The thing about Rose is what her mother would say. “The
thing about Rose is she’s not real smart, you know? Not smart smart. She’s
smart, but not too smart. That’s why she is over at the junior college.” That’s
what Mrs. Kormos told me about her daughter the first time I met her. Roseanne
was out collecting her mother’s breakfast dishes off the patio table.
I just looked at Mrs. Kormos. “Smart, though, she’s a
smart girl.” Roseanne slid the patio door open and as she came in, her mother
beamed at me. “There’s my smart girl!” Roseanne narrowed her eyes as she passed
me and went to the kitchen.
“Mom, your income taxes are done and in my bag.”
“See.” Mrs. Kormos reached down and took the brown
envelope out of the red bag. “Such a fancy bag!” She looked at me again. “Smart,
smart, smart.”
My kid sister introduced me to Roseanne at a faculty
Christmas party. Theresa teaches math at the junior college and Roseanne is in
the business department, teaching accounting and a logistics certificate class.
One semester Roseanne decided to pick up a Tuesday/Thursday evening section of
college algebra because she wanted to have extra money for her trip to Hong
Kong. The two taught next to each other and got to know one another during
coffee breaks.
My kid sister. She’s thirty-six, two years younger than
Roseanne.
What I like about Roseanne is—well, two things really.
First, she listens. She is a really good listener. And she remembers. Two, she
tells me what she thinks, she doesn’t tell me what to think. She reads a lot of
stuff, books and magazines. She reads Forbes
and The Atlantic and the Sunday
edition of the Miami Herald. She
reads Coastal Living. She admits she
mostly likes the pictures. And she reads Cosmo
because it makes her laugh and she has been a subscriber since 1998. Sometimes
we read it to each other and laugh until we start choking.
My sister dragged me along with her and Tony because she
wanted me to meet the department secretary. Her name was Tabitha and my sister
warned me not to call her Tabby. I wouldn’t have anyway, but my sister made it
out to be a big deal. Tabby turned out to be a no-show.
The second time over at Mrs. Kormos’s was when I was
delivering a simple five-shelf bookcase that I built for her. I took it in on a
two-wheeler and set it down in the breakfast nook.
“That green looks so good,” she said. “Beautiful!” I
thanked her. “You and Rose are still going out?” Of course, she knew that we
were. “You know the thing about Rose is that she is kind of quiet. She’s hard
to get to know sometimes.” I wanted to say to her that that is why I love
Roseanne. I didn’t answer. Guess I am hard to get to know.
“How much again?” I told her eighty and she handed me
four twenties, one at a time.
That first time I met Roseanne she was leaning against a
table, her head tilted a bit to the side, one hand holding on to a glass of
wine that was on the table and her other hand on her hip. I wanted to tell the
guy she was talking to that she thought he was so full of it it would take a
dump truck to unload him.
Theresa grabbed my arm and steered me over to her, so I
got a good look at her before I heard her voice. She had on a red dress, but it
was not Christmassy red, but darker than that. It fit her really well. Later, I
told her the dress was the prettiest one in the room. She laughed and said
something like “Pretty, yes that is what I am going for.” As soon as we walked
up, the other guy just sort of drifted off.
When Theresa told Roseanne my name, I said “Good evening”
trying to sound like, I don’t know, something and the first thing she did was
look down and then right back up to look me in eyes. “Hi” is what she said and
her voice was soft and sweet and even no matter how crazy it sounds, that was
it for me. And the dark red fingernail polish. I know, crazy.
In February I delivered a new headboard to Mrs. Kormos,
and I have to say it was really beautiful. She was excited and kept apologizing
for having to write a check for $180 and after I folded the check and put it in
my wallet, she asked if I really liked Roseanne or we were more like friends. I
said yes, yes I did really like her—a lot. “The thing about Rose,” she said as
she reached out and put a hand on my arm, “Rose is kind of plain. Pretty. But
plain.”
Roseanne has this long beige sweater, maybe 6 buttons,
hangs down to just above her knees. She loves that old sweater. On Sunday
mornings when it is cooler, she will pull that sweater around her when she
steps out on the porch and just let the belt hang down. I can see her pajama
bottoms and her little white socks, and she will lean over the railing while
looking at the pond and then slowly turn back around. And when the sun is over
her shoulder and she is all cuddled up in her sweater, she is so beautiful
looking to me that I actually gasp a little.
