The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (13 page)

“You used to laugh so hard you’d slam yourself against your
mattress and the whole room would shake. I remember it made your posters
flutter.”

I put the heels of my palms against my cheeks. It was
thunderous. He was nearly in convulsions. He rocked back and forth, arm and leg
bumping against me. Every touch of his skin against mine was like a warm spark.
Everything inside me fell quiet, all my inner voices and worries and
analyzations were silenced by this incredible feeling of home, of Griff beside
me. It was a feeling that added up to, more than anything else, relief.

“Check this one out,” he said. He sat up and slammed back
down into his pillow, making the sound of his body-weight in Jell-O smacking
pavement as he hit. The blankets billowed around his legs. I was laughing so
hard I made no sound at all.

“That’s nothing,” I said when I could breathe again, doing
my best to sound unimpressed. I filled my cheeks and ripped a fart through my
teeth. His individual laughs merged together into a steady
eeeeee
. His eyes were squeezed shut.

“I can top that,” he said. He elbowed me in the side, in the
ribs. “Listen to
this
.” He performed
the sound of a sumo wrestler suffering from the diarrhea Griff usually got from
tacos.

What if, when he wasn’t looking, I folded my arms around his
waist, laid my head on his shoulder? Would he care? Would he push me away?

“Dude,” I said, “that’s fucking child’s play. Let me show
you how a master does it.”

“Where are you gonna find a master this late?”

“Ooooh. Harsh!”

On a cold night when we were teenagers Griff had told me I
was a step ahead—that I was more advanced, more evolved, or just plain
more in touch with love than he was just because I could love guys and girls
equally. But it occurred to me here in clouds of mock gas—me so focused
on the rough smoothness of his skin, he so unconcerned and comfortable with
mine—that if one of us was a step ahead, if one of us was really a social
revolutionary, it wasn’t me at all.

S U N D A Y

From the kitchen I could hear him still in bed,
mumbling something at a volume that made me think he wanted me to understand.
I’d gotten up when he was still breathing nasally and sprawled mostly on my
side, feet protruding from untucked edges of blankets. I sat down at the
kitchen table with a coffee and the Sunday funnies.

“Can’t hear you,” I said.

He came out of the bedroom with his phone against his ear.
He pointed to it.

“Oh.”

His tongue fell out and he grappled with what looked like an
invisible noose. Then he was dragged back into the bedroom by an unseen foe.
With his free hand he clutched the door jamb, clawed at it with desperate
fingernails, was yanked inside.

A few minutes later he came out and opened the fridge.

“Beth?” I said.

“She can be such a bitch, but she’s so damn
sweet
about it.” He took out a loaf of oatmeal
bread and dropped four slices into the toaster. “And she’s got that smoky
voice,” he said. “You remember it. Like Katharine Hepburn in her youth.”

He took a mug out of the cupboard, put it on the table and poured
all that remained of the coffee. It went right to the brim. He sat down and
lapped it with his tongue to get rid of some before picking it up.

“She cool with us coming today?”

He nodded. “I told her mid-afternoon sometime.”

“Cool. I’m looking forward to a little road trip.”

“Yeah.” His toast popped up and with quick fingers he
plucked it out. He buttered it and dumped on a heavy layer of cinnamon sugar. “I
was thinking you should ask Zane to come with us,” he said.

I laughed but saw he was serious. “Zane? Why would I do that?”

“He seems fun.”

“No.”

“We don’t
have
to,
I just thought it might be interesting.”

“For
you
.”

He chomped into his toast and got his face poofed with a
cloud of cinnamon sugar. “
Gah.
Not
for you?”

“We’ll need the space for your stuff.”

“There’s not that much,” he said, wiping his cheeks with the
back of his hand. “And Zane’s skinny.”

He went into the living room with his breakfast.

I squinted against the late-morning sunlight that
reflected off hundreds of millions of crash-landed snowflakes, wondering how
the fuck he talked me into this.

“Here, hold this up while I go under,” Griff said, letting
go of a springy branch. He dropped to his knees and then to his stomach and
began dragging himself through the snow with his elbows.

“Couldn’t we just
call
him?” I said. My toes were cold.

“I thought you were all anti-phone,” he said. His boots were
the last of him to cross through the hedge that surrounded Zane’s family’s yard.

“I think I could’ve made an exception.” I followed him
under, the branch scraping the back of my peacoat like an admonishing finger. Thirty
feet away was the driveway, neatly plowed down to shiny black pavement. Griff
thought it would be more fun to sneak in.

I stood up, wiped snow off my chest and knees.

“Which one’s his?” he asked, looking up at the windows and shielding
his eyes from the sun.

“Those.” I pointed up at the two on the left side of the
second floor. As we traipsed across the yard the breeze wisped powdery snow
from the branches of a tall thick oak tree beside the house.

