Free Spirit
written by: Christopher Johnson
Professor Larson was teaching the Philosophy of Education to us undergrads at St. Anthony’s College in Terre Haute, Indiana. It was a course that all prospective teachers took, whether we were planning to be elementary, middle school, or high school teachers. The professor, who had been a high school English teacher himself, was tall and commanding and sported a neatly trimmed gray beard and horn-rimmed glasses, and he spoke slowly and precisely as he elucidated the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey.
As the professor spoke, I kept glancing furtively at her, one row over from me, hoping but not expecting that she would send a glance—even a quick one—back my way. I half-expected my glances to have a physical effect, like tapping her physically on the shoulder. As Professor Larson droned on, she leaned her head against her open hand and occasionally wrote a note about the lecture.
She had flaming Irish red hair, and she sat and tapped her feet endlessly on the linoleum. She wore a polka dot blouse and blue jeans with gingham patches sewn on with pink thread. Her eyes were as green as the Sargasso Sea, and I imagined kelp growing beneath the surface of her eyes. Freckles trooped across her skin like an array of ants, marching across her cheeks and up her nose and dotting her uncreased forehead. She wore sandals, and her fingernails and toenails were painted night-black. On her left upper arm was a tattoo of the sun rising over a mountain, and the sun exploded with brilliant radiance.
As Professor Larson proceeded with great earnestness through the lecture, she lifted her head from its perch on her open palm and raised her hand and was called upon, and she asked, “Dr. Larson, this philosophy and theorizing is all very interesting, but can you explain to me what good this theorizing is going to do me when I’ve got a bunch of horny seventh graders in front of me being all squirmy and squirrely?” The class laughed.
The professor didn’t laugh. He looked at her. She was a thief who had broken into his pedagogical house. “Uh . . . that’s a very good question, Miss Lloyd,” he finally said. “A teacher’s educational philosophy is the very foundation of what we do in the classroom, of the decisions that we make about methods, about discipline, and about curriculum.”
“But,” she said, continuing her challenge upon the professor’s ramparts, “What about intuition, which John Dewey and these other educational philosophers never seem to talk about? Don’t you get a feeling for what to do when you’re a teacher? At least if you’re a good teacher? I mean, like if some kid disrupts the class, don’t you need your intuition to guide how you’re going to respond?”
The rest of the class stared at her. Up to this point in the course, none of the prospective teachers had dared challenge the professor in even this minimalist fashion. He said, “Yes, yes, you do. That is an interesting point, Miss Lloyd.” The class time was ending. He said, by way of conclusion and a bit of escape, “Miss Lloyd’s point about the role of intuition is one that we can pick up next time.” The rest of the class had been shaken out of its slumber, and they all looked at Miss Lloyd and then at the professor, and a light had turned on in their collective eyes.
As the class ended and the students filed out of the classroom, I worked up the nerve to catch up to Miss Lloyd and start walking next to her. This was a very uncharacteristic behavior on my part. I was not one to make such moves. I felt vaguely self-conscious in my neatly pressed khaki slacks with cuffs and a blue button-down shirt that I had bought at Brooks Brothers. My hair was neatly combed and parted, and in fact, I had spent quite a bit of time in the mirror getting my hair just right.
Put another way, she was my opposite. But I was drawn immediately to her. I went ahead and did it. I caught up to her and said, “Hey.” She turned, and to my surprise, she didn’t seem at all surprised. She looked at me, and the look was not unfriendly, and my little heart went pitty-pat. I said, “That was really a great point you made about intuition. It kind of shook up everyone in the class.” The words sounded clunky to me, but at least I had said something.
She smiled. “It kind of shook up the ol’ professor, too.”
“Yes, it shook him up, too. That’s for sure.”
She made no effort to separate herself from me, and we began to walk together out of the Education Building and onto the quad, which was lined with elms and maples that had recently burst with leaves in the full glory of May. I continued walking with her, and she did nothing to discourage me. “I’m Paul Pendergast,” I said.
“I know. I’ve seen you staring at me. It’s really kind of obvious and maybe even a little bit rude.”
I was speechless. There was that thing—intuition. I said, “And you’re Cynthia Lloyd.”