I told Roseanne once when she was wearing that sweater
what her mother said about being plain, pretty but plain. She narrowed her eyes
and just walked past me and went into the bedroom. I was sitting at the dining
room table sketching out a wall of bookshelves for a friend, and when Roseanne
walked back in, she wasn’t wearing a single stitch of anything under that
sweater.
See, that’s the thing about Roseanne, there’s a lot there
that you don’t see. A lot you see, too. When we go out and she is dressed up, I
can’t stop staring at her. She’s beautiful, and when you get to know her, she’s
funny and smart and sweet—not fake sweet, but sweet like when someone has a
really good heart. She has a good heart. Yes, the thing about Roseanne is she
has a great heart.
I think one of the best moments I can remember is when I
came back late from a job up in Daytona. When I came into the bedroom, Roseanne
was on her right side, facing the door, reading The Hunger Games. She closed her book and put her glasses on top of
her head. “Hi” she said. And in the glow of the lamp, in her pajamas with the
strawberries on them, her hair tucked back behind her ears—well, that’s the
thing about Roseanne. She’s a beauty. Ladson 2013
The early morning’s low clouds,
down from the mountains I always say.
Descending, a thin fog.
The resident hawk silent,
a scruffle of blackbirds in a tall pine
gathered—no chorus before
lifting off. Yet.
A slight flicker of a crape myrtle leaf—
a narrow branch of crabapple, the fringed tip
of a wisteria. Tremors.
No traffic sounds.
No dog barks.
A stillness of a certain kind,
a stillness seeming to us hard-earned.
And to the east—we wait. We wait.
The sun.
We wait.
Nineteen-year-old Tsering sat back against the wall of
his sleeping room at the rear of his family’s simple home. In the darkness, he whispered
her name. “Stanzin.” The tears in tandem as if released by some cue came from
the middle of each eye and slowly ran down the middle of each cheek. He was not
so much sad. Tsering was in love.
Tsering kept his eyes closed as he whispered. “Stanzin. Stanzin,
are you awake?” He knew that she was with the livestock and a few ponies on the
high plateau for the summer grazing. “Stanzin, I love you. I am with you.”
He, of course, was home from his first year at the
university, and while his Aunt Angmo still was curt with him since he decided
to leave his training at Shey monastery, most of the family welcomed his return
with much joy.
Eyes closed, Tsering slowed his breathing and felt a
lightness come from within. “If I only could, Stanzin, I would be holding your
hand, one hand beneath to support and the other, gently, rubbing your skin.”
Tsering’s father had arranged for a teaching slot at the
government girls school not a kilometer from their home, and there Tsering
would teach biology two hours a day in the morning. In the afternoons he was
free to read and to visit friends and to spend time at Shey with his favorite
teacher.
“Let me take each foot. Let me rub them for you, my
love.” Tsering held both hands out in front of his chest and with his thumbs
made small circles. He could in his mind feel the flesh of her foot. “Stanzin.” He could feel her knee bend at times from the
pressure of his touch. “Relax. Let me have your foot. Let me soothe your tired
feet.”
Stanzin, of course, would have been in her tent for
several hours, and after two cups of gur-gur, she would be stretched out in a darkness
that can be felt in the bones. Tsering stopped rubbing her feet and thought of
being with her as she topped off his tea after each sip. They would hardly
speak to one another, the two of them, but in their silence they would share
their same feelings for one another under the tent. And in that tent under a sky
full of stars that stretched to the end of time, they would be together.
“Oh, my little Stanzin.” Never once did Tsering open his
eyes. She was there with him. He felt her skin. If he cocked his head and
stilled himself completely, he could hear her breathing. “I am with you.”
And then, Tsering could sleep.
“Wake up, lazy boy!
Say your prayers!” His father laughed. “You have a visitor this
morning!”
Tsering’s youngest sister shouted and ran and jumped on
her brother, giggling and punching at him. He pushed her back. “Don’t hurt me,
child!”
“Oh, you are so old.”
“Get up, you are not at college now,” his father said
sharply, but then he laughed again.
His sister squealed. “What, Sister, makes you so wild this
morning?”
Daughter and father looked at one another and laughed out
loud.
“What?”
“Stanzin’s father is here to see you!” She fell back on
the floor. “Stanzin, Stanzin, Stanzin!”
