The View from Mount Joy (7 page)

“I sure hope so.”

Kristi took a box of Marlboros out of her purse and offered me one.

Shaking my head, I said, “I didn’t know you smoked. Cigarettes, that is.”

Her eyes lit up. “You got some dope?”

“No.”

“Bummer. And I don’t. Smoke cigarettes, that is. At least not habitually. It’s against cheerleading rules.” She offered me a conspiratorial smile. “But you know what I think about rules.”

“I know you like to break some of them. But there are other rules I’m not so sure about.”

“Like which ones?” she asked, opening her window. As winter air skated into the front seat, the car lighter popped out and she lit her cigarette.

“Well,” I said, touching her hair, “shouldn’t there be a rule about me having to, well, having to return your very generous favors?”

Shaking her head to dislodge my hand, she took a long drag, and the smoke she exhaled drifted into the icy air.

“You mean like go down on me?”

Like a Labrador retriever begging his master to throw the stick, I nodded wildly.

Kristi laughed and inhaled again. “I don’t think so.” She released an oblong smoke ring and we both watched as it wafted toward the open window before disintegrating. “I mean, no offense, but that would just seem too boyfriendy-girlfriendy.”

Boyfriendy-girlfriendy?

“So for now it’s just blow jobs?”

“If you’re lucky,” she said, shifting the gear stick into drive. The old Ford LTD fishtailed as she pulled out onto the snow-packed road, and she chuckled while I sat with my hands on my lap, feeling as powerless and hopeful as a girl.

I lay there contemplating the deep yellow rings of Saturn and the bright red Mars my uncle had painted on the ceiling. I was beat from the long treacherous ride, but my mind was too busy to relax, let alone sleep. For weeks now I’d been on the losing side of a battle for sleep. I don’t use the word
battle
indiscriminately; from Kristi’s first ambush, I had been excited, unsettled, and on watch, like a soldier waiting for the next encounter and what the ramifications of that encounter might be.

It wasn’t as if I was in a slump, but I wasn’t scoring like I had been in those first couple prove-myself games. To make things worse, Blake was the sort of team captain who believed in positive reinforcement and never failed to mention the nice plays I’d made each game, to which I would think:
If you only knew.
I did feel guilty—I mean, I liked the guy—but hell, could I help it if he wasn’t satisfying his girlfriend on a certain level? And Shannon—our backseat play seemed just that:
play.
And now that I’d sampled a bit of the serious stuff, play was sorta boring. And if we weren’t making out, Shannon was talking, and that’s where she and my interest parted company.

“Are you seeing someone else?” she asked one evening after I declined her invitation to go to the “library.”

The telephone receiver slipped from my grip.

“Seeing someone else? What makes you think I’m seeing someone else?” My voice, high and wounded, reeked of guilt, but apparently Shannon didn’t pick up on this because she quickly offered me an apology.

“I’m sorry, Joe. It’s just that we seem to be drifting and that’s the last thing I want to do with you…drift, I mean.”

I rolled my eyes and offered that I didn’t want to drift either.
More like paddle away as fast as I can!
But I didn’t say that either because in truth, I really didn’t know what I wanted or what I wanted to do.

Darva sensed I was going through some weird shit; I could see it in her frank, squint-eyed assessment of me every time I sat down at our art table. But the break in our friendship hadn’t healed yet, at least not enough to bear the weight of a confession. Not that I really wanted to make one.

My life was snarled up enough for me to think that even Christmas spent with a grandma who could scald your skin with her bitterness was a reprieve. At least I knew what to expect here; tomorrow at dinner I, like my aunt and mother, would gnaw through the turkey my grandmother seemed to dehydrate rather than roast, and I would strain to come up with a sincere thanks for whatever personal hygiene product she had ordered from her favorite mail-order catalog (usually soaps tethered by rope or dimpled to look like golf balls and one stellar year, a shoe shine kit housed in a vinyl container shaped like a boot).

I could also expect the tension that would hail Aunt Beth’s reading of my uncle Roger’s letter. Grandma would shake her head and purse her mouth, her lips wrinkling, as if they’d been pulled tight by a drawstring, scowling over the letter’s every description, as if labyrinthine bazaars, lava-spewing mountains, or coconut-throwing monkeys might be of interest to someone, but they sure weren’t to her.

On this three-day trip, I also knew my mom and aunt would clean out the laundry room that Grandma used as an all-purpose storage bin; I knew they would give her a permanent wave to the accompaniment of Dean Martin and Perry Como’s Christmas albums; I knew they would bake and freeze enough casseroles to keep her going until spring thaw; I knew they would bend over backward to make an old woman be something she wasn’t genetically capable of being: happy.

And so to help everyone out, I tried extrahard to be the king of cheer, Mr. Entertainment, the comedian—sometimes even to the point of raising Grandma’s frown into a semi-smile. No sense letting out the real miserable what-the-hell-is-going-on Joe and bumming everyone out.

