Off Course (8 page)

“Oh, here you go.” DeeDee pointed. “Look.”

Cress looked. And saw her mother's name,
Sylvia Hartley
.

Cress's heart rate shot up and her vision blurred. A long moment passed before the cursive words shivered through:
Sylvia Hartley brought up a teacher friend last week—now she's back, renting the Fuller cabin. J's truck parked up on the spur behind.

Cress trembled afterward from the scare.

Some pages later:
S. Hartley's friend (Elsa?) rented Fullers' again, moped around lodge all Saturday. J ignored—he's moved on. Poor thing.

Elsa! Cress knew Elsa, Elsa Calderon, solemn, moon-faced, forty-ish Elsa, plain as a nun, who taught Spanish and pinned gardenias on her blouse.

Sitting thigh to thigh on the wicker love seat in the A-frame, the small book open on their knees, she and DeeDee read every entry.

“What shall we do?” Cress said. “Xerox it and pass it out at the lodge?”

“Yeah!” DeeDee laughed. “We should charge for it. The bims'd pay.”

“Oh, they'd pay all right,” Cress said.

Then they burned it in the fire. For Connie Yates's sake.

The cure, indeed.

*   *   *

“You can come in.” He'd shown up late one afternoon. “But I'm done.” In the A-frame's kitchen, he body-pressed her against the refrigerator, sent magnets skidding. “No, Jakey.” She slipped out from under him. “No more. It was fun for a while, but these unpredictable onslaughts make me crazy.”

“Oh, now, Hartley,” he said.

“I can't take it, Jakey. I want more of an everyday life with someone.”

“And you expected that with me?” he said.

“I don't know what I expected.”

“But no hard feelings, right?”

He deftly slid his arms around her and they both laughed, and she said, “No, Jakey,” and “No” again. She squirmed loose, and he took it in good humor and didn't insist, and that was pretty much that.

 

Six

Her bones and muscles ached dully, sore from the whole wild ride. She was distressed, but at her own obtuseness. In the mornings, longing drew her awake, a claw of hope: only now, what did she long for? She lugged the card table and Selectric upstairs to her bedroom, away from the distractions of phone, refrigerator, and view. She drank a pot of coffee and quivering from caffeine pushed herself further into her second chapter, so she could finish that and move on to the next, and eventually into the rest of her life, post-diss.

Franny appeared with the Hoover: the harbinger of parents.

“So soon?” Cress would've liked more time to herself.

They showed up in time for her father to visit the carpenters on site. He came back grumbling. “That Crittenden kid just spent twenty minutes trying to change a router bit—it was like he'd never handled one before. Of course, Rick's paying him a full carpenter's wage!
And
charging me 10 percent on top of that!”

Later, while Cress helped her mother with the dinner dishes, her father slipped upstairs, read her new pages, then thumped down again. “Seeing as I invested in your education, I took a look at your progress. I have to admit, your writing does improve as you revise.”

She and her mother exchanged bright, surprised looks. Sam Hartley praised so rarely, Cress decided on the spot to overlook his snooping.

“I, however, find that I never need to revise.” Sam squatted to poke the fire. “Whatever I write comes out best in the first pass. But then I know what I'm going to say before I start.” He spoke over his shoulder. “That way I don't waste paper. Think things through first and you'll save time
and
supplies.” He stood and went outside to the porch.

“He begrudges me
paper
?”

“Oh dear,” Sylvia whispered. “I don't know why he's like that.”

Sam came back inside with an armload of wood. “And you haven't kept the temperature log.”

“I know, Dad.”

“I ask you to do one thing, and you can't be bothered?”

“It's your thing, Dad. Not mine.”

“You live here rent-free, eat our food, burn the wood I chop—?”

“Now, Sam,” said Sylvia.

“She's almost thirty! When will she be weaned?”

In a single swoop, Cress crossed the room, pulled her jacket from its peg. “I'll leave. I'm happy to leave. I'll leave tomorrow, first thing.”