Tsering looked at his father. “He is? He is here?”
“Yes. Come on.”
Tsering rose and quickly pulled on his jeans and grabbed
a t-shirt and headed to the front of the house. In the morning sun Stanzin’s
father did indeed stand just outside the front door.
“Jullay, Jullay!”
“Jullay, Tsering! I need you to help me.”
“Yes? How can I help you?”
“I want you to take one yak and one pony up to the
plateau. Stanzin’s uncle is sending them. Can you do that?
“Yes! Yes, and I will get them safely there.”
“Good. Meet me at the Spitok bridge tomorrow afternoon.”
Tsering looked over at his father who was smiling and
looking off at the snow still capping the high range.
“What, Father?”
“Oh, just looking over the mountains.” Then the two men
burst into laughter, and Stanzin’s father turned and walked off from the house without
another word and Tsering’s father went back inside.
But Tsering did not laugh. Eyes closed, he too
looked over and into the mountains. “Stanzin.” Ladson 2013
It was the best of times, it was the worst. You think I
don’t know where that comes from but I know a lot of stuff. Everyone knows that
line. And no, my name is not a nickname. My father’s sense of humor. He thought
he was a funny guy. I actually like the name. Just not having his last name.
But what can you do?
It was mostly the best, the bartending gig I mean.
Tuesday through Saturdays, over 400 bucks a week and tips. Around twenty or
twenty-five cash on both weekend nights usually.
Sometimes Stevie would come out from his office when it
was really busy and put down a shot glass and tell us to do a three-count pour.
He barked orders at everyone and then retreated back his office. We would
over-pour the rest of the night.
My old man drank rye and cokes. Nasty stuff, I thought.
After the diabetes got figured out, he drank rye and diet cokes. Really nasty.
Tuesdays through Thursdays I worked prep to get in some
extra hours and every Tuesday this old dude I knew would come in and sit at the
bar and drink five g’n’ts and leave me a five-dollar tip. Never said anything.
Not hello, not goodbye, not how are you doing. Didn’t matter to me, but it
bothered some of the girls. Especially Molly the cashier.
Molly was Stevie’s kid sister, which is sort of why I got
fired. She was just a sophomore in college. Couldn’t even order a drink yet.
Tuesdays were lousy for tips but busier than hell because
it was half-price night if you had on a frat or sorority t-shirt or sweatshirt.
The sorority girls—it was mostly girls on Tuesdays—would order ice cream drinks
like Golden Cadillacs that nobody would ever want and we could only make two at
a time and then we had to clean out the blender. A table of eight would tie up
one of the bartenders for ten minutes which is a lifetime and aggravating as
hell.
They kept ordering that crap and never left tips. The
good news was that by nine or so you could short-pour and they would never
know. Sometimes we wouldn’t even bother with liquor and if they complained, we
told them their taste buds were shot for the night.
Wednesday night was fight night. Really it was Blast
Nite—3 for one, which really brought out the frats. Place was packed with guys
with six bucks in their pockets which would buy eighteen shots of liquor. They
ordered the Coffin of Death—yep, in a coffin shaped glass. Six bucks, six shots
of liquor times three. Three for one.
There would always be a fight by nine o’clock. Sometimes
the bartenders had to go out and help the bouncer before the cops came. We all
took sixteen-inch maglites with us, but we mostly just pushed and pulled our
way into the crowd. Not that I didn’t want to clock more than a few of them.
And there would always be two or three or sometimes four
guys that would pass out and the bouncer would have to deal with the carcasses.
The girls that came on Wednesday nights were almost
always drinking Long Island or Texas Teas. Three of those and they would be so
stupid you could tell them there was an elevator at the back of the bar that
led down to the subway. The drunk ones were all glassy-eyed, but a few of the
hard cores just looked like tough old gals maybe fifty-years old. In their
twenties.
On summer nights when it was really hot and steamy, the
kids would make it out to the curb and vomit on each other. Beat cops if they
were around would arrest them for drunk and disorderly. Bad for the tourist
scene, kids puking like that.
But I always had cash in my pocket.
One night one of the rookie bartenders trying to move
fast smashed a glass into the ice and cut his hand all up. Personally, I didn’t
care about the blood so much, but Stevie came out and went nuts about the broken
glass and we had to empty out the ice bin, then sponge dry it so there was no
chance of even a sliver.
