The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (15 page)

That was something I hadn’t thought about doing. I looked
straight ahead for a moment thinking and didn’t respond.

“Unless you don’t want to,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

“No,” I said, “let’s go.”

We looked up at our dorm, up through the bare branches
of trees that in April explode into pink and white blossoms. It was a ten-story
red brick building, rectangular and almost featureless save for a strip of
white granite that highlighted the windows of the fourth floor with shallow
carvings of gargoyles. Our room had been almost at the top. Room 907.

“Looks the same, huh?” Griff said. He wrapped his fingers
around the bars of the tall wrought-iron fence that, by decree of the Historic
District Commission, could never be removed. On the front steps a boy in a
knee-length green army coat sat smoking a cigarette. A boy who wasn’t us.

“Seems like a long time ago,” I said.

“Does it?” Griff said. “I guess sometimes. Right now I feel
like I’ve still got the keys in my pocket.” He patted his thigh, but now there
were no keys there at all. He let go of the fence and walked through the open
gate and up to the front stoop. He said to the smoker, “You live here?”

“Yeah?” the kid said, looking up slowly, smoke coming out
his nose.

“We used to live here,” Griff said, pointing at me. I came
up the walk and stood beside him, feeling proud, as though living in this dorm
had vested me with an authority over all its future occupants. “I’ll give you twenty
bucks if you sign us in so we can look around.”

I laughed. “You’ll what—?”

“Vin—” Griff touched the back of his hand to my chest.
“Roll with me.” He looked at the kid again. “Interested?”

The kid took a slow drag on his cigarette, tapped it on the
edge of the stone step. Ash fell by his foot. He was wearing slippers.

“How do I know you’ll pay?” he said, smooth.

I almost laughed. I wondered what Saturday matinee gangster flick
this slippered kid thought he was starring in. Griff yanked out his wallet,
fished out a ten. He folded it in half lengthwise and held it out between the
tips of his fingers. I wondered what movie Griff thought
he
was in.

“You get the rest when we’re done.”

The kid examined the ten, held it up to the sun and squinted
at it. Apparently convinced of its authenticity, he stood up and looked at his
watch.

“You get fifteen minutes,” he said, opening his coat and
sliding the bill into the pocket of his jeans. “And I’m going to have to follow
you around.” He took a final drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt into
the sand on top of the trash barrel.

“That’s fine,” Griff said.

“And no funny stuff,” the kid said, pulling open the heavy
glass door whose handle for years had been covered with my own fingerprints.

Griff mouthed it back to me, “No funny stuff,” and we went
in.

The grayed arches of the lobby were painted over
light blue now, and the old and twinkling brass chandelier had been replaced
with a boring glass bowl. Even with the improvements the dorm still looked
run-down, but it had never been dirty or unwelcoming; rather, it was like my
old baseball mitt—broken in, comfortable. We slapped our driver’s
licenses down on the front desk.

This was where I really graduated, I thought, looking
around. This lobby was my stage. When I walked through here for the last time
following the ceremony at the theatre,
that
had been the big event of the day. Away from the lights and the
audience—it was just me and the sum total of college twisted up beautiful
and sad inside me. When I left I expected never to return. This kind of thing
was always happening to me. I was so intent on having endings and goodbyes,
official life events recorded, that I almost always had them prematurely. There
was almost always one last gasp.

“Can I sign them in,” the kid in the army coat said to the
girl behind the desk. She didn’t respond but took our licenses and began copying
our info onto a doodled-on page in a loose-leaf binder.

“I used to do this,” Griff told her, as though they shared
membership in a secret desksitting society.

“Fun, huh?” she said flatly. She asked the kid what room. He
told her 812.

“Do you know the people in 907?” Griff asked.

The slippered kid nodded.

“That’s our old room,” I explained.

Griff reached across the counter and tapped the back side. “Is
there an
AGD
carved here somewhere?”

The girl stopped writing and checked, mildly unamused. “No.”

He moved his fingers a couple inches to the left and tapped
again. “Around here?”

