It’s a job for him, this skiing. Every day around 8 he heads back to the garage on the alley and disappears in his yellow VW bus. He comes back at 4, 4:30. The routine is reassuring. He heads downstairs, hangs up his ski clothes by the boiler, then comes up to share his day. When it snows, that’s when he’s happiest. Today, for instance…
“Nine inches!” he beams. “And snowing an inch an hour when I left. Hope they don’t close the roads tomorrow and I can make it up.”
“Don’t you need a day off?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“But what if the road is closed?”
“Then I’d go up Big Cottonwood, to Solitude or Brighton.”
“What are those like?” I asked.
“Not so good. They’re not as steep. They only close the Snowbird road when it’s snowed two or three feet.” Al replied.
“That’s good though, right?”
“No. The snow is so deep, it slows you down, you almost stop. It’s not fun. If it were steeper, like at Snowbird, then it would be great.”
He took a can of soup out and heated it on the stove, then rooted around for some bread. He went on, “The best days, a perfect day, is when it starts snowing in the night, maybe a foot or snow, I get up there, and it keeps snowing and they close the road for avalanche work. Nobody can get up. If it keeps snowing, your tracks are covered every time you go down and back up, and with nobody making new tracks, it’s powder all day.”
“I don’t like powder; it’s too hard to ski in, I’m always falling or getting twisted around.”
“The secret to powder – it’s easier to ski in than other days. And the steeper, the better. With your weight centered over the middle of your foot, the friction of the snow on your legs slows you down. You reach a terminal velocity. Then, you keep your knees bent, ready to absorb, lean a little left, then right, and make those ‘esses’ all the way down.”
He poured the soup into a bowl and dipped the bread in it. He doesn’t know how much he’s eating. He’s eating all the time. I guess he’s working so much, he burns it all up. He’s certainly not gaining any weight.
*******
Having him around again helps me in school. Four months now, and I’m starting to feel I can do this, I’m going to do this, I’m going to be a midwife. When I got into Loma Linda’s midwifery school, a couple of years ago, I was unsure if I were ready. Al was eager to tie us up, said he wanted to get married. That scared me, doing both those things at the same time. I didn’t feel ready, not to be a doctor’s wife, Mrs. Truscott, and not to be a midwife, responsible for bringing babies safely into the world.
What if something went wrong, I thought. We’d been living together for two years, sharing a refrigerator, sharing a bathroom, sharing the beach and the dogs, sharing a bed. We went to movies, went to shows. I’d taken a job away from County Hospital, so we weren’t seeing each other there. Could we share our lives if I didn’t have one of my own?
He’d come crashing into my life at the precise point when I had begun to take the steps I’d planned, to be on my own, dependent on no one but myself, not my parents, not my boyfriend, not some random guy. I was a nurse, had passed my boards, had a real job, a car, an apartment. And then he appeared, a whirlwind who always had something planned, always deciding what we should do. Then he said we should get married.
I was happy with him, safe and protected. The Siren song of marriage held a powerful allure. I didn’t say, “No,” so he assumed that meant “Yes.” He started telling our friends, the other residents he worked with. Everyone acted like it was the correct next step. A few gave us wedding presents. I got pulled along in the excitement, like one of Buff’s sticks getting sucked out past the waves when Al threw it for him to fetch.
Then I got into Loma Linda, and we started talking about how that would work, how he could stay in Venice, and I’d be in Redlands, and we’d see each other on weekends, and be married…the thoughts overwhelmed me.
“But we’re still gonna stay together, right? I mean, it’s only a couple of hours to Redlands. You’ll drive back here on the weekends, right?”
“Um, I think the classroom stuff happens in Loma Linda, but they’re doing the clinical work at County. That’s the second year. Only nine months I’d have to live out there.”
“I can do that. We can do that. I’ve done it before, had a long-distance relationship, 120 miles apart. Remember?”
I remembered. His super-smart girlfriend, the one who went to Radcliffe. I looked away.
We went out to Loma Linda the next weekend, looked at student housing. “A dorm, a cinder-block dorm”, I mumbled as we drove back. “I can’t do that again. Not out here. Let’s come back next weekend and find a real apartment, OK?”
