I felt as if my mother had finally handed me the clothespin — and she herself had stepped back. She trusted me completely. I knew I could never disappoint her.
At eight o’clock the next morning, Paul knocked at the kitchen door. “I bear gifts,” he said when I opened the door.
“What?” I asked.
“They’re not for you. They’re for Kim,” he said, smiling.
Kim appeared out of nowhere. “I heard my name,” she yelled.
“Don’t yell. We can all hear you,” I told her.
Paul thrust a package into her hands. “I was thinking.… I’ve watched you out in the backyard on the picnic table, coloring those books of yours. You seem to really enjoy it, but I think you should be drawing your own pictures instead of following someone else’s lines.”
My mother appeared in the kitchen then and I knew she had heard his comments.
“I’ve brought you some drawing paper and pencils. Then, here I have charcoal and a few other items. A set of brushes, some watercolors, and oh, yes, a book on art for the beginner.”
From out of another large paper sack, he pulled several pieces of canvas, all different sizes. Each was mounted on pieces of wood and he told her that if she did a good job on each one, he would frame them all himself.
Kim sucked in her breath and then yelled, “Whew!” Her eyes grew wide with delight and suddenly she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard on the cheek. “Thank you, Paul. Oh, thank you!” I swear there were tears in her eyes.
Paul had captured another Johnson, I thought, smiling to myself. I think you could safely say, we all three loved him now.
Paul and I left the house, dashing through the backyard, hurrying to be on our way to a great day.
“Well, my lovable wench,” Paul said as he went out the back gate, “are you sure you wish to spend the day with such a serf forever, never knowing the richness I offer you as the Lord of the Strobes!” He was imitating the language in the novel I had lent him.
“Paul.” I laughed and yelled at him. “Paul, you’re crazy! But you read it, didn’t you? What do you think?”
He flung open the door of his car for me. “Into the carriage, my plucky little creature, and you will know the scarlet passion that dwells within this hairy chest.”
I was ready for him when he crawled in his side of the car. My bag with my comb and brush and lipstick and Kleenex was fairly heavy, and it bounced neatly off the side of his head.
“Hey, Mariah. You areplucky!” he screamed, trying to defend himself. With a roar of the motor we were off, laughing like little kids. Our beautiful day was about to begin.
“You’ve got your sweater?” Paul asked me after a while, after our kidding each other had subsided. “It’s about forty degrees cooler up there.” It seemed almost impossible. We would
be in the little cable car only about fourteen minutes, he’d told me, and yet we would experience an enormous change in temperature.
We turned into Tramway Road and immediately the road started climbing. “We’ll drive up to where we’ll park and hop on an open bus,” Paul explained. “This climbing is hard on cars — notice the barrels of water alongside the road. It’s such a steep incline, a lot of cars overheat.”
We were finally coming into a parking area swarming with cars. I was surprised to see so many people doing the same thing we were doing. “You should see it around Christmas holidays and Easter,” Paul said as we settled ourselves on the open bus. “It gets so bad, you have to wait for your number to be called just to board the little cable cars.”
The bus heaved and moaned as it climbed up the mountain. Finally we slid into another parking area. “We’re already at two thousand, six hundred and forty-three feet,” Paul told me, pointing out the sign. I nodded and was feeling the temperature change already.
We entered Valley Station and I followed Paul over to the ticket booth. People were everywhere, some of them lined up by the windows, watching for the cable car to descend.
“They go up every half hour,” Paul told me. “One is always going up while the other is coming down. Come on, let’s go outside and watch.”
“How many people can go up at one time?” I asked.
“About eighty,” Paul said, checking on the tickets in his hand. “You can even take up skis in the winter or camping equipment. Last winter Joe and I brought up our skis and the summer before, we came up twice and set up camp in the woods.”
I looked up at the huge cables where soon the little car would appear. It scared me to death. “I don’t know if I want to go,” I told Paul lamely. “What if the thing breaks? What if the lines get tangled?”
