sheer headlong excitement of singing with Cecily, but it is fun, and we’re beginning to improvise harmonies that sound nice together.
“We’re good!” she crows, after we finish a perilously sweet rendition of "The Water is Wide." “We might do concerts together, what do you think?”
I don’t know what to say. Mara is a lot more experienced than I am, I think; but her enthusiasm is infectious. “I suppose we might. What sort of thing were you thinking about?”
“Well, there’s that recital hall in the library. They have a concert series there.”
I feel a quease of stage fright turning in my tummy. “Oh.”
“Scared? Don’t be. I’m not. Look, I made this list of the songs we do together. And then, with solos in between—”
I study the paper she gives me. “Sure, we could I guess,” I say carelessly. “Gives me butterflies, though, just to think about.”
She laughs. “Oh what can happen? We’ll just brazen it out.” Clearly she doesn’t really know what stage fright is. Still her self-confidence is infectious.
“Now, I suggest to get ready for the concert series we see how well we go over with people,” she says. “There’s the dorm party in the lounge Sunday night, we could inveigle someone to ask us to sing ...”
“You are such a Lucrezia Borgia,” I accuse her.
“Aren’t I?” she whoops with delight.
So when the party is going strong, having secreted our guitars beforehand, she gets Carol Zeale to ask us to sing. We’re fairly unprepared, as Mara is breezily indifferent to rehearsing. Still we do five songs that seem to go pretty well, and even come up with some off-the-cuff banter that makes the other girls laugh.
Afterward, while I’m living through every agonizing second of it over and over like a puppy gnawing a bone, worrying at the weak spots and feeling ten times a fool, Mara is smug. “We wowed ‘em, Robyn.”
“Are you sure? I wondered if we were a laughing-stock.”
“No! They were laughing with us, not at us.”
It’s after eight. I am in Carol Zeale’s room. In fact I am, at the moment, lying with her on her bed.
It’s not what you think! We’re decently clad. In fact we’re still in our blouses and skirts from dinner (slacks aren’t allowed at the dinner table, as Gracious Living is in effect at suppertime). Carol just broke up with her boyfriend, she’s been crying till she got the hiccups. I said BOO, which stopped them. She was grateful, but then started crying again, so I put my arm around her, that’s all.
Carol doesn’t attract me. She’s fluffy blonde, scatterbrained and silly, an inch or so shorter than me. A person with whom I share very little.
That’s I guess why we went to the fortune teller’s together. It was such a hoot! You can’t imagine this little brown woman with the Hungarian style accent and she actually had a crystal ball, can you believe it? I thought these things were just in stories.
I went first. The moment we sat down across the little round table it was “Cross my palm with silver.” I giggled, it was so perfect.
“Silver?”
That brown palm is out in front of us, face up. “No pennies, no nickels, no bills. Dimes and quarters to make up the full two dollars, please.”
I scrounged in my purse. It’s a good thing I’m a pack rat, or I’d never have had change enough. “Would you really not take dollar bills?”
“Sure, anything,” wisecracks the woman. “But thanks for the change, I was running short.”
After this anything was possible. She peered into the crystal ball and said, “I see a man. Not tall, not dark.”
“Really. No woman?”
She gave me a keen look. “A woman’s what you want in your fortune?”
“No no,” hastily, “just asking.”
She told me I have a longish lifeline. That’s good, though I can’t imagine living past thirty … But the trouble happened when Carol sat down for her fortune. Lingering near the door, I heard her say, “But that’s him! And he’s dumped me!”
Out of the fortune teller’s little shop she came teary and mad. “How dare she tell me I’ve got a tall dark man in my future when he just broke up with me?”
“Maybe she meant a different tall dark man.”
All the way back to campus Carol was fretful, and once we got to her room she was crying. Though I was anxious to get back to my studying, my heart went out to her, I couldn’t just leave her there. So I sat with her on her bed, soothed her clammy brow, whispered comforting comments in the pale yellow curls at her ear. I was about to ask her if she wanted a washcloth to sponge away the tears. But then there were her lips, wet with those same tears.
Why, oh why did I kiss them? Me and my stupid impulses! Anyway I did. No good reason.
She shook her head, eyes scared. “What are you doing to me? Girls aren’t s’posed— I can’t possibly—”
What was I supposed to answer? I didn’t even like her. But this neediness wouldn’t let go of me. She grabbed my hand, pushed it back. There was a little tussle, Carol crying weakly, refusing. I sat up. She put herself to rights. I stood up.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought it was what you wanted.”
“Obviously it wasn’t,” she hissed, so scathingly my scalp crawled. “As any idiot with one eye could easily see.”
I was at the door in a second. “My mistake. Sorry.”
She snarled, “Don’t you ever, ever even think of doing any such thing to me again.”
Stung, I retreated to my room thinking I’d try to pick up the thread of my studies. But what I did instead was endlessly, hopelessly agonize about what had just happened. How could I? What could I have been thinking of? What kind of person was I?
After that I got sick. My tummy just gave out, it seemed. I didn’t go to the hospital, but I did miss two days of classes. Carol to my astonishment brought me a big covered container of chicken soup. Her severe looks were priceless, but being the object of them I merely felt like a worm.
“Psychosomatic, probably,” she reproved, voice stilted as if she’d practiced the line beforehand. “Emotional turmoil, I wouldn’t wonder.”
“As if you would know?” I was past being nice.
“Comes of trying bad things on decent people. Things nobody should ever have to put up with, and I don’t know why I did. That’s all the soup I’m going to bring. I just wanted to return good for bad, and I hope it teaches you a lesson.”
“What?”
But she just turned and marched out.
Is this what they call sophomore slump?
The mirror can be unkind, specially at this time in the morning, when the light shows every bad feature. My eyes, I think, a little too heavy? … I dab away a grain of mascara that’s caught on a lash. I feel like a statue that’s been bewitched by the Bad Fairy and has to be re-carved every morning. Is my lipstick on straight? Now do I look all right?
Wish I could be reliably pretty without all this work!
It’s a relief, though, to be back at Holyoke, away from home where all things are grim and tense. Unsettlingly, some of the grimness and tension seems to have traveled back to college with me. Can’t I leave it behind? I don’t want to be a sad girl! I want to be happy, I will be happy. I am happy—there.
The hall is full of trilling and chirping like a birdcage, girls sounding heedless, larky, goofy with delight. How do they manage that? I feel out of it, as if I have somehow lost a year or two when I wasn’t noticing, and am now older and more worried than everyone else.
They say sophomore year can be a bad year for many students—full of pitfalls, false steps, mistaken moves. I hope mine won’t be!
I know I can never be perfect enough. Daddy let me know that before I left home, sitting me down to one of his pep talks. He went through every one of the things he loves to insist I do: developing my character, learning determination, taking responsibility, having foresight, making an effort, currying influence, cultivating an impression, putting your best foot forward … But if I force myself to do them, they leave a feeling like death inside me. With all that hanging over my head, what are my chances of ever getting anything right?
Class is too risky to talk in, for fear of making myself more of a fool than I already am. The other girls sound so self-assured, they seem to know far more than I do. I’ve become so silent now! I wasn’t always this way. Where’s the chatterbox of yore?
I used to think I would grow up to feel like a heroine. Instead I feel like a cardboard cutout.
Debby, Harriet’s roommate last year, lasted less than two months before she had to go home because, Harriet says, she couldn’t take school.
Can I take school?
There are moments when a pair of arms around me would be very heartening.
Life seems to have come down pretty quickly to a routine. Wake up. Throw on clothes. Get to the dining room for breakfast (if you woke up in time). Go to classes. Stuff lunch. More classes. Afternoon activities like art and sports and dance—I’m still trying to dance, though it’s clear I am hardly Martha Graham. Finish sweaty, change, shower, dress again for supper. Evenings: book it in the library—or risk trying to study in the room where everyone on the hall sooner or later breezes in.
“Hey! Robyn, you going to the sing?” We five or six guitar players on campus (most are Outing Club girls who sing raucous silly songs from their days and nights on the Appalachian Trail) seem to have started a trend. Now twice a month in some convenient nook or lounge we hold a songfest, and magically people show up. Most are girls from Holyoke or Smith, but boys seem to cluster wherever we do, like flies, and some of them play and sing as well.
“Have to finish this French first.” Six years of French now, and I still speak it like a klutz. Conversation class is embarrassing.
“Aw, come on, what are you, some kind of straight arrow?”
“’Course not.”
“Take a break then!”
I seem not to have any friends to speak of. The other girls are mostly nice to me, but it’s as if a glass wall stands between us. There’s no one I can confide in. I feel rattled much of the time, embattled inside, my head in turmoil and I can barely concentrate. It’s like there are two souls in me fighting endlessly so I can never have any peace and I’m exhausted a lot of the time. I can be glad and full of daring and then suddenly mad, or crying so hard my chest aches.
Robyn, what is the matter with you? Normal people aren’t like this, are they?
Daddy’s voice on the phone makes me sick to my stomach, possessing me all over again. “You’ll need to develop closer relationships with your professors.”
“I know, Daddy.”
Hanging like a greasy umbrella over it all is the ownership in his voice. “The worst thing you can do is fall in with a bunch of slackers and never develop your full academic potential.”
“I will, I promise.”
Putting the phone down I feel dirtied. In a robe and my backless sheepskin flip-flop slippers I flap down to the showers, sit naked, forlorn, defiant on the septic floor with four showers beating on my head. I feel I must be the only girl in the world this has happened to, and it is somehow my fault. Really the only remedy is to put it out of my mind. Mostly I am able to do that.
I go through the motions. Here I am in class, opening my notebook for my Comparative Lit course. We’re studying Crime and Punishment. It seems to be a little too much about me. Or here, in my Geology course, struggling with the formula for flow in a streambed, ambushed by math in disguise. Or I’m at one of the biweekly sings, playing blues guitar, voice croaking hard because there’s nothing nice about this song I learned off an ancient 78 rpm record:
Moon going down, babe, stars about to shine,
Oh, moon going down, you know, stars about to shine,
And my rider told me, I don’t want you hangin’ round.
or, in my best old mountainy voice, a ballad hundreds of years old about a lovers’ murder (cheerful, huh?):
As they were talking by the garden gate, a-taking kisses sweet,
With a little penknife held in her hand, she stabbed him so deep,
Lie there, lie there, loving Henry Lee, till the flesh drops from your bone,
The girl you love in that merry Greenland will await your coming home.
Or poised in the dance studio in my baggy black leotard, one arm extended, balance, dissonant modern music shuddering through me, trying not to forget the choreographed figures. Later in my nice dress, dining among other girls with Mrs. Freed our literature professor I’ll be blinking prettily, talking about Jonathan Swift and Fenimore Cooper—ice locked in a cube that used to be nice free flowing water, yet now, cold set in hard, stony, slippery, freezing, temperatures dropping, dropping—
“And what do you plan to do with yourself after graduation?”
“I haven’t decided yet …” Will I ever?
Suddenly I am writing poetry. But it didn’t come about as any outpouring from the heart. A class assignment started it all.
“You are to write a sonnet,” said our American Lit prof, midway in our studies of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville & Co. Over the ensuing moan she explained, “It may be about anything you please, but ladies, I’ll expect you to follow the sonnet form correctly.”
Alto and soprano groans quaver floorward. Scattered girls among us bat their hair, twist about, kick their ankles, chew their lips. A hand shoots up. “Does that mean, well, you know, rhyming and everything?”
“Naturally. Intricate rhyme is the hallmark of the sonnet.”
The bell rings. Dainty feet beat a retreat, girls shaking their heads. “I can’t, can you?”
“I don’t think it’s fair. This was supposed to be a reading course, not a writing one.”
My heart’s in my shoes. I couldn’t write a sonnet if my life depended on it—could I? I’ve fiddled around writing since I was nine: funny stories, even a few serious ones,. I’ve even written a tiny bit of poetry (when I was feeling really down in the dumps), but it was free verse, of course. Me, rhyme? Are you kidding? I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to start. What would I …? How would I …?
Well, there’s “moon” and June.”
Oh well, it’s a game. I tackle it and hours later, with a headache, it’s done. Pretty awful, but it’s technically a sonnet, rhymes in all the right places. I hand it in and get a B minus with her usual comments in red ink like blood all over the page. Luckily I’m never going to write another sonnet in my life!
Yet the experience jars loose something in my brain (I guess that was the general idea). I start writing poems, unrhymed ones, even rhymed ones. It becomes an absorbing evening activity to see how many poems I can write at a stretch. Soon I am writing scads of them, and can’t stop. I put my head down to go to sleep and I get a poem idea and have to put the light back on.
Then I start writing a story. In fact several stories. Suddenly I’m a writing maniac. I start keeping a clipboard and ballpoint pen by my bed to scribble down my ideas.
Cecily thinks I’m a nut. “Are you going to write songs too?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. “Why? I’ve already got more songs than I can sing.”
“Suit yourself. Remember, though, in New York lots of folksingers write songs.”
“Write? Traditional songs aren’t things you write, they’ve been handed down from long ago …”
“Pooh. Where’d you think all the songs came from, if somebody didn’t make them up to begin with?”
Cecily sounds distracted, though. She’s restless here, unhappy, her classes aren’t going well. Lately she’s been letting her homework slide, and everything else too. Her boyfriend’s at Columbia, she never gets to see him unless she goes home, and now he’s sent this letter she broods over, reading between the lines.
“He’s got somebody else, in my opinion—just doesn’t want to say so.”
“That’s bad.”
“I’m sure he’d like to keep both of us on the string and hope we never end up together with him, all three in the same place.”
“You would let him do that?”
Amid the tousle of her brown hair her dark brows knit in her straight-featured face. “That's what I'm not sure of. He does mean a lot to me, but if he’s going to play me like a fish—”
I comfort her. “Maybe you should write him a Dear John letter,” referring to the Ferlin Husky song that was all over the radio a couple of years ago.
She stands bolt upright, all nervy. “Maybe I should go see him. Right now.”
“Huh? You can’t very well, not in the middle of the semester—”
Cecily releases a long breath. “I can, though, if I quit.”
“Quit what?”
“School.”
“Oh come on.”
“No, face it, I haven’t been happy here for so long, I’m going nowhere, now this—”
Bewildered, I’m still trying to come up with arguments why this good friend and fellow banjo player shouldn’t give up and leave college (after all, wasn’t it her dream that we’d play banjo duets together till the end of time?) while she packs her one bag—she never had much in the way of clothes. Nine at night, and she’s in her winter coat and dress and stockings heading out onto Route 5 to, of all things, hitchhike her way south to New York!
“Hitchhike? It’s not safe. Take a bus at least.”
“Waste of money. I’ll be all right.”
For days I watch the papers, expecting to see a headline COLLEGE DROPOUT SLAIN HITCHHIKING. But she must have made it all right—that is, if no news really is good news. She promised to write when she got to New York, but she hasn’t. Only when it was too late did I realize I hadn’t gotten her home address.
The college didn’t leave her bunk empty long. Yesterday evening a large, bluff, baffled-looking Junior girl wandered in. “Um, I’m Rickie Shaddock. This the right room? They told me to move in here.”
Which she does. And talks my ear off about her woeful love life. Worse yet, she's in love with a girl.
As I walked into her room, Mara Schott regarded me like a rug sample. “Well, if it isn’t! I wondered when you’d get around to me again. Tired of all banjos all the time?”
