The View from Mount Joy (15 page)

“No kidding,” said the math teacher.

“Is that right,” said the geography teacher.

“Tell me more,” I said, mimicking their breathless voices.

“Joe,” said my uncle, clapping me on the back, “let’s go find us a brew, eh?” He bowed to the circle of women. “I shall return.”

Steering me toward the bar, he thanked me. “I was afraid that math teacher was about to ask me to dance again, and not only does she have two left feet, but she has two left feet that like to step on mine.”

He ordered two beers from the bartender, and we clinked bottles. “God, it’s good to see you, Joe.” He took a draw of his beer, and as we both leaned against the bar, surveying the crowd, he made a sweeping motion with his hand. “Good to see Carole with a good man again, good to see my mother having a good time—she moves pretty well for an old bag, doesn’t she?”

“Real nice,” I said, laughing.

The band, composed entirely of former students of my mother’s, was playing “The Look of Love,” and my grandma and the silver-haired guy were dancing as if they’d been doing the cha-cha together for years; she not only followed his every step but seemed to anticipate it.

“She should dance every day,” said Roger. “She could have avoided a whole lot of unhappiness if she just danced every day.”

I took a long pull of beer, feeling like I had to defend her. “It’s kind of hard to dance without a partner.”

My uncle shrugged. “I’m not saying she had to remarry. Hell, it takes resiliency—and hope—to marry again, and God knows Ma does not have a lot of resiliency or hope in her makeup. Not like Carole.” He gestured with his bottle at my mother, who in her pale blue floaty dress looked like Ginger Rogers out on the dance floor, even though there was no way Len could be mistaken for Fred Astaire. “All I’m saying is she should have found a way to do something that she loved to do.”

Unable to argue with that, I nodded.

“Look at Beth,” said Roger.
“Finally.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, but the math teacher chose this time to corral her alcohol-induced bravery and pull my uncle to the dance floor.

He looked at me, his expression wide-eyed, like a calf being roped and hog-tied, but to the math teacher he smiled as if the prospect of getting his feet trampled was one he could hardly wait for.

Looking past him and past my grandmother, who was now gamely following the lead-footed lead of one of Len’s nephews, I saw my aunt Beth dancing with Linda, the friend she’d brought, and I immediately understood what Roger was talking about: Linda was Beth’s girlfriend.

Once again, I’d been oblivious to the obvious. Immediately I tried to excuse my ignorance—it wasn’t that unusual a thing for women to be dancing together at weddings, and in fact, on the floor right now were three female couples—but the weight of a dunce cap was heavy on my head. Or maybe it was the bottles of beer that made me a little woozy. Either way, I made my way through the throng of dancing couples, reaching my aunt just as the band finished playing “Begin the Beguine.”

“May I have the next dance?” I asked.

My aunt held out her arms. “The next dance is all yours.”

As her
friend
smiled and headed toward their table, the band began “Downtown.”

“What a great little band,” said Beth as we began dancing. “Do you suppose they’ll stay together after tonight?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Will you and Linda?”

I felt my aunt tense, but she followed my steps without missing a beat.

“I think I finally found the one I’ve always wanted,” she said finally, and in her face there was not only happiness but gratitude and surprise.

Seeing that face, I felt like a chump, but couldn’t resist asking, “Why didn’t you tell me before? Why am I always the last to know everything?”

Beth laughed and patted my shoulder. “As new as this is to you, Joe, it’s pretty new to me too. I mean, it’s
scary
to fall in love.”

“You don’t seemed scared,” I said as she giggled again. “You seem
giddy.
”

“Oh boy, if that’s true, I’d better get it together. I don’t want to wreck Carole’s wedding by having everyone figure out that the bride’s sister came with her lesbo girlfriend.”

“She’s too good-looking for people to think she’s a lesbo,” I said. “And so are you.”

“Ha-ha,” said my aunt, holding my hand as she spun in a circle toward me and then back out again. “As much as you think that’s a compliment, it’s not.”

It was an excellent party. I was newly twenty-one and took full advantage of the open bar, getting loose but not smashed. I danced with my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, my aunt’s girlfriend, assorted teachers (including the math teacher, whose feet
were
lethal weapons), assorted counselors and school administrators, Len’s two sisters (my new stepaunts?), his three nieces, and a foreign exchange student from Barcelona.

I beat Roger in catching the garter Len threw and applauded wildly when Beth caught Mom’s bouquet. I ate two pieces of cake and the contents of a half dozen little paper cups full of mints and cashews.

“That was our last song of the evening,” announced the pianist at midnight. “’Cause our bass player’s got to get up for his paper route.”

“Gotta make a living,” said the bassist, shrugging.

