[First draft]
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 I can make it up again tomorrow, they don’t close the roads.”
“Don’t you need a day off?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“But what of 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. When the Snowbird road is closed, and I go up there, it usually means it’s snowed two or three feet.” Al replied.
“That’s good though, right?”
“No. The snow is so deep, that 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 it’s still snowing, your tracks are covered every time you go down and back up, and there’s almost nobody there making new tracks. Powder all day.”
“I don’t like powder; it’s too hard to ski in, I’m always falling or getting twisted around.”
“There’s a secret to powder – it’s actually easier to ski in than other days. Especially when it’s steep. Get 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 just sort of sit there, 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 even know how much he’s eating. He’s eating all the time. I guess he’s working so much, he just burns it 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 didn’t know if I was ready. Al was all 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 just 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 any 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. And then he said we should get married.
I was happy with him, felt safe, protected with him. 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 even 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 there 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 felt 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. I had 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 very 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 colored yarn. I might fit in there.
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 I can get to skiing easily, 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, I wouldn’t be going there, 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 know more, not be afraid when something goes wrong, you know?” 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 just 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 as usual. 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 just above crescendo’d. Now a little dizzy I went on, “It’s all too much. Not getting into school, 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 know I’m going to be a midwife. Then, there’s 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 don’t leave, as long as you’re around, it’s all OK.”