“No—o,” I retort. For it’s true, I can take infinite banjos.
“What then?”
“Cecily left school.”
“Your roommate? For where?”
“New York,” I say, stricken. “She’s not coming back.”
“Oh.” Mara digests this. In her sprightly way she exclaims, “So this means the rest of us can finally get some sleep?”
“Oh no.” Hard to fall into the teasing mode at the moment, but I do. “I’m still here, and I play louder than she did. No one is going to get any sleep if I can help it.”
Mara beams. “So she cruelly left you roommateless?”
“Seems as if.”
“Poow wittle Wobyn, aw by ooself.”
“Actually no. This other girl Rickie Shaddock’s moved in.” To Mara’s questioning look, I explain. “She was in a room downstairs, no roommate, they needed to consolidate. She’s from Maine.”
“Uh-oh. Far be it from me to say anything the least uncomplimentary about our valued northeasternmost state—”
“Yes yes yes yes,” I say, for Mara can be nastily uncomplimentary when she gets a bee in her bonnet. “Anyway, not to play psychoanalyst, but I think Rickie’s sort of sad. Her scholarship is lapsing, she said, because she hasn’t getting any work done. But that’s because she has this girlfriend—or rather she hasn’t got her—” I realize I might have said too much. Mara makes no secret of her distaste for other people’s sexual shenanigans.
“Girlfriend?”
“It’s just her taste,” I squirm, feeling the familiar panic. “She can’t help it, any more than—” I stop myself short.
Mara’s scoffs, “Doesn’t anyone around here have boyfriends?”
I shrug. Holyoke isn’t a hotbed of sin and she knows it.
“So who’s the lucky girl she’s laid her perverted affections on? Anyone I know?”
I sigh, wishing Mara weren’t quite this heartless. “Barbara Noone. Faculty brat, I think. She’s driving Rickie—”
“—Out of her wooly little mind. Familiar story. She mopes, she sulks, she glums. Accurate to within five percent? And what is our poor Rickie doing about it?”
“At the moment she’s sitting at my desk moaning and writing Barbara long letters that cost the earth to mail, since this Barbara person is in Switzerland—”
“Skiing?” she inquires sweetly.
“Schooling.”
“Oo la la.”
“Anyway it’s so sad in my room now, I had to get away.”
“Well, while you’re here …” Mara reaches for her guitar. “Want to work on some duets?”
I hesitate. “Sure.”
After this Mara and I fall into the habit of singing together fairly often. We concentrate on soft songs because that’s the kind she mostly does. Singing with her lacks the sheer headlong excitement of singing with Cecily, but it is fun, and we’re beginning to improvise harmonies that sound nice together.
“We’re good!” she crows, after we finish a perilously sweet rendition of "The Water is Wide." “We might do concerts together, what do you think?”
I don’t know what to say. Mara is a lot more experienced than I am, I think; but her enthusiasm is infectious. “I suppose we might. What sort of thing were you thinking about?”
“Well, there’s that recital hall in the library. They have a concert series there.”
I feel a quease of stage fright turning in my tummy. “Oh.”
“Scared? Don’t be. I’m not. Look, I made this list of the songs we do together. And then, with solos in between—”
I study the paper she gives me. “Sure, we could I guess,” I say carelessly. “Gives me butterflies, though, just to think about.”
She laughs. “Oh what can happen? We’ll just brazen it out.” Clearly she doesn’t really know what stage fright is. Still her self-confidence is infectious.
“Now, I suggest to get ready for the concert series we see how well we go over with people,” she says. “There’s the dorm party in the lounge Sunday night, we could inveigle someone to ask us to sing ...”
“You are such a Lucrezia Borgia,” I accuse her.
“Aren’t I?” she whoops with delight.
So when the party is going strong, having secreted our guitars beforehand, she gets Carol Zeale to ask us to sing. We’re fairly unprepared, as Mara is breezily indifferent to rehearsing. Still we do five songs that seem to go pretty well, and even come up with some off-the-cuff banter that makes the other girls laugh.
Afterward, while I’m living through every agonizing second of it over and over like a puppy gnawing a bone, worrying at the weak spots and feeling ten times a fool, Mara is smug. “We wowed ‘em, Robyn.”
“Are you sure? I wondered if we were a laughing-stock.”
“No! They were laughing with us, not at us.”
It’s after eight. I am in Carol Zeale’s room. In fact I am, at the moment, lying with her on her bed.
It’s not what you think! We’re decently clad. In fact we’re still in our blouses and skirts from dinner (slacks aren’t allowed at the dinner table, as Gracious Living is in effect at suppertime). Carol just broke up with her boyfriend, she’s been crying till she got the hiccups. I said BOO, which stopped them. She was grateful, but then started crying again, so I put my arm around her, that’s all.
Carol doesn’t attract me. She’s fluffy blonde, scatterbrained and silly, an inch or so shorter than me. A person with whom I share very little.
That’s I guess why we went to the fortune teller’s together. It was such a hoot! You can’t imagine this little brown woman with the Hungarian style accent and she actually had a crystal ball, can you believe it? I thought these things were just in stories.
I went first. The moment we sat down across the little round table it was “Cross my palm with silver.” I giggled, it was so perfect.
“Silver?”
That brown palm is out in front of us, face up. “No pennies, no nickels, no bills. Dimes and quarters to make up the full two dollars, please.”
I scrounged in my purse. It’s a good thing I’m a pack rat, or I’d never have had change enough. “Would you really not take dollar bills?”
“Sure, anything,” wisecracks the woman. “But thanks for the change, I was running short.”
After this anything was possible. She peered into the crystal ball and said, “I see a man. Not tall, not dark.”
“Really. No woman?”
She gave me a keen look. “A woman’s what you want in your fortune?”
“No no,” hastily, “just asking.”
She told me I have a longish lifeline. That’s good, though I can’t imagine living past thirty … But the trouble happened when Carol sat down for her fortune. Lingering near the door, I heard her say, “But that’s him! And he’s dumped me!”
Out of the fortune teller’s little shop she came teary and mad. “How dare she tell me I’ve got a tall dark man in my future when he just broke up with me?”
“Maybe she meant a different tall dark man.”
All the way back to campus Carol was fretful, and once we got to her room she was crying. Though I was anxious to get back to my studying, my heart went out to her, I couldn’t just leave her there. So I sat with her on her bed, soothed her clammy brow, whispered comforting comments in the pale yellow curls at her ear. I was about to ask her if she wanted a washcloth to sponge away the tears. But then there were her lips, wet with those same tears.
Why, oh why did I kiss them? Me and my stupid impulses! Anyway I did. No good reason.
She shook her head, eyes scared. “What are you doing to me? Girls aren’t s’posed— I can’t possibly—”
What was I supposed to answer? I didn’t even like her. But this neediness wouldn’t let go of me. She grabbed my hand, pushed it back. There was a little tussle, Carol crying weakly, refusing. I sat up. She put herself to rights. I stood up.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought it was what you wanted.”
“Obviously it wasn’t,” she hissed, so scathingly my scalp crawled. “As any idiot with one eye could easily see.”
I was at the door in a second. “My mistake. Sorry.”
She snarled, “Don’t you ever, ever even think of doing any such thing to me again.”
Stung, I retreated to my room thinking I’d try to pick up the thread of my studies. But what I did instead was endlessly, hopelessly agonize about what had just happened. How could I? What could I have been thinking of? What kind of person was I?
After that I got sick. My tummy just gave out, it seemed. I didn’t go to the hospital, but I did miss two days of classes. Carol to my astonishment brought me a big covered container of chicken soup. Her severe looks were priceless, but being the object of them I merely felt like a worm.
“Psychosomatic, probably,” she reproved, voice stilted as if she’d practiced the line beforehand. “Emotional turmoil, I wouldn’t wonder.”
“As if you would know?” I was past being nice.
“Comes of trying bad things on decent people. Things nobody should ever have to put up with, and I don’t know why I did. That’s all the soup I’m going to bring. I just wanted to return good for bad, and I hope it teaches you a lesson.”
“What?”
But she just turned and marched out.
Is this what they call sophomore slump?
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Nice to see your return Robyn, and a nice effort.
I liked how you talked about her father perhaps maybe just trying to help her avoid mistakes he's made or seen others made, to make the most of her opportunitys, and she takes it as a condemnation of anything less than perfection. Because this is her autobio, not her dads, and we don't know what's in his heart. It reminded me a lot of my younger daughter in that part of the story-she's become overly perfectionistic, which is perhaps part of being a teenager, but it gets in her way.
I wrote a sonnet once. A lot of traditional poetic forms like that seem forced to me. But the blues rhyme also (of course you get to rhyme words like door and show) and they are easy to write and sound correct. I guess it's cultural.
Absaroka
I liked how you talked about her father perhaps maybe just trying to help her avoid mistakes he's made or seen others made, to make the most of her opportunitys, and she takes it as a condemnation of anything less than perfection. Because this is her autobio, not her dads, and we don't know what's in his heart. It reminded me a lot of my younger daughter in that part of the story-she's become overly perfectionistic, which is perhaps part of being a teenager, but it gets in her way.
I wrote a sonnet once. A lot of traditional poetic forms like that seem forced to me. But the blues rhyme also (of course you get to rhyme words like door and show) and they are easy to write and sound correct. I guess it's cultural.
Absaroka
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
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Robyn Katie
- Miss Platinum Goddess
- Posts: 380
- Joined: Thu Oct 02, 2008 5:02 pm
Stuff
Hi sisters,
First, Absaroka, thank you for the nice response. Secondly, everyone ...
Thought I ought to let you each know: I realize my posting to this thread has been becoming erratic. That's because right now I'm finding it a struggle.
I'm not sure what the trouble is, but I can feel that I've reached a point where I'm no longer happy where the story is going. The ring of truth I felt in it up to now seems to have slipped away, and what's upcoming doesn't feel right to me.
I've enormously enjoyed posting so far! From here on, though, I'm unsure whether / what I will post. At the very least I need to take time to rethink, decide whether I want to rewrite, recast, etc.
On top of that it's summer and I'm wanting to be out and around in the good weather, so my focus isn't here right now. And I don't want to give this thread less than my best. So it may be a while before I post again, but I hope when I do it will be worth your while.
Meantime: won't *you* post? Yes, you. Really! We all have in us surmises about what our "girl" lives might have been like. Share some, please? I can't encourage all of you enough to help carry it on! Believe me I will read them with the utmost interest.
Thanks everyone for the journey so far,
Love to all, Robyn Katie
First, Absaroka, thank you for the nice response. Secondly, everyone ...
Thought I ought to let you each know: I realize my posting to this thread has been becoming erratic. That's because right now I'm finding it a struggle.
I'm not sure what the trouble is, but I can feel that I've reached a point where I'm no longer happy where the story is going. The ring of truth I felt in it up to now seems to have slipped away, and what's upcoming doesn't feel right to me.
I've enormously enjoyed posting so far! From here on, though, I'm unsure whether / what I will post. At the very least I need to take time to rethink, decide whether I want to rewrite, recast, etc.
On top of that it's summer and I'm wanting to be out and around in the good weather, so my focus isn't here right now. And I don't want to give this thread less than my best. So it may be a while before I post again, but I hope when I do it will be worth your while.
Meantime: won't *you* post? Yes, you. Really! We all have in us surmises about what our "girl" lives might have been like. Share some, please? I can't encourage all of you enough to help carry it on! Believe me I will read them with the utmost interest.
Thanks everyone for the journey so far,
Love to all, Robyn Katie
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Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Robyn I'm happy to keep this going while you regroup. I've been spotty on posting because I've been busy also, plus I didn't want to hog the thread. But I'll keep going.
I fully understand questioning where the story is going. It can be quite the little adventure, discovering who your characters are even if they are us. Mine is about to take a drastic change in direction, going from distrubed and rebellious kids who are successful in their own way, to dealing with adult stuff that they are just going to have to be ready for, even though they aren't.
The first half of this next chapter, which is what I'm putting here, was an attempt to explore where Mountain Girl's life is supposed to go. The part about Lee got added much later, in response to a question by my sister about what is it that is making M.G. so afraid of the rest of the world.
Enjoy.
Goodbye
The next year seemed to be one big gift of happiness. Had they been older they might have had some forebodings that it was all too good to last, but even Vickie seemed to think that their time had finally come and that they were just going to keep living happily ever after as adolescents. Mountain Girl was enjoying her other friends when Andy and Vickie weren’t there and as long as she stayed in the mountains and out of the town they lived in the unease she had felt before didn't seem to bother her too much. And Andy and Vickie seemed to be coming up to see her far more often than before. Andy even brought his little brother Stu along a couple of times. The spring came with an enveloping sense of life and possibilities. It was true that more and more often they would bring marijuana and wine with them and consume it after Zechariah had fallen asleep or on a little trip into the surrounding wilderness, but the feeling of the high just seemed to match the feeling of the spring so effortlessly. It was nothing like what happened when Vickie’s parents drank. Zechariah was ever more appreciative of the help they provided and didn’t even object when they started having their drum circle near the cabin. They would sit by the fire inventing rhythms and songs at night as they drank their wine and cuddled and then fall asleep staring up at the stars feeling as if the Earth itself was cradling them. Zechariah was tired all the time and they didn’t have to worry about waking him and that was nice too. Then Zechariah had some news for his daughter.
He had gone to see a doctor, perhaps the first time he had done this voluntarily in well over fifty years. He had come back with a plan to put his affairs in order. Most of those affairs concerned his daughter. She was almost an adult, he might as well have her become one in the eyes of the law. A talk with the local judge, another man he had hoped never to see, had left her an emancipated minor. Everyone concerned thought this was pretty funny-she had been able fend for herself for a very long time now. Next had come the matter of a will and he did that too, threatening in town to haunt anyone if there was a bit of trouble over this. No one really believed this sort of thing but they all agreed that if anyone was to come back to exact revenge for their wishes not being carried out after their death it would be Zechariah and that it would be best not to take a chance. And then there remained the task of preparing his daughter for the inevitable.
He had talked to Andy’s parents and they had been concerned, supportive. His daughter could live with them they said; they already had one permanent guest. He told them that he appreciated the offer but that wasn’t what she would be needing. What she did need was someone to ask for help if the state should decide not to honor his will leaving her his home and land. She would need help with the funeral. And she would need her two friends more than ever, and he hoped they would understand this.
The one who didn’t understand was Mountain Girl. She had never known her father to be unduly worried about anything but now that he had picked something to worry about he sure picked a doozy. She was having none of this, her father was invincible and was going to live as long as she did. Zechariah sat on the rocks where he liked to think and then began a plan of casually talking about what would happen “later”. He wished there was more time. There was so much he had not taught her, so much he didn’t even know how to teach her.
The morning that he lay cold and still as she called him to breakfast she had checked a dozen times, sat, run frantically around the cabin, eaten, thrown up and finally managed to walk herself down to the town below. She had asked the man in the store how to use the pay phone and when she had no money he could see that something was very seriously wrong and given her a bunch of dimes. She had called Andy and explained to him and then waited while he got his father and explained again and they said that they would be there as soon as possible. The store owner overheard enough to send for the sheriff and a doctor and then there had been an inquiry but the doctor already knew what had been about to happen. It was Mountain Girl herself who dug a hole near the rocks Zechariah had gone to when he wanted to think, and the minister from the church that Zechariah had suggested she seek out years ago said some words as Andy’s family and Vickie stood with her and then the ceremony was over.
