Dive From Clausen's Pier (4 page)

“Better late than never.”

She half smiled but then quickly shook her head, as if she didn’t want to be derailed. “Do you know what she was doing when I got home this afternoon? Ironing
tablecloths
. Do you know when the last time we used a tablecloth was? Christmas! Do you know when the next time will be? Thanksgiving!”

“She has to do something,” I said.

“Then why doesn’t she do something about Mike?” Julie cried. Then she burst into tears. “Because there’s nothing to do,” she sobbed. “There’s nothing to do.”

I put my arms around her and pulled her close. Why hadn’t I cried? Why couldn’t I? I felt stony. I ran a hand down her hair and felt her shoulder blades, how bony and angular they were.

She palmed her face, wiped her hand on her skirt, then looked up at me. “Why couldn’t it have been Rooster?” she whispered fiercely.

As if it had to have been someone: I’d thought the same horrible thing. “I don’t know,” I said to her. “I really don’t.”

Rooster was still in the lobby when I got there, standing near the exit, talking to the same blond nurse. Her hair was down now, a sweep of pale waves, and she carried a shoulder bag. After a moment he looked up and saw me, then motioned for me to join them.

“Have you guys actually met?” he said. “Carrie, this is Joan. She’s from Oconomowoc, believe it or not.”

I nodded: his parents were both from Oconomowoc; it was where he went for holidays.

“You know who Carrie is.”

Joan smiled at me. She was taller than I’d realized, nearly six feet, with clear, fair skin and extraordinary pale blue eyes. “I’m sure sorry about Mike,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“It’s way too soon to give up hope, though.”

“Exactly,” Rooster said.

Joan headed for the exit, and I watched Rooster watching her, his eyes on her even once she was out the door and heading into the parking lot. “Nice,” he said at last.

“Nice what?” I was used to his ways. Nice legs. Nice ass.

“Just nice.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, and after a moment we started
toward the door together. It was muggy and hot outside, the sky a glaring white. Heat blew toward us from the parking lot, thick and exhaust-tinged.

“Let’s go for a drink.”

I glanced up and found him watching me closely, face flushed, red hair damp at the hairline. I looked away. “I don’t really feel like it.”

He stopped walking and put his hands on his hips. “Come on, Carrie, be a friend for once, OK? One beer, I promise. We’ll go somewhere quiet.”

“For once? Why did you say for once?” My eyes burned a little, and I thought it would be incredible if this were what finally made me cry.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

He rolled his eyes. An impatient look came over his face, and he stared out at the sea of cars baking in the late sun. Finally he looked back at me. “I didn’t mean it at all, OK?”

I sighed. Rooster always got his way eventually, through sheer force of will. I could go on resisting, but what was the point? “All right,” I said, “one beer.”

We drove separately, then met up in front of the University Bookstore. While we were standing there trying to decide where to go, we ran into Stu, who talked us into the Union terrace. Rooster stood in line for beer while Stu and I got a table. Lake Mendota was a rippled silver, like a vast piece of silk spread out but not yet smoothed. I remembered the morning, how both lakes had disappointed me, and I decided they’d been tainted: by my failure to visit Mike the day before.

“Earth to Carrie,” Stu said.

Rooster had arrived with the beer. I reached for my mug and took a sip. “Sorry.”

Stu leaned forward. “How are you doing?”

I lifted my hand off the table and rocked it back and forth.

“And the Mayers?”

“Lousy,” Rooster said. “Like all of us.” He glanced at me, and I had a fleeting moment of thinking he was accusing me of something.

“It’s John I’m worried about,” I said. “John and Mister.”

Rooster frowned. “I don’t think Julie’s that hot, either. And Mrs. Mayer told my mom she hasn’t slept more than an hour at a time since it happened.”

“I just meant John seems especially vulnerable.”

“Johnny’s tough,” Rooster said. “Like Mikey.”

I thought of Mike on the pier, completely hyped up to dive into water
he knew would be freezing. “Tough,” I said. “That turned out to be a good quality.”

Rooster and Stu stared at me in shock. A tiny breeze blew in from the lake, and a paper napkin lifted from our table, flipped over once, and settled again. I felt odd, the skin on my upper cheeks tingling a little.
Take it back
, I thought, but I couldn’t. I looked at my hands, aware of Rooster’s glare on me.

