Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘Well,’ said Michael, gathering his book and sheets of notes, ‘I’d better be going.’

  ‘I’ve got to go out too,’ she said. ‘I need something from Dumas’s.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ he said eagerly and without thinking, since Dumas’s was in the opposite direction from home.

  She smiled hesitantly. I shouldn’t have said that, he thought, feeling geeky and futile. ‘The thing is,’ she said, more hesitantly still, ‘it might be best if you left first. Then I could meet you outside.’

  He nodded dumbly but didn’t really understand. She motioned upstairs with her head, then flicked back the hair from both sides of her face. ‘He worries.’

  Got it, he thought. The parson won’t approve. And with a sudden, furtive joy, he found himself saying goodbye as the parson came halfway down the stairs.

  Cassie’s father nodded curtly. ‘I’ll be down presently, Cassie,’ he announced.

  Outside Michael waited by the corner, out of sight of the living room window.

  When she joined him she was wearing a down vest. They stood silently for a moment, then she pointed down the street. ‘Look at that,’ she said, ‘isn’t it beautiful?’

  Look at what? he wanted to say, seeing only Lonergan’s modern ranch house and the raspberry patch in back where, when he was little, he and Donny had snuck fruit on Wednesday evenings when the Lonergan clan went as a family to midweek service at the First Baptist Church just up the block. They had done it two weeks running and doubtless would have picked the raspberry patch clean if Mrs Donovan across the street hadn’t seen them in the late-August dusk. She’d called Donny’s father, who had scared the living hell out of them both by telling them what he would do if they so much as walked on the sidewalk next to the Lonergans’.

  ‘The houses here,’ said Cassie, ‘are wonderful.’

  Michael didn’t know what to say. No one in his family other than his mother had ever used the word ‘wonderful’. And what about the houses? They were, it seemed to him, just houses.

  ‘You like it here?’ He tried not to sound incredulous.

  ‘Of course. Don’t you?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I guess I’d like to see somewhere else for a change.’ I want you to see the world, his mother had said. Stillriver’s not the be all and end all.

  ‘You must have been to a big city.’

  He thought of his uncle’s house, not seen since his mother had died, located on the outskirts of the city. ‘I’ve seen Grand Rapids.’

  Dumas’s loomed ahead of him across the street. Don’t push your luck. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hope the exam goes all right.’

  ‘Thank you so much for your help.’

  ‘Let me know how you do before you thank me too much.’

  She was looking away. ‘I usually go for a walk each day at five.’

  Why tell him this? And then he understood it was an invitation, as awkwardly put as his own offer to accompany her here. ‘I’m working then,’ he said. ‘I work in the drugstore.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said with a false brightness to her voice. ‘I guess I’ll see you at school then. Thanks again.’ She started to cross the street as he saw the one truly hopeful thing in his life start to disappear.

  ‘I don’t work on Wednesdays,’ he shouted as she reached the far sidewalk. She turned around and waved. Did she hear me?

  A week later he announced at ten to five that he needed to go to Dumas’s, ignored his father’s questioning gaze, and walked towards Main Street. When he didn’t see Cassie on the street that stretched from the Gilberts’ house down to the Main Street intersection, he walked around the block. Then he spied her, a block ahead of him, as he passed by her house for a second time.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted, forgetting altogether his plan to meet her ‘by accident’.

  When he caught up to her she was smiling. ‘I was hoping I might see you,’ she said. ‘Gosh it’s cold.’ She dug both her hands into the pockets of the green parka she was wearing. It made her look like a model in an ad for a ski resort.