A few days later she dug up a baby peach tree and replanted it over his grave since the peach trees had been his favorite. It never occurred to anyone, not even Andy’s parents or Mountain Girl herself, to try to figure out who the rest of his family was or how to contact them.
She was suddenly an official grown up. It was her home and her land and she was on her own with it. She had felt pretty free with her father for a long time. Life with him was simple. You took care of business and then you could do what you wanted, assuming that you had done all that needed to be done. Many were the times when she had spent the night away from the cabin alone or with her friends at the various little shelters they had scattered about the mountain range. But she always left her plans with Zechariah and always knew that he was there. Now he wasn’t.
She went to the rocks by the waterfall a few times but it was suddenly not the same. One day she sat with Lee staring off into the distance ignoring all of Lee’s efforts to talk to her. Finally Lee resorted to sarcasm. “What happened? Did someone die or something?” And to Lee’s horror Mountain Girl answered her. “My father. About a month ago.” Leigh had fallen all over herself apologizing and then suddenly figured something out. “I should have known. You’re Crazy Zechariah’s wild child, aren’t you?”
Lee's description of her didn’t bother Mountain Girl. She’d heard her friends discuss the weird old man on the other side of the divide and his allegedly feral daughter before. The first few times she’d been terrified that they would realize that she was the person they were talking about. But Vickie had explained to her about hiding in plain sight and she’d gotten almost comfortable with it. But now Lee knew. “That’s me” she replied. “I’m not nearly as wild as they say I am.” And then Lee wanted to know all about where she lived, what Zechariah had been like, and a million other things. Mountain Girl swore her to secrecy and Lee was happy to agree. Mountain Girl believed her. She trusted Lee. But still, it felt like she’d bared her soul to a stranger. Who knew what might happen next?
When it was getting dark Lee hugged her. It felt good, it felt right. A few days later Mountain Girl wandered down the trail into the town. She found Lee's home with little trouble. She stared at it for a while, wondering if she was there, and the longer she stared the more she wondered what she could have eaten to make her feel so sick to her stomach. Eventually she began to walk up to the house, and then half the way there she turned around and left. Lee probably wasn‘t home and who knows what kind of questions her family might have.
A few days later her fears seemed silly and her stomach felt fine. Once more she walked over the divide and down into the town. This time she walked up to Lee‘s house and knocked on the door as fast as she could. To her immense relief it was Lee who answered. “I thought we could go for a little walk over the divide. I’ll show you where I live” she offered and Lee was excited, eager. They spent the rest of the day walking to Mountain Girls home. Lee spent the night and Mountain Girl was ecstatic. The house felt almost alive again. The next day she walked Lee most of the way home. And then on the way back from the water fall she felt so sick to her stomach she could hardly walk. It was too much. She retreated from Lee and Ron and Kelly, trusting only Andy and Vickie. They came to see her as often as possible but the times in between were terribly sad. It had been years since she had even imagined that her mountains could be lonely but now they were silent friends. Her home, always her home, but so silent. Even the wind and songs of the birds seemed suddenly inhuman to her. When her Andy and Vickie would get ready to leave she would feel a gnawing in her stomach as if they might never come back and would write long letters to them while they were away. None of them ever got mailed but they didn’t have to, she told them everything she had said the next time they came to see her, told them all about all the letters and then they would just sit by the fire, sometimes holding each other and sometimes just sitting but it was like she could finally relax with them here. She told them she was okay, it was just grieving, but they knew better. Andy was worried and scared and Vickie was angry.
At least that's how it seemed to Vickie. She had the thought that if she had been devastated by the death of her father who she couldn’t stand then Mountain Girl's loss must be unimaginable. Finally after a particularly morose visit she got herself suspended from school. It was a surprise to everyone but her and Andy; it had been a long time since she had crossed the line that she understood so well. Andy knew without her telling him what the plan was even if it was a plan that Vickie couldn’t quite explain to herself and drove her up to the mountain where she said she wanted to walk up by herself and to come get her when the two week suspension was over. She made it sound like Mountain Girl was doing her a favor to let her stay there but they both knew this was Vickie trying to let her friend save face. Andy and Mountain Girl also knew that this was silly, that Mountain Girl was thrilled to have her stay there but that this was just how Vickie’s mind worked.
I fully understand questioning where the story is going. It can be quite the little adventure, discovering who your characters are even if they are us. Mine is about to take a drastic change in direction, going from distrubed and rebellious kids who are successful in their own way, to dealing with adult stuff that they are just going to have to be ready for, even though they aren't.
The first half of this next chapter, which is what I'm putting here, was an attempt to explore where Mountain Girl's life is supposed to go. The part about Lee got added much later, in response to a question by my sister about what is it that is making M.G. so afraid of the rest of the world.
Enjoy.
Goodbye
The next year seemed to be one big gift of happiness. Had they been older they might have had some forebodings that it was all too good to last, but even Vickie seemed to think that their time had finally come and that they were just going to keep living happily ever after as adolescents. Mountain Girl was enjoying her other friends when Andy and Vickie weren’t there and as long as she stayed in the mountains and out of the town they lived in the unease she had felt before didn't seem to bother her too much. And Andy and Vickie seemed to be coming up to see her far more often than before. Andy even brought his little brother Stu along a couple of times. The spring came with an enveloping sense of life and possibilities. It was true that more and more often they would bring marijuana and wine with them and consume it after Zechariah had fallen asleep or on a little trip into the surrounding wilderness, but the feeling of the high just seemed to match the feeling of the spring so effortlessly. It was nothing like what happened when Vickie’s parents drank. Zechariah was ever more appreciative of the help they provided and didn’t even object when they started having their drum circle near the cabin. They would sit by the fire inventing rhythms and songs at night as they drank their wine and cuddled and then fall asleep staring up at the stars feeling as if the Earth itself was cradling them. Zechariah was tired all the time and they didn’t have to worry about waking him and that was nice too. Then Zechariah had some news for his daughter.
He had gone to see a doctor, perhaps the first time he had done this voluntarily in well over fifty years. He had come back with a plan to put his affairs in order. Most of those affairs concerned his daughter. She was almost an adult, he might as well have her become one in the eyes of the law. A talk with the local judge, another man he had hoped never to see, had left her an emancipated minor. Everyone concerned thought this was pretty funny-she had been able fend for herself for a very long time now. Next had come the matter of a will and he did that too, threatening in town to haunt anyone if there was a bit of trouble over this. No one really believed this sort of thing but they all agreed that if anyone was to come back to exact revenge for their wishes not being carried out after their death it would be Zechariah and that it would be best not to take a chance. And then there remained the task of preparing his daughter for the inevitable.
He had talked to Andy’s parents and they had been concerned, supportive. His daughter could live with them they said; they already had one permanent guest. He told them that he appreciated the offer but that wasn’t what she would be needing. What she did need was someone to ask for help if the state should decide not to honor his will leaving her his home and land. She would need help with the funeral. And she would need her two friends more than ever, and he hoped they would understand this.
The one who didn’t understand was Mountain Girl. She had never known her father to be unduly worried about anything but now that he had picked something to worry about he sure picked a doozy. She was having none of this, her father was invincible and was going to live as long as she did. Zechariah sat on the rocks where he liked to think and then began a plan of casually talking about what would happen “later”. He wished there was more time. There was so much he had not taught her, so much he didn’t even know how to teach her.
The morning that he lay cold and still as she called him to breakfast she had checked a dozen times, sat, run frantically around the cabin, eaten, thrown up and finally managed to walk herself down to the town below. She had asked the man in the store how to use the pay phone and when she had no money he could see that something was very seriously wrong and given her a bunch of dimes. She had called Andy and explained to him and then waited while he got his father and explained again and they said that they would be there as soon as possible. The store owner overheard enough to send for the sheriff and a doctor and then there had been an inquiry but the doctor already knew what had been about to happen. It was Mountain Girl herself who dug a hole near the rocks Zechariah had gone to when he wanted to think, and the minister from the church that Zechariah had suggested she seek out years ago said some words as Andy’s family and Vickie stood with her and then the ceremony was over.
A few days later she dug up a baby peach tree and replanted it over his grave since the peach trees had been his favorite. It never occurred to anyone, not even Andy’s parents or Mountain Girl herself, to try to figure out who the rest of his family was or how to contact them.
She was suddenly an official grown up. It was her home and her land and she was on her own with it. She had felt pretty free with her father for a long time. Life with him was simple. You took care of business and then you could do what you wanted, assuming that you had done all that needed to be done. Many were the times when she had spent the night away from the cabin alone or with her friends at the various little shelters they had scattered about the mountain range. But she always left her plans with Zechariah and always knew that he was there. Now he wasn’t.
She went to the rocks by the waterfall a few times but it was suddenly not the same. One day she sat with Lee staring off into the distance ignoring all of Lee’s efforts to talk to her. Finally Lee resorted to sarcasm. “What happened? Did someone die or something?” And to Lee’s horror Mountain Girl answered her. “My father. About a month ago.” Leigh had fallen all over herself apologizing and then suddenly figured something out. “I should have known. You’re Crazy Zechariah’s wild child, aren’t you?”
Lee's description of her didn’t bother Mountain Girl. She’d heard her friends discuss the weird old man on the other side of the divide and his allegedly feral daughter before. The first few times she’d been terrified that they would realize that she was the person they were talking about. But Vickie had explained to her about hiding in plain sight and she’d gotten almost comfortable with it. But now Lee knew. “That’s me” she replied. “I’m not nearly as wild as they say I am.” And then Lee wanted to know all about where she lived, what Zechariah had been like, and a million other things. Mountain Girl swore her to secrecy and Lee was happy to agree. Mountain Girl believed her. She trusted Lee. But still, it felt like she’d bared her soul to a stranger. Who knew what might happen next?
When it was getting dark Lee hugged her. It felt good, it felt right. A few days later Mountain Girl wandered down the trail into the town. She found Lee's home with little trouble. She stared at it for a while, wondering if she was there, and the longer she stared the more she wondered what she could have eaten to make her feel so sick to her stomach. Eventually she began to walk up to the house, and then half the way there she turned around and left. Lee probably wasn‘t home and who knows what kind of questions her family might have.
A few days later her fears seemed silly and her stomach felt fine. Once more she walked over the divide and down into the town. This time she walked up to Lee‘s house and knocked on the door as fast as she could. To her immense relief it was Lee who answered. “I thought we could go for a little walk over the divide. I’ll show you where I live” she offered and Lee was excited, eager. They spent the rest of the day walking to Mountain Girls home. Lee spent the night and Mountain Girl was ecstatic. The house felt almost alive again. The next day she walked Lee most of the way home. And then on the way back from the water fall she felt so sick to her stomach she could hardly walk. It was too much. She retreated from Lee and Ron and Kelly, trusting only Andy and Vickie. They came to see her as often as possible but the times in between were terribly sad. It had been years since she had even imagined that her mountains could be lonely but now they were silent friends. Her home, always her home, but so silent. Even the wind and songs of the birds seemed suddenly inhuman to her. When her Andy and Vickie would get ready to leave she would feel a gnawing in her stomach as if they might never come back and would write long letters to them while they were away. None of them ever got mailed but they didn’t have to, she told them everything she had said the next time they came to see her, told them all about all the letters and then they would just sit by the fire, sometimes holding each other and sometimes just sitting but it was like she could finally relax with them here. She told them she was okay, it was just grieving, but they knew better. Andy was worried and scared and Vickie was angry.
At least that's how it seemed to Vickie. She had the thought that if she had been devastated by the death of her father who she couldn’t stand then Mountain Girl's loss must be unimaginable. Finally after a particularly morose visit she got herself suspended from school. It was a surprise to everyone but her and Andy; it had been a long time since she had crossed the line that she understood so well. Andy knew without her telling him what the plan was even if it was a plan that Vickie couldn’t quite explain to herself and drove her up to the mountain where she said she wanted to walk up by herself and to come get her when the two week suspension was over. She made it sound like Mountain Girl was doing her a favor to let her stay there but they both knew this was Vickie trying to let her friend save face. Andy and Mountain Girl also knew that this was silly, that Mountain Girl was thrilled to have her stay there but that this was just how Vickie’s mind worked.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Here's the 2nd half. Lots of forshadowing here of things to come which some of you will recognize. Also a lot of autobiography here, not in how I reacted to my parents death but in other things during their hour of darkness.
Mountain Girl moped around the first day while Vickie was there in spite of her happiness that Vickie would be staying with her for almost two weeks. The second day was a breathtakingly beautiful mid autumn day and as Vickie let her mind wander down various paths in search of an idea to cheer her friend up an idea came to her. "Lets go look at the cats ears tonight. We'll stay there until I can actually see that stupid cat you say is there." Mountain Girl agreed, a hint of excitement over visiting what had become one of her favorite places. A place who's history, unlike most of these mountains, didn't have too much to do with her father.
They arrived just with a couple of hours of daylight left and made themselves some dinner. Then Vickie produced a big bottle of wine. "Let's get a little drunk and you can tell me all the stories you want of your dad" she suggested, hoping she'd had a good idea. It wasn't like Mountain Girl ever talked that much anyway but maybe she'd have something to say tonight.
They took their time drinking the wine. Mountain Girl didn't get any more talkative but Vickie wondered if it mattered. It was one of the most beautiful autumn evenings she'd ever experienced. She sat against a rock watching the lake, breathing in the smell of the golden color of the falling aspen leaves. The smell of a final burst of glory as life ended with just a hint of mold. The smell of decay was almost comforting. As the sky turned a brilliant Deep bluish gray the bats appeared. It was too cold and late in the year for mosquitoes but still she always enjoyed the bats, thinking of all the bloodsucking insects they devoured. She watched their erratic flight, keeping up what she hoped was a comforting chatter in response to Mountain Girls silence, wondering what in the world she wanted to say.
Usually when she talked in circles Mountain Girl would eventually distill the whole thing into a few cryptic words that made sense to Vickie, but not this time. Well maybe that was the way it was supposed to be, but Vickie felt like she was failing at something, she wasn't sure what. By time it was too dark to watch the bats the wine was gone, leaving only the pleasant smell of ripened fruit in an empty bottle. She dug into her pack and produced another bottle, this one of blackberry brandy. Perfect for a night this time of year she thought. The moon had risen and by now it was cold out. The frost had begun to fall and it provided a soothingly crisp background to the scent of the fallen leaves and sharp smell of the brandy. Maybe the sheer beauty of the evening would cheer Mountain Girl up. Maybe having Vickie here. Maybe both together would bring her out of this mood.
She had a moment of irritation as she thought that this would have been a wonderful, mystically beautiful night if only Zechariah hadn't died, if only his death hadn't left Mountain Girl so bereft of joy. A stupid thought that she felt ashamed of. She heaped leaves over their legs and then spread a blanket over the two of them, creating a little burrow and trying to banish her selfishness and began drunkenly singing to herself and to Mountain Girl since talking didn't seem to be working. Then finally with most of the brandy gone Mountain Girl began to speak.
"Daddy hardly ever came here" she said fondly. "He showed me this place when I was little and said it was mine. He said everyone needed to have something that was theirs and that this could be mine. I guess the waterfall was like that too but this is the place he told me was mine. Remember the first time I let you come here?" Before Vickie could divert her to a happy and very special memory Mountain Girl continued. "Everything I see or do here reminds me of him. Even this place. The place that he said was all mine is his now. He took it away from me. Oh God, I miss him."