This was around eight o’clock or so on a Saturday night.
Not good. On weekend nights the three of us fixed drinks without a break from
six to around eleven as fast as we could. Emptying the ice bin in the middle of
all that? That was the worst.
Molly was really sweet and sometimes after work we would
go a Waffle House across the river and put a couple bucks in the jukebox. I
would have a ham and cheese omelet with grits and a side of bacon and Molly
would get an order of whole wheat toast. Every time she ordered wheat toast.
That killed me.
When Stevie wasn’t around, I would fix Molly a White Russian.
She loved them. She would lean across the bar and kiss me on the cheek and then
go over the cashier’s cage to get ready for the night.
I remember another afternoon when a guy came in with
slicked back hair and wearing a purple shirt and wearing a silver i.d. bracelet
on each wrist, which I thought was pretty weird. He asked for a margarita on
the rocks and after he drank it he said it was the smoothest he ever had. He
gave me a fifteen-dollar tip and asked me to come work for him at a new bar he
was going to open over in West End. I took the money but told him no. He didn’t
fuss about it, just said if I change my mind. I think he was pretty much full
of it.
My dad shot himself out in the greenhouse. Bad enough,
but worse, he was out there for almost two days because he was living alone.
The neighbor lady who lived next door to him for twenty years thought it was
funny that he didn’t pick up his morning paper or the weekly shopper from the
driveway but his car was still there. She called the cops. Not funny funny, but
weird funny. I was glad Mom left him when she did.
When I asked Stevie about cutting back my hours, not
coming in for prep time, he acted like I was telling him his dog drowned or
something. He kept telling me that everybody else would screw it up and stuff
wouldn’t get done.
Trust me, I thought, it’s not that tough.
Molly and I started dating and Stevie seemed cool with it
for a while, but after a few months we starting talking about moving in
together and he got bitchier with us by the day it seemed.
Then one Saturday night, Stevie went home early with a
stomach virus and left me in charge of shutting the place down. It was a really
busy night, and it took us until nearly four to get the place back together.
Everyone else was gone but Molly and me, and after a few drinks we started getting
pretty hot and heavy on a table and then Stevie came in from the back and there
we were going at it.
He came back for gold cigarette lighter that his platoon
gave him when their deployment ended. He started screaming at Molly and told me
not to walk through the bar door ever again. I thought he might want to rough
me up a bit, but that was about the worst of it. He was out the door before we
were.
Now that was the worst. I mean, who comes back for a damn
lighter? Ladson 2013
Ah, spring. Better yet, ah spring evenings. The chatter
of children next door, on their swings, on their trampoline. A couple of mugs
of coffee—yes, decaf. Talk with the neighbors—gardening, wildlife, always the
weather it seems.
Blueberries ripening, a trio of Gala apples developing,
some peaches growing. The red—or reddish—new maple leaves, the tips of crape
myrtles. Ligustrum in full bloom, coreopsis too, and the knockouts just past
their fullest first flush. Ah, knockouts.
And, then, yesterday evening. I with my mug of coffee in
hand, and five or six girls between I would think 6 and 12 on the trampoline with
safety net next door. What a sight for a Whitmanesque moment. Like gazelles, pronging
in the sweetly scented air? Oh, glorious spring, oh glorious frolic?
Uh, no.
Armed with brightly colored hopper balls and pool swim
rings, our princess warriors were beating the daylights out of each other. I’m
not talking a little slap of the wrist or jabs from the elbow. No, I’m talking
rearing back and taking roundhouse swings that caught opponents full flush in
the head, on a shoulder, in the back.
My personal favorite were attacks from the rear aimed at
the back of knees, and with the target down, then boom to the head.
These shots were of the knock-you-off-your feet variety.
I could hear blows land even from 40 yards away. Bam! Whump! Thwack! Holy,
physical carnage, Batman! You may imagine the shouts, screams,
shrieks—fever-pitched.
Pain dished out, pain received. Of course, some
complaints, even some tears—oh, let the combatants speak for themselves. The
refrain: You’re going to get hurt, and if you can’t take it, get out.
Remember, they’re on a trampoline, so extra oomph on some
of the shots, up or down. Wham! What an uppercut.
Now if you’re thinking they’re soon exhausted, what,
maybe 10, 15 minutes, well you’re horribly, terribly, brutally, excruciatingly
wrong. No, no, an hour.
