Eighteen
Girl
Scout Epiphanies
On a map of the United States, the drive
from San Jose to Hirshfield is a tall stork with excellent posture, its feet
planted in the South Bay marshlands, its shoulders arching westward from
Ashland, then due north to Corvallis, where it stretches seaward to dip its
bill into the Pacific. But the map is
not where the traveler takes account of her journey. This happens in the watercolor landscapes,
the cognitive blinks of gas stations, rest stops, offramps, restaurants – and
the wildfires going off in my brain.
The buzz gripped me early in the morning,
an alchemy of acrylic paint, typewriter ribbon, and the varnish scraped from an
old guitar. The sun was barely tapping
at the windows when I popped from sleep like a piece of toast, and just about
ran in place during my shower. Five
minutes later, I was descending the driveway, carrying my mosaic wrapped in an
old comforter. I heard a step behind me
and found my poor sister, bleary-eyed and quizzical, dragging forward for her
farewell embrace.
“You’re really… sure about this?” she
asked, fighting back yawns.
“Does it seem to you like I have any
doubts, little sister?”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek, then
turned and sleep-walked to her porch.
It was early enough that I got over 17
without much traffic. After a hurried
session of packing at my house, I raced into a tight but flowing Silicon Valley
rush hour, settling into the vibration of distance passing beneath my feet (oh
that sweet song of mileage). It wasn’t
long before I was greeted by my thought-attendant, pushing a silver cart of
accusations.
“Today we’ll be driving at a height of
three feet,” she said. “May I remind you
to please keep your seatbelt fastened at all times. If you look to the right of the cabin, you’ll
notice the six-month portion of your non-renewable life that you threw away on
computerized illusions and a man who heals his deepest pains with power tools. Should you find yourself unable to proceed
directly to the Oregon Coast, a mask will descend from the overhead compartment
with a fresh supply of cyanide gas. Have
a pleasant flight, and thank you again for flying Rodeo Butt airlines.”
I obviously needed a little
distraction. I flipped on the radio,
hoping for some station that I couldn’t usually get. At the apex of the Benicia Bridge, over the
wide, calm mouth of the Sacramento, I found a jazz station from Modesto,
kicking into a session of Rat Pack favorites.
Dino, Sammy and Frank provided the exact brand of chutzpah I needed to
face down the sins of Hirshfield. They
sang me to Redding, where the sky was blueing.
I stopped at a too-modern gas station and was greeted by a thick wall of
heat. I suppose I had been wussed-up by
my air conditioning, but the temporary sauna made my skin go all a-tingle. Once I climbed back in and revved up to the
standard mile-per-minute, the temperature shift brought on a whole new bevy of
thoughts.
Most of the thoughts centered on a
clear-eyed rundown of my own bad behavior.
What, in short, could I possibly have been thinking? This brought me
back to the Perfection Point Excess Syndrome.
Had I, in fact, been hoping that Frosty would fail in his courtship? Was
I just a little disappointed when his alarmingly sane parents showed up to nail
my heart to his dartboard? Frosty was clearly going nowhere that didn’t have
sand or waves, and true love meant giving up my addiction for Silicon Valley’s
self-aggrandizing mythologies.
Failing to find a fatal negative in
Frosty, then, I had been well-prepared for an alternate positive. Then along came handsome, successful McNeal
and his intriguing packages of photocyberadventure. Whoosh! There goes the Silicon Girl, right
into the trap of her own making.
That got me through the green spiderlegs
of Lake Shasta and around the queen mountain herself, cruising the high plateau
to Weed, where the thought occurred to me, Why
would you call your town “Weed”? Why not just call it “Shithole” or “Stinkwad”?
Just about then I was coursing through Yreka and heard a radio spot
for a bakery. Yreka bakery – my favorite
palindrome. Fueled by wordplay, I
slanted up the desert-dry Siskiyous and down the green Oregon luge run to
Ashland, where I could feel those Panosys-generated Shakespearean theaters off
in the foothills. Just beyond Medford,
the sun laying its thumb atop the hilltop indent of the freeway, I scanned the
dial and picked up a high school baseball game.