"I guess he's okay now. He used to feel so guilty about whatever he did before he came here. But whatever he did was forgiven. I forgive him for everything he ever did to anyone even if I don't know what it was." She was crying now, tears running down her cheeks, filling her nose, making her voice hard to understand. Vickie felt a sharp twinge of a disturbingly familiar childhood fear. Mountain Girl went on. "I loved him so much. I was a good daughter. I did everything I was supposed to. Oh God how can he be dead? How can he be doing this to me?" She began to repeat herself, saying everything again, and the twinge of fear Vickie had felt turned into something bigger, scarier.
Much scarier. Mountain Girl was losing it and her voice was rapidly getting harder to listen to; reminding her more than anything else of her mother on a drunken tear. Her mother demanding something of someone, something beyond anyone's ability to give. Or of either her mother or her father just before they hurt someone. The warning was all in the voice and here it was, telling her to escape as fast as possible. But from her friend? It couldn't be. She had to be wrong about this. She took a big slug from the blackberry brandy and then put the bottle down on her other side, away from Mountain Girl. She'd drink the rest surreptitiously and that would at least keep Mountain Girl from getting any drunker.
"There were so many things I never did. So many things I wanted to tell him. But I did everything I could. I did everything I was supposed to do. I took care of him when he wasn't feeling so good. I loved him as much as I could. How could this happen?" By now her voice was a broken jumble of half hysterical sobs. Vickie had the urge to put her hands over her ears, to shut her eyes, to scream at the top of her voice for this to stop. But somehow she sat motionless, listening. As if a stone could listen. That's what she felt like. Mountain Girl was repeating herself over and over. "I did everything I was supposed to. I did everything he asked me. It's just not right. How could this happen? Why did it have to happen?" It had become a maudlin mantra for her, repeated endlessly like some sort of perverted meditation. Then it changed slightly.
"It's not fair. It's just not fair. What am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? It's just not fair." An expression Vickie had never heard Mountain Girl use. She'd never seemed to think fairness was a concept with any application to her. Life dealt you a hand and that was it. Asking for fairness was like asking fate to say you were special. It was one of the things Vickie admired most about her friend. And here she was, drunkenly screaming that it wasn't fair. Who was this person? And then without any warning Mountain Girl let out a screech like an animal about to be eaten by something that hadn't bothered to kill it first. A scream that Vickie suddenly knew that the mountains had been hearing ever since Zechariah's death. She picked up the bowls they had been eating from and hurled them into the lake, screaming at the top of her voice. Then she grabbed the blanket they had had over them and began tearing at it. Vickie stared at her friend in terror. Mountain Girl had turned into something she didn't want to know.
She had to do something. Anything. She had to break something, hit someone, and then either beat it into submission or run away as fast as she could. There was no one here to hit except Mountain Girl. How could she be so stupid? If she was going to pitch a drunken fit like this why didn't she have the sense to do it where there was someone else? Someone they didn't know. Someone they could hurt. There was no one else here. No Andy for comfort. She knew what he would do. He'd stand and watch her till she was ready and then he'd do something to distract her. That didn't seem like the right thing to do here. Not with Mountain Girl.
Mountain Girl threw the blanket into the lake and then sat sobbing hysterically. Exactly like Vickie's mom. Exactly like the rest of her family, out of control, unreachable. How could this be happening? She considered quietly packing up all her stuff and leaving. Mountain Girl was too hysterical to notice. The thought lingered long enough to be taken seriously. Was she really seriously thinking of abandoning her friend? Was she seriously considering not leaving? She didn't know which thought was more absurd. More scarifying to her entire being. Maybe if she just hit Mountain Girl on the head with the bottle. Not enough to hurt her, just to knock her out and shut her up. Feeling like this was life or death she picked up the empty wine bottle. Her hands were shaking with fear at the thought of what she was about to do. At the thought of enduring one more second of not doing it.
Another thought returned to her. What would Andy do? She forced herself to walk over to where Mountain Girl sat. The wine bottle was still in her hand. One foot at a time, one step. She stopped, paralyzed with something. Fear, terror, fury, indecision. She took another few steps. Again she stood, frozen. After what felt like an epic journey of a few yards she stood next to her friend. The wine bottle wasn't in her hand. Had she put it down? Dropped it? Had she ever picked it up? She sat, hoping Mountain Girl hadn't noticed she was there. Tentatively, agonizingly, she reached her arm over to Mountain Girl. Her hand touched her shoulder. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel like something was tearing her whole arm off, ripping it from her body.
Hesitantly she hugged Mountain Girl to her, expecting to feel like a fish caught in an octopuses tentacles. Like a fly caught in a spiders web, paralyzed by it's venom. No such feeling. Mountain Girl melted against her. Vickie didn't feel quite so sick. Mountain Girl quieted down. After a minute she looked at Vickie. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I can't stand how sorry I am. I know how you must hate this." "It's okay" lied Vickie. Maybe it wasn't a lie, she thought. Maybe she meant she could do this in spite of how she felt. She brushed Mountain Girls sodden hair away from her face. The most beautiful face in the world thought Vickie. How could it be so distorted with whatever it was Mountain Girl was feeling? She thought of Andy again, how many times he'd listened to her talk in enraged circles. She wondered if her own face as distorted as Mountain Girls and felt foolish, selfish, childish. Felt like a punk. Zechariah was dead and Vickie couldn't deal with what? If she had just one wish in her whole life it would be that this would never, never, ever happen again. Who was she trying to spare? She felt a moment of relative peace. Both of them. She wanted to spare both of them. It was okay. She kissed Mountain Girls cheek and Mountain Girl gave a little shudder. She relaxed against Vickie again and then her entire body seemed to clench up. She bent over and vomited all over Vickie. Vickie held her head, guiding her away from her, stroking her hair as she retched. Finally Mountain Girl fell onto her back, staring up at the stars. "Now I'm really sorry." "You'd better be" Vickie responded. She felt sick again, but not like she needed to hurt anyone anymore.
They lay for a while, silent. Afraid to say anything. As if Mountain Girl had vomited up all of her grief, all of her hate, all of Vickie’s terror, and a single word could bring it back to life, creating a living breathing entity out of the vomit that covered Vickie. Then somehow enough peace returned for Vickie to notice the smell. Was she getting back to normal? Had she vanquished something? She wasn't going to think about that. She took a deep breath and gagged. "I've got to do something with these clothes" she said. "You stink pretty bad" responded Mountain Girl. "I'll never be able to get to sleep with you smelling like that." Her voice was still drunkenly indistinct but Vickie felt something inside her relax further with the sarcasm. She changed into what few spare clothes they had and washed the vomit off in the lake. Then they crawled into their sleeping bags with a blanket over them and lay next to each other staring up at the stars. "I'm sorry I got you drunk" Vickie told her. "I know" said Mountain Girl. "I should have known better. We're screwed up enough already." "It's still a beautiful night" replied Vickie. "Remember the first time we came here? You changed my life you know." "I know. And I know I've got you and Andy. Sometimes I want to curl up and die." Mountain Girl felt Vickie become rigid next to her.
"I'll be okay. I won't throw up on you again. I won't get all crazy again. I love you Vickie. I'll always love you. I'll always love Andy. Three of us forever. I won't do that to you again. Don't be afraid of me." Vickie shivered. The girl had a way with words. She always had. As if she could look into Vickie and see everything she'd always tried to hide. It would be okay. She had to remember who it was she was lying here next to staring up at the moon through the autumn trees. Who it was that she could smell through the frost and drunkenness. Who it was who was holding her in her arms, warming her in the October chill. She felt herself drifting off to an exhausted sleep. The nightmares were excruciating but she didn't remember any of them.
They awoke the next day to find that the rest of the booze had spilled out of the bottle that somehow broke while they were passed out. They both knew this was a good thing and a few days later Vickie agreed that Mountain Girl had done the right thing to break it while Vickie slept. Something unremembered but torturous had happened last night they knew, and they spent a hung over morning wondering what the other remembered. They spent half the day by the lake before deciding to head back to the cabin and on the way home Mountain Girl worked up the courage to ask Vickie what had happened the night before. Vickie remembered Mountain Girl crying hysterically and then drew a blank. Mountain Girl remembered Vickie singing to her. Singing badly. They couldn't remember anything else but both were left with an overwhelming sense that whatever it was it was better unremembered. Neither of them could understand why their bowls were in the lake and what had torn the blanket to shreds. There were no telltale tracks around the campsite. Mountain Girl had a bad feeling about that and Vickie didn't like it at all. She knew what this sort of thing was called. She explained to Mountain Girl that most of her family had this happen from time to time. It was called a blackout she said, and it was usually a very bad sign. At a loss for the vanished night they agreed not to do this again.
Within a couple of days the sense of uncleanliness they had both felt was gone. Mountain Girl began to feel less morose and the rest of their time together was progressively more enjoyable. At the end of the two weeks Mountain Girl said that she would be okay and that Vickie definitely did not need to disrespect any more teachers on her behalf, especially when Mountain Girl didn’t even go to school and was in fact a legal adult now. Her strange sense of humor and way of explaining things seemed to be returning. Upon her return Vickie told Andy everything that had happened, even that that there was a night she didn't remember, and soon after Andy told his parents most of what she had told him, saying that he was really concerned and as usual leaving out anything that he thought might worry them, which was of course also what worried him the most. It seemed to him that they looked right through his omissions to the truth but they let him miss a week of school since he was always so responsible and Zechariah had even spoken to them about this. So Andy stayed up on the mountain also.
One look at Mountain Girl told him she still wasn't eating enough but she seemed to finally know what she needed to do. It was a quiet, retrospective week, sitting on the rocks by the little peach tree that stood by the grave while Mountain Girl first quietly repeated all the stories about her father that he already knew and then later all the memories she had of him and Vickie. He didn't think he'd ever listened to her talk this much in all the time he'd known her. By time he left Mountain Girl knew that she was going to miss her father an awful lot for an awfully long time but that she wasn’t going to be alone. The wind and the birds and the streams all sounded like friends again and her stomach didn't hurt very much.
Mountain Girl moped around the first day while Vickie was there in spite of her happiness that Vickie would be staying with her for almost two weeks. The second day was a breathtakingly beautiful mid autumn day and as Vickie let her mind wander down various paths in search of an idea to cheer her friend up an idea came to her. "Lets go look at the cats ears tonight. We'll stay there until I can actually see that stupid cat you say is there." Mountain Girl agreed, a hint of excitement over visiting what had become one of her favorite places. A place who's history, unlike most of these mountains, didn't have too much to do with her father.
They arrived just with a couple of hours of daylight left and made themselves some dinner. Then Vickie produced a big bottle of wine. "Let's get a little drunk and you can tell me all the stories you want of your dad" she suggested, hoping she'd had a good idea. It wasn't like Mountain Girl ever talked that much anyway but maybe she'd have something to say tonight.
They took their time drinking the wine. Mountain Girl didn't get any more talkative but Vickie wondered if it mattered. It was one of the most beautiful autumn evenings she'd ever experienced. She sat against a rock watching the lake, breathing in the smell of the golden color of the falling aspen leaves. The smell of a final burst of glory as life ended with just a hint of mold. The smell of decay was almost comforting. As the sky turned a brilliant Deep bluish gray the bats appeared. It was too cold and late in the year for mosquitoes but still she always enjoyed the bats, thinking of all the bloodsucking insects they devoured. She watched their erratic flight, keeping up what she hoped was a comforting chatter in response to Mountain Girls silence, wondering what in the world she wanted to say.
Usually when she talked in circles Mountain Girl would eventually distill the whole thing into a few cryptic words that made sense to Vickie, but not this time. Well maybe that was the way it was supposed to be, but Vickie felt like she was failing at something, she wasn't sure what. By time it was too dark to watch the bats the wine was gone, leaving only the pleasant smell of ripened fruit in an empty bottle. She dug into her pack and produced another bottle, this one of blackberry brandy. Perfect for a night this time of year she thought. The moon had risen and by now it was cold out. The frost had begun to fall and it provided a soothingly crisp background to the scent of the fallen leaves and sharp smell of the brandy. Maybe the sheer beauty of the evening would cheer Mountain Girl up. Maybe having Vickie here. Maybe both together would bring her out of this mood.
She had a moment of irritation as she thought that this would have been a wonderful, mystically beautiful night if only Zechariah hadn't died, if only his death hadn't left Mountain Girl so bereft of joy. A stupid thought that she felt ashamed of. She heaped leaves over their legs and then spread a blanket over the two of them, creating a little burrow and trying to banish her selfishness and began drunkenly singing to herself and to Mountain Girl since talking didn't seem to be working. Then finally with most of the brandy gone Mountain Girl began to speak.
"Daddy hardly ever came here" she said fondly. "He showed me this place when I was little and said it was mine. He said everyone needed to have something that was theirs and that this could be mine. I guess the waterfall was like that too but this is the place he told me was mine. Remember the first time I let you come here?" Before Vickie could divert her to a happy and very special memory Mountain Girl continued. "Everything I see or do here reminds me of him. Even this place. The place that he said was all mine is his now. He took it away from me. Oh God, I miss him."
"I guess he's okay now. He used to feel so guilty about whatever he did before he came here. But whatever he did was forgiven. I forgive him for everything he ever did to anyone even if I don't know what it was." She was crying now, tears running down her cheeks, filling her nose, making her voice hard to understand. Vickie felt a sharp twinge of a disturbingly familiar childhood fear. Mountain Girl went on. "I loved him so much. I was a good daughter. I did everything I was supposed to. Oh God how can he be dead? How can he be doing this to me?" She began to repeat herself, saying everything again, and the twinge of fear Vickie had felt turned into something bigger, scarier.
Much scarier. Mountain Girl was losing it and her voice was rapidly getting harder to listen to; reminding her more than anything else of her mother on a drunken tear. Her mother demanding something of someone, something beyond anyone's ability to give. Or of either her mother or her father just before they hurt someone. The warning was all in the voice and here it was, telling her to escape as fast as possible. But from her friend? It couldn't be. She had to be wrong about this. She took a big slug from the blackberry brandy and then put the bottle down on her other side, away from Mountain Girl. She'd drink the rest surreptitiously and that would at least keep Mountain Girl from getting any drunker.
"There were so many things I never did. So many things I wanted to tell him. But I did everything I could. I did everything I was supposed to do. I took care of him when he wasn't feeling so good. I loved him as much as I could. How could this happen?" By now her voice was a broken jumble of half hysterical sobs. Vickie had the urge to put her hands over her ears, to shut her eyes, to scream at the top of her voice for this to stop. But somehow she sat motionless, listening. As if a stone could listen. That's what she felt like. Mountain Girl was repeating herself over and over. "I did everything I was supposed to. I did everything he asked me. It's just not right. How could this happen? Why did it have to happen?" It had become a maudlin mantra for her, repeated endlessly like some sort of perverted meditation. Then it changed slightly.