A few days later, I got a call from the nursing department chief at Loma Linda. “Cheryl, I’m calling all the incoming midwifery students today with some distressing news. ___, the director of the program, was killed in a plane crash. We’re going to have to find a new director. We may have to delay the start of our midwifery program until we can get organized again. I hope you understand.” Relief flushed through my chest, my heart now open and free. “I hope you can wait until we have all that finalized.”
Al was on call that night, and I worked the next day, so I didn’t tell him until a day later. In the meantime, I thought about what I wanted to do next. When we first met, Al had told me a story about driving from Cincinnati back to Los Angeles five years earlier, in 1972. He’d been driving all over the American West that summer, the last he would have free before his final two years of medical school and four years of residency.
Camping in his car, staying with friends or family, he tried to visit all the places he remembered from family trips when he was young. Near the end, in mid-August, he took a detour back to Cincinnati to see his parents and then stopped in Chicago to watch the Olympic Trials for swimming. Heading west, he found himself in Iowa late in the evening. The sun had set, yet the air was still hot, a damp muggy humidity oppressing him. He had a sudden thought, I don’t ever want to go east of the Continental Divide again.
“Why?” I’d asked.
“The air is different here. Even in LA, in the summer, the evenings, nights are cool. And in the mountains, out in Colorado, it’s drier, no humidity. I’m not going back.”
I knew I wanted to be a midwife. It gave me purpose, even more than photography or living with Al. And yet, I didn’t want to leave him either. There were few places to train as a nurse-midwife; the one I’d heard most about was in Kentucky the Frontier School of Midwifery. I imagined long-haired, make-up free hippie girls in an Appalachian valley, long dresses, flowing tresses tied back with colored yarn. I might fit in.
But would Al follow me? It was so close to Cincinnati, a place he’d said “was great for raising kids, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” When he talked about his dreams, where he might want to practice, it was never LA, never back east but “somewhere close to skiing, where the weather isn’t hot and muggy, and in the winter the snow is soft and fluffy. Colorado, San Francisco, Idaho, Seattle…”
When I told him Loma Linda had closed and I wouldn’t be going, he nodded, straight-faced. “Are you going to apply somewhere else?”
“I think I need another year, work in the ICU, learn more about serious illness and trauma. I want to see more difficult cases, so I won’t be afraid when something goes wrong.” I hesitated. “There’s one more thing I think I’m not ready for.”
“What, you don’t want to leave LA?”
A pounding started in my chest, a bubble forming in my belly, right below my heart. I looked at Al, his hair, his eyes. So much like the little Golden Retriever puppy we’d bought in Diamond Bar. Now full-grown, Jet still had boundless energy, always eager for our walks to the beach.
“No…no…”
We were in the kitchen, wondering what to make for dinner. He opened the refrigerator, reached for the Hawaiian Punch he always kept there. Grabbing a can-opener, he punched two little triangular openings in the top, and drank straight from the can. Disgusting, I thought, but also why I love him.
“No…I don’t think we should get married. Yet.”
“Yet?”
The lump below my chest swelled, the pounding of my heart above crescendo’d. Now a little dizzy, I went on, “It’s all too much. Not getting into school, it made me think.”
“Think?”
“How I’m not ready, not ready for so much all at once. I need to slow down. First find somewhere to go to school. I have to be sure I’m going to be a midwife. Then, what about your residency? You’ve got another year, your senior year. I don’t think we can…don’t think I want to do all that, all that at once. I can’t do it,” I said.
“Can’t do what?” Al asked.
“We can’t do it. Can’t get married.”
His face went blank. For once I’d taken control, set the direction for our life. Powerful, in charge, I went on, “Maybe after, maybe when I graduate…” This is it, I thought. This is when he tells me I’m scared of commitment.
His unreadable face stared at the can of Hawaiian Punch.”
“OK,” he said.
“OK?”
“Yeah, I get it. As long as you’re around, as long as we’re together it’s all OK.”
*******
“Everybody’s talking about where they’re going next year, after graduation.” Al had Jet in a headlock, the Golden loving every second of his master’s attention.
“And…?” I said.
“And, I don’t have anything set yet. I thought you were going to apply again for midwifery school.”
“There’s a few I wrote to, asked for applications.”
He raised his eyebrows. I went on. “Frontier School of Midwifery, in Kentucky? That would be where I want to go. They’ve been around forever; I like the vibe of the place. More natural, helping the poor people in Appalachia.”
