The group thinned out. Mr. Hastings called out little cries of good-bye and au revoir, and everyone sort of shuddered and wondered what the world was coming to when this was the best the faculty could muster. Jamie was slightly behind me, Elsa slightly ahead. I slowed down. “Hi, Jamie,” I said smiling. My lips trembled. One dumb smile, I thought, it can’t matter that much. Surely in seventeen and a half years I have at least learned to smile.
“Hi, Holl,” said Jamie. He did not slow down. Either he was heading after Elsa, or he was avoiding me.
I said, “Jamie? Want to go to the Pew and have a muffin with me?”
Sixteen
IF YOU ASK FOR a hot drink at the Pew, you get it in a thick sand-colored mug, with a handle so thick you can’t use it, and instead you wind your fingers around the mug and heat them off your hot chocolate. Ice water is served in an old mason jar. They’ve done that long before anyone thought that kind of thing was cute. It comes from the Depression, they’ll tell you, when they couldn’t afford glassware.
My jar had a pattern of grapes and leaves and vines running around it. I stroked the bulges of the grape cluster with my thumb and listened to Jamie’s stories.
Sitting there with him I had this strange complete feeling. It was like the last piece you put into a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, or the final word you write in a twenty-five-page term paper. Seeing it done completes it. Seeing it finished wraps you up, too.
Seeing it right.
Jamie, I thought happily, is right.
We were talking about the ice sculptures. The wooden bases were beginning to go up on the fraternity lawns, and it was always fun to try to guess what on earth they might be. Ice sculptures are made from slush. A four-legged animal, for example, requires a simple saw-horse with a wooden headpiece around which you pour your slush, which you’ve mixed to your secret proportions in your snow and water pails. As you pour on the slush, you shape it with paddles and shovels and knives. After it’s all up and frozen, you carve it with a hatchet and finish it off with a fine water spray that shines like glass when it freezes.
Some of the fraternities and some of the independent efforts (like Lydia’s) were starting to go up, but so far there was just the wood and the beginnings of scaffolding for the really big ice constructions.
“Last year I remember Chi Rho had this huge thing on the lawn that I was convinced was going to be a stegosaurus,” said Jamie.
“Chi Rho!” I said, laughing. “They won last year with that giant fifteen-foot-long bunch of bananas.”
“I know. When it was all done it was a perfect banana bunch, but while it was going up I was positive it was a dinosaur.”
“Doesn’t it make you think of Halloween?”
Jamie looked puzzled.
“The ice sculptures,” I explained. “I mean, the effect of them all is sort of wild and crazy and sometimes attractive, but always so ridiculous. It makes you feel surprised at humankind for even thinking about it. Like Halloween. Who would believe there’s actually a day set aside each year for people to pretend to be ghosts?”
We talked about the weirdness of other people. It was a topic good for hours. Jamie slid into discussing the solar greenhouse we’d be building over the summer, if we managed to raise all the money we needed during the Ice Sculpture Festival. “Solar greenhouse,” he said scornfully. “I can’t stand it when people say stuff like that. Even the biology teacher says it. I want to execute him. I mean, what other kind of greenhouse could it be? There’s no such thing as a lunar greenhouse.”
I buttered another strawberry muffin and handed it to Jamie. It was a purely selfish act. Any more muffins and butter and they’d have to shovel me out the door.
“Tomatoes in winter,” said Jamie dreamily. “Instead of going to the vending machines for two-week-old chocolate-covered doughnuts or soft, ancient golden apples, we can go to the biology room and buy fresh tomatoes.”
I wouldn’t be there.
I would be a thousand, five thousand miles away.
I stared at Jamie for a moment and rethought my position. I could at least glance through the catalog of the University of New Hampshire. It was silly to write off a perfectly fine school without a thorough investigation. It was possible, I thought, regarding Jamie from a distance of two inches and planning how to reduce that to zero inches, that climate was not everything.