She loped down the porch steps and the driveway, then turned right, past the Orlisses', into the farthest, uninhabited loop of the subdivision. The moon was an ungainly oblong. How dare her father claim reading rights to her work when, in fact, she'd worked and gone into debt for graduate school, and had paid her own way since college, except for a few emergencies, like when her CETA job hadn't paid her on time. And she'd quit that job, which would have been so good to put on her résumé, to take a waitressing job in order to make her student-loan payments. Working at the Dinner Plate had been hateful, eight hours on that concrete floor, hounded by a boss who criticized her appearance and her job performance nonstop by day, then called her at home at night, drunk, to beg for sex. After her last shift at the Dinner Plate, Cress had unlaced her white orthopedics, stepped out of them by the front door, and walked to her car in her stocking feet.

She would leave the A-frame, too, as happily: good riddance to the Meadows and its denizens. But where would she go? To return to Pasadena felt like going backward. As for joining John Bird in Minneapolis—unthinkable!

So maybe she'd light out to parts unknown, like Bishop, Mammoth, or Tahoe; she could rent a room, work the breakfast shift in a coffee shop, type in secret all night. Or fly to London and Sharon's lumpy couch.

Leaking into her thoughts came a sound so mournful, so minimally tuneful, Cress mistook it for an animal's cry or the creaking of trees. Then came the first recognizable bit, a scrap of “House of the Rising Sun.” Another scrap was possibly the yodeling riff in “Lovesick Blues.” An accordion? No, wheezier. Bagpipe? The shreds of melody stayed so low and private, a step could take her out of range and she couldn't get a fix on it.

Back in the A-frame her mother was reading Simenon and nursing a plastic cup of bourbon. Her father had a flashlight in pieces on the table. Cress went upstairs without a word. Her mother came in and sat at the foot of her bed. “Don't let him get to you. Rick has him all upset. Nobody wants you to leave.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“If you could only write down the temperature…”

“I can't, Mom. I just can't.”

A long silence. Moonlight filled the room with blue.

“I'm glad you're getting your work done,” Sylvia said.

“I am, more or less. And it's pretty up here.”

Sylvia moved her hand over the bedspread to Cress's shin and squeezed. “Not such a concentration camp after all?”

*   *   *

Tillie said, “Are you meeting any new men up there?”

“Supply exceeds demand,” said Cress.

Between the carpenters and a sheepish Jakey, she never had to pay for a drink. Being single on the mountain was a form of public service.

*   *   *

The flaps on Don Dare's tent were open. T-shirts hung on a clothesline strung between trees. The Sawyer Songbird was wringing out a cloth over in some bushes. “Hello? Hello?” Cress called. “Are you the famous Donna?”

The Songbird regarded her coolly. “Do I know you?”

“We've never officially met. I live in the Meadows? Don works on my folks' house? He said I should introduce myself. You
are
Donna?”

The Sawyer Songbird glared. Between them, on the heavy, government-issue picnic table, sat a coffee can stuffed with dry, fuzzy grasses. “I guess not!” Cress said brightly, and turned to leave. “Sorry!”

“Just what did Don say about me?”

Cress swung around. “That I should introduce myself.”

Another long, scouring look. “You want some ice tea?”

Donna lowered a netted cooler—“The bear's piñata,” she called it—and took a pick to the block of ice, filling two pint mason jars with large clear shards, then sun tea from a pitcher. They took seats across from each other at the picnic table.

“I love your tent. It's so exotic. And luxurious.”

“You've been here before?” The coldness and suspicion were back.

“Jakey Yates showed it to me once—Jakey, who runs the lodge?”

“Are you the one seeing him?”

“
I was
,” said Cress. “We split up.”

“Probably for the best,” Donna said. “For you, at least.”

“Yeah—since he was seeing fifty other women at the same time.”

“Jakey's a goat, all right,” Donna said.

“And I thought he was just this sweet, lonely divorced guy.”

“I know a goat when I see one,” said Donna, “'cause I used to be married to one. I know the signs.”

“Like what?” said Cress. “What signs?”

“That spotlight of attention. The way they single you out, get you off by yourself. Jakey damn near irradiates a girl. And the sexual confidence!”

“Really? He just seemed so good-natured and easygoing to me.”

“Yeah? Well, whatever you do, don't marry him,” Donna said. “That'll really drive you crazy. Those goaty guys sneak and lie for the fun of it. Never a straight answer to your questions.”

