The View from Mount Joy (4 page)

Shannon was wearing a green dress whose many tiers of ruffles didn’t do her any favors; really, she sort of looked like an upside-down artichoke.

But Kristi—well, as usual, Kristi was something else.

She wore knee-high black boots under a long red and black dress slit up the front to reveal a very short pair of red hot pants. It was scooped in the front, just low enough to advertise,
Hey, boys, this way to Breast World!
Her hair had been pinned up on top of her head, except for two little ringlets that zigzagged in front of her ears, and I thought having to deal with Shannon’s sullen mood (we’d lost the homecoming game that afternoon, 21–7, and she was rah-rah enough to still be carrying the burden of defeat) was a small price to pay for being in the presence of the gorgeous vision that was Kristi.

“Okay, you kids better get going,” said Mimi. “We don’t want to make the cutest couples late for the big dance!”

My mother had been willing to obey protocol, but when Mimi opened her arms to hug us all and wish us “a magical night,” my mother felt free to do the same. She was always hugging and kissing me at home, but I had long ago given her orders “not to make a public spectacle, Ma. I’m not kidding.”

Touching their triceps, she dipped herself politely toward each of my friends, saving her big embrace for me.

“Have a wonderful time, honey,” she whispered in my ear. “I love you!”

“You too,” I whispered, worming my way out of her arms and her suffocating momness.

As school mascot, Shannon had been given the honor of announcing the homecoming court. The rest of us serfs stood on the edges of the gym, watching the royal procession.

“I voted for you,” I whispered to Kristi, who didn’t seem to be clapping as enthusiastically as the rest of the onlookers.

“You don’t know how many people have told me that,” she said as she watched Blake, who’d been crowned king at an assembly earlier in the week, escort the queen up a paper walkway that was supposed to signify the red carpet. “If you ask me, the whole thing is rigged.” She offered Blake a sour smile and a slight wave as he passed, and then, taking my hand, said, “Come on, Joe.”

A surprised thrill—on the whole, not a bad feeling—zipped through me.

We cut behind the crowd of people and out a side door.

“Where’re we going?” I asked as Kristi pulled me down the hallway.

“To the car,” she said. “To get this party in gear.”

Opening the driver’s door of Mr. Erlandsson’s Lincoln Continental (“You can’t take those pretty girls in your dinky little Maverick!” he had said, throwing Blake his keys), she nodded at me to get in on the passenger side.

“Reach under your seat and give me that purse, will you?”

Obediently I did as I was told and watched as she took a joint out of the black satin bag and punched in the dashboard’s cigarette lighter.

“Sometimes they do random checks at the door,” she explained, lighting the joint. She took a long inhale and passed it to me.

“Are you sure this is okay?” I said, regretting my words as soon I’d said them.

“Oh man, don’t tell me you’re a wuss too?”

“No, not at all,” I said, taking a toke from the joint. I tried to hold in the smoke, but it tumbled out of my throat in a cough.

Kristi laughed. “Yeah, you’re a pro.” She took the joint and drew in a deep inhale. “But at least you’re a little open-minded.” Her voice strained through her clenched throat. “Blake’s so straight he won’t even try it. He says he doesn’t want to break team rules. Not like it’s even hockey season yet.” She exhaled and waved the rush of smoke out the open window. “God, he’ll be pissed if he smells dope in his dad’s car.”

“Maybe we should leave,” I suggested.

“We will, when we finish this,” said Kristi, handing me the joint.

The fact that I could count on one hand the times I’d smoked dope wasn’t because of ideology but availability; beer was the preferred party favor in Granite Creek, and weed was available only when Dan Powers’s brother was home from Iowa State.

“I mean, really,” said Kristi. “Colleen Whitley? Colleen ‘I’ve-got-a-mustache’ Whitley? Come on! I wouldn’t say she’s a dog, but I hear she enjoys a nice bowl of Alpo for breakfast.”

Proud of myself for not coughing, I exhaled out the window and turned to her.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The homecoming queen! There’s no way I didn’t get enough votes to at least be a lousy
princess,
let alone the queen! It’s all rigged, I’m telling you—that skanky Miss Rudd is in charge of the vote counting, and she hasn’t liked me since I put too much food coloring in the Christmas cookies in her stupid home ec class.”

I looked at her fingernails as she took the joint; they were painted the color of pink you see inside seashells.

