!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Mike was waiting for me as I walked off the plane into Stapleton airport. Once again the mile-high air in Denver had me breathless, almost panting, my cheeks flushed. He stood hesitantly, gauging my mood. Then, a soft hint of a smile from him, one raised eyebrow, and I remembered my vow after agreeing on the phone to come. Enjoy ourselves, together, now is all that matters for this next week. I smiled back, he hugged me from the side with an extra little squeeze, and we walked down towards baggage claim.
“I almost didn’t get here,” Mike said as he grabbed my suitcase.
“Oh?” was all I could manage, thinking, That’s not much of a start.
“In Glenwood, an hour down the road from Aspen, it was, what, maybe 6 this morning? The speed limit’s 25, no one’s around at all, it’s Saturday morning, so I’m going 40. Cop pulls me over. He said, ‘You’d better have a good excuse for this, when you see the judge,’ as he pulled out his little ticket book.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“I told him the truth, said I was going to pick up my girlfriend in Denver at the airport, I hadn’t seen her in over two months. He smiled, put the book away, then looked stern and shook his finger at me.”
“Well, at least I’m good for something,” I murmured, almost too soft for him to hear.
Mike gave a little laugh, then added, “He said he’s going to be watching for us when I come back through, I’d better be going under the speed limit.”
Jack had been busy over Christmas, as the main room upstairs and our downstairs bedroom were now wood-paneled, hiding that friendly sparkling insulation as we lay in the wide old rosewood bed. No curtains on the windows, which meant an outdoor light show twinkled right outside, more brilliant than any planetarium.
“Is that…the Milky Way?” I marveled.
Mike leaned over, looked out and up, and said, “Yup. It’s unreal here right now. See, no moon, it’s already set behind us. So few houses in this valley, the air so thin, the stars are much brighter here.” He eased back down, resting on his elbow as he brushed my hair back across the pillow. “Your face…your hair…I just remembered how much I like to look at them.” With a smiling open mouth and closing eyes, he nuzzled down into my neck, then my face, my lips, finally drawing back to say, “And your smell, I’ve missed that smell.” With that, we fully fell together, enacting once again the dance we’d rehearsed so many times before.
By the time he crawled upstairs, I’d been awake two hours. “East coast time, you know,” I said, answering his puzzled look. He’d always been the early riser in our couple, me the night owl. I felt a step ahead of him for once. Finding the coffee, making pancakes for him, even, I saw how easy falling into domesticity might be. My anxiety increased when I remembered, today we were going skiing.
He’d already dressed in blue jeans and that sweater I’d given him the year before. We quickly found some long underwear of G’s which fit me, covered that with one of her fluffy sweaters and those jeans Eddie bought me in Chicago. My long down parka and dark green watch cap completed the alpine ensemble. Rental skis and boots were next, then out to try my luck.
“OK, watch these people getting on,” Mike instructed as we waited by the chair lift. It seemed to whip around the bull wheel impossibly fast, but then was grabbed by an attendant who held it for the next pair to ease down on a wooden seat. “You stand there, put your poles in one hand, turn back and grab the pole with the other. Then, sit down. Watch a couple more.”
I tried to reassure myself by thinking, even if I don’t spend my life with Mike, if I never ski with him again, knowing how to get up and down a mountain will be a good skill to learn. Broaden my horizons, and all that. When it was our turn, Mike went first, then I quickly followed. Turning toward the center, he let me grab the pole first, then reached above my hand as we both sat down. He threw his right arm out to hold me back, and off we went. Three minutes to the top of this baby lift – “Fanny Hill”, they called it – during which he repeated over and over, “At the top, lean forward just a little, stand up, and let yourself slide forward. Do not walk, keep you feet and legs together.”
I did all that, and safely made it off. But he’d neglected the little part about stopping. When I found myself still sliding, not knowing what to do, I simply fell down. He walked over, reaching down to pull me up.
I shook him away. Irritated, I said, “I’ll do it myself, all right?” But of course I couldn’t, not with those six-foot long planks on my feet getting in the way. I let him help me up, then dutifully followed his instructions about “making a ‘V’, a snowplow, then weight on that uphill ski as you let yourself slide down and around.”
Amazed when it worked, I zig-zagged all the way down that bunny slope, not falling once and turned back into the line of waiting skiers, ready to go again.
Mike hockey-stopped right above me, spraying snow nearly to my face, shook his head in disbelief, then said, “See, I told you you’d like it.”
Each day, we came back out, in the sun, in the snow, and kept that yo-yo rhythm, first ride up, then slide down. On the second day, I graduated to a longer lift, half way up the lower part of the mountain, the part we couldn’t see from his house, and discovered “Wipe-out Hill”, which certainly deserved its nickname. After our third time down, my blue jeans were caked with freezing snow, rapidly growing stiff and crackly. Mike noticed, and suggested we go inside, to thaw out and rest a bit.
“But first, let me stop in at the post office, see if there’s any mail.” He deposited me by a cozy fire in the Timber Mill, where I could warm up and look out at the other beginning skiers trying to stay upright.
He returned, frowning, waving several envelopes across his face.
“I heard that each week, the medical schools send out a list of everyone they’ve accepted to all the other schools. That way, supposedly, they know who’s in and who’s not, and unless they really, really want someone, they can feel better knowing someone they reject, but think is good enough, will have a place somewhere else.”
I had my doubts, it seemed this story might be apocryphal, designed to make the applicants feel better about being rejected over and over. After all, hadn’t Mike already gotten into two schools?
The letters that day, in their thin envelopes, told us he wasn’t going to Harvard or Colorado. Columbia, Michigan, St. Louis and Yale soon followed. By the time San Francisco, Stanford, and Washington came through, we’d gotten used to the idea Mike would be headed to Los Angeles next fall. “About as far as you can get from Boston,” I noted.
Mike had always been the most upbeat person I knew, able to find a silver lining in the darkest news. He speculated, “If I’ve got to be inside 8, 10 hours a day in class, then study, it’s good to know that when I do get out, it’ll be sunny, the weather will be nice. Oh, and maybe I should write to the admissions director, see if I can get a summer job there.” He never mentioned the yawning continental chasm opening up between us. He knew, he finally knew, our days on Martha’s Vineyard, weekend drives to Cambridge in that little red Lancer, cozy walks along the Charles, all that was gone forever. I stayed silent, too.
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