“You still have the blue dog,” he said, smiling. “Hey boy, long time no see.” Yes, he was speaking to my art. It struck me as so cute I almost started crying. And I imagined the perpetually expectant look in the blue dog’s oil-on-canvas-on-posterboard eyes softened just a little at the sound of Griff’s voice.
I cleared my throat. “Come on,” I told him. I led him out of the kitchen and down the hall to the rest of my little house, wishing for the first time that it was bigger. When the tour ended we’d have to talk about something other than furnishings and blue dogs and snow, and I had no idea yet what that would be. It was easier to continue stating the obvious. “Bathroom,” I announced, pushing open the door and discreetly kicking a pair of underwear into the corner against the hamper.
“Bathroom,” he repeated, nodding. “All the amenities.”
“And this is basically a junk room,” I said about the second bedroom, which contained my desk, an overloaded bookcase and that box of Simon’s old comics (I realized, for the first time, they smelled). “And my bedroom.“ I didn’t take him in, but rather just walked past it, and then I tapped the two remaining hallway doors. “Closet. Cellar. Cellar’s kind of gross, so we’ll leave that alone.”
And then it was done. We returned to the kitchen, kind of facing each other a few feet apart—on a map of us this space would be labeled Awkwardland. I turned and began wiping off the counter, just something to do, while he looked around taking in details. I wished again that I’d had a chance to clean up more. “So that’s, uh, pretty much—”
“I like it,” he said with a smile. “This place is exactly you.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“The fireplace smells good,” he said.
“That’s my favorite part.”
“Can I stoke it?” he said. “Is that a word? Stoke?”
“I think so.” I looked over the half-wall. The glowing coals in the charred cradle were low and hungry. “Go for it. Stoke away.”
He went to the living room and moved a few pieces of split wood from the bin onto the embers. They snapped at the weight and he leaned away and touched his hair.
“You own this place?” he said. “Or rent?” He curled up in the brown chair, tucking his feet underneath him. He looked at home. He used to sit that way on his bed when he was doing homework, tapping his pen against the spine of a textbook, humming, swearing, asking me to come look at something real quick. Something about roommates, good roommates at least, is that once you live with someone, you always feel like whatever place they’re in now is a little bit yours. Same smell, same stuff—same trinkets and furniture—that once intermixed with your own. He reached over to the stereo and turned my music down, as he’d done so many times before. The familiarity of the action quieted my buzzing nerves.
“My grandparents bought this place a few years ago when my grandpa was sick,” I said. “They were planning some renovations and then they’d move in after he got better—they loved the Cape. Something to look forward to, I guess.” I went into the living room and sat down in the other chair.
“Light at the end of the tunnel?” he said.
“Yeah, well he found the other light first. They never moved in. My grandmother won’t sell it. So yours-truly took over as the official custodian person guy.”
“Sweet.” He laughed. “So you’re squatting.”
“I’m not squatting. Come on. I’m paying the mortgage. It’s fair.”
“Good deal,” he said. “Well not the grandfather part, but you know.” Then I saw the photos on the wall catch his eye. “Hey—is that me?” He got up and went over to them.
“There are a couple of you, yeah.” When I saw him coming up the street I should’ve run inside and taken them all down. They made me feel like some kind of stalker.
He stood with his arms crossed, eyes moving back and forth across the photos. “This one’s fucking funny,” he said, tapping the frame. “Our antics. I like that you have these. Hey, that reminds me—I brought you a present.” He went to his backpack, unzipped a nylon pocket, rummaged around, took out some t-shirts, a few sci-fi paperbacks. “I don’t mean to keep you in suspense—there’s no drum roll necessary. You paid about a hundred and thirty grand for this so I wanted to make sure you got it.” He managed to yank out what he was looking for and held it out to me.
It was my Shuster College yearbook. I took it from him and his fingerprints evaporated from the glossy cover. I traced my finger along the raised gold letters of my name. Vincent J. Dandro. “How’d you get this?”