Six

From the
Ole Bulletin,
January
1972:

ANNUAL “BEAT THE WINTER BLUES” SHOW SCHEDULED

by Alison O’Grady

“In 1964 we had the entire football team doing a pas de deux from
Swan Lake,
” chuckles Mrs. Holbrook, advisor to the drama club. “In 1968 Paulette Renfrow sang a medley from
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
As you know, our Paulette went on to become first runner-up in the Miss Minnesota contest just last year.”

Are there any burgeoning beauty queens who can sing in this year’s lineup? Any macho football players willing to don tutus for a laugh?

We’ll find out on February 21, when the annual “Beat the Winter Blues” will be put on by the most talented—or brave—students of Ole Bull High.

“We’re looking for all kinds of acts,” says Mrs. Holbrook. “We pride ourselves on the diversity of our lineup—so whatever your talent is, be sure to come and try out!”

Tryouts are the fifteenth and sixteenth of this month at three-thirty in room
304.
Mrs. Holbrook advises singers to bring their own sheet music.

“Did you hear Debbie Teague’s p.g.?”

“Who’s Debbie Teague?”

Kristi rolled her eyes, one of her favorite gestures.

“Only little Miss Perfect—or tried to be. Ha! I guess she didn’t try hard enough!”

I had been told to meet Kristi in the empty audiovisual office, and I was impatient with the social commentary, anxious to get down to the wonderful business of fellatio.

“Shouldn’t we get started?” I asked, unbuttoning my fly.

“My, my, don’t we have a sense of entitlement,” said Kristi, fanning out her fingers to admire her pink frosted fingernails.

“No,” I said quickly, feeling a rush of panic, as if I was an alcoholic who’d been cut off by the bartender before I even sat down at the bar. “No, I was just…uh, so what happed to this Debbie girl?”

“She’s pregnant! Her parents shipped her off to some home for wayward girls to wait out the blessed event.
Debbie Teague!
I’ve gone to school with her since kindergarten and I don’t know that there’s an honor roll she hasn’t been on, a brownie point she hasn’t tried to earn
…Debbie Teague!
She was the straightest girl I know!”

“I bet she’s bummed,” I said, when what I wanted to say was,
Come on, come on, come on!

“Yeah, bummed that for being so smart, she couldn’t figure out how to use a little birth control!”

Leave it to Kristi to make gloating look attractive. Her moral superiority and cheer over someone else’s misfortune brought a flush to her cheeks and a glitter to her green eyes that left me, well, attracted. Still, I decided a risky move might be the only way to get things started.

“I’m sorry to hear about your friend,” I said, standing up, “but I guess I should get to class.”

Smiling, Kristi pushed me back into the swivel chair.

“Don’t you want what you came here for?”

Do you even have to ask such a stupid question?

“Well, sure,” I said, all nonchalance. “I mean, if you want to.”

Kristi laughed. Sitting on the desk facing me, she put her feet on the chair and pushed them so the chair moved side to side.

“Debbie Teague’s not my friend. But she was the accompanist for the Beat the Winter Blues show. And since she’s now
indisposed,
and Mrs. Holbrook is having a hard time finding a replacement, I told her I’d ask you.”

I planted my feet on the floor to stop the slow rocking back and forth.

“Nah.” I could play stuff like “Till There Was You” and “Send in the Clowns” at home, but I sure wasn’t going to do it onstage. “Thanks but no thanks.”

“Come on,” said Kristi. “Mrs. Holbrook’s my favorite teacher and she doesn’t ask just any lame-o to student-direct. She asked me because she has confidence that I can get done what needs to get done. Besides, you’re such a good player, Joe.”

“Nope. Not interested.”

Kristi feigned a big, shoulder-lifting sigh and folded her hands in her lap.

“Well, if that’s the way you want it,” she said, her voice sweet. She pivoted and pushed herself off the side of the desk. “Only you might as well know: If you can’t do this one simple favor for me, consider all future favors from me over.”

I gulped. “By favors you mean…?”

“Uh-huh,” said Kristi, smiling as sweetly as a candy striper asked by her first patient to tell him a little about herself.

“You mean now?”

“Now and who knows how many more times?” said Kristi, and before she finished her sentence, I had agreed to the trade by unbuttoning my jeans.

I wound up having an okay time at the talent show. Because of hockey, I only made it to one rehearsal, but it’s not like I needed more. I mean, it wasn’t like I was a beginning piano student.

“Wow, you’re good,” said a girl named Holly after I’d accompanied her while she sang the Carpenters’ “Close to You.”

“You are,” agreed Miss Holbrook. “In fact, if you’d like to vamp at all between acts, feel free.”

