Off Course (3 page)

*   *   *

Sam Hartley built the A-frame's shell from a kit he found on sale in a catalogue, 40 percent off. Sylvia and Cress both lobbied for something more rustic and charming, a board-and-batten redwood cottage with shutters, say, or a modest log cabin stained dark; Sam insisted that the A-frame would give them more room and a panoramic view—for significantly less. Having been a union carpenter when younger, he managed the nailing, plumbing, electrical, and finish work by himself, to his own relaxed standards. For paneling, flooring, and fixtures, he haunted salvage yards and a warehouse by the Los Angeles railyards that sold unclaimed and damaged freight.

Friday afternoons, when Cress and her sister got home from school, anxiety shivered their mother's voice. “Get your coat, Sharon, your
parka
 … Cressida, where are those new snow boots I bought you?… Sam, I
told
you we needed ice for the cooler!”

Sylvia exhorted her friends, colleagues, even her students to
come up to the cabin.
Her closest friends were under steady pressure. Cress heard her mother on the phone:
You haven't been up for a year, Barbara. That's right. More than a year. Nope, nope. I'm sure. I have my calendar right here
.

All Cress wanted was to stay home with her friends—Tillie and Rochelle Boyer and the Ellis twins—and loll in each other's bedroom or take the bus downtown in a gang. That was her real life, and it was forbidden to her. When she was fourteen, Cress called the A-frame Auschwitz to her mother's face. And was slapped across the mouth.

Tillie had once tried to intervene on Cress's behalf. “Please, Mrs. Hartley, can't Cress stay home a couple weekends and do stuff with us? These are her
high-school years
! She should have fun!”

For days afterward, Cress heard her mother on the phone:
Cressida's friend thinks I'm a terrible mother because I won't let her run wild every weekend.

Cressida's friend informed me that Cress should be able to do whatever she wants.

Apparently, our having a beautiful vacation home has ruined Cressida's whole high-school experience. So I've been told.

Once at the cabin, the sisters could come and go as they pleased, as long as they were home by dark. Sharon stuffed a backpack with books and food and disappeared until dinner. Cress stayed in bed, exhausted, her head throbbing, until her father started hammering or her mother put a Mahler symphony on the stereo. Taking a book, Cress wandered down to the eponymous meadows, alluring green expanses that were deceptively boggy; she hopped hummock to hummock; a misstep and she sank to her shins in muck. A narrow, deep trout stream meandered through the middle and led to a slumping, shuttered log cabin. The Bauer family, who had owned the whole private parcel before the Meadows was developed, had held on to this ancient cabin and the two meadows. (In fact, there were no meadows in The Meadows, Inc.) Cress spent weekend afternoons on the cabin's shady porch, technically trespassing, but she never ran into any Bauer—or anyone at all. She stretched out on a waney-edged wooden bench to read and daydream and doze until the bugs or the rising cold or the sinking sun sent her home. Such was her teenage wilderness experience: hours alone on a bench.

Sylvia Hartley's strategy to keep her girls away from boys, booze, and drugs so easily could have backfired. For all the attention Sylvia and Sam actually paid to their daughters up in the Meadows, Cress and Sharon might have spent their days joyriding on borrowed snowmobiles, smoking pot, losing their virginities on the warm smooth granite slabs by Spearmint Creek. Had there been any Meadows boys, or even naughty girls. But the Meadows never prospered as Reggie Thornton predicted. Rope tow and clubhouse, tennis courts and skating rink never materialized; families never swarmed the mountain, nor did land prices skyrocket. Around the time Cress started college, Reggie Thornton was forced to sell the Meadows Lodge and Land Company. Cress was in grad school when her mother reported that Reggie was in prison for killing a young couple in a head-on collision while driving drunk.

*   *   *

Jakey Yates came over on Saturday afternoon and left the A-frame once that night for thirty minutes, when he went to check on the lodge. They ate and drank in bed. He brought steaks and a stack of LPs and sang along with George Jones and Lefty Frizzell, clamping her under his hot arm.

He rolled his big overheated body right on top of her, and she gasped with laughter, then for breath.

