Holly in Love (13 page)

“Oh, Jamie, how awful. I thought they were just laughing. I didn’t think they were laughing at you.”

“Oh, sure. All this stuff about how I expected you to show me Life and guide my weak little mind into Adulthood.”

I almost chewed my lip off, hearing it. Jamie had certainly deleted the actual words out of kindness to me. “Nobody said anything that bad to me,” I said. “Just how I was into cradle-robbing along with dollhouses, probably was a case of severely retarded mental development, was warped, and required a similarly warped mind to keep me company.”

We smiled. Tense, rueful smiles that didn’t stay very well on our faces. Suddenly I wanted fiercely to be alone with Jamie. To hug away the accumulated tension of all the teasing and the uncertainty. We stared at each other over the table, and Jamie said, “Forget the hot chocolate. Let’s go somewhere.”

We were up from the table, and we touched fingertips as a preliminary. I shivered, thinking of the two of us being alone, but that was the highlight of it, I’m sorry to say. Cold weather once again reared its ugly head. We couldn’t just saunter out and find a park bench. We had to locate our coats among the incredible pile-up at the door, figure out how to get our arms into the sleeves when we were being crushed by a dozen other couples eager for our vacated table, zip up, wind our scarves around our chins, pull on our two pairs of mittens, excuse ourselves twenty times while shoving through the crush, and then, outside in minus four degrees with the wind blowing, adjust to the shock and the sheer viciousness of the weather.

I dragged my crutches behind me, and we stood on the sidewalk crunching the pellets of rock salt. Jamie said, “Holly. This is the
pits
.”

We both began to laugh. The wind was so cold it froze the insides of my lungs, and I had to put a hand over my mouth to soften the air before I breathed it in. Jamie grabbed my hand away and began dragging me right across the new-fallen snow onto the college campus. “Jamie,” I protested, but the wind tore the words away. He pulled, I dragged, and the crutches made sinister streaks in the snow as I let them slide along the ground after me.

We came to a cluster of enormous, ancient fir trees whose branches swept the ground and the sky. Jamie walked straight into them, holding branches back for me, and there, inside, was a tiny clearing with a tiny stone bench and relief from the piercing wind. Jamie kicked snow and ice off the bench and sat me down on it, leaning the crutches up, and then sat down beside me.

I put my arms around him and felt nothing but layers of puffy cloth and padding. He put his arms around me and I knew the arms were there because I could feel the pressure, but that was all. I yearned for a hot sandy beach with a private lagoon just for two. I yearned for a heated car of our own, or at least a living room without a brother or a parent, or even membership in a fraternity with a warm sitting room and people who wouldn’t turn the lights on.

No such luck.

We did find, however, that two faces pressed up against each other can at least keep the cheeks warm, providing entertainment and pleasure at the same time!

“You too cold?” said Jamie.

“I am always too cold. But don’t let that stop you.”

We laughed, and our breath hung in the air like clouds of love.

“You know something?” said Jamie. “Last year you were just some girl at the bus stop.”

I nodded and touched him. “At first I just stood next to you because your shoulders were wide enough to block some of the wind.”

“When do you get your cast off?” he said.

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Friday, then. Let’s celebrate. Where can we go together?”

We hugged each other and I thought, where
can
we go? Any place local means teasing, unless we stick to college hangouts like the Pew. Any place around here means being trespassed upon by the unfair, unthinking laughter of our friends.

“We could come to my house,” I said, wondering uneasily how my brother would react to an evening of Jamie, and where we would sit, and whether we could possibly relax at all.

“No,” said Jamie flatly. He and Christopher must have been more hostile than I had thought. “Your house?” I said tentatively.

“No. You don’t want to see my parents in action.”

“I don’t?”

Jamie’s face took on a hooded, private look. “I’m not the kind of son they had in mind,” he said. “They’re always mad at me, or embarrassed by me, or bewildered. We can’t get along. I’m just never doing what they want.”

“Do you ever give in?” I said. “Be what they want?”

Jamie laughed. “I might if I could ever figure out what they want. All I know is, it’s not me. I can shrug it off now, though. College is in sight. Leaving home. My parents feel kind of temporary, as if I’m doing the last lap and pretty soon it’ll be over and I can get out.”