“I can’t believe you,” he said, and he set his mug on the table with a loud thud. He scraped his chair back and stood up. “I’m out of here,” he said to Stu. “I don’t need this shit right now, I’ll see you later.”

I looked up in time to watch him walk away, and I thought there was something sad about the way he looked from the back, his suit coat straining a little across the shoulders. I turned back to Stu. “Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You don’t?”

“Well, I do.” I drank some beer and wished I were home sewing, not sitting on the Union terrace. It was packed, and I thought of similar evenings there in early fall or late spring, when classes had just begun or ended. Evenings with Mike, and a restlessness that we were where we were, that nothing surprising could happen. Sometimes Jamie would be with us, and I’d feel her excitement, feel her looking around, thinking,
Maybe him, maybe him
.

Stu was staring at the lake, his hands wrapped around his beer. He had small hands, and they looked almost childish against the thick, faceted mug.

“What are you thinking?” I said.

He looked over at me, something troubled in his blue-green eyes.

“Stu.”

He smiled uneasily. “I was thinking about that word ‘tough,’ actually. About me and Mike and Rooster walking to Picnic Point on the ice that time.”

I stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Mike never told you?”

“Told me what?”

He looked away. I felt a little sorry for him, sitting there in his oxford shirt, his haircut. He’d just finished a grueling first year of law school.

“Stu,” I said.

“Do you want some popcorn?”

“Stu.”

He shook his head and sighed. “OK, this was freshman year and I—”

“Freshman year of high school?”

“God, no—college.” He snorted. “Who remembers high school?”

I did. Sometimes I thought remembering high school was my biggest problem. Those first sweet kisses, the sinking feeling I later learned to call desire. Mike at his best, before I made the list of things I loved about him, in case I forgot.

Stu took a sip of beer. “It was freshman year of college, I was at Marquette. It was Christmas vacation and I was so psyched to see those guys I left Milwaukee maybe five minutes after my last final, although that of course is classified information. Anyway, I drove home and called Rooster, he called Mike, and the three of us came down here. Mike was like, ‘I’m here all the time now, let’s go somewhere else,’ but it was snowing, it was cold, there was nowhere really to go. I was thinking,
I wanted to get home for this?
Then Rooster goes, ‘Let’s walk out to Picnic Point.’ It was fifteen degrees out, but all of a sudden all three of us were trooping outside like it was the best idea we ever heard of. We went down to the lake and it’d been a warm fall, it was hardly frozen, but Rooster started walking out on the ice. I said to Mike, ‘I thought he meant go
around.’
Mike goes, ‘Be tough.’ Tough is one thing and dead is another, right? I said, ‘Fuck no, you guys’ll kill yourselves.’ Mike gives me this look like,
Well, let’s hope not, but if we do, we do
, and he goes out on the ice. So what was I going to do? I followed right after them. We walked the whole way there and back without saying a word, and it was the next day that that kid fell through the ice up in Sawyer County, remember? He was in the water for like half an hour while his friend ran for help, and—”

“Stop, I remember, I remember.” It had been a little boy, maybe eight: by the time they got back to him it was too late; he was still alive but he died on the way to the hospital. I’d seen photographs of him, but it was his friend’s face I recalled now: they showed him on TV one night, and I could still picture his scared little eyes, how you could see in them the question of whether or not he should have stayed and tried to pull the boy out himself.

“I thought Mike would have told you that,” Stu said.

I shook my head. I looked out at Lake Mendota, the last sailboats heading in. Picnic Point was across the way, a little peninsula pointing into the water. Four or five times a year Mike and I biked or drove to the parking lot nearest the trailhead and then made the trek out to the end. In winter we bundled up in down jackets and Sorels; in summer we took a picnic and spent the afternoon. It was at Picnic Point that I first felt his finger inside me; and a few weeks later, in the same secluded clearing, we
lost our virginity together, on a beach towel I still had. We were sixteen then. We thought we’d waited long enough.

I turned back to Stu. “Would you have dived? At Clausen’s Reservoir? If he’d come right up and said, ‘Come on, Stu, it’s great.’ Would you’ve?”