“All right, let’s see here.” He bent down and gathered a
handful of snow, pressed it together. It wouldn’t stick. “Dammit.” I reminded
him that this kind of snow doesn’t make good snowballs. He looked at me
blankly—“Well what
else
can we
throw up there?” he said—as though our inability to find anything else
would persuade the snow to just give up and turn sticky. Any other projectiles
we might’ve found lying around the yard were buried. The whole expanse, aside
from our tracks, was pristine white.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Your shoe?”

“Cute.” He looked up. “I don’t suppose you want to try
climbing that tree.”

“Not particularly.”

“All right—looks like we resort to the old-fashioned
doorbell technique, then.” He sighed.

We did our best not to collapse the neat snow piles that
lined the shoveled front path. I rang the doorbell; it was that kind that plays
a tune instead of just ding-donging but I could never figure out what it was.
After a minute Zane’s brother opened the door. He was round-faced and
pudgy—a freshman, he had become the basketball team’s water boy for the
exercise, and, according to Zane, for the social benefits that came from
hanging around with upperclassman jocks. Namely, as Zane related it,
first-class pussy
.

“Hey Ralph,” I said. “Zane home?”

“I guess. Hold on.” He closed the door. I heard him yell.

“Let me get this straight,” Griff said. “They named one of
their kids Zane and the other one
Ralph
?”

“Zane’s real name is Peter,” I said. “Peter Perkins. He
re-named himself in middle school, so the legend goes.” Griff raised his
eyebrows and nodded in approval. “Kind of like you, Ariel.”

“Can you blame me? That fucking mermaid movie ruined my
life.”

The door opened again in a breath of warmth. Zane’s black hair
was flat on one side and sticking up on the other. “Hey guys.”

“Hey.”

“Get dressed,” Griff said cheerfully, “we’re springing you.”

“You’re what?”

“We’re going to Boston to get Griff’s stuff from his
ex-girlfriend’s place,” I said. “We were wondering if you wanted to come for
the ride or whatever.”

Zane’s dark eyes drifted behind me to the front yard and
registered a tiny surprise, as if he was noticing the snow for the first time.
There was a grain of sleep-sand in the corner of his left eye and an eyelash
clung to the tip of his nose. “Now?”

I looked at Griff. “Well, yeah, you know, whenever you can
be ready.” I was suddenly, strangely, afraid he’d say no.

“Do I have time to jump in the shower?”

“Please do,” said Griff.

“OK.” Zane started to close the door but before the latch
caught he yanked it back open. “Did you want to come in, or...?”

“We’ll be in the car,” I said. “We’re parked down the street
a little ways, down there.”

He asked why we didn’t just park in the driveway.

“We were trying to be covert and stuff,” said Griff.

Griff stuck his iPod’s cassette adapter into the
dashboard tape deck.

“I can’t believe you have one of those,” I said.

“An iPod?”

“Digital music,” I said, turning to look out the window, “is
so impersonal. I like to hold something when I’m listening to music. A record
sleeve, at least a CD case. Something more tangible than ones and zeros.”

“You’re tactile like that,” he said. The little white
machine made clicking noises as he swirled his thumb around the button.

“When I play someone a song on the record player, it’s
intimate. It’s romantic. If you want me to hear a song, what do you do, toss me
the earbuds? And I won’t even get into the issue of album art and liner notes.”

“Well,” he said, “you can’t take your record player on a
road trip, now can you?”

“...”

“I rest my case.”

“That’s the only thing they’re good for,” I conceded. “I just
feel like the personality has gone out of things. Email instead of letters.
Words on a screen. You can’t say I’m nostalgic for the good old days, because in
my good old days I learned my letters on a Speak & Spell. Something’s just
missing now.”

“I was thinking yesterday when I was at your house by
myself,” he said, “that you live in kind of a quiet. A hush. With your records
and your old comic books and your fireplace and your corduroy furniture. There’s
no pop in your house—it’s all sort of like candle-light and
black-and-white movies.”

“A hush, huh?”

“Sort of a whisper,” he said. “It feels maroon.”

“Maroon to me suggests areolas.”

“It’s not a
visual
thing,” he said impatiently. “But fine.” He thought for a moment. “It isn’t
exactly right, but how about cranberry?”

“That’s a little fruity,” I said.

“
You’re
a little
fruity.”

Zane knocked on my window. He had on a peacoat like
mine over a yellow hooded sweatshirt. I got out and let him in.

“Hope I didn’t take too long,” he said, squeezing into the
back seat.

I pushed my seat back and got in. “Griff was just explaining
to me that I live in a hush.”

Zane laughed. “That’s not the word I would’ve used, but
yeah, I totally know what you mean.”

