“Girl. Melanie. She works at the art gallery down the street from my comic shop. Or worked. I assume she still does.”
“You working there? At the comic shop, I mean?”
“Yeah. Sort of a manager. We don’t really have titles. My boss Simon owns the place.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised. You always liked your funny books,” he said with a laugh. “Anyway, go on— Melanie?”
“Yeah.”
“Hot?”
“Very.” She’d had the most beautiful chocolate-colored hair. It was long, went down to the middle of her back. When we kissed we could hide in it, like people behind a waterfall. “There’s not a lot to tell,” I said. “We dated for like four months. Fun, cute. I thought it was going pretty well. Then her ex came back from Iraq and was worth a second look, apparently, now that he was some kind of war hero. Suddenly me and my superheroes were second rate.”
“What happened?”
“She gave me the heave-ho in a McDonald’s drive-thru.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Burgers went cold that night. I was pretty pissed off.”
“About the burgers or the dumping?”
“Well, both.” I gathered a clump of snow in my hands and pressed it together, but it was too light for snowballs and sifted through my fingers. “But what can you do, right?”
Griff nodded and tossed a load of snow over his shoulder. “Yeah, what can you do.” He’d cleared most of the driveway and was breathing out big white clouds.
“Aren’t you tired?” I said, getting up and really hoping he’d hand over the shovel before he passed out. “You said you barely slept last night.”
“Now that you mention it, yeah.” He started to take another scoop but slowed and stopped. “OK. Here.” He harpooned the shovel into the remaining square of snow.
He walked up the driveway and took over my vacated snow seat. “So what did Melanie think of the bi thing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. She seemed OK with it,” I said, heaving a shovelful of snow. “I think she thought it was interesting.”
“Cool.”
“It’s funny how it works. Gay guys love it when they just want to hook up because they think I’m actually straight and hooking up with straight guys is hot.”
“Seriously?”
“Apparently, yeah. But they hate it for a relationship. And I’m not really a one-night-stand kind of guy, I guess. Then girls usually hate it flat-out because they think I’m actually gay and just waiting to break out of the closet. It’s kind of rough.”
“I get that. There’s so many variables and stuff that can make people wrong for each other, though,” he said. He waved his arms through the snow on either side of the snow-chair, giving it angel wings. “You probably have more crap to deal with than average, I’ll give you that. But it’s not like it’s a cakewalk for me either, you know?”
“I guess.”
I finished clearing the driveway down to the sand and the crushed purple shells, hacked through the snow bank at the end, opening my house to the street and to Harwich beyond. Finally I cut a path along the walk up to the front porch. Griff had been quiet for a while and I noticed after putting the shovel away that he had fallen asleep.
“Griff, wake up,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder. “You can die doing that.”
“I need to crash,” he mumbled.
“Come inside,” I said, pulling the garage door closed, “before you get hypothermia.”
There was no bed in the spare bedroom, and in the living room just the two corduroy chairs.
I offered him my own bed, glancing down at the chipped teal paint on the baseboard heater as I said it, my arms crossed masculinely over my chest. With Griff I’d always been afraid of implications.
He mumbled something that sounded like thanks and scuffed down the hall to my room. I heard the headboard smack the wall. I felt like smiling, and may have, but at the same time my heart began to pound with the full weight of whatever was going on here. Through the picture window I watched a flashing plow grind its way down the street, leaving in its wake a new snow bank at the end of my driveway. We were snowed-in all over again.
The yearbook was still lying on the chair. I sat down and opened it across my lap, flipped through the pages like a squeamish med student through a medical textbook, afraid that on the next page, or the next, would be blood and guts. My memories were carefully filtered and I was wary of seeing a photo that rekindled one I was happy to have forgotten.
