Off Course (21 page)

Norma, a medical receptionist, could be chirpy and friendly, but Ike, her fiancé, a big, bearded, small-eyed lumberman, stared mistrustfully at Cress. The betrothed were in their mid-twenties and harmoniously overweight, her two hundred pounds to his two-seventy. They called each other Lovey and Sweetie interchangeably, relentlessly. After childhoods of schoolyard teasing, they'd taken on adulthood and their pending marriage with great self-importance. Every night, with the slow lumbering bustle of grandparents, they cooked large balanced meals: roasts or chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, frozen corn or green beans, pie or cobbler. They ate at the large table set with pitchers of ice water and milk, and never offered food to anyone else. If Cress went into the kitchen to make tea or toast, Ike growled, “We'll be done in twenty minutes.”

“I wouldn't think that being obese was enough common ground,” Cress whispered to Donna.

“Oh, they're very compatible,” Donna said. “And besides, I read that obese means a hundred pounds overweight, and they are not quite that.”

Donna's expertise on this and all things human, Cress deduced, came from the well-thumbed supermarket glossies stacked in the bathroom, the living room, and under her own bed: the
Cosmopolitan
s
, Mademoiselle
s
, Redbook
s
,
and
Glamour
s whose headlines Cress herself could not resist investigating:

Is Your Man Cheating? A Checklist

Twenty Ways to Keep HIM Happy

Wife or Lover—Which Are You? Take the Quiz!

A streetlamp shone all night through the filmy curtain, so Cress's room was never dark. She slept restlessly, queasy in transition's dim passageway. In her dreams, roads grew steep, then rocky, as narrow as game trails, and finally perilous—a single rotting plank over a gorge. She constantly tried to get back up the mountain. She tried, too, to reach Quinn, but people waylaid her with urgent requests, crevasses gaped in the road, or her car's steering wheel turned into a soggy wooden Popsicle stick.

Sternly, in daylight, she checked her yearnings. In the bright mornings, she drank coffee and read the newspaper under the leafing sycamore beside the lively river. Quinn, she imagined, was drinking coffee at the Formica table as his kids got ready for school and Sylvia scrubbed and swept around him.

He had said that their months on the mountain were the happiest of his life, that the memories would keep him going for a long time. They would see each other one last time, when he would pay her for the sanding, sawing, and routing she'd done. (She'd only done it to spend time with him.) They might meet after that, too, he'd said on their last night, from time to time. As friends. (They'd both smiled at this.) After a cooling-off period. How long a cooling-off period? she'd asked, and he shook his head, signaling an end to the discussion. Six months? she persisted. A year? He shrugged. A year, then. She imagined a key slid into a numbered door, the snub corner of an ugly bedspread. Thin towels. Small wafers of soap. Shyness after so much time.

But she might love someone else by then.

For now, she'd get some cash together and head back to civilization, wherever that might be.

*   *   *

She made the most money from large nighttime banquets, where 20 percent was added to the bills and divided equally among the servers. But Cress requested any shift Dalia could throw her way. Why not work as much as she could? Her boyfriend was back with his wife. Her dissertation was in a box in a closet at 7,300 feet. So Dalia duly gave Cress the small private luncheons that senior waitresses were only too happy to relinquish: the Junior Leaguers, the Sierra Wildflower Society, the Beech Creek Women's Golf Association, and its more casual subset, the Beech Creek Hackettes. These memberships overlapped, so Cress waited on the same women, aged forty-five to eighty-five, in varied configurations. They ran her hard. Some asked for their salad dressing or butter or mayo on the side; others demanded extra lemon in their ice water, or no ice, or a glassful of extra ice. Or they had Cress dump out a little water and add
just a splash
of lemonade or ice tea, but not so much that they would be charged for it. Some required their cottage cheese in a cup and not on a lettuce leaf; several had to have sliced tomatoes instead of French fries or, if it was the baked halibut entree, double vegetables in place of mashed potatoes. Together—and Cress saw them as a single many-headed organism, a sort of polo-shirted, paste-pearled hydra—they had nosed out every possible cost-free adjustment to their meals. If Cress mentioned a surcharge—fruit substituted for fries, for example, was fifty cents, as was mixing half lemonade with ice tea—the request was immediately withdrawn.
Oh, just forget it!
The small banquet room where these luncheons took place was on the far side of the large banquet room, so that all the running to the kitchen and the bar and back made it difficult for Cress to do her basic job of serving and clearing plates in a timely fashion. The women, irritated by waiting first for their food and then for their places to be cleared, left Cress negligible tips, quarters and dimes. Still, the twenty, twenty-five dollars she earned each lunch shift was that much more than nothing, and added up.