A high school baseball game! And then I saw a billboard proclaiming that
the Pope was the antichrist. And then
one team beat the other on a suicide squeeze, and I stopped for gas in Grant’s
Pass.
It was getting well into night, but I was
determined to let my body go as far as it would take me. This plan lasted as far as the Seven Feathers
Indian Casino in Canyonville, where I avenged Custer by extracting three bucks
from the nickel slots. Even this,
however, could not save me from a growing drowsiness, so I checked into a rest
stop at Myrtle Creek. I curled up on a
futon in the back of my Mitsubishi and ventured quickly into Dreamland.
I woke to the chatter of children, from
the camper next-door. My eyes fuzzed
into focus on the sycamore leaves parasoling my window, turning a pleasant
yellow-brown with the early autumn.
After splashing my face in the ladies’
room and applying talc and deodorant to strategic locales, I dove back into the
freeway, but was soon distracted by a little town just off the road. On my way out of a log-cabin general store, I
spotted a smoke shop and ventured in, retrieving a pack of cigarettes with a
Native American theme: no additives, grown under the philosophies of one-ness,
approved by the Great Spirit. Cruel
people, these Indians, pretending to be killed off by the white man only to
instigate the greatest self-inflicted genocide of all time. I laughed at my little joke, lit one up and
watched the white effluent as it scuttled across my windshield. Onward.
The next chain of thought struck me on
the west end of Corvallis, as I loaded my chambers for the final run over the
coastal mountains. It was about my
childhood, a subject that doesn’t come up much because it was, well,
unremarkably pleasant.
We all run inventories on our personal
skills and traits, and many of us can say that we are a Mom’s child or a Dad’s
child. Not me. I am an absolute dichotomy, a woman sectioned
off by two equal streams.
My mom was a born-and-bred bleeding heart
with an irrepressibly creative mind and a life-long love affair with color and
spark. She was always writing little
rhyming poems for us, leading our Girl Scout troops through one ingenious
crafts project after another, doodling whimsical creatures while she talked on
the phone. I was rifling through her
files one time, looking for an old National Geographic, when I discovered a
novel she had started: first chapter, last chapter, nothing in between. Her sewing room was piled with baskets of
buttons, zippers, thread, patterns, stacks of magazines full of never-accomplished
projects. She also loved buying kitschy
two-dollar shoes at the thrift store and then bragging about them – pride being
nothing compared to good bargain-hunting.
Her capacity for empathy was so great
that I feared it would kill her off. She
would sit and watch the evenings news, and every time they reported the
standard accident, killing, or house-fire, she would wince and cry “Oh my!”
like each one had happened to a dear friend.
”Mom!” I complained. “You can’t take that much responsibility for
the whole world!”
She also translated that empathy into
action. She had a deep compassion for
adolescents, and once Meg and I hit college, she took a job at a center for
troubled teens. Former gang-bangers,
children of wife-beaters, crack addicts, and even murderers. One of the counselors was killed by a kid
with a kitchen knife, but even then, she wouldn’t think of leaving. She kept working there, and she kept
crocheting blankets for all her friends, and she kept adding baubles to a gypsy
dress that she wore to work every Halloween.
Dad, on the other hand, was discipline
personified, a former Air Force mechanic.
He would fix your bike for you, but not unless you stayed there with him
and observed each slow, careful step.
That way, the next time, maybe you could fix it yourself. Sitting in one place for such a long time was
sheer hell, but over the years we began to notice that the things Dad fixed,
stayed fixed.
Dad also had a thing about instruction
books. He considered the use of a newly
purchased appliance not a right but a privilege, one that you earned only by
reading the instructions front to back.
Dad didn’t want simply to open cans with his new can opener, he wanted
to understand how the can opener opened cans, why it opened cans. He wanted to be the Zen master of can
openers.