“You didn’t pick it up at gradua— Ow, fuck that’s cold!” He shook a socked foot out of the puddle by the door. “You didn’t pick it up at graduation, I guess. Beth was on the yearbook staff. She has a whole box of unclaimed books. I don’t know if it’s really legit, but she has them. I guess she’s supposed to mail them out if someone requests theirs, but it doesn’t seem like many people ever do. I was looking through last fall and found yours. Got me thinking about you.”
“I beat it out of there pretty quick that day,” I said, meaning graduation. I opened the yearbook—its spine creaked and it smelled new, like paper, but like something else too. Was it Griff’s house? Their house? I sat down on the ottoman.
“I looked for you after the ceremony,” he said softly, “but yeah, you were gone. Anyway, there was a supplement thing they put out with grad photos and stuff, but I don’t know what happened to that. I think you had to order it or something.”
“It’s OK,” I said. “Thank you.”
“You’re a memory person. It’s good to have.” He gathered up his scattered belongings, separating from them a change of clothes and a baggie containing a toothbrush and a stick of Degree deodorant. “Would it be cool if I grab a quick shower while you’re looking through that? I feel kind of rank.”
“Sure, of course. I think you remember the bathroom from the tour?”
“Haha.”
“Water takes a while to heat up, but it gets really hot so be careful. Towels are under the sink.”
“Thanks. I’ll try not to melt my flesh off.”
“Hey, are you hungry?”
“Starved.”
“I could make pancakes?”
“That would be awesome, thank you.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door. I listened for the sound of the lock, wondering if he would turn it, and then it came. Tink.
I flipped through several glossy pages of the yearbook, but when I heard the shower turn on I closed it and set it on the arm of the chair. It felt cold in my hands, and not just because it had been outside.
I pulled a dusty griddle out of the kitchen cupboard and put it on the counter and cleaned it off. An icicle, thick and clear enough to make the yard behind it wobbly, hung behind the frosty window over the sink. I could see an orange snowblower against the white, spewing a snowy fountain into the air above my neighbor’s yard.
I cracked eggs into a green plastic bowl, sniffed what was left of the milk, was glad there was almost enough, added a little water to compensate, poured, began to whisk it into pancake mix. I focused intently on the batter, making sure to pop every pocket of powder.
There was a yelp in the bathroom.
“Told you it gets hot!”
When I heard the shower turn off I ladled raw pancakes onto the griddle. Watching them bubble, listening to Griff putter in the bathroom—the click of his toothbrush against the sink, the fwap of pants being unfolded—I felt nervous, almost queasy. Before today I hadn’t spoken to the guy since graduation two years ago, and even that brief conversation was just a blip in the span of our silence. You really had to go back four years to get to the last time were close. I noticed my hand was shaking. I started whisking what remained of the batter.
The bathroom door opened and Griff emerged in a cloud of steam, the grand entrance of every B-movie alien I’d ever seen. Maybe this wasn’t Griff at all but some interstellar p
rankster setting me up. Forget about abductions, anal probes and secret alien cookbooks—the real fun was in poking at the Earthlings’ old heartaches.
“Feel better?”
“Much,” he said. “I hadn’t been warm in like—thirty-six hours!”
He stopped at his backpack, carefully stepping around the cold puddle this time, to pack away his dirty clothes. Then he took a seat at the kitchen table.
“How’re those pancakes coming?” he said, flicking at a bubble in the bottle of syrup I put on the table.
Griffin Dean at my kitchen table. He looked the same, mostly. His blond hair hung past his jaw in damp waves. He’d worn it long in college to hide the acne he’d been constantly at war with. His skin was clear now but scars speckled his temples and jaw. His green eyes were framed by eyebrows several shades darker than his hair. He was tall and lanky and apparently still wore his shirts too big. On his right shoulder-blade, I knew, was a tattoo of a knobby and twisted joshua tree. His white-socked toes curled around the bottom rung of the chair.