“Jakey and I didn't even get to the point where I could ask questions.”

“God, I cross-examine Don so much, he thinks I'm a nutcase. But if he's got nothing to hide, he's got nothing to worry about, right?” Donna poured more tea. “Oh, another sign would be crabs. Or chlamydia. Warts.”

“Yeesh,” said Cress. “I probably should see a gyno.” The evening breeze high up in the pines made the long needles hiss. Cress was struck, not for the first time, how women could go from hello to gynecology within minutes of meeting. “But Don's crazy about you,” she said. “He told me right away that you two are exclusive.”

“Why should that even come up?” said Donna. “Was he flirting?”

“Not at all.” A small lie. But why get Don in trouble? Especially since she wasn't even attracted to him. He was too familiar, too passive. And surfers had never interested her. Nor, for that matter, had heroin addicts. Cress was too polite to spell this out to Donna; certainly more polite than Donna had been to her.

Donna stood and started rummaging through foodstuffs, pulling out onions and carrots, a package of stew meat. “You'll stay for dinner?”

“Oh no, no thanks,” Cress said. “I've got to get home.” The truth was, the Sawyer Songbird had worn her out.

*   *   *

Crossing Spearmint Creek on a log, Cress took the campers' shortcut to the lodge.

“Whoa now, Cressida Hartley!” Jakey hollered from the lodge's porch. “I need to talk to you.” He held a clipboard, a coil of raffle tickets. “Help me out here,” he said. “Up your ante in the snow pool, kid. I'm trying to break a record.” He had sold over three hundred tickets and needed to sell forty more.

“Nothing left in October?” said Cress. “How 'bout November 4?”

Jakey perused the clipboard, lifting the pages. “I have November 7, noon through two—three tickets. Three bucks.”

“Put it on my tab.”

He made notes, scrawled the times on three tickets, handed them to her. “Come in, try my new invention. A Rustic Nail. Yukon Jack 'n' brandy on ice.”

“No thanks, Jakey. Thanks, anyway.”

The quaking aspens by Jakey's house were yellow and fluttering madly on their slender hitches. The sky had deepened to a soft twilight blue. Up ahead on the road, the older Morrow brother, Quinn, in his crimped hat, walked alone, his gait oddly graceful, as if he were crossing a narrow beam or tight rope. Cress trailed him for a mile. He didn't look back once.

*   *   *

Apparently she and this carpenter had the same walking schedule. Every day, he was up ahead or behind her. After having the woods largely to herself, Cress was acutely aware of his presence. She used to pee whenever she felt like it, barely bothering to step off the road—a man's freedom. Now she headed deep into the bushes, once literally stumbling over the carcass of a coyote, its back haunch eaten by yellow jackets so that the dark pink meat had brainlike whorls and crevices.

Once, she saw him crouched beside the oxbowed meadow stream, smoking and gazing into the narrow channel. As she watched, he lifted a hand over the water and a trout rose up after it as if by sorcery, gold twisting in the air.

Of course, he'd been fishing (out of season!) with just nylon line, no pole. Wetting his hands, he laid the wild fish on the grass and, after a long moment, he slipped the hook from its lip and pointed it back into the leather-brown water.

*   *   *

At Family Night, she sat with Don Dare, Brian, and Franny, and waited for the buffet to open. Honor of Hapsaw Lodge sipped wine at the bar. According to DeeDee, Honor had thought Jakey would marry her once his divorce was final, and she still held out hope. Perhaps Honor hadn't heard about the bims, or, as Cress once had, she'd dismissed them as a predictable post-divorce effusion, soon to pass.

“Look who's all gussied up,” DeeDee whispered, nodding at the Morrow brothers, who had on leather vests, cowboy boots, and those scrunched leather hats with their hair wisping out, while their beards were freshly, meticulously trimmed. They looked like extras from
Gunsmoke
, Cress said. Or some spaghetti Western.

“But they're great craftsmen,” said Don. “They usually work down south for movie stars, but no one's building. Rick got 'em for, like, half their rate.”

Brian said that they'd worked for one famous movie star in particular.