He assembled sentences in the same
manner, pausing between subject and predicate like a pedestrian stopping at the
island of an intersection, in order to attach the most precise ending
possible. To hyper teenage children,
waiting for Dad to finish a sentence was the cruelest form of torture. And it was always a bad idea to try and
supply the ending yourself, lest you catch the wrong end of that dark military
stare. One day, when he was doing it
every other sentence, I started counting off the pauses in my head: one
Mississippi, two Mississippi... Seven
seconds. If you don’t think that’s a
long time, try it out on your friends and see if they don’t interrupt you.
This caution also came through in his
politics. Dad was one of those
irritating Republicans who insisted on backing up his opinions with logic and
reason. He had a great sense of humor
about it, too. One day, he spotted my
mother and me outside the polling place and declared, “Well! That cancels out
my vote.”
One last thing. My mom’s handwriting was the most beautiful
cursive you have ever seen; if you planted it in your garden, it would sprout
graceful little violets the color of ink.
My dad’s cursive was indecipherable, so he wrote instead in sharply drawn
block letters. You could use their edges
to shave your legs.
In high school, I possessed a great
degree of playfulness. I sang in the
chorus, performed in a couple of musicals, and hung around after school with
the ceramics teacher, Mrs. Koepcke, who taught me how to make calm-looking, strangely
anthropomorphic birds. Mrs. Koepcke said
that I was genuinely talented, that I should consider art school – but I was
also good in science, math and English.
Once I hit college, my father’s river grew strong in the rain of
impending adulthood, leading me to my MBA at Wharton.
I have been happy and successful in my
father’s river; navigating its currents has made me a strong and sharp-minded
woman. But sometimes I long for my
teenage self, sculptor of wise-looking bluebirds. Now, given the chance to stand on a sandbar
and gaze leftward toward my heart, I was astonished to find my mother’s river
still there, fed by tributaries of fancy and whim, awaiting my return.
One primary attraction to motherhood is
the chance to revisit our own childhoods, to rediscover the joys and adventure
of play. We tell ourselves that we are
doing this only to cultivate our children’s minds, but isn’t it nice to play
again? Isn’t it nice to have fun? I
think of that silly game of follow-the-leader with Maisey and Tanner. I felt my mother’s artfulness just then,
pumping through my limbs, lessening the pull of gravity.
Sailing through the little green towns of
Highway 20 – Burnt Woods, Eddyville, Chitwood – following the straight-edge
walls of evergreen sheared away by loggers, I realized that part of my decision
had already been made. Whether or not I
shared my life with a man named Frosty, his bottle-shards had worked their way
under my skin, leading me to a couple of hearty resolutions. First, to swim in my mother’s river, and
second, to stop waiting for the appearance of children before I allowed myself
to play. I rounded a bend in the road to
find Archer Memorial Bridge, hunching its concrete shoulders over the
rivermouth. I held my breath and drove
on. I wanted this man so much it made my
muscles ache.
Driving up the waterfront to 101, I
contemplated the various strategies running through my head and realized I
couldn’t have any. Showing up at the
campsite after six months was bad enough; showing up with a prepared speech
would be obnoxious. I deserved only to
present myself and take whatever abuse I had coming.
I descended Third Street in the
mandarin-orange twilight of a surprisingly clear day. If I was looking for signs, that was pleasant
enough. No way I wanted any notice from
the folks at the Bel Canto (I had forgone postcards to Hessie, as well), so I
parked my Mitsubishi at the farthest corner of the Knickerbocker Beach parking
lot. I took a back-alley route along the
mom-and-pop motels, and then descended a cobblestone path to the state park’s
southernmost trail. This climbed back to
the wide grass field along the path to Frosty’s.
The failing afterglow lit up the
well-worn path like a sidewalk, but once I crossed the footbridge, the lush
forest was pitch dark. I stumbled into a
clump of ferns, and realized I had to slow down and feel for the packed dirt
beneath my soles.
The evening wind coursed in from the
ocean, rustling the leaves above me, and I found my head rumbling with
thoughts. I tried to recall the last
time the force of sheer anxiety had made my heart beat so fast. I had to go all the way back to fourth grade,
when I read a piece of scripture at my church.