“I wonder if I could hear the ocean if I listened to your fingernails,” I said.

Kristi laughed. “Oh man, you’re
stoned.
” She took another deep toke, and after she exhaled, I took her hand and held it up to my ear.

I made a slow shushing sound.

“I was right,” I said. “It is the ocean!”

I made the shushing sound again.

“The secrets of the Caribbean—all inside your fingernails!”

Laughing, Kristi pulled her hand away. “Not only are you stoned, you’re
weird.
”

When we got back to the gym, the band was doing a serviceable cover of America’s “Ventura Highway” and Kristi untied Blake from his knot of friends and dragged him onto the dance floor.

The phrase
What am I—chopped liver?
came into my head followed by a wave of marijuana-induced reflections:
How did chopped liver get such a bad rap? Why doesn’t someone say, “What am I—minced beef tongue?” or “What am I—diced gizzards?” Or how about sliced head cheese? Wouldn’t sliced head cheese be the wallflower of the butcher case?

“So
there
you are,” said my date. I had heard friendlier voices.

“Shannon!” I said. “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

Her forehead crimped. “Is that supposed to be funny?”

“It’s supposed to be, but if you don’t agree, I won’t hold it against you,” I said in a fair Cary Grant impersonation. “I will, however, hold
me
against you. Come on, let’s dance.”

Shannon gave me the kind of look stoned blather like that deserved but let me take her hand, and surprise, surprise, we started to have fun.

She was a good dancer and, thanks to my mother’s lessons, so was I. When the band played “Colour My World,” she followed my lead, and we glided through the clumps of couples who thought hugging one another and swaying constituted slow dancing.

“The last time I got to dance like this was my cousin’s wedding,” said Shannon. “Not many boys know how to
dance
dance.”

I dipped her backward, and the green ruffles of her dress fluttered like leaves in a spring breeze.

“But you are forgetting, I am not a boy,” I said, now Maurice Chevalier. I pulled her back up. “I am a man.”

During the band’s break, we gathered around a table where a few teachers and parents were dispensing punch and cookies.

“Hope you move just as good on the ice rink as you do on the dance floor,” said Mr. Teschler, handing me a Styrofoam cup of punch.

“Well, I
can
do a nice little rumba while I’m back-checking,” I said to the hockey coach.

He laughed, thank God, even as I screamed to myself:
“Rumba while I’m back-checking?” Not only is he going to think you’re stoned, he’s going to think you’re a homo!

After the band played “Cherish” and the lights came on, Shannon said, surprise in her voice, “That was
really
fun.”

“It was,” I said, just as surprised. I felt a mellowness that was either residue from the pot (the fun-and-wonder rush had long since burned off) or from all the dancing.

In the backseat, I put my arm around Shannon, and before Blake had driven out of the parking lot, we were making out.

I put my hand inside her coat and my hands made little swishing sounds as they made their way up and down those slippery ruffles. Shannon had pressed herself into me, and the weight of her breasts against my chest and her tongue in my mouth made me breathless, yet I thought this kind of suffocation might not be such a bad way to go.

“Hey, are you lovebirds coming in?” asked Kristi, leaning over the front seat to slap my knee.

Shannon turned her face away from mine. “Where are we?”

“The Coliseum,” said Blake. “We’re gonna get some pizza.”

Shannon looked at me. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah,” I said, kissing her.

We steamed up the windows good, but kissing was all Shannon was willing to do, batting my hands away anytime they wandered south or north.

When we finally dragged ourselves out of the car, Shannon stumbled and I grabbed her arm so she wouldn’t fall.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, “I feel like I’m drunk or something!”

Holding her face in my hands, I kissed her, pleased that she had found me intoxicating.

The dim, candlelit restaurant was packed with Ole Bull kids, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Love the One You’re With” was playing on the jukebox.

“Over here, you guys!” shouted Kristi, waving from a crowded table, and as we sat down on two chairs at the end, she gestured toward the half-eaten pizzas in the middle of the table.

“While you guys were out in the car losing your virginity, we took the liberty of ordering.”

“We were not losing our virginity!” sputtered Shannon, to the amusement of everyone at the table, and with a sudden urge to practice chivalry, I decided to defend her honor.

“Yeah,” I said, helping myself to a piece of pepperoni. “We were just looking for yours. We heard you gave it to the busboy out in the back alley years ago.”