Yes, 60 minutes of nearly lethal head-spinning, bruising,
vicious contact sport. Contact? No justice done with that word. And then I went
inside for the evening. Thrash-O-Mania done?
Not for another half hour.
I’m telling you, should the zombie apocalypse come, that
squad right there is the one I’m traveling with.
Hah—as if they’d have me.
For the first time in his 26 years, Erik Hess invited a
girl—a young woman—to his home. His two rooms on the third floor overlooked the
16-foot wall that ran along the river on the west side of the city. The view
out the window behind his bed allowed him to watch the barges working up and
down the river, and the tiny window in the bathroom in the front gave him a
clear view of the former capitol.
His grandfather George lived in the room behind the
kitchen on the ground floor and his window had been plastered over right after
the city was divided and the wall went up. His grandfather did not complain
about the windowless room. “Even if my eyes were any good, any good at all,” he
would say, “what would I want to look at in this miserable city.” He spent much
of the day in bed reading old newspapers, his legs bent to relieve the pressure
on his knees hurt during the last war.
Erik’s older brother William lived with his family of
four on the second floor. William’s wife stayed at home with their children,
both boys, one 6 and one 11. William worked as a clerk for a municipal judge
and refused to talk in any detail about court proceedings other than to
characterize them as charades masking rampant injustice and cruelty.
However, his wife Catherine would dutifully ask daily at
supper how William’s day had gone. “Lousy thieves were at it again. Always the
same, they make money, others pay and pay and pay.” Catherine would look down
at her plate, and William would hastily compliment her cooking, or the fresh
flowers on the table, or her hair. “This chicken is perfectly cooked, my sweet
one.” Then Catherine would look up and smile and chide the boys for their table
manners.
Erik often took his supper up to his room, and after
checking out the back window to see if anything interesting was moving on the
river, he would sit at his tiny desk and bless his meal and eat slowly, chewing
each bite as if it might never be served again. When he at last finished, he
brushed his teeth and gargled some soda water, and then most evenings he would
pull out his students’ work for evaluation.
Because he did not gain admission to the university’s
school for architecture, he taught mechanical drawing classes at the poly-tech.
Some of the drawings were in such disarray that Erik crumpled them and then
sort of smoothed them out again after writing in large red letters one word.
No! But a few of them were so clean and so perfect they seemed to have come
from a machine. The heads of the arrows were perfectly balanced, the marks designating
measurements consistently the same size. Nena’s work had shown such quality.
Now 22, Nena worked for a modular construction company in
the former mill district. Her primary task was to create basic drawings for
potential customers after they met with the sales engineers. Her exactness and
the tidiness of her hand won her honors at the poly-tech, and her skills earned
her enough money to live alone in a three-room flat in the market district.
Erik invited Nena to coffee the day she finished her
second course with him. Of course, that was two years ago, but Erik still liked
thinking about watching her yellow hair she fixed to the top of her head with
two Morado pencils slowly bobbing up and down as she leaned into her work.
Sometimes, she would glance up and catch him looking at her. She never smiled
or frowned, but Erik believed her dark brown eyes betrayed some interest.
Between the wall and the river ran a two-lane road, but
no traffic—vehicles or cyclists or pedestrians—were allowed. Across the river
there was no wall, and so Erik could see people on the bank fishing and buses
and trucks going by and children playing near the water’s edge. He could also
see to the right Victory Bridge that now had a barricade across the middle.
Erik moved into the top floor rooms when he was 16, when
his parents were killed in the October Blast. William and his wife and a baby
boy moved in and took over the second floor. The first thing Erik did was to
take down the curtains in both the bedroom and bathroom. Some days he talked
about getting rid of the bed and finding an old sofa to sleep on so he could
put his desk at the window and look out over the river.
One Saturday morning during breakfast, Catherine was the
first to speak to his plans for the bed. “You will need a bed. You will want a bed
for your special guests.” Erik blushed and for the next week could hardly meet
her eyes or even mutter a hello. William shrugged. “Don’t do something so
stupid. It’s a good bed.”
Nena’s flat was on the second floor and her living room
had two 8-foot windows that opened up onto a small porch just deep enough for small
chairs. The first time Erik went with her back to her place, she fixed coffee
for them and they sat outside in the cool late afternoon air and shared a
cigarette. Across the four lanes of the boulevard was a small park with ancient
sycamores, leafless in the December light.