The problem was, Pastor Price booked my reading right after the sermon,
and that sermon went on forever! He had this way of fading off into what
sounded like conclusions, then taking great Old Testament pauses (much like my
dad’s) before launching yet another tangent.
About the fifth time he did this, I was ready to proclaim myself an atheist.
But all this pain did teach me
something. Every time the pastor headed
into a windup, I could feel my heart accelerate, my mouth dry, and my breathing
become shallow. The more familiar these
sensations became, the more I could control them, and lessen their effect.
This served me well in my career. I eventually became the best speaker in the
company, and was often called on for crucial presentations. I drew on this power as I neared the campsite,
and saw firelight seeping through the trees.
I measured the quickening of my pulse, the twitching in my limbs, the
fireworks in my nerve endings, and gave myself an important final command: you
don’t want to surprise a grizzly bear in the wild, so you’d best enter talking. I swung around the madrone tree at the end of
the path, proclaiming as I went.
“Wonderful weather you’re having. I’d always heard Oregon was more of a rainy…”
What I saw by the dull orange light was a
fleshy spider atop the picnic table, eight limbs, two faces. The one facing me, marked by a small,
vee-shaped goatee, was Frosty’s. The
other, turning in surprise from a pedestal of two cheeks and a long, curving
question mark of spine, was Carlotta’s.
The shock reduced me to animal instincts
– fight or flight – and I flew. I
squeaked out a few random vowels and sprinted back down the trail. The foliage rushed by on either side, lashing
me with sharp fingers. I heard the thump
of my shoes on the footbridge, then dashed into the field without stopping to
find the trail. This cost me soon
enough, as I struck a log and went sprawling, landing on my right knee. The pain only served to spur me on; I bounced
up, found the path to the clifftop, then scampered down the stone walkway to
the beach.
I leapt to the sand, just missing an
outgoing roller, then sped past Mocha Rock in search of refuge. In the faint light I spotted what looked like
a hovering seagull - then it morphed into a flag, tied to a pole atop a high
mound. On closer inspection, the flag
became a ragged T-shirt, knotted to a piece of driftwood. Behind the mound lay a deep trench – probably
dug out by some kids.
That was good enough for me. I jumped in, landing with the side of my face
against the cool, damp sand. It was a
soothing sensation, but I knew it wouldn’t last. I rolled sideways to rest my back against the
slope and found my old friend Ursa Major poking his snout into a bank of low
clouds. I ducked my little-girl head,
waiting for the sermon to end, but it was just me and the Pacific, out there
rumbling around, and that really was what I had seen up there, Frosty and
Carlotta, naked on a tabletop. My grief
and shock were too bundled up in my own stupidity to allow me to cry about
it. What gave me the right to make
plans, anyway, to read palms, to plot my horoscopes – to assume that the
outside world gave one half of a shit about my Girl Scout epiphanies?
My self-loathing demanded physical
expression, so I flung myself against the sand.
I discovered it’s very difficult to hurt yourself on sand, so I settled
for hard language, cussing blue streaks as I threw my fists against the bottom
of the trench.
“Fuck you, you fucking MORON, Sandy! You
fucking IDIOT! What were you thinking, you stupid piece of shit? You drop in
after six months without so much as a postcard and everyone’s supposed to kneel
in your path and lay down fucking gardenias? God DAMN you, Sandy! God DAMN
you…”
In flinging my limbs about, I began to
notice the damage I had incurred during my flight, scratches on my face and
hands, a big gash on my right knee, maybe even a broken toe where I had tripped
over the log. I delighted in my wounds,
I wanted more of them, more pain to bite at me and let me know I was still
alive.
But maybe that was the problem. I was alive.
The ocean called to me, ready to wear away the rough spots, make me
smooth and beautiful, wash me into the path of some kindly beachcomber. I crept to the top of the bunker to gauge the
ocean’s intentions, and found half of Whalespout Rock missing.