“So anyway, Mrs. A.—well, I guess you’re not Mrs. A. anymore, but you’ll always be our favorite teacher. And you too, Mr. Rusk, even though we all liked music better than we did civics.” He cleared his throat, his ears reddening. “Anyway, we just played our last song, but the family of the bride would like to play another.”

Amid applause that I encouraged by waving my hands, my grandma, Roger, Beth, and I climbed onto the stage.

In the middle of the dance floor, looking like figures on top of a wedding cake, stood the bride and groom, arms encircled around each other.

I sat at the piano as the others formed a semicircle around the microphone.

“Carole,” said my grandmother, “you’ve got yourself a good man and I’m thrilled for you. Len, you’ve got yourself a wonderful woman.”

Len nodded his agreement.

My grandmother turned toward me. “So go ahead,” she said, still bossy even in her best mood.

I played a short intro and launched into a song my mom’s dad—the grandfather I’d never met—had taught his kids to sing long ago.

It had been Beth’s last-minute inspiration to serenade my mom with it, and we agreed—even my grandma—that it was a great idea and would make a great present to the bride.

We are the Lunds and this is what that means—

We like bacon in our baked beans

We like the funnies—Mark Trail and Mary Worth

We like the sky and we like the earth.

My uncle Roger stood in the middle of the trio, his arms around his mother and sister, and as my mother watched them, she alternately laughed and mouthed the words of the song, her eyes wet with tears. Whenever she had sung the song to me, she explained that it had been composed one night after Roger had said that a classmate of his had brought his family coat of arms to school for show-and-tell and why didn’t
they
have a coat of arms?

“Because we don’t,” said his father, going to the piano, “but we could have a family song.”

They composed it that night, with their father putting together the melody and the kids shouting out lyrics.

We are the Lunds, we are a happy group

Except when Mom makes her sauerkraut soup

Except when Dad says to do our chores,

Except when Roger falls asleep—he snores!

Except when Beth tells her knock-knock jokes

Except when Carole said that Santa was a hoax.

I was just so happy.

Have you ever seen the look on the faces of members of a really good choir, when they can’t stop smiling over the fact that their voice is a part of a big, glorious whole? That’s the look the trio wore—my aunt, my globe-trotting uncle, and my grandma. Man, I was so used to my grandma’s face puckered in disappointment that I hardly recognized the woman standing with her two children, serenading her third.

No coat of arms, but a family song to sing,

Mairzy doats, babaloo, and ring-a-ding-ding.

I was so full of good feelings, I felt buoyant, bouncing up and down on the piano bench as I battered the keys. My mom was in love. Again. With that thought, I expected a shadow to pass over this yellow sunshine of emotion, but it did not come; instead, there was a bright little flash and an uptick of temperature. I felt the presence of my dad then, and I knew more deeply than I had known anything that my mother’s happiness was cause for his own. Rolf Selmer Andreson wasn’t here to spin Carole Lund Andreson Rusk on the dance floor or applaud Joseph Rolf Andreson for his Jerry Lee Lewis impersonation, but his love for us was. In that moment of music and happiness, I understood that while he might be in a place unfathomable to me, he was also
right here with us now.

The thought filled me with such joy that I jumped up, pounding the keyboard as if it had caught fire and as the wedding guests clapped and shouted their approval, my mother and I looked at each other. She blew me a kiss and I pretended to catch it with my hand, tucking it into my vest pocket, next to my dad. Then I spun in one quick circle and thumbed a loud glissando going up the scale and another one coming back.

Twelve

Hey doofus—

Guess where I spent Thanksgiving break? In Cocoa Beach on a surfboard! Caught a bunch of waves, but they always caught me back before throwing me onto the ocean floor. Still, it was loads o’fun.

Having a great time wrestling alligators and girl watching—easy when they all wear bikinis to class. Suppose everyone’s got their parkas on in Minnesota…

Hi to Ed,
Kirk

I pinned Kirk’s postcard next to one from Darva, who was no longer living in Limoges as an au pair but was, as she had always wanted to be,
une étudiante aux beaux-arts
in Paris. The bulletin board above my desk held a class schedule, the name
Terri
scrawled on a Stub and Herb’s matchbook cover along with a telephone number I hadn’t successfully deciphered, and a
Minnesota Daily
article I’d written about a seventy-three-year-old nurse who was back in school working on a chemical engineering degree, but the majority of the corkboard was reserved for postcards. Florida and France were represented, but so were Scotland (Greg Hoppe was on a work-study program in Edinburgh) and Boston (where Blake Erlandsson was playing his last year of hockey for BU). As much as I enjoyed their messages, I usually pinned them picture side out, making a collage of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, some guy in a kilt, Boston Common, a pyramid of water-skiers in leopard-print bikinis (I especially liked that postcard), and a sunning manatee. That my friends were having far-flung adventures bothered me not in the least because I happened to be having one of my own.