“Sure,” Stu said. “Why not?”

C
HAPTER
2

I met Mike a few weeks before Christmas the winter I was fourteen, and it’s probably true that if I hadn’t met him I would have met someone else, and my story would have run in an entirely different direction. Mike’s, too, of course. Away from Clausen’s Reservoir. Away from the dive.

Jamie and I were Christmas shopping that afternoon, ninth graders in twin fuzzy hats to ward off the chill, mine purple and hers red. Because I already had my mother’s challis scarf bought and wrapped and had only Jamie left on my list, I spent the afternoon standing by while she bought things for her family and dropped big, obvious hints about what I could get her. Gold-plated hoop earrings. A light blue angora sweater. We were best friends, we were allowed to ask each other for the moon.

Late in the day, we wandered into the rink where our school’s hockey games were played and took seats on the bleachers. Freshman hockey didn’t appeal to us much, but there was always the chance that we’d run into someone interesting while we were there: there was always that chance in everything we did, which is why it’s not really an exaggeration to say that as I sat there in my Icelandic sweater I felt as if I were waiting for my life to start.

And there was Mike. In the box across the ice from us, his helmet off: big and young and beautiful. I nudged Jamie. “Number twenty-four,” I said. “By the gate, next to number seven.”

“Seven’s in my math class,” she said. “Back row, kind of loud. Twenty-four is good.”

For a moment I had the strangest feeling—like a clear, soundproof bubble had suddenly surrounded me, the world still there on the other side but beyond reach. Then everything was normal again.

“Yeah, he is,” I said. “Isn’t he?”

I don’t remember a thing about the game, but once it was over I talked Jamie into waiting around outside the locker room, where there was a bulletin board studded with colorful notices we could pretend to be reading. Finally, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the math class guy come out, and I whispered to Jamie to go say hi.

That was Rooster. Mike was right behind him.

Jamie and Rooster talked about the game for a few minutes, and then together the four of us walked out into the frosty Madison dusk, ending up at a diner on Regent Street that was famous for its hot chocolate. Jamie and I sat on one side of the booth, Mike and Rooster on the other. Our orders came, topped with fluted hills of Reddi-wip.

Rooster talked. Jamie and I were “you ladies.”

“Where do you ladies live?” he said. “Would you ladies like to go to a movie sometime with me and my mute friend here? Don’t mind him, he’s just what we call shy.” I stole a look at Mike and found him blushing endearingly.

At school the following week the four of us met in the lunchroom and ate together. I thought Mike’s mother’s sandwiches were a clue about her, him, the whole Mayer family: a perfect ruffle of lettuce frilling the edges of the bread, mustard on the meat and mayonnaise on the cheese. I lived alone with my mother, and I was enchanted. I wanted to see where he lived even more than I wanted him to kiss me, but it all happened at once, on Christmas Eve, thanks to a piece of mistletoe he told me later he’d gotten his mother to hang. Julie was ten then, John Junior seven: they made me think of a TV show, the kind where the younger siblings are pesky but adorable. Rooster and Jamie were there, too, helping trim the Mayers’ tree, still pretending to flirt for the sake of Mike and me and where we were going, where we were afraid to go.

The mistletoe hung in the doorway to the kitchen. I smelled the dissolved end of his Certs. “I knew it,” he said when we’d parted. “Knew what?” But he wouldn’t tell me.

My mother and I had been alone for over ten years by then, living the quiet, still life of a girl and a woman left long before by a man. Life at the Mayers’ was the exact opposite, and I never really looked back. All through high school I went home from school with Mike, stayed for dinner several times a week, hung out there on weekends. When they rented a cabin on Lake Superior each summer, I went too. Their big white house was always full and noisy, with kids, friends, dogs, skates, coats. Music
from a couple different stereos, a TV on, someone yelling “Where are my shoes?” Mrs. Mayer bought ten bags of groceries a week. She treated me so warmly it was as if she’d picked me out herself, a gift for Mike like the little gifts she was always giving me—a bar of lavender soap, a picture of Mike as a five-year-old in cowboy boots, a little ceramic vase painted with tulips.