“No!” I cried. “No!” to the Big Bear, crooking his head
around the fog bank. Can’t I have just
one fucking thing? Can’t one fucking thing stay the same?”
“Would you like to hear a story?” said
the Bear. I slumped into the trench to
find Frosty looking down at me. I might
have crawled out and sprinted down the beach, but my limbs were useless
now. Real or mythological, Frosted Glass
Man was here, and I would just have to listen.
He settled on the back of the trench,
dangling his feet over the edge, rubbing his goatee.
“A thousand generations after Sandrina
Fingertip gave birth to the human race, there remained only one who remembered
her story. This one man wandered the
beach every day, hoping to reassemble the pieces of Frosted Glass Woman and
bring back the glassling race. One day,
he was returning from his harvest when he saw a beautiful glass statue of a
woman perched on Mocha Rock. As he came
closer, however, he realized it was a woman with ordinary skin and flesh – but
one who bore the same features as the image of Frosted Glass Woman he had kept
in his mind.
“The woman saw divinity in him, as
well. She joined him in his daily
journeys, and at the end of the day they would sit on Mocha Rock and tell each
other stories. Now, as anyone can tell
you, all things that pass from one lover to another leave a residue in the
air. So, every evening when the man and
woman talked, the grains of their words drifted out from Mocha Rock and settled
at a spot a hundred yards out to sea.
After many months, the lovers found that their words had risen from the
sea in the form of two great rocks. The
ocean would rumble between these rocks and shoot out silvered breaths, much
like the spout of a whale.
“One day, the woman left to see her
family. She promised the man that, while
she was gone, she would send her words to him, and he could read them to the
ocean, and that way their beautiful rocks would continue to grow. But the woman did not send her words. After a time, her story rock began to weaken
and crumble, until one day a storm came and swept the rock completely away.
“The sight of his rock standing alone in
the ocean brought the man great pain, and his tears fell into the ocean. They drifted to an island just past the
horizon where the spirit of Frosted Glass Woman resides, in the form of a brightly
colored tropical bird. Frosted Glass
Woman recognized them as the tears of her only remaining follower, and she
breathed her spirit into them, changing them into spheres of glass. She dipped her feathers into the ocean and
used them to paint the spheres in extraordinary colors, then placed them back
in the water and returned them to their source.
“When the man began to find his
transformed tears along the shoreline, they brought him much comfort. He vowed that, should he find fifty of these
small planets, he would release his memory of the woman and send his grief
drifting into the ocean, never to return.
Two months later, when he did, indeed, discover the fiftieth orb – an
eye-shaped spot of indigo surrounded by rings of green and white – he kept his
vow.”
At the end of Frosty’s story, the ache in
my muscles drifted out to sea, as well, and I took my first full breath in
days. I wiped my hands down the sides of
my face and found him there, a clear-eyed statue of glass, gazing at the
remaining half of Whalespout Rock.
“So that strange vibration we heard…”
“Yes,” he said. “The old rock was giving way all the
time. Would you like to come to the
campsite and warm up? You look a little roughed up. We’d better clean up those scratches.”
I wasn’t sure how to phrase the next
question, so I reduced it to a word.
“Carlotta?”
Frosty let out a little burst of
laughter. “That’s… a very interesting
story. I’ll tell you later, but don’t
worry – she’s not up there. Here…”
He extended
his hand to help me out of the ditch. I
allowed myself a minute of shelter in the hollow of his shoulder, and then we
started slowly up the cliff.
After dabbing my wounds with disinfectant
and bandaging my knee, Frosty stoked the fire and heated up some mulled
wine. He handed me a mug and wrapped me
in a blanket, the combination of which had me feeling immensely warm and
better. Frosty fell unbidden into the
story of him and Carlotta.
“Do you recall your tale of the moon’s
creation?” he asked. “When Earth and
Orpheus collided?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“The same theory holds that, before the
collision, this proto-Earth was covered completely in water, populated solely
by aquatic creatures. One of the
consequences of the meeting with Orpheus was the creation of land masses, which
enabled the Earth to foster the growth of reptiles, mammals, plants, birds and
humans.”