“Your lips are buttery,” observed Jamie.
“I know. We can’t go on meeting like this.”
I thought he would kiss me, and I think he thought so, too, but at the last moment Jamie caught himself and pulled back an inch and instead drew a butter mustache on my upper lip.
We had each paid for a round of hot chocolate and muffins. Jamie said, “You have any more money? Because I am now down to fourteen cents, and we can’t sit here forever not ordering because there’s a line at the door.”
I dug around among the used Kleenex and scribbled memos and dried-out felt pens and discovered enough for two more hot chocolates.
“I’m not sure I can drink any more,” said Jamie. “I’m going to float away.”
“We can order it just to sit here,” I said. “We’ll look busy, at least.”
We sat quietly waiting for the waitress to bring another set of drinks. “About the cafeteria the other day,” I said. My stomach clenched around all the food I’d consumed at the Pew. Jamie looked at me without expression, waiting.
“I—I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said. “I loved it that you were there in line with me, Jamie. It was just—when Lydia—well, those girls started giggling and I felt so—I mean, that teasing about the older woman and the younger man thing really threw me.”
Jamie nodded. “I haven’t enjoyed it either.”
I was astonished. “You got it, too?”
“What do you think all the junior boys were laughing so hard about when I went back to sit with them after Gary took your tray?”
“Oh, Jamie, how awful. I thought they were just laughing. I didn’t think they were laughing at you.”
“Oh, sure. All this stuff about how I expected you to show me Life and guide my weak little mind into Adulthood.”
I almost chewed my lip off, hearing it. Jamie had certainly deleted the actual words out of kindness to me. “Nobody said anything that bad to me,” I said. “Just how I was into cradle-robbing along with dollhouses, probably was a case of severely retarded mental development, was warped, and required a similarly warped mind to keep me company.”
We smiled. Tense, rueful smiles that didn’t stay very well on our faces. Suddenly I wanted fiercely to be alone with Jamie. To hug away the accumulated tension of all the teasing and the uncertainty. We stared at each other over the table, and Jamie said, “Forget the hot chocolate. Let’s go somewhere.”
We were up from the table, and we touched fingertips as a preliminary. I shivered, thinking of the two of us being alone, but that was the highlight of it, I’m sorry to say. Cold weather once again reared its ugly head. We couldn’t just saunter out and find a park bench. We had to locate our coats among the incredible pile-up at the door, figure out how to get our arms into the sleeves when we were being crushed by a dozen other couples eager for our vacated table, zip up, wind our scarves around our chins, pull on our two pairs of mittens, excuse ourselves twenty times while shoving through the crush, and then, outside in minus four degrees with the wind blowing, adjust to the shock and the sheer viciousness of the weather.
I dragged my crutches behind me, and we stood on the sidewalk crunching the pellets of rock salt. Jamie said, “Holly. This is the pits.”
We both began to laugh. The wind was so cold it froze the insides of my lungs, and I had to put a hand over my mouth to soften the air before I breathed it in. Jamie grabbed my hand away and began dragging me right across the new-fallen snow onto the college campus. “Jamie,” I protested, but the wind tore the words away. He pulled, I dragged, and the crutches made sinister streaks in the snow as I let them sli
de along the ground after me.
We came to a cluster of enormous, ancient fir trees whose branches swept the ground and the sky. Jamie walked straight into them, holding branches back for me, and there, inside, was a tiny clearing with a tiny stone bench and relief from the piercing wind. Jamie kicked snow and ice off the bench and sat me down on it, leaning the crutches up, and then sat down beside me.
I put my arms around him and felt nothing but layers of puffy cloth and padding. He put his arms around me and I knew the arms were there because I could feel the pressure, but that was all. I yearned for a hot sandy beach with a private lagoon just for two. I yearned for a heated car of our own, or at least a living room without a brother or a parent, or even membership in a fraternity with a warm sitting room and people who wouldn’t turn the lights on.
No such luck.