How awful, I thought. Why, I’ll miss my family terribly when I leave for school. And they’ll miss me. That’s one reason they fight my going off so far.

We left the little circle of evergreens. The wind was biting as cruelly as ever. Jamie carried my crutches and took my arm, and we went slowly on the treacherous paths. Down on Little Pond at the edge of the campus, some little kids were out on the ice playing “Crack the Whip” in the growing darkness. The kid on the end got spun off the whip, and he slid in a crazy whirl across the ice. There was a shriek of happy laughter from the children who had skated too fast for him.

“Sometimes I feel like that,” said Jamie.

“Like the last person on the whip?”

Jamie blew out an enormous cloud of hot breath into the frigid air. We walked through the cloud, and Jamie didn’t answer me. “I know what we can do,” he said. “There’s a terrific old movie series at Dartmouth. Let’s drive down there Friday night and see some silent films. Do you like popcorn and movies and stuff?”

Did I like popcorn and movies. “I also have a thing for chocolate-covered raisins,” I said.

“At the same time?”

“If possible.”

At least Jamie didn’t condemn the practice out loud, although he did look a little pained around the edges. “I’ll try to get the car,” he said. It sounded as though getting the car would put Jamie in a war zone. I wanted to talk about Jamie’s family, but I had the feeling he wasn’t quite ready for that.

We came to Featherbed Lane and went down the hill very slowly, so I wouldn’t slip. The cast was exhausting me, and I ached all over, but I loved every minute of it. The feel of Jamie beside me, the grip of his arm, the way he pulled his steps shorter so he’d keep pace with me.

Far beyond us, on the opposite side of town, we could see one of the ski slopes. By day it was a smooth sheet of snow, but now, as the sun’s rays vanished, each rise and swell of the mountainside cast a blue shadow on the white, and the infinity of ski and pole marks were like flaws on the surface of a moon.

Christopher opened the door. He raised his eyebrows, reminding me unpleasantly of Lydia. “If it isn’t Jamie,” he said mockingly.

“Come on in,” I said to Jamie.

For one second Christopher blocked the door. He and Jamie stared at each other. I could not analyze what passed between them, but it sure wasn’t brotherly love. “Yeah, Jamie,” said Christopher, making the name sound idiotically girlish, “come on in.”

I could have kicked him. Instead I took Jamie’s hand and pulled him on into the living room where my parents were. Even Christopher wouldn’t be rude if my father and mother were looking on.

“Why, hello, Jamie,” said my father. “How are you tonight?” He shook Jamie’s hand. It took Jamie completely out of the visiting-little-neighbor-kid category and put him into the man-who-dates-my-daughter category. Christopher was very annoyed.

“And how’s Eunice?” said my mother. “Doing any better?”

We chatted about Jamie’s sick aunt until Jamie said he had to leave. “What a shame,” said Christopher, and my mother said, “Christopher, set the table, please.” Christopher left, not very gracefully, and my mother and father found they had things to do upstairs. My mother gave me a tiny smile, as if she remembered how it was and we girls had to stick together.

It gave us a few moments alone to say goodbye, and as I kissed him and we looked at each other and felt an odd nervousness climb over us, so that the kisses got quicker and we were out of breath, I thought how neat it was that a person could love the whole world, and her parents, and needy migrants, and even (with an effort) her brat brother…and still have plenty of love left for a boy named Jamie Winter.

“N
OW,” SAID THE LECTURER
, “the first thing you must understand about silent movies is that they were never silent. Movie houses often had full orchestras, or at least a string quartet. Even the most rural movie house had its theater organ or its piano with organ pipes attached to double the notes on a flute and piccolo. The organ always had drums, thumps, foghorns, and sirens. Cowbells, tubas, traps, and xylophones could be built into the organ. Even newsreels were accompanied, as they were silent right into the nineteen-thirties.”