“They’re getting there,” I told him. “They may be a little bland—I didn’t have enough milk.”
“That’s OK, that’s what syrup is for.”
“I have this thing about going to the supermarket. I hate it. So I like never have any food around here.”
“I hear ya.” He rocked the syrup bottle back and forth with his thumb. “At Beth’s we’d have to carry all the groceries from the market to the apartment. That was a bitch, let me tell you. The handles on those plastic bags turn into razor-wire in about ten seconds.”
“What part of Boston do you live in?”
“What part did I live in?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
“Down by Fenway. One of those brownstone-type places. Cool location, but yeah, buying groceries was the pits.”
“Perks of city life, huh?”
“It just forces you to be creative. We got stuff that could do double, triple meal-duty. A lot of cereal. Kix, Cheerios—they’re good for breakfast, lunch, snack. And they’re light.”
“I like cereal. Oh, grab a plate.” I gestured with my chin to the cupboard and began to pry the pancakes off the griddle. They were a little burned and I felt embarrassed.
He got up, reached for the cupboard door, showing dark dots on his sleeve where he hadn’t dried thoroughly. He should’ve been gorgeous, really. On paper he was. He had the blond hair, the bright eyes, the strong jaw with a shadow of golden beard—all the elements, all the materials—but he looked somehow more boy-next-door than runway model, and that was fine. It made him seem more within reach, more attainable, even though as a straightboy he was no more attainable for me than a runway model. He pulled out two plates, put one on the counter and held out the other. I slapped a half-dozen pancakes onto it.
“I probably don’t need all those,” he said.
“Oh, I thought you were hungry?”
“I am,” he said, blushing just a little, or maybe those were his freshly-showered cheeks. “But some things never change.”
“Still have the legendary weak stomach, huh?”
He smiled, as though he was happy I remembered, and I pulled two of his pancakes onto my own plate. “That OK?” I said, and he nodded.
“Could I have some coffee?” he said, reaching for the French press with his free hand. “Is this coffee?”
“Yeah, but it’s probably stone cold.” I touched the back of my hand to the glass. “Might be OK, actually.”
That it was still warm, the pot I’d made before going to sit on the stoop, made me realize how little time had passed since the coolest thing about today was that I didn’t have to go to work. It was just over forty-five minutes but felt more like a year. Or—no—it felt like some kind of space-time portal had opened up and I’d fallen years-deep into an alternate past.
He poured himself some coffee—he always drank it black, luckily—and brought his breakfast to the table. I put the last pancakes on the other plate and sat down with him. He divided his pancakes into two piles of two and cut them neatly into sections, like a pizza. He ate from both stacks at a time, dipping each forkful into a creeping pool of syrup he maintained at the side.
“These’re good, thanks.”
“No problem.” I squirted zigzags of syrup across my plate—too much, but it was something for my hands to do. “Let me know if you want any more.”
He chewed and nodded.
“So how is Beth?” I said. “I guess I haven’t seen her in like four years.” He looked a little uncomfortable as he tipped his mug to his face, and I realized she was bound to be a sore subject. “Oh, I’m sorry, you probably don’t want to—”
“Nah, it’s OK. She’s good. Hasn’t changed much.”
“It’s hard for me to picture her outside the dorm.”
“Yeah.”
“So wasn’t it—I don’t know—kind of mean? That she made you leave in the middle of a blizzard?”
He swallowed. “Like I said, same old.” He grinned for a second. “No, it was a pretty mutual thing.” He stabbed another pancake wedge, looked around for another one that matched its size, dunked, and brought the fork to his lips. “We just took it as far as we could take it, and then... Well, Beth has never been into wasting time. You know, go go go.” He chewed.
“Well that’s good it wasn’t messy. It’s always easier when things aren’t messy.”
“No, not messy,” he said and considered for a second, “but like final, you know?”
