“They estimated sixty,” said Stein happily.
I looked at him for traces of insanity or frostbite and found neither.
“We needed to test out our new sleeping bags,” he explained. “They were supposed to be fit for arctic weather, so the holidays were perfect for trying them out.”
I thought, imagine. Camping. Voluntarily. In this weather. “And were they?” I said. “Perfect, I mean?” I sustained myself up the second flight of stairs with a vision of my future camping expeditions. The Florida Keys, perhaps. White sand for miles, hot blue sky above me, blazing yellow sun turning me a golden tan.
“It was great,” said Stein. “Terrific.” He helped me negotiate a turn in the stairs. “One more floor,” he said, with excessive enthusiasm.
He sounded like a one-man cheering squad. I could just hear him on a hike. One more mountain, guys. One more blizzard. Isn’t this great?
At last we reached the top. I leaned against the wall for a moment to pant. The cast was very heavy, and dragging it up two flights was very tiring. Stein looked at me edgily. “Never fear,” I reassured him. “I am not about to faint on you. Just getting my breath back.”
Stein shuddered visibly. At first I thought he was terrified by exhausted women, but then he said, “That broken bone must be awful. You can’t do anything.”
A cast on the foot does not prevent a girl from decorating a dollhouse or watching TV reruns. Stein was thinking of his own life, which was solidly packed with skis, skates, basketballs, hockey pucks, tennis balls, and soccer fields in their seasons.
“I always worry about broken bones,” said Stein. “So far I’ve been real lucky. One broken collarbone and a broken finger, but nothing serious. Never had to have crutches or a sling.”
“But every time you participate in one of your sports, you risk it,” I objected. “Think of the hockey pucks flying in your face.”
“That’s what my mother says. She wants me to be a doctor. She says that way it’s the other people who’ll get hurt.”
I had not known that Stein was capable of making a joke. I’m always ready to laugh so I laughed. But this turned out to be an error. Stein was not kidding around. He was peeved with his mother for not wholly supporting his athletic future.
Stein was handsome, in a shaggy dog sort of way. I wondered what it would be like to go out with him. It would certainly impress everybody. We wouldn’t even have to have fun, or exchange a single interesting remark. All we’d have to do would be appear together and people would be impressed.
What would a girl do with Stein? Other than admire his plays during games, that is. He’d probably ask a girl to go ice fishing, I thought.
Stein glided down the hall, hampered not in the least by my faltering progress. He had that athletic body where every movement seems to involve every perfect muscle, so you always sort of yearn to see him without clothes, so as to admire those muscles working together, like a male chorus.
Now, now, Holly, I said to myself. The only thing you and Stein have in common is that you both breathe. And even that you don’t do in the same fashion. You’re gasping like a fish, and he’s probably got a resting pulse of around ten.
Bet he doesn’t butter his salad, I thought, and suddenly I wanted fiercely to be back in the cafeteria, replaying the whole scene with Jamie, ignoring Lydia, sitting with the junior boys. The junior boys? No. I wouldn’t have done it.
“…the waterfalls in Swann’s Wood,” Stein was saying. “Boy, you should join the Snowmobile Club, Holly. It was only eight miles cross-country, and that waterfall was so beautiful, frozen solid like that. Nature,” said Stein pompously, “at her very best.”
I myself prefer people at their very best. Art museums and restaurants, libraries and airplanes, shoe shops and sidewalks.
I pictured Jamie and me sitting in the Pew slathering butter on our blueberry muffins and talking about People versus Nature.
In chemistry our teacher—he’s one of those supremely boring teachers you get from time to time—droned on about the test we were to have on Friday. He hoped we had spent our holidays fruitfully pursuing our chemistry texts and memorizing our formulas, he said ominously, because on Friday, we would separate the men from the boys.
What a hateful phrase. I visualized our high school separating its men from its boys, and I could see all too well which line Jamie would end up in. Men were seniors.
