The Other (9 page)

Late in the day we passed, according to the Shaw sisters’ map, underneath Monte Sella di Fanes, and came into barren and colder country. In a saddle to the southeast was another rustic chapel, this one of unmortared stone, and below that was a slope cut by bands of rock and broken by rivulets, near the bottom of which we could see the Rifugio Lavarella, or the smoke from its chimney and the late sun against its west-facing façade, and beyond that was Lago Verde and a road snaking up from a valley of trees and pastures. I remember all of this because when we paused to take it in there was pink light against the stone pillars to the east of the
rifugio,
which prompted Erin to say “coffee-table-book-ish.” We stood a moment longer, and then Jamie intoned, “Now they would have the run home together,” but I was too embarrassed to ask her what she meant.

W
E DRANK GRAPPA
that evening. It’s made from grape skins and whatever else is left, the seeds and pulp, after a wine pressing. These dregs are distilled until a clear liquid results that retains, supposedly, the vapors left behind by the grapes gone to the vintner. I say “supposedly” since this was all explained to us, in English, by the
rifugio
’s bartender, who may not have been reliable as a source on this after-dinner drink, and who also warned that the grappa he was serving might sting our palates and taste a little flammable. Erin, after drinking hers as if it came in a shotglass, employed the term “solvent” before switching to German lager. The bar was full of smoke, from cigarettes and from the woodstove and from a few jaunty Tyrolean briar pipes. Its low ceiling was black, and its floorboards were warped. The windows were fitted with wooden shutters, but on this night they were open, so stars were visible. We had to lean on the bar for half an hour until a table cleared, and then we sat down and started a round of Hearts, with me keeping score on the inside back cover of my journal. I was happy to be there, drinking grappa and playing cards. The light was low, but there was a lit candle on a nearby sill by which we could see our hands, the abuse the tabletop had taken through the years from Alpine travelers—people had put ice axes and crampons on it—and each other’s faces. After a while, Erin went to the bathroom, so Jamie and I put down our cards, and I said that I would take a few notes if she didn’t mind. This is when she remembered that there’d been eight cows that day on the trail underneath the Sasso delle Nove.

Something else from my journal. When you’re feeling good about somebody there comes a moment when his or her appearance improves, and that’s what happened with Jamie that night in the
rifugio
bar. I’d thought until then that her green eyes were conspicuously too far apart, but from then on it hasn’t seemed so to me. “You might be wondering,” said Jamie, “why Erin is constantly trying to shoot the moon, even when she doesn’t have the right cards.”

“Some people play like that.”

“So far she’s losing by something like two hundred.”

“We can quit if you want.”

“My sister’s up and down,” said Jamie. “She’s had a good day, but tonight is bad, with the beer and the way she’s playing Hearts.”

I don’t want to hold forth, or write the way a teacher talks while standing at the front of a class, but I have to say that things are rarely simple. You don’t get to come across two sisters in the Dolomites, young and long-legged, both fair, and walk with them in the pink light and drink grappa beside them, without sooner or later coming to see that they don’t just embody your romantic fantasies. They’re themselves, too, with all that implies: in Erin’s case, a bipolar disorder. Her illness is now controlled by lithium, but not in ’74, in Italy, when her symptoms first came to light.

But I didn’t ask, in the
rifugio
bar, what Jamie meant by “My sister’s up and down,” and changed the subject to something I’d just written in my journal: “Now they would have the run home together.” “Erin and I’ve been cracking up over that line since high school,” said Jamie. “Since Mr. Cheadle’s class. Since Cheadle and his Hemingway stories. ‘Now they would have the run home together’ is the last line of ‘Cross-Country Snow.’ Nick Adams is skiing in Switzerland with George, only now he has to go back to the States because his girlfriend’s pregnant.”

“George?”

“His skiing buddy.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Well, it’s one of Hemingway’s poor-Nick stories,” answered Jamie. “Nicky doesn’t get to play anymore. He has to go home and face the music.”

I
N THE MORNING
, around five, I was awake and had my pack ready and wanted to go, partly because I always want to go, but instead I sat in the bar eating breadsticks left on a counter overnight, reading my notes, staring out the window, and nodding at other hikers who came in to have cigarettes and coffee for breakfast, and to look at maps together and talk in Italian or German, probably about the trails and the weather. Then I had coffee, too, with a
cornetto,
which I ate slowly while taking notes on the changes in the light outside the window as the minutes wore on, and more hikers came into the bar, where by now there was muesli and warm milk on the counter, and hard-boiled eggs, bottled water, and almonds and apricots for the trail, and I realized after a while that some of the hikers were ordering lunches, which came to them out of the kitchen in small cartons. I ate some muesli. I ate an egg and had more coffee. All the while, I thought of leaving but didn’t get up. I nearly left on a couple of occasions, thinking that, all things considered, I still wanted to walk on my own, but instead I looked out the window. Other hikers, in groups, were on the trail already, disappearing around a bend to the southwest, and I took notes on how the details of their clothing faded gradually as they moved into the distance. My chair was uncomfortable, and I wrote about that as well. Then the Shaw sisters came into the bar at seven-thirty, and Erin, with a demitasse in front of her, asked me to look at the back page of my journal regarding her final Hearts score, and Jamie pursed her lips to stifle a laugh. I noticed that the color of Jamie’s eyes was variable, though since then I’ve come to see that most people’s are, according to the light: in the morning pallor of the bar, her eyes were gray instead of the green I’d noticed the day before.

The Shaw sisters didn’t seem to share my impatience. We sat with their battered map spread, and Erin said, “Hey, James, remember Tim Football? He used to have this phrase ‘cumulatively tired.’ That’s kind of perfect.”

“Eat something.”

