Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  In his dorm they made love for the first time without any fear of getting caught, though his single bed and the cramped confines of his room eventually drove them outside. He took her to dinner in an Italian restaurant, a first for him, since although there were pizza parlours in Atlantic County, there was no risotto within a hundred miles. ‘My aunt took me to one once,’ Cassie said shyly. ‘But it wasn’t as nice as this.’

  He told her about his classes, and confessed how hard he was finding mathematics. ‘It isn’t much fun,’ he said, and Cassie looked concerned. ‘And I can’t stand chemistry.’

  ‘Keep trying things,’ she urged him. ‘You’ll find something you really like.’

  He worried she would start to get bored with her visit, since it exposed how little he had explored either the campus or Ann Arbor. He said as much to her as they went back to the dorm. ‘When you come next year it will be different,’ he added. ‘To be honest with you, this year it’s seemed like either I was in Stillriver visiting you, or working hard here and missing you.’

  Cassie didn’t say anything. Later that night they made love in the dark while a party went on noisily along the corridor, dope fumes wafting down the hall. They lay quietly together afterwards, listening to the noise of talking and music. Then Cassie removed her arms from his, got out of bed and turned on the lamp on his desk. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked dozily, for he had been half-asleep.

  ‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ she said quietly. She was naked, and went and took one of his T-shirts out of the drawer.

  ‘If you’re cold why don’t you come back to bed?’ he said, but she put on the T-shirt and sat down on the one chair in the room.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, growing alarmed.

  ‘I won’t be coming here next year,’ she said, in the same flat, dull way she had announced the year before that she would be staying behind.

  And it was for the same reason – the parson. ‘This could go on for ever,’ he protested. ‘Your father’s got you trapped there.’ The parson may have become an invalid, but he seemed to be hanging on to life – and to his daughter – with the vigour of a healthy man.

  Cassie shook her head. ‘It’s not going to last for ever.’

  They argued back and forth throughout most of the night, or rather Michael argued, since Cassie stuck firmly to her decision. Finally, as dawn neared, they agreed to stop talking about it and she came back to bed, though he could not resist saying, ‘I hate to see you wasting your life. You’ve got to get out of there and see something of the world.’

  She turned over, so her back was towards him. ‘I live in the world, too, Michael. And it’s not a bad world. I like Stillriver, I always have. And I keep busy.’

  In the summer he found that she certainly did. Her father was a demanding, complaining patient, whose chronic discomfort meant you couldn’t ask, ‘How are you feeling today?’ if you ever wanted a cheery answer. Yet somehow Cassie managed not only to tend him – which meant give him his pills, cook his meals, do his laundry, make his bed, and most of all keep him company – but also go half-time to North Shore, the community college twenty miles north, and get ‘A’s in both her courses, sing in the church choir, bake and sell salt loaf bread to the bakery downtown, and help coach the girls’ high school basketball team. Even Michael had to admit that Cassie didn’t act like a victim, though her busyness meant that often when he went home for the weekend he only saw her for a couple of hours. He wasn’t getting all of her, he thought bitterly, and he certainly wasn’t getting much of U of M.

  He found the drugstore unchanged, which he supposed indicated that he was the unchanged one, something he had not expected before going to college. Fine weather through June and July meant the store was very busy and there were scarcely any lull times on the floor. It was Marilyn’s turn to be ill – she got pneumonia and was out three weeks – and he found Alvin relying on him heavily to oversee the summer staff.

  As if in reward for this, he found himself increasingly taken into Alvin’s confidence, commercial rather than personal. He began discussing the daily take with Michael, showing him through the newly-acquired computerized tills how much came from liquor (by law only served from the till in the back) and how much from the register nearest the newspapers and cigarettes.

  He’d call Michael up behind the drugs counter when he was filling prescriptions, not to give him lessons in pharmacological science, but to show how he ordered the bulk medicines (beta blockers, insulin, Valium), what they cost wholesale and what their mark-up was. He explained too how over the years he’d resisted the urge to expand, feeding any growth from cash in hand rather than the bank. Alvin was half talking aloud, half giving a tutorial. Although Alvin’s temper had not been entirely displaced by his ulcers, Michael realized he was no longer scared of his boss.