  ‘Let’s keep moving,’ Michael said, and they started walking without an agreed destination, which proved to be no problem since their conversation was at once so easy – yet somehow so intense – that it overshadowed the issue of where the two might be headed. She walked quickly, he noticed, her long legs striding out with the loose grace of a filly happy for exercise. But then he forgot her legs as she began to talk, first about the math exam (‘I got a B plus!’ she said excitedly, giving his arm a sudden two-fingered pinch), then basketball, and then Stillriver, which she seemed to like so much that Michael began to wonder what he had been missing all these years, then more about some book she was reading, which he decided he had better read too. And suddenly he started talking, and over an hour later as he was describing the twins to her (how had they got on to Ethel and Daisy?), he found they had ended up three doors down from the Lonergans’ and four from Cassie’s own house, so they stopped (as if tacitly agreeing they did not want to be seen by her father), and stood there under one of the tallest maple trees in town. ‘Gosh it’s late,’ she said, looking at her watch.

  He nodded and said, ‘I’d better get home,’ then paused, uncertain of what to say next.

  ‘That was fun,’ she said, and flashed a big open-mouthed smile. He saw her teeth were wonderfully white and her mouth was so expressive as she laughed that he felt waves of prickles spread all over his skin.

  ‘We could do it again,’ he suddenly blurted out, looking away and wondering where he had found the courage to say that.

  And she laughed, reached out and pinched his arm again, lightly and playfully. ‘Same time, same place?’ she asked. He looked up at her and saw that her eyes seemed to be dancing, such was their sparkle, and he found himself smiling back and laughing too. And he watched as she strode away, noticing again how quickly her long legs moved, and when she got to her front door she turned and waved once, real quick, before sliding into the house.

  As he walked home he whacked himself hard on the chest with both fists because his heart was beating so fast (thump, thump, thump, like the drum in the high school marching band) and he wondered if he felt the mixture of adrenalin and warmth because, for the first time in as long as he could remember, his heart was full.

  After this, he could be sure of seeing Cassie by herself at least once a week, though getting to know her was a gradual process of discovery, made slower not because she was putting up a deterring façade but rather, he sensed, because she was . . . well, just taking her time. On their walks, Cassie talked more than he did, but she wasn’t gushy; in fact, what he liked right away was the mix of slight reserve and utter absence of affectation. She had a light, soft voice which, when they were walking in winter weather, Michael had to strain to hear. And once in a while she would sing, without embarrassment – usually something folky, a Joan Baez song taught her as a child by her Berkeley aunt, or a favourite from The Band, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’.

  He liked it when she sang. In fact, he found very little in her that he didn’t like, except that he couldn’t get to see her often enough. He liked the fact that she made him laugh, and could laugh at herself. He liked the fact that she liked fruit as much as he did, though her favourite was cherries, his peaches. He liked that she read novels mainly, usually by authors he had never heard of. Who was Lawrence Durrell? He liked the fact that she liked to cook, since he didn’t, and he wondered why she ate so little meat; she drank wine too, or at least a little bit, even though the parson was teetotal. He liked her small hands, though she was tallish, and that she sometimes bit her nails (he was chronic), and the way she liked wearing men’s shirts, though the shirts in question came from her mother, one of the few references she made to her. He liked, when he got to know her pretty well (it was summer by then) the fact that she waxed her legs, and he even liked the fact that she once declared she wouldn’t ever sleep with anyone she didn’t love, because he thou
ght (she was still seeing him wasn’t she?) that this somehow kept him in the running

  Intentionally or not, Cassie moved effortlessly into his tight circle of friends, helped by the fact that she was already a team-mate of Nancy Sheringham. Cassie was quiet with them, not talkative as she was with Michael, which made it easy for the circle to accept her. They might have closed ranks against a pushier person. And like most of them, she was a fairly normal kid without a normal family: Nancy Sheringham’s father drank and, though Nancy didn’t talk about it, hit his wife and kids; Kenny Williams had no father, and his mother ran a beauty salon in the basement of the unfinished house his father was building when he dropped dead while she was pregnant with Kenny; Mrs Fell, Ricky’s mother, was confined to a wheelchair; Michael’s mother was dead. Only Donny had two ostensibly normal parents, and it was accordingly Donny’s house where they often gathered, and where Mrs Washington fed them without complaint. So Cassie, sports-playing, mother dead, father odd (and ailing), fit in right away.