Stein grinned at me from his side of the room, as bored by the lecture as I was, and he rolled his eyes at the teacher. I was thinking of Jamie when I flushed, but several kids saw the look Stein gave me and my subsequent blush, and they totally misinterpreted it. Oh, no, I thought. Do I need this?
Lisa, next to me, kept clearing her throat to attract my attention. She leaned down on a crooked elbow to hide her face from the teacher and mouthed at me, “You and Stein?”
Her eyes were bright with eagerness. If I nodded—yes, me and Stein—she would smother a giggle and grin triumphantly as if she and I had plotted a long campaign to snag Stein and now I had him.
I wondered what Lisa would say if I told her how I felt about Jamie. Eeeuuuhhh, you like him? But, Holly, he’s a junior!
“Miss Carroll? Did breaking your ankle also deprive you of speech?”
I stared numbly at the teacher and flushed even redder.
“You were asked an important question, Miss Carroll.”
“I’m sorry. Could you repeat it, please?” I hate being caught daydreaming. It makes me feel so stupid, and I felt stupid enough for one day.
“No, I could not. Pay attention, Miss Carroll. That’s a zero for class participation again today.”
Again today? Had I begun making a habit of this kind of thing?
Zero.
Talk about New Year’s omens. So far I’d had: Coordination—zero; Boys—zero; School—zero. Sounded like a really successful year coming up.
Thirteen
THAT NIGHT WHEN I got home, absolutely drained of all energy and ability, I found the first of my college application blanks waiting for me.
Now, I usually love filling out forms. Sometimes on Sunday I entertain myself by filling out all the book club forms and all the mail order forms in the Sunday paper. I write my name very neatly, centering the middle initial perfectly, and when I get to my street address, I get this tiny little pleasure from how distinctive it is. 17 Featherbed Lane. Now there’s an address. Of course, you hear a few raunchy jokes about it and those get pretty tiresome, but it’s so antique and Yankee-sounding and it sure beats North Main or Maple Avenue.
I shoveled the trash off half my desk so I’d have a good form-filling-out space and decided that a college application would be good therapy.
I was wrong. There were five pages of blanks. I am not sufficiently interesting for five pages. Five lines, maybe.
The only successful spot on the whole page was 17 Featherbed Lane, and that certainly wasn’t original with Holly Carroll. The blanks, far from being friendly little white spaces to fill with comforting letter shapes, loomed like a nightmare of gravestones. I was a zero—a nothing—and yet I had to package myself successfully and sell myself to those colleges. On that grayish recycled paper. I had to face the fact that I was not the best student, the most interesting writer of essays, the finest athlete, or the incoming freshman with the most leadership potential. There were going to be all sorts of spaces I’d have to leave blank because I was blank.
I pictured Stein filling out his. He’d need extra paper, the way Honor Society types need extra paper during essay tests. I’m there writing three paragraphs in my most sprawling script, and they’re writing a book, they know so much.
I must capitalize on my strong points, I told myself firmly. I’m okay, they’re okay. I’m number one. Good in Spanish. Really nice hair. Functions exceptionally well in heat waves.
I left the college form on the desk and wandered over to my dollhouse and its new octagonal barn. I need to cut hay, I told myself. Make some mini
ature geraniums out of red tissue and green wire, and plant them along the path from the house.
But the pleasure was gone. It was difficult to believe I had ever actually done that sort of thing. Decorated dollhouses and daydreamed of miniature oriental rugs. That sort of occupation was as remote as the five-year-old for whom it had been made. Right now there was room for nothing in my mind but college and Jamie. Also, Jamie and college. And the general worthlessness of Holly Carroll for either.
I got myself so involved in trying to figure out Truth and Who Am I that I got even more depressed and ended up lying on my bed drowning sobs in the pillow.
If Christopher comes into my room right now, I thought, I’ll murder him. Then I’ll be sent to prison and that will decide the future for me. My career will be making license plates.