He perched
on the picnic table and placed his feet on the bench.
“You, Sandy, are my Orpheus, the catalyst
for my evolution. Before you arrived –
let’s face it – there was a reason I was consorting solely with tourist
ladies. They all had imminent expiration
dates.”
“That was pretty obvious,” I said.
“I thought it might be. Until you came along. For the first time in years, I was faced with
the idea of working on something deeper.
It was scary – but good. I guess
what I’m getting at is that, even though you broke my heart, you left me with
new Orphean terra firma to work with.
Even, maybe, with a local girl, someone who wasn’t going anywhere.
“The details were all your fault,
too. Week after week, I would hike to
the Bel Canto for that elusive California postcard. The third time it failed to arrive, I decided
to console myself with a hearty breakfast at Gilda’s. I knew Carlotta from before, of course – that
big bonfire when my folks were here.
Over my weekly therapy breakfasts we began to talk, and flirt. Later, once I found net float number fifty,
we began to date. Despite her anxieties
regarding the ghost of Sandy Lowiltry – the messiah who would rise again – she
and I have traveled to great ocean depths.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Meaning tonight’s interruption was
Carlotta’s worst nightmare.”
“Sorry to say – yeah,” said Frosty. “But it shouldn’t matter. It’s awfully frustrating when a woman refuses
to trust your affections. I told her
many times that it wouldn’t matter if you came back. So here you are, and it still doesn’t
matter.”
I studied the spices floating in my wine,
feeling a little stabbed in the heart.
“You love her a lot, don’t you?”
Frosty gave me a purposeful look. “Yes.
I do.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” I said, then shot
back a look of my own. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”
“That’s all right.” He hopped down to
poke at the fire and refill my wine.
“So. How’d you like to tell me
your story?”
I didn’t relish confessing my sins of
self-delusion, but I think it was good for Frosty to hear the list of
remarkable events it took to keep me away.
It was a long story, and in the course of telling it we drank two small
pots of mulled wine. After that, Frosty
pulled out some wicked homemade plum brandy.
Apparently, neither one of us wanted to be sober anytime soon. Lord knows, we had our justifications. Mine was a punishment more harsh and sudden
than even I deserved. As for Frosty, my
reappearance had caused a flaming row between him and Carlotta, leaving him
feeling generally persecuted by the fickle psyches of the female gender.
“What I am being punished for,” he said,
flouncing one of my Chippewa cigarettes like a gay actor, “is my innate
desirability – or rather, my innate repellent-ness, depending on how you look
at it. Now, Sandra Lowiltry – SHE finds
me so fucking irresistible that she pitches boyfriend, family and fancy-shmancy
job on the off-chance that I might take her back.”
I raised my glass to interject, but was
driven back by Frosty’s big Hungarian laugh (it changed nationality by the
hour).
“HAH-hah-hah-hah! On the other hand, were
she really, truly, even half-assed fond of the boy, perhaps she would not have
waited six goddamn months to ditch the yuppie schmuck and get her fine white
ass back to Oregon! Why, it must have been one of those – what do you call
them? – epiphanies?”
He took on an expression of indigestive
reverence and lifted his palms to heaven.
“But, well,” I stammered. “It sort of was, Frosty.”
“Of COURSE it was! Each and every member
of the female species is required to have an epiphany regarding his holiness
Frosted Glass Man. I didn’t ask for the
job, but yes indeedy there it is. If you
are a forty-year-old, good-lookin’, spiritually deprived turista lady you are
required by the federal tax code to report to Hirshfield with your Technicolor
homophonic Freudian slide projector and find that Frosty!”
He was working up a good gospel rant
now. He waggled a finger and went right
on.
“But epiphanies don’t last, young
lady. They are the mayflies of the
metaphorical Scala Naturae, present on this earth only long enough to fuck and
die – the same fate as my darling lube-job flings. They screw, they talk all night about their feelings,
and then they disappear. Touch the magic
penis and be healed, I say! And take home some lovely glass souvenirs.”