And so I did. Kristi, as the student-director, had cast herself as emcee, and on the night of the performance, she walked out onto the stage in a black sparkly evening gown, basking in the enthusiastic applause and whistles the male half of the audience gave her.

She pushed down the air with her hands and finally the crowd quieted.

“All right, then, without further ado, let’s move on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen—Pete and Petey!”

A skinny little ventriloquist came out carrying a dummy. I played “Me and My Shadow.” The audience laughed, and as Pete settled himself on the stool, the dummy looked in my direction and said, “Oh, so we got a wise guy at the piano, huh?”

None of the soloists I played for had bad voices, but none of them had great ones either; the fun for me came in the music I’d play in between acts, or to introduce them.

Before Sharon Winters came onstage in her leotard (a costume that nearly upstaged Kristi’s) to do a gymnastic routine, I played “Ain’t She Sweet.” Before the identical twin brothers who juggled came out, I played “All Shook Up.” To introduce Leonard Doerr, I played “He’s So Fine.” It could have been a pricky thing to do—Leonard Doerr, after all, was probably the antithesis of the kind of guy the Chiffons were singing about—but he laughed when he heard it, and then surprised everyone by his act, which was a series of impressions. He did Johnny Carson and Rod Serling and then Johnny Carson as Carnac the Magnificent doing Rod Serling.

“
The Twilight Zone,
” he said, holding up an imaginary envelope to his head. After a moment, he pretended to open the envelope and read what was inside.

“What do students call Mr. Lehman’s advanced geometry class?”

The joke was a C© but the impression was an A®, and he followed that with a Mick Jagger impression and then Richard Nixon doing Mick Jagger.

“Pat—I just can’t get no satisfaction,” he said in Nixon’s gravelly, jowl-shaking voice, and the audience howled.

He got wild applause, and after he took a bow, Kristi came out from the wings and kissed him on the cheek.

“Pat,” he said, flashing the peace sign to the crowd, “let’s spend the night together.”

The show should have ended there, but there was enough talent at Ole Bull High for another half hour of entertainment before Kristi wrapped the show up by sitting behind a drum kit and blasting out a version of “Wipe Out.” My impulse was to jump in by playing the guitar part on piano. It was just backup stuff, because this was entirely Kristi’s show. Man, could that girl
drum.
The drumsticks in her hands were a blur as they battered the snare drum and the toms, and when she crashed the cymbals at the end, the whole audience erupted in a wild ovation. From the smile she threw at me, you knew she would have accepted nothing less.

After the show, the cast members received their fans out in the hallway.

“Whoa,” said Coach Teschler, slapping me on the back. “Quite the piano man, Andreson!”

“Sharon—nice moves!” said Charlie Olsen, his voice like a wolf whistle.

“
Du bist sehr gut!
” said one of Leonard Doerr’s fellow German club members, who swarmed around him.

My mom and aunt found me in the crowd.

“For the maestro!” said my aunt Beth, handing me a cellophane-covered cone of roses.

“What’s this? You never give me flowers after a hockey game.”

“You’d never forgive me.”

“You’re right,” I said.

My mother had sidled up to me, sneaking in a sideways hug.

“You were so good,” she said, and the happiness on her face made me think of something Jay Mitvedt said upon hearing that our sixth-grade class had won the school paper drive. As captain, Jay had been urging us for weeks to “collect as many newspapers as you can” and the day of the drive, he nervously watched each classroom add to their piles of paper, paying particular attention to room 307, who had one kid whose mother emptied out an entire station wagon of twine-tied newspaper bundles. When the announcement of our victory came over the PA system, Jay had shouted, “This is a cherry-on-top-of-a-whole-hot-fudge-sundae kind of day!” and at the time I remember thinking,
Geez, it’s only a paper drive,
but right now, looking from my mother’s face to Kristi’s, I could understand the sentiment.

“Joe, what pretty flowers,” she said, and reflexively I stuck out my hand, presenting them to her.

“Well, thanks!” said Kristi. She held them in the crook of her arm, like a beauty queen, and said hello to my mom and Beth.

“He plays piano like Elton John
and
gives me flowers!”

“He
is
thoughtful,” said my aunt Beth, smiling. “And you—my gosh, what a great drummer!”

“And a wonderful emcee,” added my mother. “And just look at you—what a beautiful dress.”

“I dug it out of the costume bin. Mrs. Holbrook said the last time someone wore it was when they put on
Dinner at Eight
back in the sixties.”

“Well, you certainly do look lovely,” agreed my aunt.

“I second that emotion,” said Blake Erlandsson, and it suddenly seemed we were besieged by people—Mays and Lamereau from the hockey team, Greg Hoppe and some other kids from the paper, and Shannon.

“Joe, I felt like I was watching Liberace or something!” she said, and I thought,
Gee, thanks,
and then she kissed me and what I thought was:
No thanks.