I left my room eventually only because I was starving. The only truth I had come upon during my weeping was that food solves a lot of problems. I decided upon an open-faced cheese sandwich. Cheese melting and getting soft and golden brown, running down the sides of a thick slice of whole wheat bread. Yes, the more I considered the toasted cheese sandwich, the more food mattered and the less college did.
Still, when the phone rang, I decided not to answer it. If it wasn’t for me, there was no point in rushing to get the call. I chewed another delectable bite of hot cheese and bread. And if it was for me, I wasn’t interested in discussing anything with anybody anyhow.
“Holly!” yelled Christopher, with a particularly jeering tone in his voice. Rotten little creepy kid brother, I thought. Why didn’t I strangle him back when he was small enough that I could have done it easily? “What?” I bellowed back.
“It’s Katie Bait.” (An old nickname, from when Kate used to go fishing all the time and Christopher hated her because she babysat for him twice and he wished somebody would go fishing with her.)
I got up, cramming the last of the sandwich in my mouth, and went to the phone. Christopher had intelligently withdrawn from the combat area. “Mmhellmo?” I said through the cheese.
“Hollyberry,” said Kate excitedly. “Guess what we’re doing tomorrow?”
“What?”
“Stein had this great idea. Last week he went over through Swann’s Wood to the waterfalls and they’re frozen and extremely beautiful and—”
“Nature at her very best,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“And everybody decided to have a winter picnic by the falls. You and Lydia and Susan and Gary and Stein and me and Ross…”
Oh, no, I thought. Oh, no, oh, no.
Kate was as wound up as a violin string. “It’ll be so much fun!” she squealed. “And just think, Holly. You can get to know Stein better this way. I’ll make sure you share his snowmobile. I think he wants it that way, anyhow. He likes you.”
“I know Stein as well as I need to,” I said. “I’ve been in homeroom with him since September seventh, and if there’s one thing we feature down in that prison it’s intimacy.”
“Holly,” said Kate, getting annoyed. She sounded like my babysitter. I began to identify with Christopher’s feelings toward her. “Holly, Stein likes you.” Intensely, as if we were discussing something important. “Anybody can see that,” Kate went on. “If you’d just put some effort into it, you could get Stein to ask you out. And—there’s nobody better in the whole senior class!”
There’s somebody better in the junior class, I thought. “So drop Gary,” I said, being mean, “and go after Stein.”
Kate said nothing. I was ashamed of myself again. “I’m sorry, Katie,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t have anything much to say to Pete Stein. I like him okay. He’s a fine person. But—”
“At some time in your life,” screamed Kate into the phone, “you have to exert yourself. You can’t always hang around waiting for things to come to you. Sometimes you have to go after them, Holly. Why can’t you try learning about the things Stein likes? Why can’t you go to his next game and cheer for him?”
Why couldn’t Stein learn how to build miniature firescreens? Why couldn’t Stein become involved with afternoon television? Why couldn’t Stein sit around buttering his salad? “I guess I could do that,” I said morosely.
Kate tried to whip up a little enthusiasm describing the glories of Swann’s Wood in January, but I had already had that nature series from Stein himself. Why should I have to change to be attractive? I thought. Why can’t I just be me? Why pretend to be interested? Why fake enthusiasm?
But then I remembered that the real me was getting nothing but zeroes this season. School, coordination, boys, and college applications.
Perhaps what was required here was a new Holly Carroll. A swinging, athletic, enthusiastic, exciting Holly, paired with the best man in the senior class.
I pictured, instead, the best man in the junior class. Hunched over a muffin at the Pew, drinking in that beautiful sight of Nature at her best—butter melting.
I had never even thought of steam engines before Jamie mentioned his, but I’d been instantly interested.
“…by ten o’clock in the morning,” said Kate very firmly. I began to see a future for her in government, ramming unwanted programs down people’s throats. “Be dressed properly, Holly.”
“Okay,” I said. “It’ll be great.” I thought of eight miles of frigid woods, and me on the seat of a snowmobile, the windchill factor molding my cheeks into new shapes. “Terrific,” I told Kate. “I need the fresh air.”