Kristi was back in my life again, bringing some pretty good dope, some excellent windowpane, and, joy of joys, sex. And this time the division of labor was fifty-fifty.

She had called me up out of the blue one October night when I was writing a paper on agricultural economics, using as my references a stack of books so dry I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had spontaneously combusted. At least then they would have provided me a little entertainment.

“Joe,” she said, sobbing, “Joe, my grandma died!”

I don’t know why she sought comfort from me, but I was happy to provide it, and the day after the funeral, after I’d given Kirk and some other relatives a ride to the airport, she decided to reward me.

“Do you have any money, Joe?”

I shrugged, always a good answer to a loaded question.

“The reason I’m asking,” she said, scooting a little closer to me in the car, “is because I thought it might be fun to get a motel room.”

My dick was like a hand raised in agreement:
Yes, teacher, it would be really fun.

And it was, or at least the sex was. Kristi was as uninhibited and enthusiastic as I’d imagined (how many times had I imagined?) she’d be in bed. It was afterward, when we lay hot and sweaty and completely sated on the rough, starchy-smelling sheets of the Hiawatha Motel, that things turned from fun to not so fun. I can understand a woman crying after sex—I mean, I understand it’s a release—but Kristi didn’t just cry; she wailed.

Holding a pillow to her stomach, she was curled up in a fetal position, rocking back and forth on the bed.

“I miss my grandma!”

I patted her shoulder (not the easiest thing to do with all her rocking), feeling totally ineffectual.

Then, not knowing what else to do, I shushed her softly, whispering that it was all right, and as she didn’t tell me to shut up, I kept going,

“Nobody ever loved me like my grandma did,” she said after down-shifting from keening to soft crying to hiccups.

Instead of arguing with her and saying,
What about your mom or your dad?
I just held her. It was a nice feeling, cradling her in my arms;
vulnerable
wasn’t a word you’d usually use to describe Kristi, but she was vulnerable now.

“She just loved me, you know?” Kristi lifted her head to look at me, her eyes swollen from crying, the tip of her nose pink.

I nodded. Seemingly happy with that, she nestled back down on my chest again.

“Anything I did she thought was great. I mean, she was proud of, you know, my
achievements,
but even if I hadn’t been cheerleader captain, even if I hadn’t been voted best-looking, even if I hadn’t made the honor roll every single semester since junior high—well, she still would have thought I was great.”

I smiled. Even in grief, Kristi found a way to promote herself.

Sensing my reaction, she lifted her head again. “I’m not bragging. I just meant that, well, I could have been the opposite—a thief, a drug addict, a dropout—and she still would have thought I was the greatest thing since Peter Lawford.”

“Peter Lawford?”

“Her favorite movie star. An English guy. She said her two great disappointments were that she never met him and that her hair couldn’t hold a curl.”

I laughed, and Kristi hugged me—happy, it seemed, that I appreciated her grandmother’s words.

I petted Kristi’s hair, feeling the curve of her head.

“Mmm, that feels nice.” A remnant of a sob staggered up her throat, and I petted her hair until her breathing settled back down.

“We just clicked, you know? There’s something about chemistry, and my grandma and I had it. It was like we got a joke no one else did.”

She fell asleep in my arms, and I would have liked nothing more than to hold her all night, but my circulation was being cut off.

Hockey season started, and gloom descended like the gray winter weather—a gloom alleviated by Kristi’s biweekly visits from Madison. We had made a little game of taking drives—we both loved road trips—and finding out-of-the-way motels.

“Hey,” said Kristi, looking at the map as I drove out of the city one cold slushy afternoon, “did you know we’ve slept in four different counties?”

I laughed. “Let’s make it our goal to sleep in all of them.”

She was quiet for a moment, tapping the map, her lips moving.

“There’s eighty-seven of them.”

“All the better.” And so “visit a new county” became our catchphrase for finding a place to have sex.

We had just finished our hot and sweaty business as tourists in the Flying Duck Motel in Isanti County when Kristi asked, “So if it bums you out so much not to play, why not try out again for the team?”

My fine postcoital mood was suddenly elbowed aside by my defensiveness.

“You don’t understand, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” said Kristi cheerfully. “Explain it to me.”

She was lying on her side, one hand supporting her head, her streaky blond hair now grown long and tumbling over one shoulder. It was the middle of winter, but the radiator in the Flying Duck chugged out so much heat that we had kicked off the bedding in the frenzy of our love-making. I had covered myself with the sheet, but Kristi suffered none of my modesty and lay there beautifully naked, her skin dark against the thick bleached sheets.