I didn’t expect to be in much of the yearbook, though, and I wasn’t. Amidst the standard thumbnail photos I found the one starring Vincent J. Dandro: I was leaning against my Jeep, new when the photo was taken and gleaming cobalt blue in the sun. In the space beneath the photo that most graduates filled with inside jokes and cryptic memories, I was surprised to find that I’d written only “I never drink when I fly,” a line I recognized immediately as coming from the movie Superman, but which I had absolutely zero memory of writing. I cringed. The quote looked awkward, uncomfortable, even sad, especially in comparison to other people’s. It couldn’t have really meant anything to me; it was probably just the first thing that came to mind when I was filling out the form. It was profound only in that it showed I had nothing more meaningful to say.
To the right of my photo was Virginia Daniels, a good-looking auburn-haired number with perfect eyebrows and pouty lips, and to the right of her, there he was: A. Griffin Dean.
His smile looked a little forced but it was a good, professional picture. His hair was shorter than I ever saw it back then. A tie hung loosely around the collar of his paisley shirt, over which he wore a solid brown vest. Beneath his photo was an unpunctuated list of things I didn’t understand, and that stabbed me with sadness. They must’ve been from the two years I hadn’t been part of. Ah, but here was one I did recognize. It said simply, Pantie-O’s—a reference to the breakfast cereal with undergarment-shaped marshmallows we’d crafted from an empty Cocoa Krispies box.
I wondered, not for the first time and as always with a mixture of loneliness and guilt, how much he’d thought of me during our second half of college. Had he put that in there just for me, or were Pantie-O’s a joke he let other people in on? Was it no longer just ours?
I turned the page.
The club photos were next—I hadn’t been in any of the clubs—and then came the sports teams, the intramural baseball team being the second and last photo I expected to be in. I was OK. I played outfield—never liked hitting. I liked being far enough away to almost just be a spectator like the rest of the crowd, but with the special potential, unique among them, to at any moment appear out of nowhere and make a game-winning catch. It barely mattered that I never did.
After the teams were the general campus photos: the dining hall (I could remember the plates clinking, the symphony of conversation, the routine comfort of soft-serve ice cream eaten at circular tables with friends), the library where I’d worked a couple semesters, the white-washed marble arches of my dorm’s ancient lobby. These were places I didn’t have my own photos of. I hadn’t seen them since graduation. It was almost a surprise to find they existed outside my own brain.
Stapled to the last page of the book was a manila envelope. I ripped it free and pried back the brass fastener. The graduation supplement was inside after all. It was nothing fancy, just a ten-page collage of photos from graduation. Our class speaker—the CEO of a dot-com that had since gone under—and our valedictorian; lots of people I didn’t know in blue and green robes. But then out jumped someone I recognized: Griffin—and there beside him, me. The photographer was more interested in a mortar board a girl had decorated with elbow pasta, though, so we weren’t in focus. We were off to the side. We were blurry.
In my memory time had managed to make the end of our friendship seem practically romantic, a tragedy out of Shakespeare or Dickens, a tale of heartbreak and stiff upper lips. But this photo brought that shit tumbling like a house of ca
rds. There was nothing romantic about this photo at all. It had no more relationship to romance than a dying soldier has to war movies. We were standing side by side and there was enough glaring awkwardness in our eyes to taint even the happiness in those of the main subject.
I remembered seeing him, standing alone in the crowded lobby of the ritzy theatre we graduated in. I remembered the shock of seeing his face two years after we roomed together, at once so familiar and so different. I’d turned away, hoping he wouldn’t see me—I probably thought about ducking behind something. It wasn’t easy but somehow I made myself walk over to him. He had on red Converse All-Stars with his navy blue pin-stripe suit. His graduation gown was tossed over his shoulder like a locker room towel.
“Look at you all dressed up,” I said as I approached, doing my very best to sound like I’d seen him the day before and every other day before that, too. But of course the act was useless.
“Hey,” he said softly and almost with suspicion, as though he wasn’t sure I was really there. His dark eyebrows furrowed but he stepped forward to hug me. It was a quick clap-on-the-back hug, though, a hug of strangers. “Hey Vince. How you been?”