“Forget the fresh air,” said Kate. “Concentrate on Stein.”
Fourteen
MY MOTHER THOUGHT ALL this sounded like marvelous fun, and she smiled with delight thinking about the wonderful time I would have on my winter picnic. She even borrowed a snowmobile outfit (which is just a stylish adult-size snowsuit) from a friend of hers so I’d be properly dressed for the great adventure. The snow-suit was enormously bulky, a muddy pink color with lavender, white, and rose slashes down the leggings. Only color-blind people could even think about wearing it. I put it on and stared down at my doubled waist size.
“You look like a pro football player,” said Christopher.
My father more or less rolled me into the car to take me to Kate’s and embarrassed me horribly by hanging around to chat with everyone about drugs. He’s not very subtle. He’d heard the drug scene was getting bad again, and he wanted to know for sure so he buttonholed each of my friends and asked them where they bought drugs. Everybody said, “I don’t buy,” and “I don’t associate with people who do,” which was probably correct, but they would have said that to Dad no matter what the truth was. Everyone kind of stumbled around hoping not to be asked any more questions.
There was a bad moment when I thought Dad would say a blessing over the picnic basket and the thermoses, but the moment passed without a prayer (except mine to stop him!). My leg was strapped onto the snowmobile to prevent it from falling during the ride and getting tangled in the moving parts (a rather hideous thought), and thanks to Kate’s maneuvering and Stein’s basic lack of interest, I was settled behind Stein.
Actually it was easiest that way. I didn’t have to pretend enthusiasm or utter little sentences of pleasure, because Stein is a doer, not a waster of time on meaningless chat. He just grinned, and we took off.
The engine made an appalling amount of noise. It was the sort of grinding, screaming mechanical racket that is totally offensive when you hear it in the distance, and yet when you’re making it, and it’s your noise, the racket is kind of comforting.
Deafening, though.
Others had used the path before us, and often. It was worn to a smooth road of ice. We’ll all be killed, I thought, as Stein took the curves at speeds that would qualify us for an Olympic bobsledding team. I wondered if Jamie would come to my funeral.
We covered the eight miles to the waterfalls in mere seconds, or so it seemed. I hadn’t even noticed Swann’s Wood go by because I’d been too busy clingin
g to the grip. Stein and I arrived first. Either the others had less horsepower or they were more sane.
Stein stopped the engine and for a moment we just sat there, gazing at the waterfalls.
From between the scattering of evergreens came rays of winter sun, turning the ice to fire and the snow to stars. The waterfalls had frozen as they fell, in great gleaming icicles and enormous rounded nobs and tiny delicate plumes of ice sugar spray. Windblown snow and frost decorated the firs like patches of old lace. Every cluster of pine needles was thick with hardened snow in tight cruel balls, so that the pines looked decorated for Christmas by the icy hand of winter.
Near the skis of the snowmobile was a young fir no more than eighteen inches high. A filigree of ice clung to its tiny branches like a cathedral window star.
The sun reflected so blindingly I got tears in my eyes and had to blink to see.
Thank you, God! I thought unexpectedly. Thank you for so much that’s beautiful. For the ice and the sun and the blue of the sky!
I’ll be darned, I thought. There are still little pockets of religion in me. Who would have guessed?
Immediately, having made friends with God by complimenting Him on his terrific frost patterns, I began wondering what it would be like to talk to God about boys. “God, I think the mating pattern you allowed to evolve here is altogether too difficult. I want you to intervene in my life. Miracles will not be necessary. I want only a softening of the path.”
I giggled softly, and Stein said, “Nice, huh?”
“Yes. Thanks for bringing me.”
“Any time,” said Stein, and he sounded very serious. As if I could phone during the next blizzard at three A.M. and Stein would gladly go out again to admire Nature’s best with me.
I ached to be able to jump up. Circle the little pond. See how the frozen falls looked from behind the stand of birches. Look down into those animal prints immortalized in the crusted snow and guess who visited the pond.
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