We did find, however, that two faces pressed up against each other can at least keep the cheeks warm, providing entertainment and pleasure at the same time!
“You too cold?” said Jamie.
“I am always too cold. But don’t let that stop you.”
We laughed, and our breath hung in the air like clouds of love.
“You know something?” said Jamie. “Last year you were just some girl at the bus stop.”
I nodded and touched him. “At first I just stood next to you because your shoulders were wide enough to block some of the wind.”
“When do you get your cast off?” he said.
“Day after tomorrow.”
“Friday, then. Let’s celebrate. Where can we go together?”
We hugged each other and I thought, where can we go? Any place local means teasing, unless we stick to college hangouts like the Pew. Any place around here means being trespassed upon by the unfair, unthinking laughter of our friends.
“We could come to my house,” I said, wondering uneasily how my brother would react to an evening of Jamie, and where we would sit, and whether we could possibly relax at all.
“No,” said Jamie flatly. He and Christopher must have been more hostile than I had thought. “Your house?” I said tentatively.
“No. You don’t want to see my parents in action.”
“I don’t?”
Jamie’s face took on a hooded, private look. “I’m not the kind of son they had in mind,” he said. “They’re always mad at me, or embarrassed by me, or bewildered. We can’t get along. I’m just never doing what they want.”
“Do you ever give in?” I said. “Be what they want?”
Jamie laughed. “I might if I could ever figure out what they want. All I know is, it’s not me. I can shrug it off now, though. College is in sight. Leaving home. My parents feel kind of temporary, as if I’m doing the last lap and pretty soon it’ll be over and I can get out.”
How awful, I thought. Why, I’ll miss my family terribly when I leave for school. And they’ll miss me. That’s one reason they fight my going off so far.
We left the little circle of evergreens. The wind was biting as cruelly as ever. Jamie carried my crutches and took my arm, and we went slowly on the treacherous paths. Down on Little Pond at the edge of the campus, some little kids were out on the ice playing “Crack the Whip” in the growing darkness. The kid on the end got spun off the whip, and he slid in a crazy whirl across the ice. There was a shriek of happy laughter from the children who had skated too fast for him.
“Sometimes I feel like that,” said Jamie.
“Like the last person on the whip?”
Jamie blew out an enormous cloud of hot breath into the frigid air. We walked through the cloud, and Jamie didn’t answer me. “I know what we can do,” he said. “There’s a terrific old movie series at Dartmouth. Let’s drive down there Friday night and see some silent films. Do you like popcorn and movies and stuff?”
Did I like popcorn and movies. “I also have a thing for chocolate-covered raisins,” I said.
“At the same time?”
“If possible.”
At least Jamie didn’t condemn the practice out loud, although he did look a little pained around the edges. “I’ll try to get the car,” he said. It sounded as though getting the car would put Jamie in a war zone. I wanted to talk about Jamie’s family, but I had the feeling he wasn’t quite ready for that.
We came to Featherbed Lane and went down the hill very slowly, so I wouldn’t slip. The cast was exhausting me, and I ached all over, but I loved every minute of it. The feel of Jamie beside me, the grip of his arm, the way he pulled his steps shorter so he’d keep pace with me.
Far beyond us, on the opposite side of town, we could see one of the ski slopes. By day it was a smooth sheet of snow, but now, as the sun’s rays vanished, each rise and swell of the mountainside cast a blue shadow on the white, and the infinity of ski and pole marks were like flaws on the surface of a moon.
Christopher opened the door. He raised his eyebrows, reminding me unpleasantly of Lydia. “If it isn’t Jamie,” he said mockingly.
“Come on in,” I said to Jamie.
For one second Christopher blocked the door. He and Jamie stared at each other. I could not analyze what passed between them, but it sure wasn’t brotherly love. “Yeah, Jamie,” said Christopher, making the name sound idiotically girlish, “come on in.”