Paul laughed. “I can tell you’re going to be a good writer,” he said. “Most writers are ‘what-if’people, my dad says.”
I poked him in the ribs with my bony elbow. “Come on, Paul, tell me you’re not just a little bit scared when you go up in that thing, no matter how many times you’ve done it!”
Paul laughed again and then grabbed for my hand. “Look, it’s coming down now. Let’s walk over and see if we can squeeze in that line.”
We must have been numbers seventy-nine and eighty because they closed the gate right after we entered. We were the last two to hop onto the canary-yellow car.
“Now at this very minute, there’s a cable car just like this one at the top of the mountain, getting ready to come down,” Paul said. I shivered. Even if Paul wouldn’t admit it, I bet he was a little scared, too.
“Right smack in the middle of the ride, we’ll meet the other car,” Paul told me.
Suddenly the car lurched forward. There
was no time for me to change my mind. To my amazement, I seemed to be the only person on the little car who showed any fear at all. Everyone else was laughing and talking, some of them carrying camping gear, binoculars, and cameras. The calm, fun-filled atmosphere helped me start to relax a little.
“I wish I’d brought my camera,” I told Paul.
Over the loudspeaker a male voice pointed out signs of interest along the way. “The tramway is a double-reversible operation with enclosed cable cars operating in opposite directions, each suspended from its own set of double-track cables. It is the largest double-reversible passenger carrying tramway in the world,” the voice droned on. “It was opened to the public in September of 1936.”
I looked up at Paul. “My ears are closing up,” I told him. “Are yours?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Try swallowing hard. Here.” He pulled out a stick of peppermint gum. “Chew on this. It’ll help.”
“When you step out,” the voice over the loudspeaker said, “you will be at our Mountain Station which is eight thousand, five hundred and sixteen feet above sea level.”
At the halfway point the other little cable car coming down was suddenly right beside us. The people in the other car waved and Paul and I waved back, smiling. “Whew,” I said. “And this goes on all the time, up and down this mountain! I wonder how many people — ”
The voice suddenly boomed out, “Our cable cars named Crocker and Coffman, after the two men who made it all possible, have carried over two million visitors to Tramwayland to share in a dream that is now a reality.”
“Well, there’s your answer,” Paul said and we both broke out laughing.
My ears were getting worse so I chewed the gum harder. I could see huge evergreens now against the hard slabs of mountain. “How on earth did they get the material up here to build the towers that support this whole thing?” I whispered to Paul.
“Helicopters,” he told me. “I saw the movie once when I was up here with Mom and Dad. They show it free at the Mountain Station.” The sides of the mountain were changing colors with more evergreens in sight. A small animal darted through the thick foliage.
“It’s already beautiful,” I said to Paul.
“Aren’t you afraid anymore?” he laughed, pulling me close to him.
“Just a little,” I admitted. “I guess
I’m getting used to it.”
We had reached the huge building called the Mountain Station. The cable car slid to a stop and the door opened to let the people pile out. Paul grabbed my hand and together we entered the station. Signs pointed the way to the Alpine Restaurant and the gift shop. One sign pointed to a lower level advertising a game room on the ground floor.
Crossing over a large open area, Paul ushered me through another door and suddenly we were
outside again. “We’ll follow one of the hiking trails,” Paul said. “When you get tired, we’ll go back and have something to eat.”
We stood at the top of the winding trail, a path that wound downward into the forest below. The tall evergreens stood silent all around us, the trail carpeted with their needles. The only sounds were songs of birds, and a few happy voices of children sifting through the branches of the sweeping trees. Their branches swayed like deep velvet drapes.
“This is so beautiful, Paul,” I said in a whisper for fear that even the sound of my voice would break the spell. “I don’t need a camera,” I told him. “I’ll remember this day as long as I live.”