  At home his father seemed even more absorbed in his books and local Indian history than before, while Gary was entering adolescence with a burst of facial pimples and a smart-ass manner that got on Michael’s nerves. His brother was doing badly in school but didn’t care; he and his friends seemed to have no interest other than smoking dope. Michael doubted his father knew just how much marijuana Gary smoked, then wondered if he should tell him about it. But it didn’t seem his business any more; he no longer felt a paid-up member of the household, seeing summer as just an interim period before resuming his new life at college.

  With Cassie, he struggled to dovetail their schedules so they could see each other more often, but it was difficult – he worked most evenings in the drugstore, and on the rare free night they couldn’t stay out very late because of the parson. They saw a lot of Donny and Nancy, having supper together early at the root beer stand or eating barbecue Donny’s mother made at her house. Both Donny and Nancy were at Central and at last going out together; in fact, they seemed so wrapped up in each other that college had made little impression on either of them, and Michael was surprised to find that both assumed they would be coming back to Atlantic County after college. ‘Don’t you want to go somewhere else?’ he asked Donny as they drove out to join the girls at Nancy’s parents’ farm.

  ‘Yeah, I would,’ said Donny. ‘I thought maybe after graduation I might travel a bit. See Chicago, maybe try to get to Florida. If I can save up enough.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘If Nancy wants to come, that is. And if there’s time.’

  When Michael was working split shifts he and Cassie would sometimes drive to the Half, make love on a blanket by the creek, then walk through the woods, ending up in the large meadow where, like his mother long ago, Cassie would pick wild flowers. He taught her the names of the ones she liked best: milkwort with its tiny buds, the blue tubes of great lobelia, and late in the summer closed gentian, which were protected and couldn’t be picked. The Half was where he most liked to take her, since they could make love there, though it didn’t seem to have this resonance for Cassie – twice, to Michael’s fury, she brought Ethel and Daisy along on their trips there. And Cassie seemed equally happy to stay in town, where they would walk around or go swimming: they would go down to the Channel and dive in, then swim over to South Beach. Michael’s agoraphobic reaction to the lake had pretty much petered out, and overall the number of panic attacks he suffered (he’d heard a psychology major down the hall call them that) was blessedly low. And he discovered from Mex that Ronald was still in Texas, making good money, with no known plans to come back. So that summer there were no clouds on his horizon, other than the looming separation from Cassie when he went back to school. While the hot days lasted they had, as Ethel liked to say when rapturous from gardening with Cassie, ‘the bestest time’.

  At the beginning of his sophomore year, Michael switched from a dorm to a room in a house with three other guys who’d had their fourth fall through. He didn’t really know them at all, and through the autumn it stayed that way. They were all juniors, and had known each other since their freshman year. They had a wide circle of other friends, including lots
of girls with whom, unlike Michael’s circle in high school, they did sleep. They were perfectly civil to Michael, but for the first time in his life he was conscious of being patronized – older and more sophisticated, they seemed to see Michael as a hick, a small town boy at sea in the big wide world. He did not feel he could dispute the justice of this view.

  His distance from them was magnified by the fact that none of them knew anything about pharmacology or math or geography (‘is Waukegan in Michigan?’ asked Sam, the poli-sci major from New York), and none of them seemed to care about what they didn’t know. So Michael’s new passion was a private one, for he had discovered a new love, in engineering. He wasn’t sure why he felt this way, or why he had lost his passion for mathematics. Partly, he knew deep down, it was recognition that he would never be outstanding at math, never lose the feeling that his peers got there more quickly and understood more than he seemed able to. But it was also that the purity of mathematics lay in its abstraction, and the purity of engineering was abstraction made real. It was the very applied nature of the discipline that he loved, using concrete tools to unravel the mystery of the arch, though the mystery somehow still remained, however thorough the explanation.