  From the beginning, however, Michael had the wonderful if fragile sense that it was he and not the others who mattered most to her. For she took such an obvious interest in him, even seeming to be interested in the doings of the drugstore. She didn’t hang around there, didn’t make it tough for him by wanting him to pay her attention when he was working, but she would ask him later about the job, and laugh when he told her stories about Alvin’s explosions, or about Larry’s most recent ridiculous boast (though he did not mention like a dog!). He could tell her about more serious things, too, even painful things: one afternoon he must have talked about his mother non-stop for an hour and a half, describing her, in effect remembering her out loud, for the first time since she had died.

  Soon they weren’t just meeting on Henniker Street on Wednesday afternoons; sometimes on Sundays, after the drugstore closed at lunchtime, she would come by his house (though only for a little while) during the parson’s afternoon nap. With Michael’s father, she seemed so much at ease – straightforward (grown up, really) and polite – that even his father began to unbend and initiate conversation with her. To Michael’s mild disbelief, she had snot-nosed Gary eating out of her hand by the simple expedient of pretending to care what he thought. ‘You don’t have to be so nice to him,’ Michael had told her, and she’d just smiled and said, ‘That’s all right. Your brother’s not so bad.’

  And she especially liked the twins, managing to persuade Michael (though not his father) about their specialness without going on about it excessively. They adored her, and Ethel in particular complained if much more than a couple of days went by without their seeing her.

  Michael was almost never inside the Gilbert house, since Cassie’s father grew no friendlier. When he came to the store to get his paper he was civil to Michael, but only just. He seemed to hover around their relationship like an oppressive girdle, for he was very demanding of Cassie and strict about her going out. Yet Michael was left in no doubt from the beginning that Cassie’s tending of her father always came first. He was not well, Michael was made to understand, and Cassie saw her job – well, her duty anyway – as looking after him.

  Michael asked his father early on, ‘What exactly is a parson?’

  ‘An old-fashioned word for minister. Like reverend.’

  ‘You know anybody nowadays who calls himself Parson?’

  ‘No. I thought it died out with Parson Weems a hundred and fifty years ago. Though come to think of it, there was a horse’s ass known to your uncle in Grand Rapids. But he died years ago. Never heard anybody use the title since.’

  That Sunday morning as Michael gulped hot coffee before rushing late to work, his father came down in his old bathrobe, terry cloth worn smooth from age. ‘I thought you might be going to church today.’

  ‘Church? You know I’m working. I always work Sundays.’

  ‘Reverend Taverner’s away and Cassie’s father is preaching today. I’m sure he’d be pleased to see a friend of his daughter in the congregation.’

  Michael had shrugged – he was going to work. What’s it to you anyway? he wanted to ask but didn’t. And then he wondered, Is he teasing me?

  As spring came and the weather turned warmer, he and Cassie would walk across Main Street and down to the shore of Stillriver Lake. Past Dr Fell’s, over to Mr Nelson’s dock and up the boathouse stairs, where they would stand under the high cedar and lean against the rails, looking out at the lake. It was illicit – actually, it was illegal trespass – but since the Nelsons were gone during the week they could go there undisturbed. And if any neighbour noticed them, Michael and Cassie must have had their blessing, since no one ever challenged their right to be there.

  It was a long time before he and Cassie were anything but friends, and his encounters with Susie Mest and the Mexican girl helped him not at all. I should have tried to kiss her at the beginning, he told himself; if she had said no then I wouldn’t have been losing anything. For it was the loss of her he feared, and which checked him from trying. He couldn’t read the signs at all. Sometimes she’d put her hand on his shoulder for a moment and once, standing at Nelson’s, she stroked his hair. But that was all.

  Until one day, talking about grammar of all things (Why is she talking about this? he thought) he suddenly listened hard as she explained a gerund to him. ‘Like kissing instead of kiss,’ she said, and his heart began to pound. ‘Daddy says there’s a gerundive too – that’s when you add “able” on.’