“Good. You know. Keeping busy. Looking for a job and stuff. Big day, huh?” I pulled my hands up into the wide sleeves of my gown.
“I could take it or leave it,” he said. “I feel like I owe it to my mom to walk across the stage.” His mouth opened to say something more, but then he rubbed his nose and looked away.
“Hard to believe we’re this old, huh?” I said, looking not at him but following his gaze to the crowd of our fellow students.
“Hard to believe. Yeah.”
We made small-talk about our job searches, about finally being adults, stuff like that, but there was no mention of the past. An onlooker probably would’ve guessed we were just two random students who’d had a class or two together.
When the doors of a large ballroom opened and an announcement was made for us to line up outside, we walked quickly to the entrance, thankful for motion. I expected, because of the spelling of our last names, to be lined up close together. But when the woman at the door asked not for our names but for our majors, it felt like an escape.
“Industrial design,” Griff told her, and the woman’s chubby finger directed him to the left and down the hall.
“Business,” I said, and I was pointed straight ahead. I turned to Griff. “Well I guess—”
“Remember to smile—”
And we were split up there, in the entry to that ballroom, robed graduates swarming around us like a school of jellyfish. Cut-off meaningless sentences were our goodbyes. Before today, the last time I saw Griff was from my seat in the audience as he walked across the stage to get his diploma. I’d cheered for him then.
Now, two years later, I closed the fucking yearbook and looked at the picture window, past the pictures of Griff, out at the snow.
There was a thump at the front door. When I opened it I found a newspaper on the stoop. A car threw one at the old lady’s house too and continued down the street. Her door opened and she plucked the paper off of her freshly-shoveled steps, waved at me.
The snow on the ground was nighttime blue now. I could see in the car’s headlights and in the glow of the old lady’s driveway floodlight that the snow was still coming down, but in fine flakes almost like mist. I picked up the paper, slid it out of the translucent bag. The headline proclaimed Blizzard! in giant text.
“What time is it?” Griff said behind me, startling me. I shut the door. His t-shirt was wrinkled and one of his pant-legs was rolled up.
I looked into the kitchen at the microwave. “Well the paper just arrived and you’re just getting out of bed, so it would appear to be 8:30 a.m. But in this upside-down world it’s actually 8:30 p.m.”
“Strange times,” he said, wiping his eyes. He still looked tired.
I tossed the newspaper onto the ottoman. “Paper claims it snowed.”
“Can’t believe anything you read nowadays.” He grinned, hopping on one foot to fix his sock.
“There’s pizza on the stove,” I said.
“Cool, thank you.” He went into the kitchen, sliding his socks on the linoleum. “Oh, homemade, nice!” He took a bite, testing, approving. “Have any milk?”
“No. There’s juice. Sam Adams in the drawer.” I put my hands in my pockets and stood in front of the picture window for a moment before drawing the dark floral curtains across it.
“Sorry I slept so long,” he said. “That was probably kind of rude.”
“No, it’s fine. I don’t mind.”
“What’d you do all day?” he said. He had the grapefruit juice container in his hand. “Ah—Shoveling the lady nextdoor,” he read from the note I’d stuck on the fridge. “That sounds hot. Or— But not as good as plowing.”
I smiled.
After finishing his pizza he sat down sideways in the brown corduroy chair, legs draped over the arm, feet close to the fire. He watched me flip through records for a moment and then grabbed the remote and turned on the television. The screen looked like snow, a portal into twenty hours ago.
“Is it out or do you just not get cable?”
“Cable shmable,” I said. “Use the rabbit ears.”
“Right.” He rolled his eyes and turned off the TV.
I held up two records I’d chosen from the stacker in the cabinet. “The Cure or T-Rex?”
He pointed to the T-Rex. As I was sliding the record out of its sleeve he asked, “Do you have snow tires on your Jeep?”
“Yeah.” I lifted the clear plastic cover. The Billie Holiday was still on the turntable. “Why?”