There were a few whoops of laughter, but they were quickly swallowed in deference to Kristi. A cloud of silence floated over the table.

“Hey,” I said, shrugging at the girl whose eyes were throwing daggers, swords, and scythes at me. “It was just a joke.”

“Well,
duh,
” said Kristi finally. “I’d never give my virginity to a busboy. Maybe a cook, but never a busboy.” Flashing her dimples, she laughed, and as the whole table laughed with her, I had the distinct impression that I had just sidestepped a land mine.

A confetti of daisy petals fell as I walked Shannon to her door.

“My poor corsage,” said Shannon, cupping what remained of the flowers bunched together on her wrist.

“Oh well,” she said, looking up at me with a smile. “Thanks for a great time.”

“It
was
a great time,” I said, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice. “I’ll call you, okay?”

Shannon nodded, and as she leaned against the door, I leaned against her, topping off an evening of good kisses with one final tongue-intensive one.

I could have stood there all night, melding into the warmth of her green-ruffled body, but then the porch light came on, and if that isn’t a signal to leave, I don’t know what is.

“Did you have a good time?” asked my mother, who was curled up on the couch, reading.

“Sure,” I said, sitting next to her. “Whatcha reading?”

She held up the book so I could read the title.

“
Jane Eyre
? Again?”

My mother smiled. “I don’t know if you can ever read
Jane Eyre
too many times.”

“I feel that way about
Mad
magazine.”

She pushed some hair off my forehead with her fingers; she’d been trying to rearrange my hair since I was a kid. When I reflexively tossed my head back out of her reach, she took my hand instead. I didn’t pull it away. I don’t know of many guys who’d sit holding hands with their mother, or at least any that would admit it, but hey, it wasn’t as if there were cameras in the room. My mind was all over the place, flashing on Shannon and the way her pillowy breasts felt pressed against my chest; on getting high with Kristi and how dope smoke tastes so raw in your throat, like a wet weed burning; on the lyrics to Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” which was all over the radio; on wondering if he ever thought,
What am I doing in Wings, man? I used to be a
Beatle
!
; on wondering how much my paycheck from Haugland’s would be because of working overtime last Saturday.

We sat on my aunt’s corduroy couch for a long time, both of us staring into the fireplace, and our clasped hands were like our little anchor, holding us down as we flew off with our own crazy thoughts.

Three

A letter to the editor in the
Ole Bulletin,
November
17, 1971:

I have seen rudeness and immaturity before in school assemblies (who can forget the less than welcoming response to “Up with People!”) but never to the extent that was exhibited during Officer Jeffrey O’Conner’s “Drugs Are Dumb” program.

We are seniors in high school! Is there any need to interrupt an interesting, informative program with comments like “Do you know where I can score a nickel bag?” or “Hi—I wish I was”? Those hecklers thought they were pretty funny to disrupt, but their bravado was nowhere to be found when Mr. Brietmayer asked them to stand and identify themselves!

Let’s not let some drug-infatuated hoodlums taint others’ perception of our wonderful school. To those hoodlums who are bent on disruption and, more so, on tainting the good name of our school, I repeat Officer O’Conner’s lecture title: Drugs are dumb! And you’re the evidence!

Katherine Bleursten

A letter to the editor in the
Ole Bulletin,
November
24, 1971:

Regarding K. Bleursten’s rant in last week’s paper: who died and made her our parents? I for one did not find the narc’s program to be interesting or informative, but rather a dull and
un
informed lecture that in no way addressed the reality of marijuana use. When is our government going to see that on the list of societal problems, the occasional use of pot is not one of them? We all need a little something to lighten our load; when Officer O’Conner pushes aside his after-hours beer or rum and Coke, I’ll ash my after-hours joint. Until then, I’ll be lighting up if for nothing else than to help myself forget that in my generation there are people like Katherine Bleursten.

For obvious reasons I remain,

Anonymous

Memo to: Floyd Lutz, advisor to the
Ole Bulletin

From: Robert Brietmayer, principal

Dear Floyd,

I’ve been fielding a couple of calls regarding the editorial page of last week’s paper and I’ve got to say, while I believe in freedom of the press and all, I can see where a parent’s nose might get out of joint. That is to say, we don’t want to paint a picture of Ole Bull as a haven for drug users!