The next day, she and Jakey hiked to the fire lookout on Camel Crags; he'd packed sandwiches and wine, and he gave the firewatcher twenty bucks to go for a shower and a beer at the lodge while they borrowed his bed, with its three-hundred-degree view. They laughed and grabbed their clothes when they heard hikers clomping up the wooden stairs from below.

He had been single now for two years, Jakey told her in that tiny glass hut. His wife had waited until the day their youngest graduated from high school to move out. In fact, they were driving between the graduation ceremony in Sparkville and the celebratory dinner at the Sawyer Inn when his wife said that she was filing for divorce, and even as they spoke, a moving company was in their home taking everything she'd tagged. He'd noticed that morning yellow confetti dots on a lamp, the back of the rocking chair, a pillow. Vaguely, he'd blamed the grandkids and in the flurry and excitement of the day forgot about it.

“She hated it up here,” Jakey told Cress.

From where they reclined, looking out on ridge after ridge, to the far escarpments and white glaciers of the Sierra Nevada, not one squiggle of smoke drifted upward. Jakey admitted that he had played the field some since his wife left, but he was losing his taste for it. “Enough diversion,” he said, and added, thrillingly, “I'm ready for some real company.”

*   *   *

They took long drives in his battered green truck down logging and fire roads deep into backcountry to check for grouse or deer or cougar, whatever was on his mind. (Cougar. Who knew she'd ever track cougar?) They drank hard liquor and talked. They used beds in various cabins whose owners had entrusted their keys to Jakey, and sometimes the cool banks of streams. One night, he took her to a canvas tent alongside Spearmint Creek, just outside the campground limits; the inside was furnished with a small woodstove, Persian carpets (fake, but still charming), and a real bed on a frame, with a tufted chenille spread that left stripe marks on Cress's backside, as if she'd been tied up or caned.

Jakey wasn't keen to have her at his place; although he lived alone, his two youngest sons lived nearby and often dropped in without warning. A few times, Jakey took the risk anyway, showing Cress where to park in the aspen grove, where her old Saab couldn't be seen.

He cooked dinner at the lodge, then came to the A-frame smelling of wood and cigarette smoke, alcohol, grilled meat. He held an ice pack to her temples, snuggled against her, a fleshy furnace, comfort incarnate.

“It's a shame I'm so damn old,” he said. But Cress didn't miss the athletics, often tedious, of her former, younger lovers.

*   *   *

“Cressida.” His voice was graveled after sex. “What kind of name is that?”

Well. Her mother had come to Los Angeles as a young actress and landed a role in an equity waiver production of
Troilus and Cressida
. “By Shakespeare?” said Cress. “Not his best. It's long and draws these obscure parallels between Elizabethan England and the Trojan Wars.” But her mother had received wonderful reviews:
Sylvia Hartley plays Cressida with crackling hauteur.
“So basically, I'm named for her best role. Her finest hour.”

“That's unique.” Jakey bit her arm. “Kind of sweet.”

“Except Cressida is this scheming nympho who flirts with everyone and sleeps with the enemy. Even in Shakespeare's time, her name was synonymous with
prostitute
. So thanks a lot, Mom. Why not just name me Whore Hartley?”

“Oh now.” Jakey rolled all his weight on top of her. “I'm sure she didn't mean it that way.”

*   *   *

Cress ducked into the lodge for milk or eggs, which Jakey sold to her for pennies. He poured her coffee or drinks, made her lunch, no charge. He sat her in a booth where he could see her as he cooked.

He'd loose a roar when someone he knew came through the door, and he knew legions: the Meadows' full-time and part-time residents, of course, but also the campers, hikers, hunters, fishermen, cross-country skiers, and snowmobilers who returned year after year—and the camp rangers, loggers, fire crews, and Cal Trans workers who cycled through in shifts. Men jockeyed for Jakey's attention, became heartier, gruffer in his presence. Jakey bought drinks for friends, and to woo strangers; he cozied up to the shy, the elderly, the disapproving, the worshipful; he plied them with Yukon Jack (his liquor salesman left a promotional case); he spiked their hot chocolate, no charge. He nudged with knee, forearm, and shoulder, until his subject relaxed, capitulated, fell under his spell.

“Now
you
, Hartley—
you
I can talk to,” he said. “You're a good listener.”