“In the winter, it’s entirely different,” Paul said, taking my hand as we followed the trail. “It’s like someone took all of this and topped it with whipped cream.”
I was looking down, watching for vines and exposed roots on the trail so that I wouldn’t stumble, when I saw it. It was a tiny bird, a pretty one with blue and white feathers. When I knelt down to inspect it closer, I realized it was dead. Paul bent down alongside me.
“The little thing is dead, but hasn’t been for too long,” he said. “It still has a little warmth left in its body.”
“The poor thing,” I said sadly. “And it looks so terribly young. I wonder why it died so young?”
“I guess it was its time to die,” Paul said, standing up. “Mariah, let’s bury it. I mean, it would be better than just leaving it here to be torn apart by some animal.”
He walked around looking under the huge trees and then bent down and picked up a jagged rock and a stick. “We can dig a small grave with these.”
Together we knelt and gouged out the bird's final resting place. When it seemed deep enough, I dug into the bottom of my handbag and pulled out my old scarf. I’d used it hundreds of times on the beach to tie back my hair. It was time I bought a new one anyway.
“We’ll wrap him in this,” I told Paul. “It seems proper that he should be wrapped in something.”
I spread out the pale yellow scarf on the dark earth. Paul gently picked up the little dead thing and placed it on the scarf, wrapping it with care. Then he placed the bundle into the grave and together we brushed the earth back over the hole. Paul stood up and stamped the ground down firmly with his shoes. It was an odd but beautiful moment between us, one I always remember.
We walked further up the trail. “Have you ever lost someone, someone you really loved — through death, I mean?” Paul asked, finally throwing away the stick.
I thought for a moment. “No. No, I really haven’t,” I told him. “I had a great-aunt who died just a few months ago, but I can truthfully say, I didn’t really even know her. I felt sorry, of course, but I can’t really say I loved her. No, I’ve never lost anyone close to me through death. But I know someday I will have to.”
Paul was silent as we walked on. The trail twisted and turned and with each turn was even more beautiful.
“I had a dog,” Paul said finally. “He was a funny mixture, cocker spaniel and poodle, and he looked something like a dirty old throw rug. He’d wandered onto our property when I was about four. Mom let me keep him and he was the most loyal friend anyone could have.”
“And then one day, when he was pretty old and half-blind, he ran after a car and somehow got caught under the back wheels. He died in my arms, his big brown eyes searching mine, asking me what happened.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I told Paul.
“Well, anyhow,” Paul said, “the point of the story is, my grandfather lived with us. He was my father’s father and a great old man. He used to bring me up here, even when he was in his eighties. We’d trudge around this place, and I’d forget he was so old.”
“After my dog died, I was pretty miserable. I wouldn’t eat or talk. I was being a real brat and my mother didn’t know what to do for me. It was then that my grandfather brought me up here. We sat down under the evergreens near a little brook around here, and he talked to me.”
“I wish you could have known my grandfather. He was tall and very strong. Toward the end he got very thin, but he was still a strong man for his age. He had a huge clump of white hair, and it fell over his eyes when we hiked along this trail.”
Low evergreen branches blocked our trail and Paul held them aside for us to pass. Before long, the brook Paul had spoken of came into sight. For a long time I had heard the water splashing over the rocks, flowing down and over the pebbles, but I had no idea it was so close. Paul sat down on the forest floor and removed his shoes and then walked into the shallow stream.
“Come on in,” he called to me. “It feels great!”
“Did your grandfather make you feel better by bringing you up here?” I asked, removing my own shoes. He was right. The cool water felt good on my dusty, hot toes.
Paul knelt down and picked up a shiny pebble. “Yes, but it wasn’t just this place. It was what he told me. He said that people don’t really die if we keep a good memory of them. He said, if we just think about the loved one once in a while, then that person always remains alive for us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, finally coming out of the stream and throwing myself on the cool ground under a tree.