For a while we ate in silence. A lump of butter slid across one of my pancakes and plopped into a puddle of syrup. I dragged a piece of pancake through it.
“So you gathered up your stuff and decided to pay me a visit, huh?” I was still trying to work up to the question of why. It seemed a long way off still, though.
He was looking up at the blue dog with a content smile and turned to me. “I still have some shit at her place,” he said. “I would’ve been fine with staying a little longer. But she was visiting her parents and I thought I should sort of make my official exit before she got back.”
“Where’s she from again?”
“Rochester,” he said, but that didn’t ring a bell. “New York. Anyway, don’t blame me for not calling you first. I would’ve if you had a phone!”
“What do you mean? Of course I have a phone.”
“Haha. Maybe they just didn’t have your number?”
“Who? Where’d you even come across my address, anyway?”
“Shuster alumni directory. It’s all there online.”
“It is? Jeez. I don’t even own a computer.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Just don’t see the need, I guess.”
“Well it’s all in the directory, all your vital statistics.”
“So that’s how you found me,” I said.
I meant it to be funny but there was a sting in his eyes, as though a soap bubble burst on his cornea. He got up from the table, rinsed his empty plate. He stood smoothing with his foot a square of yellow linoleum that had curled up away from the baseboard under the sink.
I felt bad.
“When you finish eating,” he said without turning around, “I’ll help you shovel.”
Pulling on my boots again, I noticed the photo Griff was looking at earlier. It was a snapshot of him lunging off his bed in our dorm room, taken mid-jump by me from my bed, where I was sitting. Jumping back and forth between our beds, a game kids play in motel rooms, had been Griff’s stress relief when writing research papers. In the picture his body was a blur but his face was clear, frozen in an airborne gasp, his hair fanned out behind him. A split-second after I snapped it he landed on my bed with a force that slid the mattress halfway off its black metal frame—and me along with it. Laughing and red, he’d hauled me to my feet.
It was something I thought about a lot. College memories played through my mind like television reruns on a high-digit cable channel dedicated to making my present feel
inadequate. Watching Griff stomp out into the snow in his sweatshirt and scarf, I thought maybe that’s why having him here didn’t feel quite as strange as it probably should’ve. I’d spent so much time remembering, that even though we hadn’t talked in years his name had never left the tip of my tongue.
I buttoned my coat and followed him outside. The yard tools were in the garage, which also housed my Jeep. The garage door opened manually, and to get to the handle we had to dig down into the snow. It took our combined strength to get it to screech up along its frozen tracks.
“If I hadn’t come you would’ve been stuck,” Griff said.
“Nah, I probably wouldn’t even have shoveled,” I said. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever shoveled this driveway. After the neighbor lady’s was done I usually made do with ruts in my own.
I could only find one shovel, stuck to the wall with springy metal grips, alongside a rarely-used rake and a never-used hoe.
“Give it here,” he said, taking it. “I’ll do it until I get tired.”
While he shoveled I kicked a crater in the snow by the edge of the driveway and sat down. Crazy how being surrounded by millions of flakes of ice can feel so cozy. A boy and a girl dressed in snowsuits walked down the street pulling red plastic sleds. There were no hills around and I wondered where they were going.
Griff tossed the snow back over his shoulder with the enthusiasm of someone digging for treasure. When he’d cleared half the driveway he stabbed the shovel into a pile and rested his chin on the green plastic handle. I got up to take my turn.
He waved me away. “I have a little left in me,” he said.
“... Suit yourself.” I settled back into the snow.
“So since we’ve covered my romantic disaster,” he said after heaving a load of snow against the fence that separated my yard from my neighbor’s, “what have you been up to? Seeing anyone?”
“I was for a while,” I said. “In the fall.”
“Guy or girl?”
The question—the matter-of-factness of it—made me smile. Unlike some people, Griff had never treated my bi-ness as something I might outgrow.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 2