"It's not fair. It's just not fair. What am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? It's just not fair." An expression Vickie had never heard Mountain Girl use. She'd never seemed to think fairness was a concept with any application to her. Life dealt you a hand and that was it. Asking for fairness was like asking fate to say you were special. It was one of the things Vickie admired most about her friend. And here she was, drunkenly screaming that it wasn't fair. Who was this person? And then without any warning Mountain Girl let out a screech like an animal about to be eaten by something that hadn't bothered to kill it first. A scream that Vickie suddenly knew that the mountains had been hearing ever since Zechariah's death. She picked up the bowls they had been eating from and hurled them into the lake, screaming at the top of her voice. Then she grabbed the blanket they had had over them and began tearing at it. Vickie stared at her friend in terror. Mountain Girl had turned into something she didn't want to know.
She had to do something. Anything. She had to break something, hit someone, and then either beat it into submission or run away as fast as she could. There was no one here to hit except Mountain Girl. How could she be so stupid? If she was going to pitch a drunken fit like this why didn't she have the sense to do it where there was someone else? Someone they didn't know. Someone they could hurt. There was no one else here. No Andy for comfort. She knew what he would do. He'd stand and watch her till she was ready and then he'd do something to distract her. That didn't seem like the right thing to do here. Not with Mountain Girl.
Mountain Girl threw the blanket into the lake and then sat sobbing hysterically. Exactly like Vickie's mom. Exactly like the rest of her family, out of control, unreachable. How could this be happening? She considered quietly packing up all her stuff and leaving. Mountain Girl was too hysterical to notice. The thought lingered long enough to be taken seriously. Was she really seriously thinking of abandoning her friend? Was she seriously considering not leaving? She didn't know which thought was more absurd. More scarifying to her entire being. Maybe if she just hit Mountain Girl on the head with the bottle. Not enough to hurt her, just to knock her out and shut her up. Feeling like this was life or death she picked up the empty wine bottle. Her hands were shaking with fear at the thought of what she was about to do. At the thought of enduring one more second of not doing it.
Another thought returned to her. What would Andy do? She forced herself to walk over to where Mountain Girl sat. The wine bottle was still in her hand. One foot at a time, one step. She stopped, paralyzed with something. Fear, terror, fury, indecision. She took another few steps. Again she stood, frozen. After what felt like an epic journey of a few yards she stood next to her friend. The wine bottle wasn't in her hand. Had she put it down? Dropped it? Had she ever picked it up? She sat, hoping Mountain Girl hadn't noticed she was there. Tentatively, agonizingly, she reached her arm over to Mountain Girl. Her hand touched her shoulder. It didn't hurt. It didn't feel like something was tearing her whole arm off, ripping it from her body.
Hesitantly she hugged Mountain Girl to her, expecting to feel like a fish caught in an octopuses tentacles. Like a fly caught in a spiders web, paralyzed by it's venom. No such feeling. Mountain Girl melted against her. Vickie didn't feel quite so sick. Mountain Girl quieted down. After a minute she looked at Vickie. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I can't stand how sorry I am. I know how you must hate this." "It's okay" lied Vickie. Maybe it wasn't a lie, she thought. Maybe she meant she could do this in spite of how she felt. She brushed Mountain Girls sodden hair away from her face. The most beautiful face in the world thought Vickie. How could it be so distorted with whatever it was Mountain Girl was feeling? She thought of Andy again, how many times he'd listened to her talk in enraged circles. She wondered if her own face as distorted as Mountain Girls and felt foolish, selfish, childish. Felt like a punk. Zechariah was dead and Vickie couldn't deal with what? If she had just one wish in her whole life it would be that this would never, never, ever happen again. Who was she trying to spare? She felt a moment of relative peace. Both of them. She wanted to spare both of them. It was okay. She kissed Mountain Girls cheek and Mountain Girl gave a little shudder. She relaxed against Vickie again and then her entire body seemed to clench up. She bent over and vomited all over Vickie. Vickie held her head, guiding her away from her, stroking her hair as she retched. Finally Mountain Girl fell onto her back, staring up at the stars. "Now I'm really sorry." "You'd better be" Vickie responded. She felt sick again, but not like she needed to hurt anyone anymore.
They lay for a while, silent. Afraid to say anything. As if Mountain Girl had vomited up all of her grief, all of her hate, all of Vickie’s terror, and a single word could bring it back to life, creating a living breathing entity out of the vomit that covered Vickie. Then somehow enough peace returned for Vickie to notice the smell. Was she getting back to normal? Had she vanquished something? She wasn't going to think about that. She took a deep breath and gagged. "I've got to do something with these clothes" she said. "You stink pretty bad" responded Mountain Girl. "I'll never be able to get to sleep with you smelling like that." Her voice was still drunkenly indistinct but Vickie felt something inside her relax further with the sarcasm. She changed into what few spare clothes they had and washed the vomit off in the lake. Then they crawled into their sleeping bags with a blanket over them and lay next to each other staring up at the stars. "I'm sorry I got you drunk" Vickie told her. "I know" said Mountain Girl. "I should have known better. We're screwed up enough already." "It's still a beautiful night" replied Vickie. "Remember the first time we came here? You changed my life you know." "I know. And I know I've got you and Andy. Sometimes I want to curl up and die." Mountain Girl felt Vickie become rigid next to her.
"I'll be okay. I won't throw up on you again. I won't get all crazy again. I love you Vickie. I'll always love you. I'll always love Andy. Three of us forever. I won't do that to you again. Don't be afraid of me." Vickie shivered. The girl had a way with words. She always had. As if she could look into Vickie and see everything she'd always tried to hide. It would be okay. She had to remember who it was she was lying here next to staring up at the moon through the autumn trees. Who it was that she could smell through the frost and drunkenness. Who it was who was holding her in her arms, warming her in the October chill. She felt herself drifting off to an exhausted sleep. The nightmares were excruciating but she didn't remember any of them.
They awoke the next day to find that the rest of the booze had spilled out of the bottle that somehow broke while they were passed out. They both knew this was a good thing and a few days later Vickie agreed that Mountain Girl had done the right thing to break it while Vickie slept. Something unremembered but torturous had happened last night they knew, and they spent a hung over morning wondering what the other remembered. They spent half the day by the lake before deciding to head back to the cabin and on the way home Mountain Girl worked up the courage to ask Vickie what had happened the night before. Vickie remembered Mountain Girl crying hysterically and then drew a blank. Mountain Girl remembered Vickie singing to her. Singing badly. They couldn't remember anything else but both were left with an overwhelming sense that whatever it was it was better unremembered. Neither of them could understand why their bowls were in the lake and what had torn the blanket to shreds. There were no telltale tracks around the campsite. Mountain Girl had a bad feeling about that and Vickie didn't like it at all. She knew what this sort of thing was called. She explained to Mountain Girl that most of her family had this happen from time to time. It was called a blackout she said, and it was usually a very bad sign. At a loss for the vanished night they agreed not to do this again.
Within a couple of days the sense of uncleanliness they had both felt was gone. Mountain Girl began to feel less morose and the rest of their time together was progressively more enjoyable. At the end of the two weeks Mountain Girl said that she would be okay and that Vickie definitely did not need to disrespect any more teachers on her behalf, especially when Mountain Girl didn’t even go to school and was in fact a legal adult now. Her strange sense of humor and way of explaining things seemed to be returning. Upon her return Vickie told Andy everything that had happened, even that that there was a night she didn't remember, and soon after Andy told his parents most of what she had told him, saying that he was really concerned and as usual leaving out anything that he thought might worry them, which was of course also what worried him the most. It seemed to him that they looked right through his omissions to the truth but they let him miss a week of school since he was always so responsible and Zechariah had even spoken to them about this. So Andy stayed up on the mountain also.
One look at Mountain Girl told him she still wasn't eating enough but she seemed to finally know what she needed to do. It was a quiet, retrospective week, sitting on the rocks by the little peach tree that stood by the grave while Mountain Girl first quietly repeated all the stories about her father that he already knew and then later all the memories she had of him and Vickie. He didn't think he'd ever listened to her talk this much in all the time he'd known her. By time he left Mountain Girl knew that she was going to miss her father an awful lot for an awfully long time but that she wasn’t going to be alone. The wind and the birds and the streams all sounded like friends again and her stomach didn't hurt very much.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
-
Absaroka
- Miss Diamond Goddess
- Posts: 3344
- Joined: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 am
Here's the next chapter. It's one of transition which I still feel needs more work, and some self indulgence on the writer's part.
The following year Andy and Vickie both started college. As far as Mountain Girl was concerned it was another tragedy, with the added guilt of not rejoicing in her friends good fortune. She'd gotten used to the fact that her father would always be with her but never again in a corporeal way. The little peach tree marking his grave had become a compulsion with her in terms of caring for it and she inspected it at least twice a day, even building a little barrier around it to protect it from unwelcome attention from wildlife. She had to learn all sorts of things that her father had not yet taught her. But she was okay. Then her friends suddenly might as well have disappeared.
She almost didn't notice what had happened at first. They had come to see her twice before the reality of just how much would be expected of them in college had set in. They were fortunate in that the nearby city had all manner of educational opportunities and although Vickie had managed on her scholarship to go to live there Andy had stayed home and commuted to school. He had thought that things could still sort of remain as they were in all respects except that now he would be a college student, but that was not how it was working out. The first set of bad grades had come as a shock to him; he had always done well in school before. The only answer to him was to study a lot harder, and he wrote Mountain Girl several times explaining this. Vickie had a similar experience, and additionally was caught up in what seemed to be heaven to her, living in the city.
She had begun to go out to the rocks by the river to see her other friends again but once it got cold they were gone too. She thought of going to find them but it still just didn’t feel like something she should do, she couldn’t see herself wandering through their town looking for them. She wished that she could feel about them the way that she felt about Andy and Vickie but she just didn’t, and had begun to wonder if she ever would. She thought sometimes about how she had felt at the carnival. Something just wasn't right, and it was probably best to avoid the entire town. It was a familiar way of thinking for her and she didn't notice that the world that seemed so expansive, the world that had seemed to grow in so many unexpected and wonderful ways for her, was once more beginning to shrink.
At Thanksgiving Andy had come to get her and she and Vickie had stayed at Andy’s house for a couple of days and it was just like old times, but when Christmas came first there was a storm and then Andy had gotten sick for a couple of weeks. Vickie had been offered a short gig with a band on a very brief tour that she absolutely could not pass up, and Mountain Girl had not seen either of them at all.
She wrote all her letters to them again, and again did not send them. She read just about every book she had stockpiled. She wrote stories about them. She talked to them as if they were there. She wore their clothes that they kept there and pretended to be them. She fixed just about everything that could possibly be fixed around her home. The trips into town on her snowshoes brought bundles of letters and gifts from them and she knew that she was not truly alone. But there was no one else here, with her. She would lie in the bed in the sleeping loft under the cabin’s eaves staring out of the small gable window and think of all the times the three of them had lain here together staring out that same window and she could feel the languid presence of the past as she longed for the company of someone, anyone, here in the cabin with her. It got worse when she climbed down the narrow, steep stair into the rest of her home. Zechariah was everywhere. Standing at the wood stove she would think of the very first time she had attempted to cook breakfast and smile as she marveled at how everything had turned out. She would stare at the things the two of them had built for the cabin and could hardly bring herself to sit in some of the furniture they had made. During a momentary spell of pleasant weather she prepared herself for what was in the winter a two day trek to the town beneath the waterfall. Maybe she'd just go visit Lee. She could find her home again and stay for a day, that was all. She began her trip and for the first hour or so contented herself with joyful thoughts of how nice it would be to see her friends. And then a momentary thought took hold, and idle breeze in her mind, and she felt the fear, the anger, that she'd felt at the carnival. Felt it return as inexorably as the winter clouds that began to move in. She stopped for the evening and spent a desperately lonely night in a small cave that had always felt like home. In the morning, shaken by what she hoped were merely nightmares, she turned around and went home.
The winter increased it's strength and pretty soon the weather forecasters were talking about record snowfall. But the gleaming white brought non of the sense of peace to her that it had every other year and she was alone, miserable, depressed, and wondering if the best part of her life had been completed.
By early spring she had decided that no matter what, it was time to rethink the entire situation. She thought long and hard about her father. His investment in his own isolation had always seemed reasonable to her and before his death she had finally come to feel that she had everything she needed, but things were terribly different now. In contrast to her father, her few dealings with the rest of the world had been benign no matter how frightening they had been, how physically ill they sometimes made her feel. The law said she was an adult now, perhaps she needed to see more of the world and make up her own mind about it. In their letters Andy and Vickie kept talking about how things would be different in the summer but she was not a student and was not about to put her emotional life in hibernation for the better part of the year. If they couldn’t come to her she would go to them. The rest of the world couldn't be any worse than the sadness she had been entrapped in for the last few months.
Zechariah’s favorite mode of transportation had been the freight trains that ran along the rail line passing through the town below the mountain he lived on. The railroad that ran along the river connecting the hamlet below her home to the rest of the world was a short line serving the small towns along the river and little else. There were practically none of the riders in the empty boxcars that would be found on a larger system and as a result the railroad had a relaxed attitude toward the few people who did occasionally use their train as a method of getting from here to there. Once one got to the terminal on the outskirts of the city everything changed of course. But on the little short line the train workers and yardmen had been among the few people Zechariah got along with, probably because they were among the few who had something he needed, which was access to free transportation. He had introduced his daughter to the people who for Zechariah were what passed for friends and shown her how to figure out where the trains were going and other necessary knowledge. He had even taken her on a few rides including a trip one time through the town that Andy had said that he lived in, making it clear that he was not about to have her doing this alone and at the same time thinking to himself that she might need to know how to do this sometime. But Zechariah was gone now and the route to Andy’s home was simple. She wondered why she had not thought of this earlier.
Andy and Vickie sometimes took the train when they came to see her. She thought about that. She could probably figure out how to do that, find a train for people. The last part of the thought stopped her. There would be people on the train. Better to do it her fathers way, alone.
It was a clear warm spring day as she climbed into the gondola as it left the tiny yard outside the town below her mountains. The few times she had done this with her father she had always enjoyed both the excitement of going somewhere and the lure of the unknown, and had on occasion wandered down from her home just to watch the trains rumble by on the way to their mysterious destination. This time the destination wasn’t mysterious, it was to be with her friends and the train itself felt a bit like a friend. It wasn’t a long one. First came the caboose, directly behind the engine. Zechariah had told her that on longer trains the caboose was always at the end of the train but on this little short line they kept it right next to the engine. There were several of the ubiquitous dirty red box cars followed by some equally dirty wood reefers; a branch like this didn’t rate new equipment. A couple of more boxcars followed the gondola she sat in. She read the names on the cars: Great Northern, Missouri Pacific, Soo Line. Even the names suggested exciting far away places, places she had read about in all her books and had begun to think that she would perhaps like to see for herself someday.
She waited for the pain in her stomach to appear. That it would be a part of her trip was something she'd accepted as a price to be paid for what she needed to do. She'd prepared for it as well as she could, eating a meal beforehand of foods she usually found comforting and bringing more to eat and drink with her. But instead of the usual pain she felt new life flowing through her as she peered over the sides at the world passing by. Soon they were away from the town and the tracks followed the river, a scant twenty feet or so from the rails. The smell of cold water and floating ice mixed with the warm air and she held onto the sides to keep from being knocked down by the bumping and swaying of the car. After almost an hour she had enough of her new freedom and movement and sat down to eat some of the snack she had brought followed by some of the fermented cider she made at her cabin. It spread a warm glow through her and she lay on the bottom staring up at the sky. Another hour of exultation and she was starting to get used to the thrill of it. She propped herself against the end of the gondola and tried to read for a while but it was hard to concentrate. She thought of trying to take a bit of a nap but didn’t want to miss the stop. It should be the fourth one and there had been three already.