The girl looked and nodded. “OK.
AGD
. That you?”

Griff just smiled.

“Two girls live in 907 now,” the kid said and pushed the
button for the elevator. The desksitter waved Griff and me through.

“Are you an RA?” I asked him.

“No, but I get around.”

The elevator door banged open and we got on. The fluorescent
light inside was blinking like a strobe.

“You going to Nine?” the kid said.

My eyes met Griff’s and I said yes. I didn’t even think of
going to Five, where I lived my freshman year, or to Three or Six, where I
spent my junior and senior years. Today this building was about one room on one
floor. The kid pressed the button.

“Elevator’s still a piece of shit, huh?” Griff said as it
chugged its way up through the guts of the building.

“Some guy and a chick got stuck in here for three hours a
couple weeks ago,” the kid said.

“That sucks.”

“Eh, they’re dating now.”

The doors parted on Nine and we got off. We were in a hall,
at either end of which was a door. The tiled floor was glossy still only at the
edges along the wall. A bulletin board decorated with construction paper
cutouts displayed the names of each student living on the floor, along with major
and a short list of likes (spaghetti, sex) and dislikes (mid-terms, war).

We took a right to our side of the building, to what we’d
called our suite—a cluster of five rooms and a bathroom off of a common
area. The carpet was a lighter gray than I remembered but the couches were the
same coarse blue. Griff and I both clocked a lot of hours draped on those
cushions, when our suitemates gathered for late-night drinking games or
Truth-or-Dare. Once, when the two games merged, Beth dared me to kiss Griff.
He’d been willing, his eyes squeezed closed, lips puckered comically. It was me
who refused. To everyone else it was just a game, even to Griff—something
funny to see. But not to me.

I remembered too how we gave each other haircuts here. And
that this was where we had our Secret Santa party that Christmas. Gia threw up
in the corner and the weird kid Brian used to lean in that doorway when
everyone else filled up the couches.

This was where we were roommates.

The door of our old room was closed. More construction
paper labels written in the same handwriting as those in the hall said
Patrice
and
Stephanie
. Our guide leaned against a column in the middle of the
common area, his arms crossed and the hint of a smile on his lips. Did he know
he had something valuable to us, I wondered—his age, his dorm—and that
all we could do was reminisce? Were we pitiful?

Griff knocked softly on the door with one knuckle.

“Come in,” said a voice.

He opened the door. A girl in a pink sweatsuit was sitting
at a desk typing on a laptop, the screen of which was tiled with IM windows.

“Hi,” Griff said, glancing around.

Our guide said over Griff’s shoulder, “Hey Steph. Some
former Shusterites—they used to live in this room or something.”

“We just wanted a quick look around,” I said, fully
embarrassed now and wanting to leave.

“Um. All right?” she said. She was baffled. Of course to her
it was just a room, just a space, and her thoughts of it hadn’t yet gained time’s
sugarcoat of nostalgia and reverence.

It was hard to say whether the desk she was sitting at was
mine or Griff’s because the room was set up differently. On our first day as
roommates we spent hours arranging and rearranging the furniture, trying to
find the perfect fit for everything. (The room was an irregular shape, not
completely rectangular.) Eventually, sweaty and exhausted and nearing the
beginning of the second day, we struck gold. The girls’ arrangement was
suitable but lacked the feng-shui appeal of ours.

“We had the desks over here,” Griff said, stepping into the
room and pointing to the wall against which a bed was now. Above the bed hung a
poster of a model-turned-actor. “The beds opposite each other, here, here.”

“We had a hard time arranging it,” the girl said.

“We almost got in a fistfight that first day,” Griff said,
looking at me, a glimmer of nostalgia in his eyes.

“When did you live here?” the girl said. She typed something
on her computer, clicked. She had multiple conversations going on; the fact
that Griff and I were there in person afforded us no higher priority.

“Four, five years ago,” Griff said. “Long time.”

“Did the hot water suck then?” she said after typing some
more. “Because it sucks now.”