He released Jet, giving him a final scratch behind the ears. “I don’t know…Kentucky…it’s east of the Continental Divide. Humid, no mountains…”
He stood up and walked into the enclosed front porch. Barefoot, wearing bell-bottom muslin pants, string tie dangling in front, and a matching loose-fitting un-ironed shirt, with his shoulder-length wavy sun-bleached hair and mid-summer beach tan, a familiar tug entwined me.
Why can’t I do what I want, for once? I thought. “Wait,” I said. I hurried after him.
The morning light, filtered through the porch windows, glittered prismatically on the scraggly plants Al had planted in small rust-colored pots. “They have a program in Salt Lake. University of Utah. The only one in the west,” I said.
He brightened, turning to look down Wavecrest to the beach. “Salt Lake City! That’s where Snowbird and Alta are.”
My heart began a war with the anger in my stomach, the thoughts of independence in my head. Was I going to let a man tell me what to do once again, take me away from where I wanted to go?
“Is that a good school, Utah? That’d be great if you went there,” he said. “Should we go and look at it?
*******
Flying into Salt Lake one October weekend, the cloudless sky, snow-capped mountains, and blazing orange trees covering the valley floor contrasted with a tang of bitterness I still felt on having my choices restricted. From the middle seat, Al leaned over me and pointed out the window.
“That must be where Alta is, up that canyon! And down there, see the Temple, and the Capitol? Is that the University, up against the hills?”
Friday morning, I had an interview with the program director. I had wondered what we would do the rest of the time, but she scheduled a series of visits. I told her about my interest in Anthropology in college; she set me up with a professor of clinical anthropology, Madelyn Leininger. I met with some current students, who rhapsodized about their classes, professors, and clinical work in locations at an Air Force base, and down in New Mexico on the Navajo reservation. I began to feel I could fit in there. There would be friends to make, a new city to discover.
Heading to my meeting with the anthropology professor, I thought about why I was doing this, why I wanted to be a midwife. Women having babies is so basic, the start of everyone’s life. At LA County Hospital, I’d seen how women from all over the world, Mexico, Nigeria, Korea, so many places, how different women act in labor.
“But every one loved their newborns when they first held them,” I told Dr. Leininger.
“It’s like that here, too,” she said.
“Really? I thought Salt Lake was all Mormons, having a lot of babies, sure, but isn’t it kind of all the same?”
She laughed. “No, it’s a very cosmopolitan place here. The LDS Church sends young people on missions, to so many different countries. There are little enclaves of immigrants all over the town as a result.”
“I wonder what that’s like, seeing how women from other cultures go through pregnancy, take care of their babies,” I said.
“You’d be coming into a Master’s program here, you know. You’d have to write a thesis to graduate. Maybe that’s something you could explore for yours!” she said.
*******
After Al had finished his post-skiing soup and bread, he said, “Driving home, I heard an ad on the radio about this ice cream place that’s having a sale – they called it ‘a cold day in January’. I mean, what is it with this town and ice cream? Baskin and Robbins is a run-of-the-mill place here. Utah has ice cream parlors like other places have bars!”
“Because they don’t have bars?” I speculated. “They can’t smoke cigarettes, aren’t allowed to drink. So sugar is their big vice?”
Al began to write his short summary of the day’s skiing in a red spiral notebook. He closed his eyes as he counted the runs, then jotted down brief details in a line or two.
“I met with my thesis advisor today,” I said.
“Hmmm,” came the response as he closed the notebook.
“When I mentioned I wanted to do a cross-cultural study of birthing practices, we had a great idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘cross-cultural’?” he asked.
“Remember at County, how the women from different countries all acted different during labor?”
“Yeah. Of course, the Mexicans, they said ‘Ai, doc-tor’ a lot. But Korean women, they were so silent, enduring, holding it in. And Nigerians, they would snap their fingers and click their tongues,” Al said.
“I want to expand beyond labor. That’s all we saw at County. But there’s so much more to being pregnant, before, during and after. And not just what individual women do, but the whole societal attitude towards mothers, and pregnancy and everything.”
“How can you do a thesis about all that? It’s so broad,” he asked.
“That’s what we talked about. She wants me to check out the community of Tongan women…” I started.
“Tongan?”
“Yeah, Tonga. It’s an island in the South Pacific.”