The train pulled over onto a siding for a while and she climbed out, bringing her stuff for just in case, and walked around. The space next to the tracks was filled with weeds which bloomed with early spring wildflowers for as far as she could see down the tracks. She picked some of them and climbed back into the gondola. She arranged them in an old can and set them on the floor of the gondola and admired them till the train started up and the can fell over. She stared at the flowers a long time. Wildflowers. As if she was bringing her world with her on this expedition.
The train had taken longer than she had expected and the thrill was almost completely gone when it slowed to pull into the town. As she remembered, the town name was on a water tower as the train neared the town so she knew at least that it was the right place. As evening began to fall and the air cooled she climbed out of the gondola, leaving the flowers there for whoever might see them, letting them announce her presence like piece of graffiti. She walked quickly and purposefully away and then as the train began to leave stood and watched for a minute. She was here. She hoped Andy was here also. Once she had decided on her plan she hadn’t had time to write him to let him know she was coming and hadn’t felt able to wait till she could.
It wasn’t that big a town but she didn’t know her way around so she wandered about for a while asking people for directions before she finally got set on how to get there. People looked at her oddly and wondered if now the stomach pains would come. Once more she told herself that it was just a price to be paid, accepting the pain before it came. And still it failed to appear. She felt a sharp pang of anxiety at the thought that maybe Andy wouldn't be home, or that maybe she might not be able to find his home in the night as she walked, enjoying the feel of using her legs. But it was just fear; it didn't turn into anything else. To calm herself she began to run in the direction she'd been told to go, but it was an enjoyable relaxed running. She ran for a long time feeling safer, more free, with every step. The sun was long gone and it had been night for quite a while when she started to recognize things from her visit a couple of years ago, She still felt good. This town was Andy's home, it was good to be here. Finally a house looked familiar and she saw his last name on the mailbox. The house was dark but she went up to it and knocked on the door as she considered the idea that names really could be useful at times. It had only been night for an hour so she imagined that they were not asleep yet; Andy had told her that city people usually stayed awake long after dark. When no one answered she settled down on the front porch to wait. She'd found his home; she knew how to wait.
She woke up what must have been several hours later to see a light upstairs. It looked like where she remembered Andy’s room being. Excitedly she banged on the door and a minute later he appeared through the window coming down the stair. He wondered who it was-when Vickie appeared in the night she usually just let herself in and either quietly went to sleep or noiselessly crept up to his room. He opened the unlocked door and Mountain Girl threw herself on him. He brought her upstairs where his room was a covered with drawings and architecture books. A cup of coffee sat next to his drafting board where he had been starting a drawing all over. He sat in a chair with her on his lap holding her silently for a long time and then they talked for half the night.
It was Monday when she got to Andy’s house. His family was thrilled with her presence even if Andy was busy all the time with school. Stu took her to the movies one night and in the evenings she had long talks with Andy’s parents by the fire. It was indoors but even so she liked the feel of sitting by the flames with other people. It was a surprise to realize that as far as they were concerned she was now an equal. They made plans to go see Vickie as soon as Andy was done with his classes on Friday but before that Mountain Girl wanted to do something else. Something she had wanted to do every one of the few times she had been to visit her friends but something Vickie had always objected to. She wanted to see where Vickie's family lived.
Andy thought it would be okay. Vickie wouldn't mind as long as she didn't have to participate in the experience with them. Her house wasn't that far from the train station so they got to the station early, parked the car and began walking towards the street where Vickie's house stood. The houses reached towards the sidewalk with their porches seemingly welcoming them to the neighborhood. A few people sitting on them waved or called hello to Andy. He stopped to chat with one of them, a pleasant older woman with a big smile. But their words were gibberish to Mountain Girl. After a moment Andy seemed to remember something. "I'm sorry" he said to her. This is my friend Mrs. Manriquez. She doesn't speak English. I was explaining to her who you are but my Spanish isn't that good either. The woman smiled apologetically at Mountain Girl and said hi with a curious sound to it. Andy spoke with her a bit more while Mountain Girl wondered what they were talking about. Then he turned to Mountain Girl. "She wanted to know if we wanted something to eat, but I said no. We'd better get going or she won't give up till she's fed us dinner, and we'll miss the train." He said something else to the woman and they began to walk down the street again.
Mountain Girl thought the whole place was fascinating. The houses came in a kaleidoscope of colors, all weathered and peeling. Ancient trees guarded the sidewalk from the encroachment of the buildings and their tiny front and side yards, each of them containing something that seemed to suggest a story about the house they fronted. A sign, a statue, a child's toy, discarded furniture, empty bottles, prize possessions and detritus. Each object raising another question, with yet more questions peering from hiding places in windows that were un curtained yet secretive. A half dozen children careened down the sidewalk towards them, swerving at the last minute to avoid a collision and screaming hellos as they sped past. Two teenaged boys a few years younger than them slunk past exuding menace and nodding almost imperceptibly to Andy. Then several girls their own age called out to Andy from another porch across the street. "Who's your friend?" they asked, flirtatious and innocent all at the same time. Andy slowed a bit and smiled at them. "I'll come over and introduce you in a couple minutes. How you been?" "Just fine now that I see you, dear" called out one in a terribly sweet voice. "You didn't tell me about no other girl though." "Don't worry Charice, you know how I feel about you" Andy responded, laughing happily. "Busy place" commented Mountain Girl to him. "It's nice how friendly people are though." "Yeah most of the folks here are pretty nice. But stuff happens" he replied. They walked a little further and another voice called out from the recesses of one of the more decrepit porches. "Yo, Little Man." Andy looked surprised.
"That's Vickie's brother. We better say hello. He's got a big mouth. Just let him talk is probably the best thing." They walked up the porch steps. A man of uncertain age sat concealed in a large reclining chair that seemed to be falling apart. As Andy started to say something the man interrupted him. "Dee’s been more of a ghost than ever. I ain't seen her since……" he paused as if lost in thought. "Since I can't really remember. I heard she went somewhere. College or something. Dee in school. I don't know….." Andy started to say whatever he had been about to say before and was interrupted again. "She ain't dead or anything is she? What you doing here anyway? Who's the chick?"
Mountain Girl hadn't said a word so far but she grew noticeably more silent at the thought that this man had no idea if his sister was dead or alive. Andy answered. "She's fine. I talked to her yesterday. She's in the city in music school" finally managing to compete a thought. "Dee in music school. What the hell. Well she always had big ones. Never said she didn't" mused the man. "Who'd you say the chick is?"
"This is our friend. We call her Mountain Girl sometimes. You might as well call her that. This is Dee’s brother. She calls him Snake. You can call him that. Vickie's family calls her Dee by the way. Not too many other people call her that in case you were wondering." Mountain Girl got as far as hello before Snake interrupted, more attentive now. "Mountain Girl. Dee told me about you. That's you, right?" "That's her" Andy said. "Cool" responded Snake as if rendering a verdict. He seemed to drift in thought again and then went on. "I heard about you. Whatever it was I heard." He was silent then, staring at Mountain Girl, appraising her. Appraising her in a dozen ways. Sexually. As a potential target, as a potential threat, as a potential friend. Then there was a small flat smile on his face. He seemed to simultaneously relax and become more guarded all at once. "I guess Dee was right, whatever it was she used to say." There was silence as he looked again like he had something more to say. "I wouldn't mess with you" he finished. "So how is the little ghost anyway? Never could seem to see her coming and never knew where she was you know. That's why we call her that" he volunteered to Mountain Girl, including her now. They talked a while about Vickie and how she had been with her brother doing most of the talking, wandering off into his own thoughts, segueing into himself. "I got out of rehab a little while ago" he volunteered, and Andy asked him about rehab. "Just a bunch of dope fiends and alkies. I didn't really belong there but I think maybe it helped me anyway, you know what I'm saying? But they were always talking about honesty and the truth. I don't know why they always had to rag on me about it. Most of them didn't know how not to lie. And you know when a dope fiend accidentally tells the truth he's probably still lying." Andy's eyes wandered down the block to an empty lot, wanting to avoid this train of thought and lost in a memory as well. "Alan's house is gone. Ever hear anything about him?" "You mean Creepshow? He's been gone for years now. I thought you knew that. No one ever heard nothing. Just gone one day, you know. I figure either he needed to disappear or someone took him off for good. I don't know. You know we thought we'd use him for a real quiet vato loco but he was taking things to a whole different level, you know what I'm saying? I figure if he's alive he'll get popped for something someday but you never know. Dude scared me to tell you the truth. Only one of the Ghost's friends that ever really made me nervous." "How about David?" asked Andy. "He still around? He doing okay?" "Long story, man" responded Snake. "Spider's probably going away for a real long time." "What happened to him?" asked Andy, unsurprised but more discouraged by the moment. Snake looked at him and shook his finger. You didn't ask these things and Andy knew better. "Too bad though" Snake volunteered. "He had a few fights you know. That's why we called him Spider" he informed Mountain Girl. "He could box like he had eight arms and each one of them was like getting bit by a black widow" Snake began to reminisce about the days before everyone had disappeared and then as they talked his eyes closed. "Well it was good seeing you" Andy said and turned to walk down the porches steps. Snake's eyes opened abruptly. "Little Man! So what brought you here tonight anyway?" he demanded. "She wanted to see Dee’s house" responded Andy. Snake relaxed again. "See away. Ain't much to look at. They rented out the first floor to some lady with some kids. My mom's upstairs with my brother's kids. It's still standing last I looked" he chuckled. "This isn't her house?" asked Mountain Girl. "Next block" responded her brother. "You know Hazy? He used to live here. Split a while ago. Don't know where to. No one does. Strung out though." "That's Dennis" Andy informed her. "They call him Hazy. I haven't seen him" Andy told Snake. "His family still live here? Doesn't look like it." "They're gone. Whole family took off. Sold the house to some guy who's been buying up the whole street. Probably going to tear it all down. But I rent a room here till he makes his move. Keeps the place occupied, you know what I'm saying? I miss them though. They was good people even if Hazy went too far sometimes." They turned to go again and then Mountain Girl had to ask something. There was a look in her eyes. Or rather there wasn't a look in her eyes. Andy thought it was something he'd rather not see in anyone's face, especially not hers. "Your sister gave you your name, right? Snake? I think she told me that." Andy felt nervous. She and Andy both knew the answer and he hoped that her brother only knew part of the answer. Snake yawned and smiled, proudly, evilly, magnanimously. Then he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a large tattoo of a rattlesnake on his arm. "Gave me the name. Got me drunk one night and gave me this. Paid for half of it with her own cash too. Used mine for the rest. At least that's what she told me. Why would she lie? She tell you why she gave it to me?" Before they could answer he continued. "She was drunk one night. Right over there." He pointed to an empty lot at the other end of the block. "These two punks wanted to mess with her. Thought they'd take it if she wouldn't give it away, you know? Dee wasn't one to give it up if she didn't like you and she didn't have any use for them cause they were real jerks, know what I'm saying? But she was wasted and they thought they'd seriously mess with her. Let's just say I put a stop to it. They lived right in that house, you know, but they had to move away real fast."
In the midst of basking in his heroics he was suddenly reflective. "You know Ghost didn't give up anything without a fight, not even a thank you. She was all grateful but all she said was it was about time I acted like her big brother. The next day she started calling me Snake. Said it in a nice way so I knew she must mean it cause she didn't say anything nice unless she wanted to. Said it was cause I was fast and deadly. Then a few weeks later we got trashed and I woke up with this and an empty wallet. She copped to it but I know she used her own bread too. Pretty cool, ain't it?" He displayed it proudly while Andy hoped the subject was about to change. Snake went on, his voice a bit dreamy now. "Funny thing though. I know she meant it. But I always dug there was something else going on. Like she had a little private joke, you know what I'm saying? What the hell. Listen, tell her I said not to be such a stranger." Mountain Girl wasn't done though. "Snake" she said. "That's a good name. But you know I would have called you Bear. You're like a bear. I can see it in your eyes." Andy felt himself holding his breath, ready to run, trying to show nothing. A bear was half blind he knew, using it's nose for almost everything of importance. Mountain Girl was insulting Vickie's brother, not counting on him to know what she had just said. "Bear. That's cool. Tell the Ghost I said yo" He closed his eyes and the chat was over. Andy hurried down the steps.
They walked down the street and Andy began to point out various things, hoping Mountain Girl wasn't going to try to talk about this any more. He pointed out the house where David had lived and the lot where Alan house had stood and began to tell her stories about them. Then they stood in front of Vickie's house. Broken furniture spilled off of the porch onto a strip of dirt that passed for a front yard. To the rear they could hear some children playing. Andy pointed to a second floor window. "That was her room. Her and her sister. I wonder what happened to her." The window stared at them, a haunted opening into a life Mountain Girl knew intimately but only second hand. "I remember the first time she brought me here." Andy said. No more of the thought needed to be expressed. They heard movement inside, someone walking down the stairs. Andy took her arm and led her away. They walked quickly, turning the corner and heading away from Vickie's block. He said hurried hellos to a few more people and then they were back at the train station, waiting on the platform, and Mountain Girl was suddenly verbose.
"That's him, right? The brother that threw her down the stairs. And all he said is true also, right?" "All of it" answered Andy. "Those two guys were real bad news. They were going to rape her and he gave them everything they deserve. Hurt one of them pretty bad and the other one even worse. I hope they've o.d.ed and died by now." There was a matter of fact rage in his voice as he pronounced his curse. Then he forced the thought away. "You know how she is, she never can quite get everything she wants to say into words no matter how long she talks. Well Snake says it all. He always was her favorite brother and he finally did a right thing. But don't forget what happened that first day you met her. She sure fit an awful lot into a name." His voice changed yet again. "You scared the daylights out of me when you asked him that and called him Bear. Don't ever take a chance on disrespecting someone in her family like that again. It's a good thing he was too high to think." Mountain Girl changed the subject a bit. "How old is he? I thought he was only about a year and a half older than Vickie but he looked real old" "That's the life. I guess rehab must have really helped him." Andy replied with a vicious sarcasm. Before he could go on Mountain Girl had another question. “Why do they call her Dee?”
“Everyone here has a couple of names” Andy explained. “You say you don’t need one because you know who you are. Here people are always trying not to let someone know something. But her first name, Vickie, well that’s short for Victoria, and that means victorious.” He laughed disgustedly. “You know her family couldn’t deal with that. I’m amazed they even let her carry the name in the first place, but I guess they thought better of it real fast. No one ever called her that till she got to school. I still remember how she didn't even answer to it at first.”
"There's something else" added Mountain Girl. "Her brother doesn't look much like her at all. That long red hair's just the beginning. I know you two used to talk about that but I really was surprised" "He's probably her half brother" Andy answered. The only one in her family that looks anything like her at all is her mom. But it doesn't matter. Probably it's a good thing. They wouldn't have treated her any better and maybe she got some better genes from someone." Then Mountain Girl had yet another revelation to discuss. "You know how I tell you sometimes that I can feel how other people used to live in my home? Like they're there in a way. Not ghosts or haunting or anything, but I just know we weren't the only ones to live there. That's how I felt here. I could walk up and down this street all day just drinking in these houses and their past. It's why you're going to architecture school now, isn't it?" And that opened up some sort of a flood gate and Andy had to talk about this the entire time they rode to the city and Vickie. The City. A place as unlike Mountain Girl's home as she could possibly imagine.