He wandered
over to the fire, and then turned to me.
“I had a neat little convenience-store
arrangement. And then you came along. I was like… the best goddamn singles hitter in
the world – look for that outside pitch, slap it into left field, steal second,
wait for one of the big guys to drive you in.
You’re the best, man, because you know what you do well, and by damn,
you do it!
“But then,
one day, our singles hitter – let’s call him Frosty Gwynn – he’s got two
strikes on him, leading off the bottom of the tenth, and he reaches inside just
to foul off an inside pitch, but somehow he drops the bat-head on it and that
sucker flies over the right-field fence, just inside the foul pole. Lo and behold, what manner of magic is this?
The fans roar, the teammates jump around like Rockettes, the sportscasters
burst forth in adjectives – and you, Frosty Gwynn, are a big fat fucking hero!
“Or so you think. Because now, the evil drug of hubristamine
has entered your system, and you start looking for that inside pitch every time
you come to the plate. And the pitchers
don’t earn all those millions for nothing, pal.
They see what you’re doing, so they slide them sliders off the outside
corner – and you take a lot of lonely walks back to the dugout. And hey, guess what? You are no longer the
best goddamn singles hitter in the National League, buddy boy, you are… you
are…”
He jumped to the top of the picnic table,
sending a wineglass smashing to the bench.
“You are the most mediocre power slugger
wannabe in God’s creation!”
Frosty jumped back down, fished in his
cabinet for a replacement glass and filled it up with brandy. He sat next to me, took a big swig, and let
out a happy breath.
“Any questions?”
“Well, maybe,” I said. “Why are you so fixated on the idea that your
relationship with Carlotta is now a failure?”
“Because… because…” Frosty knelt on the
ground at my feet, wearing a manic, Shakespearean-jester expression. “Because every time Carlotta and I get naked,
she can see a tattoo on my left butt-cheek that says, ‘Property of Sandra
Lowiltry.’ She has this completely worthless streak of sisterly devotion.”
He stood and circled the fire, working
his way back to a rant.
“I mean, excuse me, Sandy, but as a
card-carrying member of the female gender, perhaps you could tell me: don’t I
get a little credit for getting my ass dumped by thee? I am definitely the
victim here, but Carlotta still sees me as the strong one, the guru. That’s why she told me, that if you ever
returned, she and I would be instantly splitsville. Because you, to use the high school phrase,
still had ‘dibs’ on me.
“Can you understand the complete
untenability of my position? I am simultaneously too desirable AND too
undesirable, too faithful and yet somehow too unfaithful, to be considered for
a long-term relationship. I am the puppy
who is praised for peeing on the carpet, punished for shitting in the back
yard, and so here I am, going through life with my teeth bared and my tail
wagging. In short, I’VE GOT COGNITIVE
DISSONANCE UP THE YIN-YANG!”
Frosty pulled a pratfall and ended up
flat on his back, his head next to my feet.
“Could you pass my brandy?” he
asked. I did so, and took a solid belt
from mine before asking the next question.
“So Frosty. Are you still in love with me?”
Frosty wagged a finger at me.
“Ohno! You cannot rent that video here,
young lady. I don’t ping-pong around
between romances like you women.”
“Frosty, may I remind you that, at this
very moment, your face is in an excellent position for stomping? Seriously,
give me a real answer. I promise I’m not
going to play games with it. I’m just…
trying to figure something out.”
Frosty tried to take a sideways sip of
brandy, with little success.
“Yes,” he replied. “I retain my affections for you. I’m not going to do a damn thing about them,
but yet, the feelings are still there.”
“A buzz in the stomach?”
“An over-awareness of one’s own
breathing. Yes.”
I gazed at the coals in the firepit,
pulsing like the buttons on a rocket-ship.
“In that case,” I said. “I would like to give a rebuttal… to your
assumptions… about our assumptions… about you.”
“Hah!” said Frosty. “Good luck!”