“How come you’re so tanned in the middle of winter?”

Kristi smiled, her dimples asking the question they always asked:
Aren’t I cute?

“Don’t change the subject,” she said. “This is about you.”

“Well, that’s a switch.”

Kristi laughed; I had learned she could appreciate a joke at her expense, so long as it was true.

“Come on,” she said. “Tell me why you don’t play anymore.”

And so I did. I told her about how happy I’d been that my leg had healed and that I could still play, how everything had seemed to be going great at practices and during my first game back. Then I told her about getting that stick to the face, the knife cut of pain and the sudden gush of blood that fell like a curtain over my eye—the same eye that had gotten hurt a year earlier.

“I…I just chickened out. I didn’t know I was such a wuss…but I guess I am.”

Adding credence to my confession, I started crying, if you can believe that.

It wouldn’t have surprised me if Kristi had laughed or made fun of me. In fact, I expected one or the other reaction from her. What I didn’t expect was her taking me in her arms and comforting me.

“Oh, Joe, it’s all right.” Over and over, she whispered, “Shh,” and told me it was all right—the same way I’d comforted her when she was mourning her grandmother, the same way people all over the world comfort one another: by promising that whatever it is, it’s all right. Maybe that’s why those words
are
so comforting, because they don’t claim that things are going to be fantastic…just all right. And when you’re crying, when you feel like shit, “all right” is a pretty good assurance.

“People quit things,” she said after I’d stopped blubbering and told her what a loser I felt like. “I quit cheerleading.”

“You did?”

“Sure,” she said, reaching over to grab her pack of cigarettes off the nightstand. She squinted her eyes as she lit a Marlboro with a Zippo lighter. “It just wasn’t fun anymore. I mean, I was never really in it for the rah-rahness; I just liked being in front of a crowd, you know?” She inhaled and watched the smoke waft up to the water-spotted ceiling. “It’s nice to be in front of a big college crowd, but man…they still had me on the JV squad. Me
—on the JV squad
!”

If a peasant had invited Marie-Antoinette to join him for a glass of wine, the queen of France couldn’t have given a more incredulous response than Kristi’s, but I was smart enough not to laugh.

She inhaled and then puckered her lips to send her exhale upward, but her aim was off and she blew smoke right into my face.

“Oh, sorry,” she said as I waved my hand in front of my nose. “Anyway, I don’t know why quitting got such a bad rap. I mean, I quit cheerleading and now I’ve moved on to something else.”

“What?”

Kristi took one more deep drag before stubbing out her cigarette in the black Bakelite ashtray.

“What have I moved on to?”

I nodded.

Clasping her hands, Kristi stretched her arms out in front of her. “Oh, lots of things. I might get into theater—this student-director guy asked me to try out for the one-act festival that’s coming up in February—and I’ve been doing some stuff on our campus radio station.”

“What kind of things?”

“Oh, right now I’m just helping out a friend of mine who hosts this program once a week—it’s called
The Anti-Disco Hour or Two—
and I help him during the broadcast.

“But you,” she said, rolling toward me and pushing her breasts against my chest. “We were talking about you. It really doesn’t matter what your reasons were for quitting hockey; the fact is, you did. Now you can either cry about it—”

Seeing as I had just finished, it wasn’t the most sensitive thing Kristi could have said, and something must have shown on my face, because she frowned and then came as close to blushing as Kristi Casey could come to blushing.

“Which I guess you just did.” She gave me her brilliant all-forgiveness-is-possible smile. “But what I meant was if you quit something
—quit it!
Move on to something new!”

With her pressed up against me, I found it easy to take her advice.

“Okay,” I said, as my hand slid up and down some of the most beautiful geography in the world: the slope and curves of a woman lying on her side.

I thought it was an April Fools’ joke. I got the call on the second, but I figured Kristi was still getting mileage out of the holiday that gave her license to be a prick.

“Joe,” she breathed, as if she’d just run a couple of laps. “Joe, I just wanted you to know that I’m pregnant.”

I admit to holding the phone away from my ear and looking at it as if I was some bad comic.

“April Fool,” I prompted, and then closed my eyes, willing her to repeat what I’d just said.

“Joe, I’m not kidding. I can’t really say if you’re the father or not, but I just thought you should know. Not that I’m going to keep it or anything…but I just thought you should know.”

Leaning back in my chair, I exhaled a great blast of air. “Do you…Maybe we should talk about this.”

Kristi barked a laugh. “What are we going to talk about, Joe? A marriage proposal? I doubt it. Like I said, I don’t even know if you’re the father.”