“Neil,” said Erin, “do you have a car?”

“Have muesli,” said Jamie.

Erin put her head on the map and looked out the window. “Tim Football. Touchdown. Extra point. Third down. ‘Cumulatively’ was a huge word for that…” She didn’t finish.

“Understood,” said Jamie. “Let’s walk to San Vigilio.”

“We could also split cab fare.”

Jamie sighed, and Erin said, still staring out the window, “James, but what would Mom do?”

“What’s your call?” asked Jamie. “What are we doing today?”

Erin said, “I say languish. Minus the ‘l.’” She lifted her head and regarded me now as if my appearance in the bar surprised her. “We’re slowing you down,” she said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, we are.”

When I didn’t answer she said, “
Buongiorno,
Neil.
Grazie.
Sorry. Now, James—could you bring me an egg?”

W
E WALKED TOWARD
San Vigilio together only partly because I’d said “No, you’re not,” and, starting that morning, I was complicit with Jamie in the coddling that was going on. Toward the middle of the day, we were passed on a road of white sand by trucks taking farmers up to cut summer hay, and we spoke with some hikers eating fruit and cheese on spread blankets who were Romans interested in the mushrooms of the region, in particular some rare truffles they pointed out in a guidebook, Erin supplying some Italian phrases to a conversation for the most part conducted in rudimentary English. We sat down there, and Jamie said to me, while Erin was preoccupied with being upbeat and charming, that there was no reason for me to feel obligated just because we’d met on the trail. I said I didn’t feel that—the kind of thing you try to say with as much neutrality as possible, so that your implied meaning remains ambiguous.

Later in the afternoon, we stopped near racks of firewood, near some axes leaning against a tree, in lower country, where the air was warm, and while Erin snored, Jamie and I sprawled with our heads against our packs watching finches flit among the spruces. I noticed that she had a small scab on her knee. One summer, my sister spent a lot of hours in the sun, lightening her hair with lemon juice, thinking this would make her look like a Californian, and that was the suggestion of Jamie’s hair, too, so that I wondered if she’d used the same technique. “So you don’t feel obligated,” she said.

“No.”

“Were you going to San Vigilio?”

“I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Later, another group of hikers came along, including a very small dog, an old man with two walking sticks, and a girl in gaudy orange bellbottoms. They hailed us, and we hailed them back. A man in felt knickers and high stockings, a feather in his cap, did the talking. There was some discussion, in English and Italian both, about the beauty of things. I heard the word
splendidamente
repeated. When they were gone, we stood up and got on our packs. “I’m officially OD’d on Italy now,” said Erin. “I can’t take any more great scenery.”

I
N
S
AN
V
IGILIO
, we booked rooms at the Hotel Monte Sella—expensive, but one night seemed justified. At dinner, two men in lederhosen sang folk songs, one with an accordion, the other with a guitar. We ate gnocchi, barley soup, and spinach pies, in that order, and then the waiters came in while the entertainers played what you might call a Tyrolean fanfare, and these waiters were carrying, by their heads, platters of beef haunch surrounded by pineapple and watermelon slices, lit sparklers stuck in the fruit throwing sparks across the meat and onto the floor tiles. The waiters had no English but leaned in and smiled and with their tongs put small potato balls or broiled tomatoes on our plates. “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Erin said when the entertainers started yodeling. She pretended to an appetite but, claiming an attraction to down comforters, and to wood shutters thrown open to Alpine air, began to move toward bed: during the intermission before the final act of dessert, she dropped her napkin on the table and yawned theatrically, patting her mouth. “Please,” she said, on getting up to leave, “you don’t have to tuck me in, James.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Oh yes, you were.”

Erin added, sliding in her chair, “You and Neil can just sit here without me and, I don’t know, fall in love.”

W
E WENT TO
the bar. A lot of the hotel guests had moved into the bar to smoke cigarettes and drink thimbles of coffee. There were children in the foyer fighting in a mild way—a little boy in suspenders kicking a little girl—and outside our window other guests played table tennis. There was an elaborate armoire at one wall of the bar, a two-tiered cupboard with its upper doors left open, inside of which, on a silver tray, were bottles of complimentary port, brandy, and sherry. Jamie and I, across from each other in a booth, drank brandy out of snifters and played Kings in the Corner. For whatever reason, it was sometimes difficult to pick the cards up off that table, so Jamie would use a fingernail to get them started. She shuffled cards by aiming the close corners of the split deck at each other while throwing forward the flats of her elbows, and she dealt with small tosses. When you’re playing cards with people you watch their hands a lot and the way they use their fingers—it’s hard not to—so I noticed that Jamie would sometimes manipulate a card by pincering it between the pad of her middle finger and the nail of her forefinger, which seemed unusual to me. I also became self-conscious about my own hands, which are blunt. They’re the Countryman hands, good for squaring lumber and durable in cold weather, but decidedly inelegant carpenter’s mitts, right down to the broad nails and deeply dimpled joints, the wrists with their bony outside protuberances and the thick metacarpals with valleys between them. My hands are pawlike, and when I gesture with them in front of my students, employing them for emphasis as I talk, I’m sometimes conscious that they’re lacking in grace, and that was what I felt in the Monte Sella bar playing Kings in the Corner with Jamie.

We lingered. There were two things that mattered, from my point of view. The first was that Jamie went to Portland State University, which is only 172 miles from Seattle. The second was that she was saddened, nearly to the point of tears, by the fact that she didn’t know what to do with her life. “I take classes to take classes,” Jamie said. Yet she wasn’t being melodramatic—she was just being serious about her future in a way that got to me. Although, looking back, it’s probably even simpler. Taking nothing away from Jamie, her attractions, I was always ready, from the time I was thirteen, to marry the first girl who came along.