“Well, I tried it,” Paul said, following me out of the stream. “Every time I felt bad about my dog, I’d bring up old memories of him. Sometimes I’d even laugh out loud when I thought about all our good times together. It really worked. He seemed to come alive, to stay alive whenever I just thought of him.”
I sat back against the tree and hugged my knees. “And your grandfather?”
“He died last year,” Paul said. “But he prepared me well for it. You see, he never really died for me. I can keep him forever, if I just sit down once in a while and remember him. Inside of me he will live forever. Mariah, I bet you think I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy, Paul,” I said. “Maybe you found the secret to the pain of death for the survivors. If it works for you, it could work for others.”
Although he wouldn’t admit it, I could tell the hike had tired out Paul. So I persuaded him to stay with me by the brook, resting and enjoying a beautiful day together.
I said to Paul so many times, “I had no idea this was all here. It’s funny, when you come into Palm Springs, you look up at the mountains and they seem to be only cold slabs of granite. If you look really hard, you can see some of these trees, but from down there you just never can imagine that this is all up here.”
“And so many people never even look up,” Paul said with an edge to his voice. Then he was silent for a long time. I had the feeling that if he could, he would kidnap every person who even came near his beautiful town and force them to discover its inner secret wonders.
When he wasn’t looking, I stared long and hard at him. His handsome features were only part of his beauty — the important part was the
beautiful person he was inside. I turned quickly when I realized he had caught me gazing at him. I didn’t want him to know I worshipped him. Wasn’t it dangerous to let a guy know how terribly much you loved him? The men in the Gothics pursued a woman until they knew they had won the battle and then they dropped the poor girls like hotcakes. But that seemed too dramatic for real life. I was afraid Paul would get scared if my feelings were obvious.
On our way back to the tram, he grabbed my hand and pulled me over to a tree. “I don’t want you to get too tired,” he told me, concern in his eyes.
I sat down quietly beside him, his face close to mine. His
lips caught mine off guard, but his mouth was no longer gentle. I pulled away, but he caught me again. This time I responded, my mouth as eager as his. His hand touched my throat, his other arm around my waist. He stroked my throat, holding up my chin to seal our kiss. It became too much. I struggled, stopped, and gave my lips to him completely. But confusion filled me. Where was the tenderness? Our kiss felt like flames of fire.
Suddenly he pulled away. It was him pulling away, not me. He laughed nervously, stood up, and brushed the pine needles from his pants. He took my hand and helped me up.
“Mariah, I can almost hear my mom calling me — and from way down there. How could she possibly do it?” He was grinning. Perhaps Paul sensed my confusion or maybe he was afraid of
his feelings, too. I was both glad and a little disappointed by his ending our embrace so abruptly.
We were both smiling though. “I know,” I told him as we entered the pathway again. “And I think I’d better hold onto that clothespin for a while longer.” He didn’t understand me, but it didn’t matter.
I remembered the vows I had made to myself, the day I talked to my mother about the reason for my father’s leaving us.
When I fall in love, it will be for always. Nothing will change that. No one will walk out. We will stay together forever, and when death finally separates us we will have the memories that we shared. He will be that kind of person. I will know him instantly when I finally meet him. And he will love me forever.…
Silently, our hands touching, we headed back for the station.
Chapter 15
We both ordered a hot roast beef sandwich and a glass of root beer.
“My father would love it up here.” I told Paul. I remembered how he loved evergreens and the woods full of moss and running squirrels.
“You still miss him very much, don’t you?” Paul said, finishing every crumb on his plate.
“Oh, yes. I just wish — I just wish something good would happen and that he — ”
“You know what I think, Mariah,” Paul said. “It won’t be any good if it isn’t your mother’s own decision. You can’t, Kim can’t bring him back. It’s got to be her own wish, not yours. You could sit here and wish for one hundred years, and if he came back because of you or Kim it wouldn’t work out.”
P. S. I Love You Page 9