“You were my best student.”
“Thank you.” She held out the cigarette to him.
“By far.”
“Thank you. You are a good teacher.”
“You should apply to the architectural school.”
“No, no—that work, no I don’t want the work to be like
that—to be so important.”
“You are happy, then?”
She giggled. “Oh, happy. What is happy?”
“I don’t know.” Erik realized he sounded too serious, so
he stood up and stretched and gestured across the street. “You have a great
view of the park.”
“Yes. What do you see when you look out your windows?”
“I see the river and can watch the sun rise.”
Nena stood up next to him. “I would like to see the
river.”
The river never quite froze over during the winter.
Always there was a ribbon of moving water that looked black during the short
days. In the early spring the river would rise rapidly along the banks as the
mountain snow melted, and by May the mid-morning sun would strike the river and
seem to set the surface on fire.
“When will we meet this Nena?” Catherine asked him this
question as she stirred a deep pot of corn chowder and Erik, sipping hot tea,
slouched against the refrigerator. “You see her nearly every day now.”
“It’s quiet at her place. And there is more to do on her
side of the city.”
“Quiet.” Catherine laughed. “Always, men and their
quiet.”
“Perhaps soon. Perhaps.”
Often, when Erik sat outside the classroom building as he
waited for his next class to begin, he would think of Nena and how they would
kick off the sheets in her bed and pass a cigarette back and forth without a
word. Then she would stub it out in a coffee cup on her bedside table and roll
over on top of him and murmur into his ear how good she was feeling. Sometimes
she would shiver and he would fumble for the sheet and tuck it tightly around
them as if wrapping a present.
“Well,” said Catherine, “you should have flowers on your
desk when she visits you.”
Yes, Erik thought, flowers. And she would like Moroccan
mint tea, too. He would scrub the bathroom, making sure to clean the floor
behind the toilet and the bottom of the shower curtain and put out fresh towels
and perhaps a flower in the bathroom would be a right thing to do as well. Of
course the white bed linen would be clean, and he would put away the old
blanket that he kept on his sitting chair. He would take down his drawings. Or,
no, they would remain. She might admire some of them and they would have
something to talk about as they drank their tea.
The thing about the wall was that it made the city feel
second-rate, somehow inferior being cut off from the whole. The acting mayor—a state
appointee—the postponed elections, the censorship of the newspapers because of
the ongoing emergency, all left the city less than what it had been. And to
what end.
Erik’s grandfather’s verdict was simple. An inglorious
failure. Complete and utterly hopeless, a never-ending, abject failure.
“Tomorrow, Catherine.”
“Tomorrow? Your Nena comes tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” Ladson 2013
To begin, Andrea Loris was never my girlfriend. She was a
girl I met, a fellow student in junior and senior high school, someone to talk
with now and again, and then someone I was able to share some space with in our
own time. In today’s parlance, well I don’t really know how kids would label
the relationship—even that word is off by a thousand miles.
When you come into the town from the west, Highway 6
makes a steep long curve down to the Loris River Bridge, where the roadway crosses
the river about 50 yards upstream from the railroad trestle, and then track and
road run parallel to the other side of town where the railroad veers inland and
the highway mostly follows along and above the lakeshore.
The decision to return for my 20th high school
class reunion was made three days before the event started, which was of no
particular concern as the drive north was only a little more than 4 hours even
if I did choose the old highway rather than the Interstate. Arne Carlson on the
reunion committee told me about Andrea via Facebook. He and I had not spoken
since we finished up at the university. That’s how it goes, lives I mean.
I pulled over on the east side of the bridge where there
was one of those wayside rests with two unpainted picnic tables and a
historical society marker briefly noting Loris as the gateway to vast timber
reserves that made the town boom in the mid-1800s. I walked down the stone
steps leading to an outcrop of rock that allowed a view under both bridge and trestle.
The water was low as it was every August, and in the light of the high sun, I
could easily see the pool beneath the trestle that always remained deep and
cool even during the summer.
What did Arne say? Andrea slipped. Andrea jumped. Three
boys were swimming in the pool at the time, and they said they waved for her to
move farther out from where she had stopped on the track 40 feet above. But,
she didn’t. Arne told me she landed on Flat Rock.