I admire the tireless work you’ve done as advisor to the paper for the past ten years, but there are lines we don’t want to cross, Floyd, and this may be one of them.

If you have any questions as to what constitutes a letter that inspires good debate versus a letter that inspires unnecessary agitation and grief, let me know and I’ll be glad to help you edit!

Along with my Roving Reporter duties, I had gravitated to the op-ed page and had forged a partnership with Greg Hoppe, writing commentary together. Mr. Lutz didn’t seem to think it a breach of journalistic ethics if we occasionally wrote an anonymous rebuttal to a particularly stupid letter, particularly ones written by a certain Katherine Bleursten, who as student council president had lobbied for student uniforms and addressing teachers as “sir” and “ma’am.”

“Sorry about that,” I said, after reading the memo Mr. Brietmayer had sent to Mr. Lutz. “We didn’t want to get you into trouble.”

Mr. Lutz took the paper from my hand and crumpled it up.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, tossing it into the round file. “Brietmayer sends me about a dozen of these a year. It’s when he doesn’t respond to an issue that I think we’ve failed in our duty.”

“What’s our duty again, boss?” asked Hoppe, squinting at the copy he’d just written on the typewriter.

“To cause a little brain activity.”

Mr. Lutz poured the last of his coffee into his cup—by the end of zero hour he’d always emptied his big plaid Thermos, but other than tapping his pencil a little faster, he gave no signs that he was overcaffeinated. “So keep writing those hard-hitting letters, boys. Keep answering back to those people whose imaginations aren’t big enough to question authority.”

Hoppe and I looked at each other. It was great having a teacher who told us, in so many words, that it was okay to give the finger.

“Does Shannon ever wear that fur costume when you’re getting it on?”

I sighed, pretending not to hear.

“I said, does Shannon ever—”

Shaking my head, I leveled my most withering glance at Darva. “You’re interrupting my muse.”

“Joe, if your muse is responsible for that, I’m doing you a favor by interrupting it.”

We were in art class, working on our soap sculptures, and Darva was right—mine looked more like a dropped ice cream cone than a reclining nude, which had been my intention.

“Not all of us have your talent, Ms. Nevelson.”

Darva laughed and smooched the air with her lips. “I love that you know who Louise Nevelson is. I love that you said ‘Ms.’”

“Whatever floats your boat.” Examining my sculpture, I wondered if I should whittle away what I’d intended to be arms, and claim defeat:
Yeah, I
meant
it to be an ice cream cone.

“Joseph, you look frustrated,” said Mr. Eggert, our art teacher. In his suit and tie, he looked like an accounting teacher, but I didn’t know of many accounting teachers who’d play Sly and the Family Stone along with Emerson, Lake & Palmer and the Mothers of Invention during class time.

“Music is not only a stand-alone art,” he told us the first time he put
Plastic Ono Band
on the stereo. “It’s a helper art too. It unleashes those receptors in your brain that spark creativity.”

“I already had a name for it,” I said, holding out my palm, showing him my sad little blob of soap. “
Limpid Nude.
But now I think I’ve got to call it
Limpid Rocky Road.
”

Cocking his head, Mr. Eggert pressed together his narrow lips, which were bordered in the bluish stubble of his five o’clock shadow. After a moment of appraisal, he said, “I believe the second title more accurately explains the work.”

He had kinder words for Darva, who’d carved the insides of a broken watch.

“Once again, Miss Pratt, you amaze me.”

Darva beamed. She’d told me she had wanted to be an artist from the first time she held a crayon and added her own flowers to the violets already existing on her bedroom wallpaper. She was Mr. Eggert’s pet, but understandably so; her work was leagues ahead of the rest of ours.

As the art teacher walked around the tables, offering encouragement and advice, I went back to work, paring away at my nude and turning her into a dairy product.

“Hey, you’re not going to have anything left,” said Darva, watching me as shavings of soap fell to the table.

“Maybe I don’t want to have anything left,” I said, cutting deeper into the soap. “Maybe I want to create nothingness.”

“Existential art,” said Darva. She flicked the drapery of her long black hair behind her shoulders and laughed. “Cool.”

She waited for a moment—I think for my response—and when I didn’t offer one, she asked, “So you’re coming tonight, right?”

“Coming where?”

“To the planning meeting.”