“Never heard of it. Like Samoa, or Fiji?”
“I guess,” I said. “She knows some of them, says I should go to their church, and I could start meeting them, interviewing them.”
“What’s the thesis? What are you trying to prove?” Al asked.
“Not prove anything. The point would be to document how their pregnancy and their birth experience differs between here and Tonga. Find some women who had babies back there, and then came here and had a kid. Interview them and look for common threads, I guess. Document the differences.”
Dylan jumped up on the table and started sniffing Al’s soup bowl. Instead of shooing him away, or, worse, picking the cat up and tossing him on the floor (something he’d done a few times until I demanded he stop), Al began to gently scratch him above the tail, then rubbed his head softly from the nose up between his eyes, to a final ear scratch on either side.
“Look, you’re not sneezing or sniffling!” I observed.
“Yeah, that nose spray really works,” he said.
“What’s it called again? I asked.
“Nasalcrom. It prevents the mast cells from releasing the stuff that causing the symptoms, the itchy eyes and nose. I got it cause I’m allergic to spring, but it’s good for the cat as well.”
I’d always had a cat, but when I moved in with Al, he said he was ‘horribly allergic” to them. I’d thought that was another thing I’d have to give up if I wanted to live with the man, like going to school east of the Rockies.
After we bought the house in the Avenues, I moved from my little apartment down the hill. He was still in Manhattan Beach at Gary and Karen’s, and I needed a companion, a daily reminder of who I was. I found a little fluff ball and introduced him to Al when he came up for Thanksgiving. I was fearful he’d erupt, complain about his allergy. Instead, he offered the name “Dylan”, and took to the little guy right away.
Growing up, we’d always had a cat. My mother would sometimes find a stray at the back door, thin and shivering, looking for safety from the coyotes in the canyon below our house. She’d nurse the little guy back to health and sit stroking his fur while rocking in her mother’s creaky chair. I thought everybody had a cat.
“Your family didn’t like cats?” I asked.
“My father had – has – allergies. Cats make him sneeze, he claims. I think he just doesn’t like cats. He was a ranch boy, my mother a farm girl. Dogs were what they grew up with. Cats were for city people. Too effete, too aloof. So, dogs. We had a couple of dogs, little black Cocker Spaniels, Tina and Toki, when I was growing up.”
“Tina and Toki?”
“Tina – that was the first one. My parents named her ‘Sweet Bertina’, after my sister and I.”
“Wait, ‘Bertina’? How is that after you two?”
“Well, I was named ‘Albert’, after my uncle who got killed in the war, and my grandpa. So, ‘Bert’.”
“But, ‘Tina’? How do you get that from ‘Leigh’?”
“She wasn’t always ‘Leigh’. After college, she decided her name was too stodgy, not her. So she changed the spelling from ‘Shirley’ to ‘Leigh’, and dropped her middle name – ‘Justina’. You take ‘Albert and Justina’ and get… ‘Bertina’.”
“I can see that,” I mused. “I don’t know how I’d feel about ‘Shirley Justina’. It does sound kind of stodgy. Did you like your dogs?”
Al pursed his lips. “When I was a kid, they were the right size. I’d take them on walks, play with them, all that stuff. I even took Toki with me to Colorado when I worked as a dishwasher that winter after I finished college. She never ate better – I’d bring home the best steaks and bones from the plates I’d clean off at Guido’s.”
He put Dylan back down next to the plate of milk I’d set out. Dylan sniffed at it, looked up at the two of us, and wandered off to the bedroom to the waterbed. He hopped up, setting off a gentle wave which rocked him into cat dreamland.
“Then, in medical school, I had those two dogs, Ocho and Pokey. Ocho, the little one, got gobbled up one day I guess, and Pokey was too stupid to keep. So, I got Gypsy, that shepherd/collie mix, and met you.”
“And I tried to get a cat, but you refused!”
“Sneezing! Itchy eyes, throat!” He took a sip of the soup and coughed a little. “Then you snuck this guy in on me!”
“You like him, don’t you? Are you beginning to understand cats?”
“He’s OK, I guess. Doesn’t get in the way very much. I don’t like it when cats come and rub themselves on my leg and stuff. He keeps to himself around me.”
One small step, I thought. “OK”? At least he’s not rejecting the little guy.