“What do you mean, you know what he means? Is everyone going
around putting my lifestyle into catchphrases? What word
would
you have used, anyway?”

“I don’t know. RetroLand?”

“RetroLand. Isn’t that a ride at Disney World?”

“I still say it’s more like a cranberry hush,” said Griff,
crossing his arms.

We stopped for gas and then for coffee and hot chocolate at the
Dunkin’ Donuts, and then we hit the road to the city—me piloting, Griff
deejaying, Zane keeping the beat on the armrest.

Bostonians after a snowstorm reminded me of kids
trying to make brussels sprouts disappear by spreading them around on the
plate. Snow was pushed into huge piles in intersections, in tiny front yards
and along sidewalks. Already it was turning a dismal gray.

The view while we sat in traffic stirred that
strange-familiar feeling of seeing a long-lost friend—a feeling I’d been
feeling a lot the past few days. I’d been back to the city a bunch of times
since graduation and it had that same feeling every time—nothing major,
just the feeling that I’d once called this city home and now no longer did. New
buildings had been built since I’d left, old ones refaced; the skyline had
changed a bit but for the most part it looked the same. A memory-lane kind of
place.

Beth lived in the Fenway, down near the ballpark, on the top
floor of a brownstone on Peterborough Street. Buildings like hers had a
tendency to be let go on the outside and maintained only on the inside; their decrepitude
was part of their charm or something. But Beth’s place was old all around. The narrow
staircase slanted from the wall at a vertigo-inducing angle, sagging and
swaying like a rope bridge, threatening to send you over the railing into the
abyss.

“Should, uh— Should we all be on these stairs at the
same time?” Zane said, clutching the thick mahogany rail.

“Probably not,” Griff said—but we kept walking anyway.

By the time we arrived on the fourth floor Zane and I were
breathing heavy—Griff was fine, was home. Two doors faced one another on
either side of the landing.

Griff pulled a ring of keys out of his pocket, raised one to
the keyhole of the door labeled
4F
and
left it floating there for a second. Then he put the keys back in his pocket
and knocked instead, three thumps with his fist.

I heard something touch the door—the sound of someone
looking through the peephole—and then it opened and there was Beth. No
longer the roommate of chubby Gia, Beth was a woman now, the Ex of Griff.
Although she was a year younger than us she looked grown up in the similarly
indescribable way that Griff and I still looked like kids. Her auburn hair was longer
than she used to wear it; she had on jeans and an olive v-neck t-shirt. Her
eyes remained her most striking feature—one was blue and the other was
green. It suddenly made sense to me why Griff had fallen for Beth: blue and
green must’ve been happy colors.

She said hello to Griff, not much above a whisper, and gave him
a weak smile that I found unexpectedly tender and kind. It knocked off-balance
the casual contempt I was all ready to feel for her.

When Griff responded his voice was stiff, as though he were
speaking in block letters. “Hey,” he said. “We made it.”

“I didn’t really have a chance to get your stuff together,”
she said.

“I’m surprised you came back in the snow.”

“I have work.”

He shrugged. Beth stepped aside, her arm hugging the door
jamb, and he slid past her into the apartment. She opened the door wider and
hugged me. She smelled like cucumber-melon.

“Good to see you, Vince,” she said into my ear. It was the
way people who haven’t seen each other in years greet at the funeral of a
mutual friend.

“You too, Beth. Long time no see.”

“You look good.”

“Thanks. Uh, this is my friend Zane.”

“The moving crew,” she said, shaking his hand. He asked if
she’d had any baseballs come through her window. “The park’s on that side.” She
pointed in one direction and then corrected herself. “So no, but my neighbor
might’ve. It’d be a hell of a hit, though. Come on in, guys.”

The walls in the kitchen were painted the color of flower
pots. The living room, visible through a doorway, was magenta. Lots of framed
photos and a number of large black-and-white concert posters made the clashing
colors work. On the wall opposite the sink was a wrought-iron shelf filled with
cactuses.

Beth said, smirking, “They’re the only green thing I can
keep alive.”

“I stopped bothering after my first three or four murders,”
I said. “Planticides. Now I just worry about the lawn. Keeping that green and
stuff.”

Zane and I leaned against the cupboards. Beth stood in the
middle of the floor with her arms folded across her chest.

“No lawn for me luckily,” she said. “Although a yard to read
in would be nice. ...Did you find a place to park?”

“Kind of,” I said, looking out the window above the sink,
expecting to see cars below, but it was an alley; we were on the other side of
the building. “Resident-only. That’s not a problem, is it?”

“People do it all the time.” She wore pink socks and tapped
one foot on the linoleum floor. “Can I get you guys something to drink?” She
was reaching for the refrigerator door before we answered. “Lemonade? Pepsi?
Something hot? I could make coffee.”