My mind thumbed through pages of my mental calendar and came up with only one thing: my date with Shannon. We were going to the library to study—code for parking by the river.

“Uh, sorry, Darv, I’ve got plans.”

Anytime something bothered her, she flexed the little muscles at her jaw hinges, and I didn’t need to look at her to know that they were getting a workout now. I would have been happy if she’d spent the rest of the hour engaged in her jaw isometrics, but she was not concerned with making me happy.

“I thought these were your plans. At least they were when I asked you last week, remember? ‘Yeah, sure I’ll come,’” she said, and with her impersonation she made me sound both retarded and dishonest.

“Well, something came up,” I said, trying to keep the defensiveness out of my voice. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Darva sighed. “The world disappoints me, Joe. It just hurts a little more when a friend does.”

I smiled then, thinking that if she was back to making her world-weary jokes, I was in the clear. Only I could see by the hurt on her face that she wasn’t joking, and I felt bad.

But guilt always buckled under the tonnage of lust, and so later that night, while Darva sat in a booth at the Canteen with her band of believers who thought whatever protest they planned could somehow have an effect on stopping the war in Viet Nam, I was in the backseat of Shannon’s Delta 88, using my powers of persuasion for an entirely different cause.

“Come on, Shannon,” I said, trying to wiggle my hands free of her iron grasp. “Pretend I’m Columbus and you’re Queen Isabella, and you’ve hired me to explore the unknown.”

I thought if I could get her laughing, her defenses might drop a little. I was half right; she did laugh, but held fast to her no-hands-below-the-waist rule.

“You can beg all you want, Joe,” she said, moving my hands up under her sweater to her bare breasts. “If you can’t be happy with what I’m willing to give you, well, then, let’s just go home.”

“I’m happy, I’m happy,” I said; who wouldn’t be with his hands around such sweet round nippled melons? And as much I would have loved to travel south, Shannon’s rigorous patrol of the borders kept not only her safe but me too. I would have loved the sweet thrill of having my hands—or Lord, my dick—in her pants, but it sure made things a lot easier knowing I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready to have a girlfriend I actually got it on with; whatever responsibilities went along with that seemed too big and complicated for me to deal with. As long as Shannon’s mouth, her tongue, and especially those luscious breasts were available to me, I wasn’t going to complain. Too loudly.

The fact was, I loved to kiss, and the more I kissed Shannon, the less we had to talk. Shannon might have had an expansive mind, but if she did, a large part of it had been fenced off and was being used as grassland. If our conversation had to do with something other than who was going out with whom or a recounting of everything she had eaten that day, well, she wasn’t interested.

Once I’d asked her if she thought Nixon’s opening up of relations with China was a good idea, and she said, “Joe, why don’t we just go back to my house and you can sit around the living room and talk to my parents about that.”

Now she sat up, looking at the dashboard clock.

“Oh, geez, Joe, look at the time. I’ve got to go.”

Just like that, I was yanked out of our body-to-body bliss.

“Come on,” I said, trying to pull her back down. “It’s still early.”

Elbowing me away, Shannon corralled her breasts into the confines of her bra. “The library closes at eight. I told my parents I’d be home right after.”

Considering how cautiously she drove—braking at every corner to look to her left, her right, and her left again—I was home in no time, deposited on the curb in front of my aunt Beth’s house like a piece of furniture the Salvation Army was slated to pick up.

I stood there in the cool autumn evening, thinking of the excitement that awaited me inside the house—a game of Monopoly with the family (whoopee!), a review of my math homework (yee-haw!)—and then I remembered my mom and aunt had gone to a piano recital. My options of thrills and chills having decreased by half, I trudged toward the house and the yawning abyss that was my calculus book when a lightbulb blinked on in my head.

The antiwar meeting. I still had time to get to the Canteen and help save the world and my friendship with Darva.

Hopping on my bike, I pedaled as if I was being timed, nearly wiping out twice on the mats of wet leaves that lay wrinkled against the curb. By the time I got to the coffee shop, my thigh muscles were reminding me I had a week or two worth of drills before I’d be in prime hockey-playing shape.

There were two sections to the Canteen: the coffee shop, in which diners sat salting their fries at a horseshoe counter or plugging quarters into the little jukeboxes with which every booth was equipped, and the “dining room” to the left, boasting a fancier atmosphere, thanks to carpeting and wall sconces.