They spent two nights with Vickie and Mountain Girl was incredulous at the possibility of the existence of such a place as The City. On their return to Andy's home, he offered to drive her back to her home. Or to buy her a ticket for a passenger train. "I know how scary this must have been for you" he explained "You didn't get sick the entire time you were here, but the ride back might be hard. You know how a lot of times it all hits you right at the end." She thought about it. The freight train was a friend; she knew she'd be okay. But the longer she could postpone saying goodbye the better. Just the thought of sitting next to Andy as she went home made her feel somehow more whole. She agreed to let him drive her and then wound up agreeing to his walking up the side of the mountain to her home. It was late afternoon and she didn't want him to walk down the mountain again in the dark alone. The cabin felt complete again with him here. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. "Stay here and I'll walk you back down at the very beginnings of dawn tomorrow" she promised. It was a good idea he knew. There was really still too much ice on the trail for a night time descent to be prudent. He kissed her back. "Promise very first thing" he said, feeling like he too was at home.
They talked all the way down the trail the next morning. Her stomach wasn't going to hurt, she knew it. She told Andy all about looking at Vickie's brother, talking to him, as if Andy hadn't even been there. How could she be afraid of anything after talking to a bear hiding on someone' front porch?
Vickie and Andy both had just too much to do. They had been told school would be easier next year but it was still this year. Although they missed her as much as she missed them, both of them had a sense of purpose mingled with a fear of what might happen if they didn’t give their very best efforts to school that partially filled the void they suddenly had in their lives. It was time for a new plan and they were all surprised at the simplicity of it. Mountain Girl was ready. She'd take a turn being their guest for a while. By Friday afternoon they were done with classes. Andy showed her the place where the train slowed by the cemetery behind his house that he and Vickie had used as a place to board the train on their youthful explorations to the next town, and on Fridays he would go sit by the cemetery and wait for her to arrive, waving at the freight train as it passed and then racing to the bridge to greet her as she leapt to the ground. It felt like the very first summer of his friendship with Vickie. Then they would go see Vickie for the weekend. Or Vickie could come to them. Sometimes they would play like the children they made each other feel like, other times she's watch Andy draw buildings and build models while Vickie practiced. Then late Monday morning, hours after Andy and Vickie were gone, she would climb onto the freight train with a little bottle of wine kept for the occaision and then spend the rest of the week at her home with a new energy. Just in case, first several times she waited for the pain to appear in her stomach, reminding herself that it was just a feeling, just pain and fear, but it was gone.
Late in the spring Andy had gone with her one time just wanting to ride in an empty boxcar to see if it was all he and Vickie had imagined it would be when they were children. It had been all they could have hoped for and far more, a wildly romantic afternoon, and he thought to himself that it was a shame that they hadn’t listened to Vickie’s suggestions to do this years ago. But they hadn't, and it was their loss, he thought. The thought of the missed opportunity made him think that it was time to be less cautious. And then it was the beginnings of summer and college was a memory for the moment.
Andy and Vickie both had employment of one sort or another but it was nothing that required their attention the way school had. Vickie had decided to actually live at Andy’s house, paying small amounts of rent when she could and helping around the house in a way that by now seemed old and familiar. She truly felt like they were her family now and the independence of early adulthood was as wonderful as the evenings they spent together. They resumed their visits to the mountain also, no longer needing to ask Andy’s parents the permission they had always been granted.
Vickie first response to this feeling was to try to reorganize her band but too many people were away and there just wasn’t enough time for planning and preparation. But that was okay. Just as she had felt during the first summer that she had been friends with Andy, this seemed to be a moment in time when life was about to be launched in an unknown direction. She felt powerful, strong, young, and confident; ready to embrace the world, and this time would not come again. She wanted to make the most of it and her friends felt the same way. Months of warmth and freedom beckoned with a promise that was almost palpable. They could do what they wanted They began to make plans.
The following year Andy and Vickie both started college. As far as Mountain Girl was concerned it was another tragedy, with the added guilt of not rejoicing in her friends good fortune. She'd gotten used to the fact that her father would always be with her but never again in a corporeal way. The little peach tree marking his grave had become a compulsion with her in terms of caring for it and she inspected it at least twice a day, even building a little barrier around it to protect it from unwelcome attention from wildlife. She had to learn all sorts of things that her father had not yet taught her. But she was okay. Then her friends suddenly might as well have disappeared.
She almost didn't notice what had happened at first. They had come to see her twice before the reality of just how much would be expected of them in college had set in. They were fortunate in that the nearby city had all manner of educational opportunities and although Vickie had managed on her scholarship to go to live there Andy had stayed home and commuted to school. He had thought that things could still sort of remain as they were in all respects except that now he would be a college student, but that was not how it was working out. The first set of bad grades had come as a shock to him; he had always done well in school before. The only answer to him was to study a lot harder, and he wrote Mountain Girl several times explaining this. Vickie had a similar experience, and additionally was caught up in what seemed to be heaven to her, living in the city.
She had begun to go out to the rocks by the river to see her other friends again but once it got cold they were gone too. She thought of going to find them but it still just didn’t feel like something she should do, she couldn’t see herself wandering through their town looking for them. She wished that she could feel about them the way that she felt about Andy and Vickie but she just didn’t, and had begun to wonder if she ever would. She thought sometimes about how she had felt at the carnival. Something just wasn't right, and it was probably best to avoid the entire town. It was a familiar way of thinking for her and she didn't notice that the world that seemed so expansive, the world that had seemed to grow in so many unexpected and wonderful ways for her, was once more beginning to shrink.
At Thanksgiving Andy had come to get her and she and Vickie had stayed at Andy’s house for a couple of days and it was just like old times, but when Christmas came first there was a storm and then Andy had gotten sick for a couple of weeks. Vickie had been offered a short gig with a band on a very brief tour that she absolutely could not pass up, and Mountain Girl had not seen either of them at all.
She wrote all her letters to them again, and again did not send them. She read just about every book she had stockpiled. She wrote stories about them. She talked to them as if they were there. She wore their clothes that they kept there and pretended to be them. She fixed just about everything that could possibly be fixed around her home. The trips into town on her snowshoes brought bundles of letters and gifts from them and she knew that she was not truly alone. But there was no one else here, with her. She would lie in the bed in the sleeping loft under the cabin’s eaves staring out of the small gable window and think of all the times the three of them had lain here together staring out that same window and she could feel the languid presence of the past as she longed for the company of someone, anyone, here in the cabin with her. It got worse when she climbed down the narrow, steep stair into the rest of her home. Zechariah was everywhere. Standing at the wood stove she would think of the very first time she had attempted to cook breakfast and smile as she marveled at how everything had turned out. She would stare at the things the two of them had built for the cabin and could hardly bring herself to sit in some of the furniture they had made. During a momentary spell of pleasant weather she prepared herself for what was in the winter a two day trek to the town beneath the waterfall. Maybe she'd just go visit Lee. She could find her home again and stay for a day, that was all. She began her trip and for the first hour or so contented herself with joyful thoughts of how nice it would be to see her friends. And then a momentary thought took hold, and idle breeze in her mind, and she felt the fear, the anger, that she'd felt at the carnival. Felt it return as inexorably as the winter clouds that began to move in. She stopped for the evening and spent a desperately lonely night in a small cave that had always felt like home. In the morning, shaken by what she hoped were merely nightmares, she turned around and went home.
The winter increased it's strength and pretty soon the weather forecasters were talking about record snowfall. But the gleaming white brought non of the sense of peace to her that it had every other year and she was alone, miserable, depressed, and wondering if the best part of her life had been completed.
By early spring she had decided that no matter what, it was time to rethink the entire situation. She thought long and hard about her father. His investment in his own isolation had always seemed reasonable to her and before his death she had finally come to feel that she had everything she needed, but things were terribly different now. In contrast to her father, her few dealings with the rest of the world had been benign no matter how frightening they had been, how physically ill they sometimes made her feel. The law said she was an adult now, perhaps she needed to see more of the world and make up her own mind about it. In their letters Andy and Vickie kept talking about how things would be different in the summer but she was not a student and was not about to put her emotional life in hibernation for the better part of the year. If they couldn’t come to her she would go to them. The rest of the world couldn't be any worse than the sadness she had been entrapped in for the last few months.
Zechariah’s favorite mode of transportation had been the freight trains that ran along the rail line passing through the town below the mountain he lived on. The railroad that ran along the river connecting the hamlet below her home to the rest of the world was a short line serving the small towns along the river and little else. There were practically none of the riders in the empty boxcars that would be found on a larger system and as a result the railroad had a relaxed attitude toward the few people who did occasionally use their train as a method of getting from here to there. Once one got to the terminal on the outskirts of the city everything changed of course. But on the little short line the train workers and yardmen had been among the few people Zechariah got along with, probably because they were among the few who had something he needed, which was access to free transportation. He had introduced his daughter to the people who for Zechariah were what passed for friends and shown her how to figure out where the trains were going and other necessary knowledge. He had even taken her on a few rides including a trip one time through the town that Andy had said that he lived in, making it clear that he was not about to have her doing this alone and at the same time thinking to himself that she might need to know how to do this sometime. But Zechariah was gone now and the route to Andy’s home was simple. She wondered why she had not thought of this earlier.
Andy and Vickie sometimes took the train when they came to see her. She thought about that. She could probably figure out how to do that, find a train for people. The last part of the thought stopped her. There would be people on the train. Better to do it her fathers way, alone.
It was a clear warm spring day as she climbed into the gondola as it left the tiny yard outside the town below her mountains. The few times she had done this with her father she had always enjoyed both the excitement of going somewhere and the lure of the unknown, and had on occasion wandered down from her home just to watch the trains rumble by on the way to their mysterious destination. This time the destination wasn’t mysterious, it was to be with her friends and the train itself felt a bit like a friend. It wasn’t a long one. First came the caboose, directly behind the engine. Zechariah had told her that on longer trains the caboose was always at the end of the train but on this little short line they kept it right next to the engine. There were several of the ubiquitous dirty red box cars followed by some equally dirty wood reefers; a branch like this didn’t rate new equipment. A couple of more boxcars followed the gondola she sat in. She read the names on the cars: Great Northern, Missouri Pacific, Soo Line. Even the names suggested exciting far away places, places she had read about in all her books and had begun to think that she would perhaps like to see for herself someday.
She waited for the pain in her stomach to appear. That it would be a part of her trip was something she'd accepted as a price to be paid for what she needed to do. She'd prepared for it as well as she could, eating a meal beforehand of foods she usually found comforting and bringing more to eat and drink with her. But instead of the usual pain she felt new life flowing through her as she peered over the sides at the world passing by. Soon they were away from the town and the tracks followed the river, a scant twenty feet or so from the rails. The smell of cold water and floating ice mixed with the warm air and she held onto the sides to keep from being knocked down by the bumping and swaying of the car. After almost an hour she had enough of her new freedom and movement and sat down to eat some of the snack she had brought followed by some of the fermented cider she made at her cabin. It spread a warm glow through her and she lay on the bottom staring up at the sky. Another hour of exultation and she was starting to get used to the thrill of it. She propped herself against the end of the gondola and tried to read for a while but it was hard to concentrate. She thought of trying to take a bit of a nap but didn’t want to miss the stop. It should be the fourth one and there had been three already.
The train pulled over onto a siding for a while and she climbed out, bringing her stuff for just in case, and walked around. The space next to the tracks was filled with weeds which bloomed with early spring wildflowers for as far as she could see down the tracks. She picked some of them and climbed back into the gondola. She arranged them in an old can and set them on the floor of the gondola and admired them till the train started up and the can fell over. She stared at the flowers a long time. Wildflowers. As if she was bringing her world with her on this expedition.
The train had taken longer than she had expected and the thrill was almost completely gone when it slowed to pull into the town. As she remembered, the town name was on a water tower as the train neared the town so she knew at least that it was the right place. As evening began to fall and the air cooled she climbed out of the gondola, leaving the flowers there for whoever might see them, letting them announce her presence like piece of graffiti. She walked quickly and purposefully away and then as the train began to leave stood and watched for a minute. She was here. She hoped Andy was here also. Once she had decided on her plan she hadn’t had time to write him to let him know she was coming and hadn’t felt able to wait till she could.
It wasn’t that big a town but she didn’t know her way around so she wandered about for a while asking people for directions before she finally got set on how to get there. People looked at her oddly and wondered if now the stomach pains would come. Once more she told herself that it was just a price to be paid, accepting the pain before it came. And still it failed to appear. She felt a sharp pang of anxiety at the thought that maybe Andy wouldn't be home, or that maybe she might not be able to find his home in the night as she walked, enjoying the feel of using her legs. But it was just fear; it didn't turn into anything else. To calm herself she began to run in the direction she'd been told to go, but it was an enjoyable relaxed running. She ran for a long time feeling safer, more free, with every step. The sun was long gone and it had been night for quite a while when she started to recognize things from her visit a couple of years ago, She still felt good. This town was Andy's home, it was good to be here. Finally a house looked familiar and she saw his last name on the mailbox. The house was dark but she went up to it and knocked on the door as she considered the idea that names really could be useful at times. It had only been night for an hour so she imagined that they were not asleep yet; Andy had told her that city people usually stayed awake long after dark. When no one answered she settled down on the front porch to wait. She'd found his home; she knew how to wait.
She woke up what must have been several hours later to see a light upstairs. It looked like where she remembered Andy’s room being. Excitedly she banged on the door and a minute later he appeared through the window coming down the stair. He wondered who it was-when Vickie appeared in the night she usually just let herself in and either quietly went to sleep or noiselessly crept up to his room. He opened the unlocked door and Mountain Girl threw herself on him. He brought her upstairs where his room was a covered with drawings and architecture books. A cup of coffee sat next to his drafting board where he had been starting a drawing all over. He sat in a chair with her on his lap holding her silently for a long time and then they talked for half the night.
It was Monday when she got to Andy’s house. His family was thrilled with her presence even if Andy was busy all the time with school. Stu took her to the movies one night and in the evenings she had long talks with Andy’s parents by the fire. It was indoors but even so she liked the feel of sitting by the flames with other people. It was a surprise to realize that as far as they were concerned she was now an equal. They made plans to go see Vickie as soon as Andy was done with his classes on Friday but before that Mountain Girl wanted to do something else. Something she had wanted to do every one of the few times she had been to visit her friends but something Vickie had always objected to. She wanted to see where Vickie's family lived.
Andy thought it would be okay. Vickie wouldn't mind as long as she didn't have to participate in the experience with them. Her house wasn't that far from the train station so they got to the station early, parked the car and began walking towards the street where Vickie's house stood. The houses reached towards the sidewalk with their porches seemingly welcoming them to the neighborhood. A few people sitting on them waved or called hello to Andy. He stopped to chat with one of them, a pleasant older woman with a big smile. But their words were gibberish to Mountain Girl. After a moment Andy seemed to remember something. "I'm sorry" he said to her. This is my friend Mrs. Manriquez. She doesn't speak English. I was explaining to her who you are but my Spanish isn't that good either. The woman smiled apologetically at Mountain Girl and said hi with a curious sound to it. Andy spoke with her a bit more while Mountain Girl wondered what they were talking about. Then he turned to Mountain Girl. "She wanted to know if we wanted something to eat, but I said no. We'd better get going or she won't give up till she's fed us dinner, and we'll miss the train." He said something else to the woman and they began to walk down the street again.