  So he kept himself to himself, working hard in his courses, especially engineering. He continued to go home virtually every weekend to see Cassie. To his fury she had dropped out of North Shore that autumn, claiming she couldn’t be away from home at rigidly designated times, claiming too (preposterously, he thought) that she couldn’t find cover on the regular basis needed for her to go to class. Yet she managed to stay involved in all her other activities, and sometimes even helped out at the drugstore, working with Marilyn when Marilyn’s niece took time off. He tried to keep arguing with her about this, urging her to re-enrol, but instead of flaring up at him, as she would have in the past, now she simply gave up arguing back.

  It was proving difficult to sleep together, since Cassie’s father was increasingly dependent on her, and his father never seemed to go out any more at weekends – on the one night he had supper at the Fells’ and the house should have been empty, Gary got the flu and was at home in bed. At one point, Michael calculated, he hadn’t slept with Cassie for over five weeks.

  He had Christmas to look forward to, however, since the parson was planning to visit his sister in Oregon – Cassie would go with him for a week, then fly home while he stayed a second one. They would have the parson’s house to themselves, Michael told himself when he felt frustrated late that fall. So he could not mask his disappointment when the parson proved too ill to travel. ‘Is sex that important to you?’ demanded Cassie. ‘You actually get to see more of me this way.’ He wanted to say, Yes, it’s that important, but knew she’d find this insulting. He wished she shared his relentless carnal hunger, and couldn’t understand why she didn’t mind when they couldn’t make love. But then, he could not understand her apparent contentment with her whole situation. He was unhappy with it, he told himself, on her behalf.

  One Saturday night in January, on a rare weekend when he hadn’t gone home, he found himself alone in the house in Ann Arbor watching Saturday Night Live, when there was a knock on the door. Opening it he found a girl named Sophie Jansen, a senior and friend of his housemates, standing on the porch, shivering in the cold. He explained that nobody was home and she laughed. ‘You count, don’t you?’ she said, and walked past him into the living room.

  He had never talked with her before, but had admired her from a distance. She was breezy, confident and extremely attractive. Sophie had streaked blonde hair which reminded him of Mitchell’s daughter in the lumber store, only Sophie’s had a shiny, cleaner sheen to it, and it was shoulder-length. Her eyes were bluish-green, and her nose was small and curved – ‘People say it’s cute,’ she had once laughingly declared in his hearing, ‘but I do wish it were straighter.’ She moved with an obvious confidence, yet seemed without the self-consciousness about her looks, really a kind of arrogance, that had characterized so many of the pretty girls he’d known in high school, like Anthea Heaton (though in her case it was prissiness as much as conceit that rankled), or Cathy Stallover, of course, who wouldn’t even say hello half the time to the boys in her class.

  Contrastingly, this girl (woman, he corrected himself; she seemed to him a woman) seemed so easy with herself that she didn’t feel the need to act superior. She was funny, too; he had heard her one night make his housemates laugh with a story about her father, a wealthy contractor in Indiana – something about the money he’d spent on a present for her mother, jewellery that cost the earth but looked like the cheapest paste.

  She took off her coat now, then reached down and unzipped her boots, which came to her knees and were a rich mocha brown. He offered her a beer and brought a six-pack out from the kitchen, and soon they were drinking and talking as he sat in the rocking chair and she curled up on the sofa with her legs tucked under her. He was conscious of her unseasonable tan, and the fact she wasn’t wearing tights or stockings (no wonder she was cold, he thought), and of how the light from the standing lamp next to the sofa picked up the light gold hairs on her arms, and that her toenails were painted shocking pink.

  To his pleasant amazement, she asked him questions about himself, and he told her about Stillriver, about the littleness of the place, and the importance of the drugstore, and how strange Ann Arbor seemed to him. He explained too his gradual but growing conviction that he was missing something, and that it wasn’t Stillriver. Some new and wider life existed, somewhere around him in this vast, new place. There were so many forms of new life, but he couldn’t seem to find them.

  He admitted how he knew the others must think him simple and hickish, with small town stamped all over him like dye, but he couldn’t help it – ‘After all,’ he said, to her amusement, ‘that’s exactly what I am.’ But Sophie didn’t seem to think it the end of the world to come from a small upstate Michigan town, and he felt encouraged by this, trying to concentrate on what he was telling her, rather than on how she looked to him. For she seemed larger than life, this sudden, vivacious irruption into his dull, solitary Saturday night. With a little urging from her, he told her more about himself, how he didn’t like pharmacy or chemistry that much, and how he did like engineering, which he was only just discovering in Introduction to Civil Engineering (101) and how he didn’t think he wanted to go home after college, even if Alvin and Marilyn were expecting him to.

  And then he realized he had been talking almost two hours with Sophie Jansen, who was a senior, a philosophy major, the daughter of a very rich man, and hadn’t slept with any of his housemates (he knew this because they all wanted to but had not succeeded) and he had not once mentioned Cassie Gilbert.

  And feeling he had probably made a fool of himself, and slightly high from the three beers he’d had, he made his excuses awkwardly and went to his room, while Sophie said she’d sit and wait for the others to come back. He lay on his bed, which was just off the floor, wearing nothing but a pair of Stillriver High shorts (purple shorts with gold lettering, the school colours) because of the warmth of the house – his housemates were not frugal with utilities – and reading Dune with just the bedside lamp on, listening to a tape on the cheap system he’d bought the year before in Muskegon.

  ‘Is that Steely Dan?’ She was in the doorway, swaying slightly. He nodded, and she came into the room. ‘Mind if I listen for a while?’

  Before he could even reply, she came and sat down on the edge of the bed. She had a little bead purse wrapped around her wrist and she opened this now and took out a short, thin joint and a throwaway lighter. She lit the j and inhaled sharply, holding her breath until she let it out with a rush and smiled, passing the joint to Michael.

  He thought, I promised to call Cassie, but the phone was in the living room, and as he took his second hit on the joint and felt the first mild tingle on his bare legs and sensed the first hint of the mental reconstruction he experienced when stoned, he realized he wa
sn’t going anywhere. I’ll call her tomorrow.

  They smoked the whole joint, Sophie sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him, rocking slowly back and forth to the music. When the tape ended they waited for the other side to begin and Sophie gave a big, contented sigh. As the music started she said in a low voice, ‘Turn over on your stomach and I’ll give you a back rub.’

  I have to say no, he told himself, then thought for no apparent reason of his second grade teacher, Miss Summers – dry as dust his father had said of her – and he discovered that he had already rolled over on his stomach and Sophie had begun to touch him, lightly at first, her fingertips in slow circles across his back. Then she pressed more firmly – her hands were surprisingly strong – and kneaded his long, thin back, leaning on his spine at one point until he heard a small crack. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘you’re relaxing.’

  And he was, the sustained eroticism overcoming his self-consciousness and mild alarm, and he began to enjoy these new sensations – Cassie had never given him a massage – and lose himself to the blurred sensations of the soft music, the dope, and this sexy woman’s hands. She gently spread his legs and kneeled between them, rubbing the backs of his thighs, and then working for a long time on the backs of his calves.

  ‘It’s warm in here,’ she said. He felt her weight lift off the bed and, turning his head, saw her stand up and lift her lilac dress in one quick movement over her head and toss it onto the floor. He had a glimpse of her breasts and then she was back on the bed, rubbing his back again with long, smooth strokes. Now she was sitting on him while she squeezed the muscles of his shoulder blades with each hand. He felt the strong bulge of her mound as she leant forward, and her breasts brushed lightly against his back. She sat up over him and her thighs gripped the outside of his own thighs as she tucked her fingers in under the top of his shorts and started to work them down. ‘Something’s getting in the way,’ she said with a light laugh. ‘Time to turn over.’