I positioned my tennis shoes at either
side of Frosty’s head. “It’s time to go
for a walk, honey-bunny. And for God’s
sake, bring some more booze.”
It was an odd sensation, treading our
much-traveled beach, stomping down ridges of sand that we ourselves may have
kicked up months before. I felt like I
had been tossed into a tumbler, had my skin scraped all over but managed to
come out all right, as I sidled along in my loose, nicked-up limbs. The night was cold, a clear sky punctuated by
a pie-crust of day-old moon. The walk was
warming me up, though, along with Frosty’s fifth of vodka, and the flow of wild
honesty that had become our lingua franca.
I took a bracing slug of booze as we passed the ruins of Whalespout
Rock.
“Pah!” I gasped. “Ooh boy, that hurts good. I always knew that bitch Carlotta had her
eyes on you. You can’t trust a woman.”
“Tell me about it,” said Frosty, and I
didn’t even care to take it personally.
(I think, in fact, that I was turning into a guy.)
“Yeah, those Cyd Charisse legs, cute
pixie-bob hair, that wide-ass bedroom smile – lotsa artillery, and she
certainly was foisting it on you at the bonfire.”
“Carlotta had her eyes on me long before
I met you,” said Frosty. “She used to
watch me from the break room upstairs at Gilda’s. Had all kinds of fantasy profiles worked
up. The world’s youngest retired
America’s Cup yachtsman. A burned-out
rock star, recovering from the break-up of his band. A once-famous poet who has renounced
academia, declared himself the founder of a new ‘Star Wars’ branch of Zen
Buddhism, and retreated to the Oregon coast in order to get more in touch with
‘the force.’”
“That’s just silly!” I declared.
“Not much sillier than goddesses with
skins from Coca-Cola bottles.”
“Yeah, okay. So get us back to Carlotta. Was she not flirting with you at the
bonfire?”
“She was flirting, but without
intention. She was extremely loyal to
you.”
“Very admirable.”
“And practical. One does not begin strong relationships by
stealing one’s lover away from someone else.
There’s always the lurking sensation that the same fate will be returned
upon oneself. Very smart girl,
Carlotta. And yes, Cyd Charisse
legs. Thank you for that painful
reminder.”
I responded by handing over the vodka
with a coy smile. Frosty took a mighty
pull. You could tell he was sincerely
torn up about Carlotta. But God, how I
still wanted him. I was much less wise
than she.
“There’s a certain extremism about
Carlotta, though,” said Frosty. His
steps were growing sloppier, kicking out sprays of sand as he walked. “You ever pay a compliment to someone only to
have them dismiss it? ‘Oh no, it was nothing.’”
“Sure.”
“Seems okay, but when you think about it…
it’s a bit insulting. Taken to the
extreme, that person is basically saying, ‘You have no idea what you’re talking
about. I sucked and we both know it!’”
“Exactly.”
“Bingo!” said Frosty. He flicked the words off his fingertips and
over the Bel Canto, which was now looming on our left. “It’s even worse when you tell someone you
love them, and they refuse to believe you.
After a few dozen occurrences, it gets downright irritating, and then,
when the old girlfriend shows up, she goes chickenshit and disappears. You gotta wonder how often that kind of thing
is going to happen, how many times life is going to throw you a curve
ball. And where will your life partner
be just when you need her most? I’m
tellin’ ya, it rips me up inside. No
matter how much I want her, Carlotta and I may not make it.”
I believed him, because his words were
ripping me up inside. I was relieved when we arrived at the
Knickerbocker parking lot. Frosty
settled with his back to the seawall, the same wall that had held those
balancing rock sculptures the week before I left. I unlocked the tailgate of my Mitsubishi and
handed Frosty the blue-green net float.
He studied it like a gypsy searching a crystal ball.
“Evidently,” I said, “one of your
teardrops was heading for Disneyland.”
I sat down beside him, aware by the
near-emptiness of our vodka bottle that we both must be very drunk. I smiled with stupid amusement, slapped
Frosty on the knee, and started my story.
Photo by MJV
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