Twenty-One
Saturday
Interlude, l’istesso tempo
My vow of solitude held water for another three weeks, until
the softball team gathered for its only wintertime affair, the Super Bowl
party. I really didn’t want to see Stacy, but neither did I want her presence
to dictate my social schedule. I was going to be on the softball team, so I’d
better just start dealing with it.
And so I found myself on the west side of Santa Cruz,
searching for a parking space along the dirt shoulders of funky beach houses,
skirting coves and high cliffs over the Pacific. I pulled in under a shaggy
cypress and reached into the backseat for a six-pack and two ribeye steaks.
A week before our breakup, I had bet Stacy a steak dinner on
whoever might face her beloved Giants. I wound up with the Broncos, the
ultimate choke artists, but at least I had a chance. The day was unusually
sunny. I walked around the house to find her with Kenny, sunbathing on the back
deck. I had never noticed how much they looked like siblings. Stacy acted
friendly and distant at the same time.
“Hi Michael. Didja bring some beer?”
“Yeah!” (She would not catch me in a down mood, dammit.)
“Same shit we drank all summer.”
Kenny smiled, for a second, and that would be the high point
of his day. He spent the rest of it glowering, as if an invisible anvil sat
squarely upon his head. What did he want? He was out of his cast, slowly
gaining back his leg, and it was a beautiful day with all his friends. I just
wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, I had to see it through. I popped open a beer.
Sure enough, the Broncos succeeded in what they did best,
and Stacy’s Giants won the game. For me, it was a double loss, since the steak
dinner settlement involved yet another meeting. I had to make sure I wasn’t
drifting into old, masochistic habits. The early indications were not good. I
showed up at her condo the next Sunday with twin T-bones, only to find her
gone. I sat on the bench outside her door for a while, watching a storm front
crawl in over the coast. I was about to call it quits when Sharise, one of her
tenants, showed up.
“Well, she didn’t say anything about any plans,” she said.
“But you might check the Nite Owl on Seabright. She goes there a lot.”
If I was really smart I would have headed home, but I felt
like I had to at least check. When I walked in, she gave me a kiss and a pseudo-apology.
She was drunk.
“I’m finally getting through to her!” she whispered. Stacy
motioned to her opponent, a woman twenty years her senior, ratty gray hair,
dirty yellow blouse, lining up a bank shot with a cigarette dangling from her
lips. “Working for me for a year, and I’m finally getting through to her.”
“Getting through to her or just getting her blitzed?” I
didn’t say.
“Go to hell,” I didn’t say.
The whole situation made me see what our relationship had
been all along. I was the inflatable punching clown, she the kid knocking me
into a wobble every time I managed to straighten myself up. I drank three beers
I didn’t want and walked out, found a pay phone and called a friend.
“Michael, I want you to go home right now. Get some sleep
and wait for her to call you. Better yet, don’t wait at all.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said for the fiftieth time. “I will.
Thanks.”
I sat in my car across the street, waiting for the strength
to leave, staring at the numbers on my odometer. Then she tapped on my window.
I could have timed it, the way she reeled me back three movements before an
escape. The clown straightened up, ready for another shot.
I slept in till eleven and had a huge breakfast in the hotel
restaurant, my first-ever eggs Benedict. I picked my clothing out of the dryer
in the hotel laundry room, threw everything into my back seat and headed for
the interstate. I headed north toward Whidbey Island, 525 northwest to
Mukilteo, and boarded a ferry for the crossing. Being waterborne heightened the
excitement of going to a place I once called home.
My father was a Navy pilot, and when I was just entering
second grade his orders took us to Oak Harbor, a naval station at the midpoint
of Whidbey. The memories come in ten-second flashes. One is a deep spread of
pine trees up the hill from our house, where my brother and sisters would spend
the afternoons playing. Another is a trip to the air base on the Fourth of
July, my first recollection of fireworks, lying on a comforter with my mom as
the sky exploded in colors and dropped sparks into the Sound.
The ultimate memory was my affection for snakes, and how
Whidbey had them all: garter snakes, corn snakes, milk snakes. Sadly, although
I caught many of them, I could never keep them alive in captivity, mostly
because I had no idea what I was doing.
The walk home from the classic brick schoolhouse of Oak
Harbor Elementary took me across a dozen vacant lots and cedar groves, and I
made it my daily routine to check beneath hollow logs and pieces of scrap metal
. These were the hiding places; you had to be quick or they would scatter, and
you had little time to consider whether or not they were poisonous.
One fine Tuesday I hit my personal notion of a jackpot when
I lifted a piece of plywood and discovered a nest of eight baby snakes, black
with red stripes – what we called red racers. I swept up the whole lot and
deposited them in my Beatles’ Yellow
Submarine lunch box. Arriving home, I completely forgot the contents of my
lunchbox and left it on the kitchen counter. When my mother came by to clean it
out, she got quite a surprise. Any other mom would have screamed bloody murder,
but not mine. Just another day at the zoo.
We arrived at the ferry dock and I was soon driving up the
island: pasture land, idyllic farms, fields of strawberries and deep mossy
forests. I drove into Oak Harbor and, following signals, took a right turn,
uphill. The impulse becomes clear when I spot my old school.
Oak Harbor Elementary is an impressively New Englandish
block of brick, bordered by lush green lawns and a line of maples along the
sidewalk. I park at the curb and wander onto the grounds, and once I arrive at
the adjacent field I am struck by another flash: a sunny-day recess, buttercups
all around, and, in every direction, white-capped mountains, the Olympics, the
Cascades, our distant uncles.
Back around the building I find the swing sets, and another
scene unfolds. I was entertaining myself next to the swings by trying to hit a pole
with a rock, the usual childhood target practice that would lead to the seventh
game of the World Series. The playground monitor asked me not to throw rocks.
Instead of dropping my remaining handful, I threw
them to the ground. For this I was collared and taken to the principal’s
office, where I was bent bare-assed over a desk and whacked with a ping-pong
paddle.
I stand there in the same spot, looking at the boarded-up
window which once was the principal’s office, and my next step is obvious. I
reach down to grab a handful of pebbles and thrust them into the spilling gray
sky. Take that, you assholes! After three or four throws, I am spent. I take a
last handful and slip them into the zippered pocket of my jacket.
I followed Highway 20 all the way up the island, stopping at
Deception Pass to watch the jade waters of the channel swirl in fantail
currents. The road flattened out, and I found a series of luminous
silver-colored factories, winking their lights at me as I entered Anacortes. I
headed across town to the ferry station, where I discovered that I would have
to wait till the next morning to catch a ship to Victoria.
Photo by MJV
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