Flat Rock. Sat out there mornings and afternoons, and before
and after sunsets. Alone sometimes, sometimes with friends, sometimes just
guys, sometimes guys and girls. Sipped my first beer at Flat Rock. Stared at
the stars and howled at the moon from Flat Rock. I know Flat Rock.
From my vantage above, I looked hard at that great,
nearly smooth, flat slab of rock. I shielded my eyes as I looked at the
trestle. I dropped my hand and closed my eyes. I knew. Andrea let go.
The Loris mansion was a little more than half a mile above
Highway 6 in an area known as West Heights. The 3-story sandstone home was
about 100 yards below the bridge on Maple, which was the only way to get from
the Heights into town. I first started walking along the riverbed in the summer
just before I turned 12 and would begin 7th grade at the junior
high. We two weeks before moved in from Des Moines—my father, who was a
chemical engineer, got a higher paying job at the Loris paper mill, which was
the biggest employer in the region.
During the snowmelt, the river raged and roared in such
spectacular fashion it constituted a sort of mini-tourist event for day-trippers.
The crowds always amused me as they gawked at the surging brown water, ooh-ing
and ah-ing when stumps and logs would tumble over the falls just 50 feet or so above
the bridge. Only they numbered in the hundreds, not like Lumberjack Days that
would drag in five or six thousand visitors.
But that first summer, I learned the river as not much
more than a benign creek that afforded half a dozen easy crossings between the
two bridges. Our new house was only four blocks from the river, and so I nearly
daily explored the bends and drop offs as I waited on the opening of the school
term.
At the beginning of our senior year, Andrea turned around
in her seat, and in her low voice, said, “You have been sitting right behind me
in homeroom since 7th grade.”
Well, that was surely the truth. And due to education’s
great love affair with alphabetical seating, that truth mapped a part of our
geography in at least a dozen classes during our time at Walker Junior and
Loris Senior.
“I must like your hair,” I said.
“Not all you like.” Well, that too was surely the truth.
The first conversation between Andrea and me did not take
place on the opening day of 7th grade homeroom. In fact, we never
said anything to one another that school year, not even in World Geography,
where her desk was right in front of mine. She took what I handed her and
passed it forward, and she passed back what came to her from the front for me.
One morning in late July, just before my 13th
birthday, I went down along the river and crossed over to the west side and its
jumble of boulders and tree trunks, some measuring ten feet or longer, and
slowly worked my way up the steep, uncertain route. In sight of the Maple
Street Bridge I decided to just finish out the hike on River Road, and the
place I chose to give up the nature walk was right in front of the Loris
mansion.
Andrea was sitting at the top of the front steps, and on
either side of her were two 4-foot lion heads, snarling and wide-eyed. To my
surprise, when she saw me, she waved me over.
“Hi!”
“Hey.”
“Weren’t you in geometry with me?”
“Uh, no. Geography.”
She laughed. “You like the river.”
“Yep.”
“Me, too. I like sitting down there by myself. Even when
it’s cold.”
As I stood on the bottom step, I glanced at the great
double doors behind her. “This your house?”
“Yes. My grandfather’s. My great-grandfather’s actually.”
“You live here?”
“With my brother. He’s eight.”
“With your mom and dad?”
“No, just my grandfather and my brother.”
“Oh.” I let her words settle. “These lions are huge.”
“They are Japanese. Or Chinese. Yes, Chinese.”
“So are you related to—“
“We are that Loris. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The only other things I remember about Andrea that
morning were how straight and dark her hair, and how dark brown her eyes, and
how soothing her voice. Later, I told my mother that Andrea’s voice was so very
soft and low, but she wasn’t whispering. Mom just rolled her eyes and handed me
a peanut butter and banana sandwich.
The morning we were signing yearbooks in our senior honors
English class, Andrea turned in her desk, holding my book to her chest. “Hey.”
“Hey. You okay?” I asked.
“You remember that morning—you know that one—at the river, in 9th grade?”
“Yes.”
“Really? What do you remember?”
I shifted a bit in my seat and glanced down at her
yearbook on my desk. “Well, I remember you looked like you had been crying.”
She waited. “And?”
“I remember the river was running really hard still and
the air was cold, a lot colder than up on top.”
“Keep going.”
I flinched. “Andrea—“
“Say it.”