Mountain Girl thought the whole place was fascinating. The houses came in a kaleidoscope of colors, all weathered and peeling. Ancient trees guarded the sidewalk from the encroachment of the buildings and their tiny front and side yards, each of them containing something that seemed to suggest a story about the house they fronted. A sign, a statue, a child's toy, discarded furniture, empty bottles, prize possessions and detritus. Each object raising another question, with yet more questions peering from hiding places in windows that were un curtained yet secretive. A half dozen children careened down the sidewalk towards them, swerving at the last minute to avoid a collision and screaming hellos as they sped past. Two teenaged boys a few years younger than them slunk past exuding menace and nodding almost imperceptibly to Andy. Then several girls their own age called out to Andy from another porch across the street. "Who's your friend?" they asked, flirtatious and innocent all at the same time. Andy slowed a bit and smiled at them. "I'll come over and introduce you in a couple minutes. How you been?" "Just fine now that I see you, dear" called out one in a terribly sweet voice. "You didn't tell me about no other girl though." "Don't worry Charice, you know how I feel about you" Andy responded, laughing happily. "Busy place" commented Mountain Girl to him. "It's nice how friendly people are though." "Yeah most of the folks here are pretty nice. But stuff happens" he replied. They walked a little further and another voice called out from the recesses of one of the more decrepit porches. "Yo, Little Man." Andy looked surprised.
"That's Vickie's brother. We better say hello. He's got a big mouth. Just let him talk is probably the best thing." They walked up the porch steps. A man of uncertain age sat concealed in a large reclining chair that seemed to be falling apart. As Andy started to say something the man interrupted him. "Dee’s been more of a ghost than ever. I ain't seen her since……" he paused as if lost in thought. "Since I can't really remember. I heard she went somewhere. College or something. Dee in school. I don't know….." Andy started to say whatever he had been about to say before and was interrupted again. "She ain't dead or anything is she? What you doing here anyway? Who's the chick?"
Mountain Girl hadn't said a word so far but she grew noticeably more silent at the thought that this man had no idea if his sister was dead or alive. Andy answered. "She's fine. I talked to her yesterday. She's in the city in music school" finally managing to compete a thought. "Dee in music school. What the hell. Well she always had big ones. Never said she didn't" mused the man. "Who'd you say the chick is?"
"This is our friend. We call her Mountain Girl sometimes. You might as well call her that. This is Dee’s brother. She calls him Snake. You can call him that. Vickie's family calls her Dee by the way. Not too many other people call her that in case you were wondering." Mountain Girl got as far as hello before Snake interrupted, more attentive now. "Mountain Girl. Dee told me about you. That's you, right?" "That's her" Andy said. "Cool" responded Snake as if rendering a verdict. He seemed to drift in thought again and then went on. "I heard about you. Whatever it was I heard." He was silent then, staring at Mountain Girl, appraising her. Appraising her in a dozen ways. Sexually. As a potential target, as a potential threat, as a potential friend. Then there was a small flat smile on his face. He seemed to simultaneously relax and become more guarded all at once. "I guess Dee was right, whatever it was she used to say." There was silence as he looked again like he had something more to say. "I wouldn't mess with you" he finished. "So how is the little ghost anyway? Never could seem to see her coming and never knew where she was you know. That's why we call her that" he volunteered to Mountain Girl, including her now. They talked a while about Vickie and how she had been with her brother doing most of the talking, wandering off into his own thoughts, segueing into himself. "I got out of rehab a little while ago" he volunteered, and Andy asked him about rehab. "Just a bunch of dope fiends and alkies. I didn't really belong there but I think maybe it helped me anyway, you know what I'm saying? But they were always talking about honesty and the truth. I don't know why they always had to rag on me about it. Most of them didn't know how not to lie. And you know when a dope fiend accidentally tells the truth he's probably still lying." Andy's eyes wandered down the block to an empty lot, wanting to avoid this train of thought and lost in a memory as well. "Alan's house is gone. Ever hear anything about him?" "You mean Creepshow? He's been gone for years now. I thought you knew that. No one ever heard nothing. Just gone one day, you know. I figure either he needed to disappear or someone took him off for good. I don't know. You know we thought we'd use him for a real quiet vato loco but he was taking things to a whole different level, you know what I'm saying? I figure if he's alive he'll get popped for something someday but you never know. Dude scared me to tell you the truth. Only one of the Ghost's friends that ever really made me nervous." "How about David?" asked Andy. "He still around? He doing okay?" "Long story, man" responded Snake. "Spider's probably going away for a real long time." "What happened to him?" asked Andy, unsurprised but more discouraged by the moment. Snake looked at him and shook his finger. You didn't ask these things and Andy knew better. "Too bad though" Snake volunteered. "He had a few fights you know. That's why we called him Spider" he informed Mountain Girl. "He could box like he had eight arms and each one of them was like getting bit by a black widow" Snake began to reminisce about the days before everyone had disappeared and then as they talked his eyes closed. "Well it was good seeing you" Andy said and turned to walk down the porches steps. Snake's eyes opened abruptly. "Little Man! So what brought you here tonight anyway?" he demanded. "She wanted to see Dee’s house" responded Andy. Snake relaxed again. "See away. Ain't much to look at. They rented out the first floor to some lady with some kids. My mom's upstairs with my brother's kids. It's still standing last I looked" he chuckled. "This isn't her house?" asked Mountain Girl. "Next block" responded her brother. "You know Hazy? He used to live here. Split a while ago. Don't know where to. No one does. Strung out though." "That's Dennis" Andy informed her. "They call him Hazy. I haven't seen him" Andy told Snake. "His family still live here? Doesn't look like it." "They're gone. Whole family took off. Sold the house to some guy who's been buying up the whole street. Probably going to tear it all down. But I rent a room here till he makes his move. Keeps the place occupied, you know what I'm saying? I miss them though. They was good people even if Hazy went too far sometimes." They turned to go again and then Mountain Girl had to ask something. There was a look in her eyes. Or rather there wasn't a look in her eyes. Andy thought it was something he'd rather not see in anyone's face, especially not hers. "Your sister gave you your name, right? Snake? I think she told me that." Andy felt nervous. She and Andy both knew the answer and he hoped that her brother only knew part of the answer. Snake yawned and smiled, proudly, evilly, magnanimously. Then he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve to reveal a large tattoo of a rattlesnake on his arm. "Gave me the name. Got me drunk one night and gave me this. Paid for half of it with her own cash too. Used mine for the rest. At least that's what she told me. Why would she lie? She tell you why she gave it to me?" Before they could answer he continued. "She was drunk one night. Right over there." He pointed to an empty lot at the other end of the block. "These two punks wanted to mess with her. Thought they'd take it if she wouldn't give it away, you know? Dee wasn't one to give it up if she didn't like you and she didn't have any use for them cause they were real jerks, know what I'm saying? But she was wasted and they thought they'd seriously mess with her. Let's just say I put a stop to it. They lived right in that house, you know, but they had to move away real fast."
In the midst of basking in his heroics he was suddenly reflective. "You know Ghost didn't give up anything without a fight, not even a thank you. She was all grateful but all she said was it was about time I acted like her big brother. The next day she started calling me Snake. Said it in a nice way so I knew she must mean it cause she didn't say anything nice unless she wanted to. Said it was cause I was fast and deadly. Then a few weeks later we got trashed and I woke up with this and an empty wallet. She copped to it but I know she used her own bread too. Pretty cool, ain't it?" He displayed it proudly while Andy hoped the subject was about to change. Snake went on, his voice a bit dreamy now. "Funny thing though. I know she meant it. But I always dug there was something else going on. Like she had a little private joke, you know what I'm saying? What the hell. Listen, tell her I said not to be such a stranger." Mountain Girl wasn't done though. "Snake" she said. "That's a good name. But you know I would have called you Bear. You're like a bear. I can see it in your eyes." Andy felt himself holding his breath, ready to run, trying to show nothing. A bear was half blind he knew, using it's nose for almost everything of importance. Mountain Girl was insulting Vickie's brother, not counting on him to know what she had just said. "Bear. That's cool. Tell the Ghost I said yo" He closed his eyes and the chat was over. Andy hurried down the steps.
They walked down the street and Andy began to point out various things, hoping Mountain Girl wasn't going to try to talk about this any more. He pointed out the house where David had lived and the lot where Alan house had stood and began to tell her stories about them. Then they stood in front of Vickie's house. Broken furniture spilled off of the porch onto a strip of dirt that passed for a front yard. To the rear they could hear some children playing. Andy pointed to a second floor window. "That was her room. Her and her sister. I wonder what happened to her." The window stared at them, a haunted opening into a life Mountain Girl knew intimately but only second hand. "I remember the first time she brought me here." Andy said. No more of the thought needed to be expressed. They heard movement inside, someone walking down the stairs. Andy took her arm and led her away. They walked quickly, turning the corner and heading away from Vickie's block. He said hurried hellos to a few more people and then they were back at the train station, waiting on the platform, and Mountain Girl was suddenly verbose.
"That's him, right? The brother that threw her down the stairs. And all he said is true also, right?" "All of it" answered Andy. "Those two guys were real bad news. They were going to rape her and he gave them everything they deserve. Hurt one of them pretty bad and the other one even worse. I hope they've o.d.ed and died by now." There was a matter of fact rage in his voice as he pronounced his curse. Then he forced the thought away. "You know how she is, she never can quite get everything she wants to say into words no matter how long she talks. Well Snake says it all. He always was her favorite brother and he finally did a right thing. But don't forget what happened that first day you met her. She sure fit an awful lot into a name." His voice changed yet again. "You scared the daylights out of me when you asked him that and called him Bear. Don't ever take a chance on disrespecting someone in her family like that again. It's a good thing he was too high to think." Mountain Girl changed the subject a bit. "How old is he? I thought he was only about a year and a half older than Vickie but he looked real old" "That's the life. I guess rehab must have really helped him." Andy replied with a vicious sarcasm. Before he could go on Mountain Girl had another question. “Why do they call her Dee?”
“Everyone here has a couple of names” Andy explained. “You say you don’t need one because you know who you are. Here people are always trying not to let someone know something. But her first name, Vickie, well that’s short for Victoria, and that means victorious.” He laughed disgustedly. “You know her family couldn’t deal with that. I’m amazed they even let her carry the name in the first place, but I guess they thought better of it real fast. No one ever called her that till she got to school. I still remember how she didn't even answer to it at first.”
"There's something else" added Mountain Girl. "Her brother doesn't look much like her at all. That long red hair's just the beginning. I know you two used to talk about that but I really was surprised" "He's probably her half brother" Andy answered. The only one in her family that looks anything like her at all is her mom. But it doesn't matter. Probably it's a good thing. They wouldn't have treated her any better and maybe she got some better genes from someone." Then Mountain Girl had yet another revelation to discuss. "You know how I tell you sometimes that I can feel how other people used to live in my home? Like they're there in a way. Not ghosts or haunting or anything, but I just know we weren't the only ones to live there. That's how I felt here. I could walk up and down this street all day just drinking in these houses and their past. It's why you're going to architecture school now, isn't it?" And that opened up some sort of a flood gate and Andy had to talk about this the entire time they rode to the city and Vickie. The City. A place as unlike Mountain Girl's home as she could possibly imagine.
They spent two nights with Vickie and Mountain Girl was incredulous at the possibility of the existence of such a place as The City. On their return to Andy's home, he offered to drive her back to her home. Or to buy her a ticket for a passenger train. "I know how scary this must have been for you" he explained "You didn't get sick the entire time you were here, but the ride back might be hard. You know how a lot of times it all hits you right at the end." She thought about it. The freight train was a friend; she knew she'd be okay. But the longer she could postpone saying goodbye the better. Just the thought of sitting next to Andy as she went home made her feel somehow more whole. She agreed to let him drive her and then wound up agreeing to his walking up the side of the mountain to her home. It was late afternoon and she didn't want him to walk down the mountain again in the dark alone. The cabin felt complete again with him here. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him. "Stay here and I'll walk you back down at the very beginnings of dawn tomorrow" she promised. It was a good idea he knew. There was really still too much ice on the trail for a night time descent to be prudent. He kissed her back. "Promise very first thing" he said, feeling like he too was at home.
They talked all the way down the trail the next morning. Her stomach wasn't going to hurt, she knew it. She told Andy all about looking at Vickie's brother, talking to him, as if Andy hadn't even been there. How could she be afraid of anything after talking to a bear hiding on someone' front porch?
Vickie and Andy both had just too much to do. They had been told school would be easier next year but it was still this year. Although they missed her as much as she missed them, both of them had a sense of purpose mingled with a fear of what might happen if they didn’t give their very best efforts to school that partially filled the void they suddenly had in their lives. It was time for a new plan and they were all surprised at the simplicity of it. Mountain Girl was ready. She'd take a turn being their guest for a while. By Friday afternoon they were done with classes. Andy showed her the place where the train slowed by the cemetery behind his house that he and Vickie had used as a place to board the train on their youthful explorations to the next town, and on Fridays he would go sit by the cemetery and wait for her to arrive, waving at the freight train as it passed and then racing to the bridge to greet her as she leapt to the ground. It felt like the very first summer of his friendship with Vickie. Then they would go see Vickie for the weekend. Or Vickie could come to them. Sometimes they would play like the children they made each other feel like, other times she's watch Andy draw buildings and build models while Vickie practiced. Then late Monday morning, hours after Andy and Vickie were gone, she would climb onto the freight train with a little bottle of wine kept for the occaision and then spend the rest of the week at her home with a new energy. Just in case, first several times she waited for the pain to appear in her stomach, reminding herself that it was just a feeling, just pain and fear, but it was gone.
Late in the spring Andy had gone with her one time just wanting to ride in an empty boxcar to see if it was all he and Vickie had imagined it would be when they were children. It had been all they could have hoped for and far more, a wildly romantic afternoon, and he thought to himself that it was a shame that they hadn’t listened to Vickie’s suggestions to do this years ago. But they hadn't, and it was their loss, he thought. The thought of the missed opportunity made him think that it was time to be less cautious. And then it was the beginnings of summer and college was a memory for the moment.
Andy and Vickie both had employment of one sort or another but it was nothing that required their attention the way school had. Vickie had decided to actually live at Andy’s house, paying small amounts of rent when she could and helping around the house in a way that by now seemed old and familiar. She truly felt like they were her family now and the independence of early adulthood was as wonderful as the evenings they spent together. They resumed their visits to the mountain also, no longer needing to ask Andy’s parents the permission they had always been granted.
Vickie first response to this feeling was to try to reorganize her band but too many people were away and there just wasn’t enough time for planning and preparation. But that was okay. Just as she had felt during the first summer that she had been friends with Andy, this seemed to be a moment in time when life was about to be launched in an unknown direction. She felt powerful, strong, young, and confident; ready to embrace the world, and this time would not come again. She wanted to make the most of it and her friends felt the same way. Months of warmth and freedom beckoned with a promise that was almost palpable. They could do what they wanted They began to make plans.
everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon