Bridge To Happiness

by Jill Barnett

  So that was how Mike spent only an hour teaching March to board, instead of the whole weekend he’d expected. When he thought about it later, driving to his cousin’s cabin near Tahoe City to drop off their stuff, exhausted, high on the day and her, he realized he shouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing about March was expected. How nuts it was that she wanted to be special and thought she was ordinary. She was better than one of his father expensive wines, better any than hundred year old Scotch.

  Sunshine. The name just came out of his mouth at the Fillmore that night, along with everything else he was thinking and feeling. Enter brain, exit mouth. He’d spilled his guts, said exactly what he thought then, all the while he expected her to turn and run. But here she was, now the brightest part of his life. His luckiest hunch.

  At dinner that evening with his cousin over draft beer and thick sirloin burgers covered in onion rings, served in red plastic baskets at his favorite place, a small shack near the water packed with locals every night, they sat on metal chairs and ate on old, miss-matched dinette tables in front of a huge fire. She quizzed him about everything, how he made the boards, where his idea for them had come from.

  “It all started with a sled you could stand on and slide down the hill, a Snurfer. But before I ever saw one, I’d spent plenty of years on a skateboard. And Brad and I surfed summers in Santa Cruz.”

  “We all got Snurfers one year for Christmas from our grandfather,” Rob told her. “Gramps said they reminded him of when he was a kid and they used to sled down hills standing on barrel slats tied together with clothesline.” Rob nodded at Mike. “Genius here was the one who after one Snurfing season wanted to improve the design.”

  “I got tired of face-planting.”

  “You always were an over-achieving asshole.”

  “Better than just being an asshole.”

  “You’re jealous because Gramps liked me best.”

  “No. He worried about you the most. It was that IQ test you failed.”

  “Screw you, Mike.” Rob laughed, finishing off his beer.

  Rob and Mike were the same age, personality and shared the same fire in the heart, both forced to survive in a conservative family run by men who demanded they be anything but what they were. In each other they found the strength to hang onto their fire when others kept trying to extinguish it.

  “We had to do a project in my shop class,” Mike went on. “I figured I could combine the idea of a Snurfer with something like a skateboard, a surfboard and skis. That first skiboard was made out of wood and a piece of carpet and aluminum.”

  “Man, was it fast.” Rob shook his head. “If you could stay on and if you could control it, you could book-it down a hill.”

  “We started racing each other on those.” Mike pulled out his wallet to pay the bill. “I’m still trying to find the right material for the board’s bottom. The aluminum facing isn’t right. Still, these boards are so much more controllable than last year’s. But there’s got to be something better.”

  March had one of those contemplative looks on her face again, and for a tough, doubtful moment he wondered if she was thinking like his dad. He worried that he’d just bored her senseless talking about board construction. Rob was right. He was a weird geek.

  She tapped the tabletop. “Have you thought about this stuff? Formica? I remember seeing my dad install it in our kitchen. Don’t you laminate it onto a wood base?”

  Mike exchanged a look with Rob, who was shaking his head. It was so simple.

  “What?” she asked, looking back and forth between them. “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

  “Sunshine . . . it’s the perfect idea.”

  By the time they were scraping the snow off the car, she was talking to him about how he needed to apply for a patent. Back at the cabin they walked inside and she turned around, walking backwards, her hands moving in time with her mouth. “I think you should try to sell your boards, Mike.”

  With those few words from her, everything his father had said to him evaporated. March Randolph was the smartest girl he’d ever known and she believed in him. Until then, he hadn’t actually admitted to himself how badly he wanted to be important in her eyes.

  Later that night, after they were lying in the dark, legs tangled, March in the crook of his arm, he told her how proud he was when she came down that hill. That he was surprised. Amazed. And his cousin was right. She was a natural.

  She told him she loved him and was quiet for a long time, but awake, fiddling with his chest hair. He was almost asleep when she asked, “Mike? Are you awake?”

  He looked over at her. Something about her tone said trouble. “Yeah. Why?”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “When I was about thirteen?” She paused. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit this.” Her voice gave her away. She was trying not to laugh.

  He rolled over with her and pinned her to the bed. “Spill it.”

  “My dad bought me a Snurfer for Christmas.”

  After a heartbeat of silence, he was the one laughing. And he knew then he wanted to live the rest of his life drinking only milk.

  “Sweetheart? Can’t you and Mike just have a normal wedding? In a church?”

  With those words, March realized that Beatrice Randolph, her mired-in-tradition and old-fashioned mother, didn’t remember there was supposed to be romance in a wedding. Clearly her parents could never possibly understand the open, unfettered appeal of marrying the man you loved outside of a church, on rolling lawns, surrounded by the freedom of open blue skies and cypress trees twisted by the wind. How could marrying on a San Francisco hillside not be the perfect wedding venue, surrounded by nature’s honest realism?

  In the time March had lived away from home, nothing had really changed there. Her parents could never see her unique place the world, at least not in the way she did.

  “It’s a religious ceremony,” her mother said, standing in the family kitchen, a large eat-in room with off-white painted cabinets, copper pots hanging alongside fish-shaped aspic molds, and those classic blue and white dishes that had been around for more than a few hundred years displayed on crisp ivy papered walls. “We belong to a perfectly lovely church. The whole congregation has known you since you were baptized.”

  “It’s not their wedding,” March said simply. “It’s mine. And Michael’s.” In her heart, she wanted no traditional trappings. She was acutely aware of that fact while standing inside her parents’ home, which only reinforced her determination to make their wedding about the two people taking the vows.

  “The wedding is about the bride, dear, not the groom,” her mother corrected her.

  “It’s his wedding, too. It’s our marriage. This is important to both of us.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “We’re only going to do this once, Mother.”

  “Then I don’t understand why you want your only wedding to be in the woods.”

  “It’s not the woods. It’s a park. You’ve lived here long enough. You know the city. The view from that hillside is spectacular. When you stand up there, you can see from the ocean to the bay, you can see the bridge and all those blue skies.”

  “March. Please . . . ” Beatrice Randolph sat down hard on a kitchen chair, a sure sign she was disgusted. Littered across the painted tabletop were bridal magazines and old-fashioned etiquette books with gingham covers her mother borrowed from the neighborhood library, along with printers’ samples of engraved invitations on heavy cream-colored stationary with vellum inserts and embossed tissue. Her mother must have brought them home and called March after the very first flush of wedding news.

  “The park is closer to Heaven than inside any stuffy church,” March told her.

  “And so windy you’ll blow away. Think of your veil.”

  March snapped her fingers. “Not a problem, Mom. I’m not wearing a veil.”

  Beatrice sank her head into her hands and groaned.

&
nbsp; “No white lace gown with a train either.”

  “You need to think about this. It’s outside, March.”

  “I know.”

  After a too long silence her mother said, “The seagulls will poop everywhere.”

  “Oh, Mom…” March burst out laughing. “If we were Greek, that would be good luck.”

  “If we were Greek. you’d still live at home and we wouldn’t be having this argument.”

  March sat down across from her mother and took her hand, looking her straight in the eye. “Are we really arguing about my wedding?”

  Her mother swallowed, clearly uncomfortable, then looked down at her hands, thoughtful. Her nails were manicured into perfect ovals, cuticles pushed back, and painted with her immutable Coty red. The familiar pale skin of her mother’s hands didn’t have a single mark, not even a freckle. Her mother had the ivory complexion of a natural redhead. For as long as March could remember a bottle of Jergen’s that smelled exactly like maraschino cherries sat next to the kitchen faucet. Her mother’s hands had always been one of the softest things in her life.

  Harsh paint cleaners and hard, city water purified with bleach made her own hands a mess, split her impossibly short nails. Her cuticles were hopelessly snagged and often bloody. The engagement ring Mike gave her was lovely, perfect really: white gold and a row of small baguette diamonds around an oval aquamarine, her birthstone. Just looking at it made her unbelievably happy. But her hands were godawful, and she said as much.

  Her mother laughed, took March’s hand and looked at the ring for a long time, her expression slowly changing. “I suppose a church can be stuffy,” she said after a minute.

  At that moment March knew she had won. Her wedding would be exactly the way she had envisioned: majestic views and green grass, kites in the air and a hundred wind chimes in the trees. Tomorrow, those gingham covered etiquette books would go back to the library, the bridal magazines to the waiting room of her uncle’s dental practice, the invitations in the trash, or even better, in a folder kept for her sister May.

  Beatrice took her other peeling, dry, ugly hand. “The beauty is inside your hands, not outside; it spills out onto blank paper and canvas. You have the creative hands of an artist.” Not even on her most cynical day, could March miss the pride in her mom’s voice.

  Funny how the small and irritating things in a day could evaporate in the face of a moment of honest emotion. Her conservative family, all of them, would wear whatever she asked, hike up a grassy hill and stand in the Pacific wind to witness the moment she promised life’s most important things to the man who loved her.

  She’d grown up in this house. For all its unappealing and stodgy tradition, the kitchen was the heart of their home and had only been changed once, when her parents put in all electric appliances like in all the suburb tract homes built in nearby neighborhoods.

  Her own place in the Haight had a tiny kitchen with one of those old gas stoves you had to lean into the oven and light with a match. She always expected it to blow up in her face. She’d come home today to tell her mother the latest, most important news, fully prepared for the same kind of reaction.

  “I want to show you something.” March put her portfolio on the table and pulled out her initial sketches and samples. “These are my hand-designed wedding invitations. Each one is a little different. See? No printer could create these for us.”

  Her mother took each one, studying it before spreading them all out before her. The paper March had used was raw with frayed edges, soft and fibrous, hand-printed with pen and ink like old scrolls or music from the Middle Ages. Birds and stars, music notes and snowflakes were in free-form designs and patterns, some done as borders. Another had a very small pattern of the male and female symbol on each side of a scale, at equal levels. Her mother looked at them for a very long time. “They’re lovely, and very much like you.”

  “Take a look at these, too.” March slid two folded note cards across the tabletop, holding her breath for a few counts, and waited.

  Her mother looked confused by the soft colors and design.

  “They’re both very traditional. I thought you’d like that. See the colors? Pink or blue. We’ll have to send them sometime in October. The baby’s due around October 10th.”

  For a few heartbeats her mother said nothing at all. Then Beatrice sank her shaking head in her hands all over again. “Oh my God, March.”

  So the wedding was briskly-planned and Renaissance-styled, outdoors in a lush park high on a breezy San Francisco hillside, and the best of days, the way March wanted it to be. The wind was a participant; it kept the bright silk kites flying high in the air and rang the many wind chimes they’d hung in all the trees; it ruffled the sleeves of Mike’s white shirt and blew at their long hair, hers topped with a flower wreath and trailing with candy-colored ribbons.

  The wind billowed and flowed against her embroidered peasant dress, made of cotton the color of kite string, and whatever direction that wind blew, it outlined the softest beginnings of the change in her once youthful and free life, the rounded bulge of her first pregnancy and a future: motherhood.

  Chapter Three

  Mike had been working at Spreckles for a while when his son Scott made his long, difficult entrance into the world, at exactly three thirty in the morning. Labor for March lasted more than twenty four hours, much of that time with her acting uncharacteristically irrational, banishing him from the room one minute and the next, calling out for him to never leave her.

  By the time he first held his son, looking like a small red face swamped by a blue-striped blanket, Mike was blurry-eyed, over-emotional, numb, his hands crushed by hours at her bedside, and he was sapped dry of everything, especially sleep. When asked to, he dutifully counted the fingers and toes and came up with nineteen the first time, then twenty two.

  “Count again, Mike,” March insisted.

  “Look. He has one head. I’m not worried.” But Mike was worried. Nothing would ever be the same for them again.

  The baby became the center of their world. Everyone’s world. He would come home from work to their apartment in Redwood City and meet his mother or mother-in-law, both who were there so often it seemed as if they were living with them. Both women handed out advice that often contradicted each other’s.

  Already he spent a third of his life on a crusade of germ warfare, boiling everything that came into contact with anything “baby.” (He had read all the baby books himself. On occasion, March had even accused him of memorizing some of them.)

  To go anywhere they needed a moving van for all the child paraphernalia. March was determined to breast feed and had a frustrating and uncomfortable time. She cried as much as the baby at first.

  All of those changes he could handle. What scared him was something else altogether. He was a father, a word that held roiling meaning for him and caused him plenty of internal anguish and self-doubt. He was responsible for his son, for his child’s life and future and happiness.

  Ahead lay a world of strangers who could easily swallow his child whole if given the opportunity. Life, people, took big bites out of you. Mike felt this immense, overwhelming responsibility to protect his son from everything he knew awaited his child, and it scared the hell out of him.

  Finally one night, when he paced the room with the baby so March could sleep, he made a promise to his son, and to the world in that room, and mostly to himself: he would never be distant and demanding. He wouldn’t be the thing that stood between his kids, the way his father had often put himself between Brad and him. He would definitely not come into the house one day a week to rule the roost, carve some meat, and expect those slim, atavistic moments to stand for fatherhood.

  Still, every morning, Mike got up at five a.m., just his father had for so many years, and he went to work at a job he hated because the paycheck was good and the insurance even better. He had a family, so he did what was expected, everything Don Cantrell had said to him.

  March ac
cepted the news that she was pregnant for a second time without too much terror. Scott wasn’t even a year yet, and honestly, she was too tired to summon up any negative emotion. Again, the pregnancy was an accident, one that happened during an exhausted night when Scott was barely four months old.

  A few months into her new pregnancy, Mike came to her one night. (He’d been reading the latest books again.) One of the things she had always adored about him was his ability to see even a small modicum of possibility, and to embrace it with his own Cantrell enthusiasm.

  But her pregnancy was now his sudden obsession. Any day she expected him to double over with Braxton-Hicks contractions. On that night, after he had read somewhere that infants inside the womb could hear, Mike had come to her with a grand idea to start their baby’s education early.

  “If a child can hear, what if he can learn?”

  “Just what are you thinking?”

  “Let’s teach him to count.”

  “Great. He can help us during the contractions. I can hear him now, calling out of my uterus, One! Two! Three! Breathe . . . Push!”

  “March. This is serious. What if it’s true? We have to try this.”

  She snapped her fingers. “I have an idea. Let’s teach him algebra. Geometry? Trig? You took calculus, didn’t you? Or we could always call my dad over to teach him. Maybe by the time the baby is a toddler he will do polynomial equations with rational coefficients and even draw sketches of the seven continents.”

  But despite all of her sarcasm and teasing, Mike had been undaunted. At night he read to her belly, which was fine because he often read some kind of classic literature, Call of the Wild, David Copperfield, The Grapes of Wrath, which made her fall sleep more easily. For the first trimester she could have easily slept twenty hours a day without being read to.

  She loved it when he read poetry. Mike’s deep voice reading the Metaphysical poets, or beat poets like Cohen and Ferlinghetti. It was sexy as hell. The only real argument they’d had was when Mike decided to read a popular contemporary fiction novel and for some unknown reason picked Rosemary’s Baby.