“I remember it being OK,” Griff said, and I remembered it
that way too.

He stood in front of the window with his arms crossed, no
doubt looking down at the angel statue. The sight of his silhouette against the
skyline brought our room rushing back to me. It shimmered over the new
arrangement, over the girly cuteness, over the posters and the pink paper
lantern suspended from the ceiling. It was a two-fold feeling of having never
left and of having only ever been there in a dream. I could see Griff’s U2
poster of the same joshua tree that was tattooed on his shoulder; a stack of my
comics on the edge of my desk; the damp bathtowels hanging over armoire doors;
the thirteen-inch TV, its screen fingerprinted and dusty, on the little fridge
by the door. The wall Griff’s outstretched hand reached for when he
cannon-balled onto my mattress.

I suddenly missed it, all of it, very much, in a terrible,
aching way I feared I would never really get over. I could understand getting
used to someone I loved dying and not being part of my life anymore, but how
could I ever adjust to the fact that a part of
me
was forever in the past? That a whole part of
my
life was over and done and now just a
memory? Just photos in an album and words on a page?

I wasn’t sure I could get over it, but it didn’t feel like I
was stuck in the past. I wasn’t like those paunchy, middle-aged men sitting
around a barbeque in moth-eaten high school letter jackets, recalling the glory
days. There was rarely anything glorious about college, but it was
me
. And it filled every single second
with ready-made
life
. At the tips of
my fingers, on the other side of my door, all around me, whenever I wanted it.
In college I could breathe deep and say,
This
is where I belong.
Even when it was bad. And even when it was confusing, it
made sense.

What hurt most was that I rushed through it, took it for
granted. I was anxious to graduate, eager to mark the goodbye and move on to
something else; to escape and to start again. But I’d never felt quite right
afterward.

No, I wasn’t stuck in my glory days. I was homesick.

When we walked out through the glass doors it was
like being rejected by the dorm, a transplant that didn’t take. My eyes welled
up but the cold air whisked the moisture away.

“How do you feel?” I asked Griff as we passed for the last
time through the old iron gates.

“Blue,” he said.

“Sad?”

“No, blue. Actually more of an indigo. Like remembering.”
His words were so much less specific than his colors. “You have four years of
memories in that building. I really just have ours.”

We crossed into the street and walked down the block to the
car, where Zane and the plant were guarding Griff’s stuff.

“Did they let you go inside?” Zane said. The arms of the
aloe sitting between his thighs waved as the Jeep settled with our added
weight.

“He greased some palms and got us a tour,” I said.

Griff kissed the tips of his bunched fingers, splayed them
into the air. “It’s the Dean charm.”

We got a couple of blocks down Beacon Street and
stopped for a red light. When it turned green and I drove through the
intersection there was a clang under the hood, and then a
fwoop fwoop
like a sock stuck in a fan. I had an idea of what it
was.

“Shit.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Griff said.

“It’s not.”

“Eh, just ignore it.”

I pulled up beside a hydrant and got out, lifted the hood.
One end of a broken fan belt sprang up like a cobra and then fell back upon the
engine, flat and defeated. I ran my finger along the end and asked for Griff’s
phone.

A few minutes later we were sitting beside the hydrant
waiting for a tow truck to come and haul my Jeep away to some Brighton garage.

“And so their trip took a tragic turn...” Zane narrated,
kicking his heel into a clump of frozen sand.

“This is where we met, you know,” Griff said to me, jabbing
his thumb at the brownstone behind us.

I turned around. The windows of the brownstone had curtains
and snow-covered flowerboxes. “This isn’t Shuster,” I said.

“Not anymore. They sold it. It’s condos now.”

“No shit. Really?” I stood up and walked to the front steps.
Through the glass window in the door I could see the hallway (nicely
wallpapered now in a dark floral pattern), at the end of which was the room
where Rebellion in Lit had met.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Rich people play pinochle in our
classroom.” I sat back down between Griff and Zane and pulled my coat down over
my knees.