*   *   *

“Phone,” Dalia said, as Cress served mousse cake at the Tulare County sheriff's yearly fund-raiser. She took the call in the bar. Quinn's voice sent a rogue current through her blood. He had that little something for her. Would she meet him tomorrow at the Staghorn bar out by the lake? She couldn't miss it. Four o'clock?

*   *   *

Cress finished with the Wildflower Society by two-thirty. She went back to the house, washed her hair, and dried it in the sun. She helped herself to a daub of Donna's musk oil and to lip gloss from a tiny tub on the bathroom shelf.

“I think he misses me,” she told Donna, who'd just come home.

“Of course he does. Back with his little mouse.”

The Staghorn was a cinder-block box overlooking Glory Lake. Quinn's white truck, with its chunky custom toolboxes, already sat in the parking lot.

A pair of bleached, crooked antlers flanked the bar's front door. His face was the color of clay. Clambering onto the barstool beside him, she almost made a joke—
I forgot how ancient you are!
But she was cut short by his eyes, which searched hers as if conducting a depth check of her affection. Again, she almost joked—
Why the long face?
—and she was embarrassed on his behalf, that he would look to her for anything. True, since fall she'd supplied the attention he claimed to lack and sorely need; if he wanted a last top-off of that tonic, she could rally once more to the cause, muster fondness into her gaze for old times' sake—she'd missed him, too—but not without a prickle of irritation. Wasn't she the one without a home of her own, without a mate or affectionate children, or a fat final paycheck? The one who presently shared a bed with an ugly plaid suitcase in what was essentially a thin-walled storage closet? You didn't see her seeking reassurance or consolation or anything at all from him.

Oh, but a last dusting of sweetness: he craved it and she'd give it and have done, in honor of their time on the mountain.

“I know you can use this.” He handed her a check. She read quickly before folding it in half: Pay to the order of
Cash
. Discreet. The wife would never know. He'd paid her more than minimum wage, too, but he hadn't been so generous as to be flagrant or to look as if he was paying for something else: it was a fair sum for fifty-odd hours of unskilled labor. (Though not, she couldn't help but note, as much as Brian
What's-a-Router?
Crittenden had been paid—she'd seen those invoices.) She slid the check into her purse. “Hey. Whatever happened with the trailer?”

“Had it towed to my mom's place,” he said.

“And it's okay?”

“The hitch is shot and has to be replaced. Stuff came out of cupboards.”

“How is it being home?”

“Busy.” He'd had to rehang his mother's bathroom door. Take care of business at the bank. Caleb needed help installing cabinets on his job. “And all the time,” Quinn said, “I'm wondering when I can see you.”

Cress decided to ignore this. “And Sylvia? How's she?”

“She's at work,” he said. “Till ten tonight. Come on. Let's go.”

“Go where?” said Cress. “Do what?”

“Take a drive. Where we can talk.”

They drove through citrus groves to the far-flung bars they'd visited last fall. They sat pressed together in flimsy plywood booths, alone but for one or two dedicated drinkers at the bar. Cress had gone to taverns and bars before, but always in college towns, and they were not like these dim, shoddy drinking stations with gritty floors, mewling jukeboxes, and sparse liquor selections. The amenities were basic, utilitarian, joyless. These were places to drink, or to meet someone you shouldn't.

She assumed that what they had up the hill was officially over. And maybe it was: he hadn't kissed her, and perhaps he didn't intend to. Maybe this was some intermediate, post-attachment stage, where touching arms and thighs when fully clothed was allowed; it was already more than she'd expected.

He had a new, bad haircut, the top was thick and full, but the sides were shaved, so his head was shaped like a mushroom: a little boy's haircut.