I love to listen to people who love their subject. It’s so neat to find out the things that interest people. Here was this elderly man up there at the organ (clearly leftover from silent movie days) and here lecturing was this young woman, who was entranced by the whole thing. Someday I will be giving lectures on something, I thought, and I will be so enthusiastic about my subject my listeners will be riveted to my words, just like this.

“The organist had to follow the script very carefully,” she said. “He had to underscore the action, bridge unrelated film segments, approximate the gunshots, punctuate the fist fights, and sing sweetly beneath the love-making.”

I thought of violins and cellos playing as the heroine fell back on her couch, swooning in the presence of the glorious man who had rescued her. I could see, now that I knew Jamie, how a girl could be tempted to swoon a little.

She held up cue sheets, showing us the sheet music with the cues for “Teddy at the Throttle,” where Gloria Swanson was actually tied to a railroad track. The organist demonstrated what his instrument could do, and it was fantastic. Wild. Impossible. And funny. Everybody kept laughing with combined amusement and awe.

I ate another chocolate-covered raisin. Jamie popped another piece of popcorn into my mouth at the same time and watched, marveling, as I ate them together. “You’re insane,” he whispered.

“Happily so,” I said.

“Ssssshhh,” said the couple behind us.

The first film we saw was Douglas Fairbanks in “The Thief of Baghdad.” I loved it. It was full of the sort of scenes you see on Saturday morning cartoons: ropes that stiffen on their own and become escape ladders; powder tossed in the air which becomes an army; magic carpets which soar up stairways. Everything in the sets was a marvel of sumptuous luxury and silken splendor.

I ate another chocolate-covered raisin. Jamie took the box of raisins and the box of popcorn out of my hands. I thought he planned to eat them himself, but instead he set them on the floor at his feet and handed me a napkin. I cleaned off all stray butter, salt, and chocolate, and Jamie took both my hands and began to draw snowflakes on them again. I could hardly watch the film.

We left at intermission.

“Why are we leaving?” said Jamie, willingly putting on his coat.

“It’s going to last another hour and a half.”

“And good films, too,” said Jamie mournfully.

“We can go back if you want.”

“Nope. All the back row seats are taken, and the couples around us just came for the movies.”

We began to laugh until we were gasping for breath, and we literally skipped out of the building. Lots of people saw us and raised their eyebrows or looked scornful, but we didn’t know them, so they didn’t count, and we didn’t care.

The campus was a different one, and yet so much the same, one could hardly tell. We made angels in the snow, lying down in clean patches and swooping our arms—a whole row of them, as if we’d cut them from folded paper and set them hand to hand.

We rolled a snowman and chased each other around a granite wall and hid behind a Revolutionary War statue and pelted each other with snowballs.

Us. Jamie and Holly. Snow-haters.

It just went to prove that anything could be fun in the right company.

For supper we had pizza. It was the best pizza I had ever had in my life. The crust was as thick as my wrist and as crunchy and buttery as a French fry. There was so much pepperoni they had to stand it up vertically instead of laying it down on the sauce. We fed each other and held each other’s cups to each other’s mouths, and we never even noticed the rest of the world out there.

“When did your parents say you had to be home?” said Jamie.

“They didn’t.”

We kissed.

“When do they expect you, though?”

We kissed again.

“Soon.”

We let the rest of the pizza turn cold and flat. “I guess,” said Jamie finally, “that we’d better get going.”

I wanted to refuse. I wanted to sit there forever, forgetting everything else. No more school, family, home, or festival committee. Just forever kissing, eating pizza, and laughing.

But the pizza house would close eventually, and we would run out of gas eventually, and my parents would notify the state police. Regretfully, I followed Jamie to the car. We drove several miles in companionable silence, watching the outlines of the trees and the mountains against the moonlit sky, seeing the way the snow revealed a frozen world.

“You know one reason why we had so much fun?” said Jamie quietly.

“Aside from the fact that you and I are perfect?”

“Aside from that,” said Jamie seriously. “It was because no one knew. If we’d had the same movie program at home, and we knew that our friends—your group, my group—were sitting in the rows all around us, we would have been stiff and self-conscious. We probably wouldn’t even have sat together.”

He was right. There was the solution of never dating at home, but that was expensive and depended on parents surrendering cars and snow not falling.