“Would you want to go for a drive or something?”
“Now?”
“Maybe just a quick spin to get some air? You haven’t been out all day.”
“I’ve been out most of the day.”
“I mean out out.”
I thought for a moment, slid the record back into the sleeve. Being out was something to do, offered less chance for awkwardness.
“OK,” I said. “Put on your boots.”
The roads were still in pretty rough shape and there weren’t many cars out other than us. My wipers swooshed back and forth, batting the stubborn fine flakes that continued to fall. They didn’t seem to be accumulating much anymore, just added a sugary dusting to the twenty inches already there.
On Oak Street wide piles lining the shoulders reduced it to one lane. Ahead of us a plow turned onto the street. It rumbled toward us. Its revolving orange lights were bright and it shrieked warnings at us to clear the road.
“You need to make room,” Griff said helpfully.
“Where’s he think he’s going?” I looked in the rearview; the street behind us was clear but there weren’t any easy turnarounds. “One of us needs to back up.”
“Nah, there’s room,” Griff said. “It’s fine. Just pull over a bit.”
I turned the wheel and drove the Jeep onto the shoulder, more hastily than I should’ve. The passenger side scraped against the snow bank and the Jeep thumped to a spongy halt. Snowballs skittered across the hood. The plow was in front of us now. I could feel the vibrations.
“Hold your breath, here it comes,” Griff said. I wondered if he was also one of those people who ducks when driving under a bridge.
The plow passed us slowly. I could see each individual snowflake clinging to the truck’s yellow paint—could see their fractal patterns receding to icy infinity.
“Sweatless,” Griff said.
“Sure, you’re on the passenger side. I almost shit my pants.”
I put the Jeep into drive and stepped on the gas, giving it a little extra to get out of the snow. The rear tires spun and the Jeep didn’t move. I put it in reverse and tried again, then tried forward again. Rocked back and forth, no luck. I grumbled and squeezed the wheel.
“I’ll check it out,” Griff said, but his door only opened a few inches before crunching against the snow bank
.
“It’s OK.” I got out and walked around to the front, steadying myself with a hand on a snow pile. The headlights spotlighted me and inside the car I could see a wavy image of Griff obscured by the wipers. The Jeep was half buried in the bank; its passenger-side tires had all but disappeared. I got back in.
“I should’ve just backed up,” I said, thumping my forehead against the wheel.
“I could push,” he offered.
“It needs to like come out sideways, not forward.”
“We could use that huge winch you’ve got on the back. Tie it to a tree or something.”
“What, and then reel it in like a fish?”
“OK, bad idea. What do you have that thing for anyway?”
“Oh, I went through a WWSD phase last winter. What Would Superman Do. Like a Good Samaritan thing. My specialty was towing people out of ditches and snow banks and stuff.”
“Did you ever?”
“A couple.”
“And now you’re stuck yourself. How ironic.” He breathed into his gloves and pulled them on—I’d turned off the car to keep the exhaust from backing up and killing us, and it was cold inside already. “Got a shovel?”
“Nope.”
“We could knock on one of these houses and borrow one.”
“...”
When I didn’t respond he added, “OK, then we push.”
Blazingly lit by the headlights of my Jeep, with snowflakes twinkling down around him, he looked like a dream, a figment of my imagination. This was too real to be a dream, but too surreal to actually be happening. Griff, who I hadn’t talked to in two years or really in four, was standing up to his thighs in a snowy backstreet in Harwich, trying to push me out of a snow bank. He must’ve been an apparition, the Ghost of Christmas Past.
At his command I floored the Jeep in reverse. It came unstuck easily, much easier than either of us expected, and as the front bumper whisked out from under his hands he fell forward into the snow. He reappeared in my headlights a moment later with snow on his chin, laughing.
I got out and stood around while he smacked snow off his clothes, then we got back in the Jeep.
The Cranberry Hush: A Novel Page 3