“Sylvia must be glad you're home,” Cress said.

“Her birthday was Saturday. We had twenty-two people to Noah Mountain. I made my chili.”

“Did she like that?”

“I think she did.”

“And you? Are you glad to be home?”

“What do you think?”

“It must be nice to be back with your family.”

“I hate every minute I'm not with you.”

“You'll get over it,” Cress said lightly, and perhaps heartlessly, but she had not indulged in such sentiments. She had been strict with herself.

It was dark when they left the Murdock bar. Outside of Sparkville, Quinn turned onto a farm road into an olive grove, the headlights illuminating silvery slim leaves and gnarled, vaguely human trunks. He parked and held on to her and shook against her, and finally kissed her. She tasted tears in his beard, and she knew then how tightly she, too, had been holding back and wept hotly into his shoulder. They held each other until the worst passed. Then he put the truck in reverse and drove back to the Staghorn where she'd left her car.

He followed her to Donna's house. Cress zipped the plaid suitcase and shoved it atop some speakers. They had to be extremely quiet; in the next room the fiancés were composing the guest list for their rehearsal dinner, every name audible through the plasterboard walls. Quinn left only at the last possible moment, when he could still make it home before Sylvia did.

Cress now had almost four hundred dollars, and a check coming Friday.

*   *   *

Tillie said, “Good. Make your nut, then get out of there. Don't you think it's high time you ended your little love affair with the working class?”

“I just have to figure out where to go next.”

“There might be something for you to do at
City and State
.”

“Moving back south just feels so regressive.”

“Like waiting tables and dating a married man is progress?” Tillie said. “L.A.'s huge. You can't dismiss it out of hand. Things are picking up! There are jobs—and lots of
single
sad sacks to cheer up.”

“Maybe I'll visit Sharon in London.” Cress could use a vacation. Her stint on the mountain didn't count; it wasn't a vacation when you were under constant pressure to write your dissertation, even if you were blocked or avoiding it. She hadn't had a real vacation in years. The summer when she and John Bird went camping for a week in Wyoming, they'd drilled each other for their orals the whole time.

*   *   *

Up on the mountain it was snowing more than ever, blizzard after blizzard. Eighteen, then twenty, twenty-two feet accumulated.

You could hop over the power lines, Don Dare reported. Cress could walk into her A-frame through the second-floor windows. The Simmses' roof had partially collapsed. The state plows hadn't made it up yet, which meant that homeowners had to park two miles below the lodge, where the county stopped plowing, and either snowshoe or ski the rest of the way in.

Cress missed the A-frame. She was sorry not to be there for all that snow.

She and Quinn now drove in aimless, perpendicular patterns past groves of Valencia orange trees simultaneously bearing fruit and blossoming, the perfume heavy, heady, cloying. One night, with no explanation, he took her to a bar in downtown Sparkville, the Coach 'n' 4, where a spoke-wheeled buggy hung from the rafters and harnesses and whips straggled along the walls. The clientele was older and dressier, the bar well stocked. They drank while, three blocks to the east, Sylvia served her regulars fried chicken and hamburger steaks.

Later yet, they sat at Donna's picnic table by the roaring Hapsaw.

“You face-suckers want some Ovaltine?” Donna called from the kitchen.

Owls hoo-hooed. Across the river, coyotes threw their voices to sound like fifty madcap laughers. “You'd better go on home,” she said. “Aren't you afraid of being late? She'll wonder where you are.”

He said, “That's not for you to worry about.”

They slipped out Donna's back gate to lie on thick grass by the loud river, privacy courtesy of a lilac bush. In this way, they kicked loss farther down the road.

In the mornings, Cress woke to the jubilant jeers of mockingbirds. She ached all over from hauling dishes and tables at work, and the exertions of love. She carried her coffee and book outside. Spring was a clear flammable gas in the air. She was reading a novel whose cover showed a naked woman seated in a chair with her hair on fire, a literary novel that was borderline pornographic and seemed of a piece with the tremble of new leaves, the heavy orange perfume, the river's gush, her own sexual fog. (Years later she'd try to reread the book and was surprised that it was about the Holocaust, of which she had no recollection.)