I could have kicked him. Instead I took Jamie’s hand and pulled him on into the living room where my parents were. Even Christopher wouldn’t be rude if my father and mother were looking on.
“Why, hello, Jamie,” said my father. “How are you tonight?” He shook Jamie’s hand. It took Jamie completely out of the visiting-little-neighbor-kid category and put him into the man-who-dates-my-daughter category. Christopher was very annoyed.
“And how’s Eunice?” said my mother. “Doing any better?”
We chatted about Jamie’s sick aunt until Jamie said he had to leave. “What a shame,” said Christopher, and my mother said, “Christopher, set the table, please.” Christopher left, not very gracefully, and my mother and father found they had things to do upstairs. My mother gave me a tiny smile, as if she remembered how it was and we girls had to stick together.
It gave us a few moments alone to say goodbye, and as I kissed him and we looked at each other and felt an odd nervousness climb over us, so that the kisses got quicker and we were out of breath, I thought how neat it was that a person could love the whole world, and her parents, and needy migrants, and even (with an effort) her brat brother…and still have plenty of love left for a boy named Jamie Winter.
Seventeen
“NOW,” SAID THE LECTURER, “the first thing you must understand about silent movies is that they were never silent. Movie houses often had full orchestras, or at least a string quartet. Even the most rural movie house had its theater organ or its piano with organ pipes attached to double the notes on a flute and piccolo. The organ always had drums, thumps, foghorns, and sirens. Cowbells, tubas, traps, and xylophones could be built into the organ. Even newsreels were accompanied, as they were silent right into the nineteen-thirties.”
I love to listen to people who love their subject. It’s so neat to find out the things that interest people. Here was this elderly man up there at the organ (clearly leftover from silent movie days) and here lecturing was this young woman, who was entranced by the whole thing. Someday I will be giving lectures on something, I thought, and I will be so enthusiastic about my subject my listeners will be riveted to my words, just like this.
“The organist had to follow the script very carefully,” she said. “He had to underscore the action, bridge unrelated film segments, approximate the gunshots, punctuate the fist fights, and sing sweetly beneath the love-making.”
I thought of violins and cellos playing as the heroine fell back on her couch, swooning in the presence of the glorious man who had rescued her. I could see, now that I knew Jamie, how a girl could be tempted to swoon a little.
She held up cue sheets, showing us the sheet music with the cues for “Teddy at the
Throttle,” where Gloria Swanson was actually tied to a railroad track. The organist demonstrated what his instrument could do, and it was fantastic. Wild. Impossible. And funny. Everybody kept laughing with combined amusement and awe.
I ate another chocolate-covered raisin. Jamie popped another piece of popcorn into my mouth at the same time and watched, marveling, as I ate them together. “You’re insane,” he whispered.
“Happily so,” I said.
“Ssssshhh,” said the couple behind us.
The first film we saw was Douglas Fairbanks in “The Thief of Baghdad.” I loved it. It was full of the sort of scenes you see on Saturday morning cartoons: ropes that stiffen on their own and become escape ladders; powder tossed in the air which becomes an army; magic carpets which soar up stairways. Everything in the sets was a marvel of sumptuous luxury and silken splendor.
I ate another chocolate-covered raisin. Jamie took the box of raisins and the box of popcorn out of my hands. I thought he planned to eat them himself, but instead he set them on the floor at his feet and handed me a napkin. I cleaned off all stray butter, salt, and chocolate, and Jamie took both my hands and began to draw snowflakes on them again. I could hardly watch the film.
We left at intermission.
“Why are we leaving?” said Jamie, willingly putting on his coat.
“It’s going to last another hour and a half.”
“And good films, too,” said Jamie mournfully.
“We can go back if you want.”
“Nope. All the back row seats are taken, and the couples around us just came for the movies.”
We began to laugh until we were gasping for breath, and we literally skipped out of the building. Lots of people saw us and raised their eyebrows or looked scornful, but we didn’t know them, so they didn’t count, and we didn’t care.