I looked around at our classmates to make sure no one was
listening. “I put my arm around you. Then, I, well you, you put my hand inside
your shirt.”
“That shocked you, didn’t it?”
“Yes” I whispered. “Yes, of course.”
“I liked it. You liked it too. You remember Ninth Grade
Day, the last dance?”
“Of course.”
“We slow-danced. I liked that too.”
Yes, I liked it, too. I remember sitting at home in the
kitchen and telling my mother how surprising it was that Andrea chose me for
the last dance, and I told my friends the next afternoon sitting out on Flat
Rock that holding her in my arms was like holding the softest thing that I
could ever imagine. They didn’t need to know about the moment at the river when
she had been crying.
“You’re going to the U?”
“Yep, with a bunch of others. Kind of boring.”
She laughed. “I won’t be that far away. Not like the ones
who are going east. Don’t tell anyone, but I picked Northwestern out of a hat.”
“You did?”
“I found my great-grandfather’s bowler—black and round
and still shiny—and put the names of the schools in there, and that’s what came
out. So I’m going there.” She giggled and handed me my yearbook. “Promise you
won’t read it until you get home. I signed on the NHS page.”
“I promise.” And, I kept that promise. A promise is a
promise is a promise. The rest of the school day, as soon as I saw that page
and her very large and rounded writing, I skipped to the next page.
The first of those did-you-hear-about-Andrea stories was
that she slept with her Western Civ instructor and dropped out after the first
semester. I can tell you she was for a fact a no-show at the 10-year-reunion.
Diane Larson, who was as close to being Andreas’s best friend as anyone during
high school, told us that Andrea was working at a strip club in Miami. Becky
Tastides told us that Andrea was a porn star and was trying to get together
enough money to start her own movie company in Los Angeles.
Arne told me that Andrea never returned to Loris until
her grandfather’s funeral, that she stayed at the house with her brother and
his wife and their three children, and that no one saw her anywhere other than
at the church. She spoke to no one. It was closed-casket and the funeral was
family-only.
Two days later, Andrea was dead.
After logging off with Arne, I picked up my senior yearbook
and held it tightly with both hands. Maybe this will make some sense or maybe
not, but in some unspoken way, Andrea and I were always on the same side. Did I
need to read it again? Taking a short breath, I opened to the page.
Up the left side of the page and across the top, she
wrote “Wish we could have talked more! Good luck in the Pulitzer race! Write
me! Tons of love!!! Forever!!! A.”
Forever. Amen. Ladson 2013
At some point, late in my teaching career, I began
suggesting to students that the United States’ body politic is an experiment,
the results uncertain, still to be determined.
Sometimes I offered up India with its billion plus as a
democratic lab to keep an eye on going forward.
Several times more recently, in the past month or so I
would say, I trotted out the notion to family and friends that the veneer
politically, socially, economically we superficially understand, and
paradoxically deeply depend on, is thin, thin, thin.
Hardly earthshaking insights, to be sure, but they are
generated by observing the world through the lens of my history.
We each have our formative moments, stretches even, where
our understanding of the world beyond the end of our noses begins and in some
cases quickens.
For me, from 10 to 20 marked quite a decade to see the
world revealed. A few months after I turned 10, John F. Kennedy was
assassinated. In ‘68, both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, assassinated.
Stunning.
Yes, yes, the moon landing and Woodstock in ’69, but the
working title for this post to my mind was “Grim Reaping”. We are, after all,
in the comparative casualties phase of our current rolling disaster, this
pandemic. Post losses due to traffic accidents and the flu season. Yardsticks,
don’t you know.
And it’s a war out there. Sort of.
Vietnam: 47,424 killed—with the understanding that
quibbling over this body count goes on. Of course, that war undergirded much of
the nation’s miasma during my decade of growing awareness of the world beyond
baseball cards and Doc Savage novels.
Unfortunately, this afternoon—I just checked the Johns
Hopkins virus fatality update—our losses are at 66,425. Sadly, more to come.
With the understanding that quibbling over this body count will go on.
Now how my 10-year-old neighbor processes her new
reality, I do not know for certain. On the other hand, I think we all know the
Class of ’20 must feel a gut churn of emotions.
Going forward, to what end and how we get there, no one
knows. Or, at least, I know I don’t know. What else can I say.
Oh, with the understanding body counts to be updated as
more information becomes available. Quibbling aside.