*   *   *

“He's how old, again?” said Tillie.

“But I like that,” said Cress. “He's the first real grown-up I've been with.”

“And the diss?”

“I've opened the boxes. That's more than I did at Braithway.”

Braithway Court in Pasadena was a pretty, U-shaped complex of ham-pink tourist cottages from the Arts and Crafts era. Cress had stayed there with Tillie and Edgar for three months after her orals, with the idea that she would move into the next available one-bedroom unit—Tillie was the manager. While Cress was in college and graduate school, Tillie had wandered through Europe, India, and the Middle East, then come home to Pasadena, where she found the Braithway job in the classifieds. The position came with a large second-floor apartment that had a commanding view of the court. It happened that Edgar Copperud from Karachi, post-doc in climate physics at Caltech, lived in #6.
Three with one blow
, Tillie liked to say:
Home, job, and husband landed in a day.

Before Cress saw Braithway for the first time, she had planned to move to Minneapolis with her grad-school boyfriend, John Bird. She and John both had internships at the Fed that would turn into real jobs once their dissertations were done. But after visiting Tillie's architecturally beguiling pink home over Christmas break (when the daytime temperature stayed steady in the high sixties/low seventies), Cress found the Midwestern winter intolerable. Why live where the temperature did not rise above freezing for six weeks straight? Why not return to her sunny hometown and dwell among the very friends off-limits to her in high school? John Bird took her defection well enough; he moped, but never tried to talk her out of it. Who can argue with homesickness?

Only then she had to find work. She took a CETA job in a university art gallery, but her boss kept forgetting to file the necessary paperwork to pay her. She finally quit to be a waitress at the Dinner Plate, an upscale coffee shop in South Pasadena. But waitressing took so much energy, she had little left for the diss. Writing on her own—without her advisor's prompts, without John Bird modeling discipline in the same room, and without a firm deadline—was like doing jumping jacks at home: in aerobics class, jumping jacks were as easy as skipping; at home, her arms felt leaden and she soon lost all bounce.

By the time she moved to the A-frame, all she had was an ambitious prospectus, a rough introduction, and detailed outlines of the first two chapters.

*   *   *

On his day off, Jakey took her to the Kern River to fish and swim in the warm, low, late-summer water. He stood up to his thighs, his thick chest pinkening in the sun, and hollered: “Any happier, I'd need a tail to wag.”

Back when he had his own landscaping firm in the San Fernando Valley, a client had offered him the use of a Meadows cabin. With two days of trout fishing and the alpine air fizzing his blood, he saw the
FOR SALE
sign on the Meadows Lodge and all interest in hardscape and nursery plants deserted him. Now he grew one box of petunias on the lodge's deck each summer.

He and his wife had envisioned lodge life as a family-run business: living above the store, kids doing homework in booths, all pulling together to make it work like the family in a TV show.
Little Lodge on the Mountain.

They put in eighty-, sometimes a hundred-hour workweeks. The bar, restaurant, grocery, and gas pumps didn't generate a living, so they added caretaking services, housecleaning, a realty office. “I loved every minute,” Jakey told Cress, “but she isn't such a people person. The public wore her out. She missed her sisters in Northridge. I built her a big house across the way there, but the kids took school buses down the mountain every day, two hours each way; in winter, we never saw them in the daylight. Then they started graduating and leaving. She struggled over that.”

Even so, Jakey said, he was shocked—no,
devastated
—when she left. “A cannonball to the head,” he said. “Then my back went out. For four days, I crawled around on all fours like a damn baby. The lowest of the low.”

His two younger boys, Kevin and Derek, shared a cabin by the Meadows' back entrance. The oldest boy and two girls lived down the hill in Sawyer and Sparkville. They were in and out of each other's home all the time.

*   *   *

Among the full-time residents, Jakey, Abe Johnson, Barry Sypes, and now Rick Garsh jockeyed for what money and status could be eked from the small community. Each offered caretaking services and patrolled the development, checking the homes on their lists. They opened and shut cabins, they monitored water pipes in the winter, hired housecleaners, often their own wives and daughters. They shoveled decks and stairs. The snowplowing franchise with its small state stipend and aging, orange Oshkosh plow rotated among them.