  ‘Like kissable,’ he said at once, determined not to let the door close – if in fact it was open.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s poss-ible.’ They both laughed.

  ‘And even prob-able?’

  And she leaned over and turned her mouth to him, and just before they kissed she said, ‘Yes.’

  She laughingly called him fast mover after this for weeks, but she was very slow to let him do anything but kiss her. Then one Saturday early in July, he was working a split shift, with the afternoon off. When he came out of the store he found Cassie outside. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Daddy’s gone to Grand Rapids with Reverend Taverner. I offered to go with him but he said I should stay and do my homework.’ She grimaced. ‘It’s too nice out for that.’

  ‘I’m free all afternoon. You want to do something?’

  ‘I want to go to the beach.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said hesitantly, and they walked down Main Street past the Dairy Queen and turned along Beach Road. Now they walked in the street like everybody else; you only stayed on the shady sidewalks, with their split concrete and obtruding tree roots, if you were trying to be low key.

  The State Park was packed with cars and the beach was crowded. The chalk board on the back of the lifeguard station said 78, and there was virtually no wind off the lake.

  ‘Grand Central Station,’ said Cassie. ‘I wish the Nelsons weren’t here weekends – we could go there.’

  They walked over to the channel and climbed onto the long, thin concrete pier. ‘What’s over there?’ asked Cassie, pointing across the channel.

  ‘South Beach.’

  They watched as two Coho fishing boats moved through the channel, then a succession of smaller craft, one of them heading out to waterski. A voice came from left and below them, and looking down Michael saw Larry Bottel entering the channel in his father’s speedboat, his girlfriend Ursula beside him in a bikini. ‘Hey there,’ shouted Larry, ‘we’re going out on the big lake. Want to come?’

  Michael looked at Cassie, who shook her head. Then she said, ‘I know, let’s get him to give us a ride over there.’ And she pointed across the channel to South Beach.

  Michael called down to Larry, who manoeuvred the boat next to the iron rungs on the side of the pier and idled while first Cassie and then Michael climbed aboard and stood in the well. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘come out with us for a while.’

  Michael hesitated but Cassie shook her head. ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘drop us over there will yo
u?’

  Larry kept looking at Michael. ‘Come on,’ he said again, ‘the big lake’s like glass today. We can really let her rip.’

  Cassie’s voice grew harder. ‘No. Please just drop us over there.’

  Larry shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ and he swung the boat hard, gunned the engine, then immediately eased off as they approached the matching ladder on the other side of the channel. ‘Have a good time,’ he said a little sarcastically as they clambered up the ladder.

  Up on the pier Michael and Cassie watched Larry and Ursula move out towards the larger waters. ‘Why didn’t you want to go out there?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to be with you,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘Besides, Larry gives me the creeps.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Sometimes a guy looks at you,’ Cassie said, ‘and seems to like what he sees without your minding at all. And sometimes he likes what he sees and makes you feel like a piece of meat. That’s Larry.’

  They clambered over the rock fill that divided the channel from the beach, then moved down onto a wide expanse of sand that stretched south ahead of them all the way to Sable Point.

  ‘Look at the difference,’ Cassie exclaimed, and Michael nodded. Perhaps half a mile down the beach he could see three or four people running into the water; otherwise, the beach was theirs. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said. ‘Or is this private?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m sure some people would like it to be,’ he said, pointing towards one of the old cedar cottages up in the dunes to their left. ‘But it’s not. No beach is.’

  ‘But why isn’t anyone here? You’d think with the State Park so crowded some of the people would want to come here.’

  ‘They’d have to swim across the channel. Or drive all the way round, and even then, there’s nowhere to park. All the property between here and the road is private.’

  They were walking quickly now, though Cassie would stop to look up at the houses, shrouded by brush and high pines above them. Then he stopped to look as well.