She looked at him. “Good for you. You’ve done your homework. Bravo!” She laughed gaily, drily, mischievously. She stopped laughing. “You’re right. I admit it. But everyone calls me Cyn. Like ‘sin,’ only spelled C-Y-N.”
“I like it.”
“People do. I’ve been Cyn ever since I can remember.”
“And are you sin-ful?”
“Ah, now that’s for me to know and you to find out.” She laughed. I laughed. I didn’t know what to say next. I was lost in the temporary awkwardness of being twenty-one and, frankly, inexperienced in the ways of love.
As we walked, she looked at the trees lining the sidewalk of the quad and said, “They are magnificent, aren’t they? These trees, all woken up after the long winter. I love the smell of May. Don’t you?”
I stopped and smelled, and May exploded into my nostrils. I looked at her. She reminded me of a wraith–of someone floating just above reality–of someone who was going to evade capture at all costs. Yet. . . yet. . . I was drawn to her wispiness, almost in spite of myself. We passed one tree after another on the quad: elm, birch, maple, linden. She parted from me without a word and walked up to one of the trees and felt its bark. It was a birch. I followed her from the sidewalk, joined her, and felt the bark. She put her ear against the trunk of the tree. She looked at me and said, “If you listen closely, you can hear the tree talk to you.”
I put my ear up against the tree. Other students stared at us as they passed on the quad. I didn’t care. She had inoculated me against their stares. I pressed my ear against the bark of the birch. From deep inside the trunk came a soft, deep murmur. It was a murmur of contentment and complaint and deep history. I drew my ear away from the trunk of the tree. “How did you know that?” I said.
“I just knew.” A glint of mischief tramped through her leaf-green eyes. She agreed to have coffee with me, as we both had a free period before our next classes. The cups of coffee sat between us and sent up their piquant odor. I stared at her burning red hair and her sea-green eyes. “So, what are you going to teach?”
“Language arts in junior high. You?”
“High school history.”
“Ah, Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Lincoln and all that patriotic stuff.”
“That’s the general idea. Why junior high?”
“’Cause I like kids that age. Not to brag or anything, but I think I’d be good with them. I know I would be. I can relate to them. I admit that I was a brat when I was in junior high. I was in trouble a lot.”
“What for?”
“For the mortal sin of talking too much. Of relating to my fellow human beings. Don’t tell anyone, but I really haven’t grown up since then.” She laughed. She looked at me. “No offense, but you look like a high school history teacher with your Brooks Brothers shirt and your neatly combed hair. I’ve never seen hair so neatly combed! It’s practically amazing! You definitely look the part. Of a high school history teacher. I can just see you up there in front of the classroom, spieling away on FDR.”
I looked at her with a slight sense of embarrassment. She had summed me up like a captured butterfly. I stared at her. There was something going on. “If you don’t mind my saying so,” I said, “I like the way you look.”
“Oh, I don’t mind your saying so. You can say it as often as you like.” I laughed.
She thought for a moment. “When I asked that question in class today, I was being quite sincere. In all this philosophizing about education, the learned professors forget about intuition. The right side of the brain. The instinctive part.” She paused. “Like knowing how trees speak to us. I just sense that trees have a language, and you have to listen to their language.”
“Intuition,” Paul said.
“Intuition.”
We finished our coffee. I arose and grasped the two ceramic cups, and took them up to the counter to leave them. When I returned, she was standing by the exit to the coffee shop, ready to leave. Her eyes were ablaze. We walked out of the shop and returned to the sidewalk that proceeded across the quad. She turned to me, a gleam in her eyes. She was wearing a jean jacket. She opened the front of the jacket, and inside she had squirreled away a pound of coffee beans from the coffee shop. “Clever, eh?” she said. She grinned.
I looked twice at the pound of coffee beans. “Well, that wasn’t very nice.”
“Oh, they’ll never miss it.”
“Yes, but if everyone shoplifted. . . .”
“Ah, the old categorical imperative gambit. Who do you think you are, Emmanuel Kant?” She paused. “What can I say? I’m short of cash this week.”
“I would’ve bought it for you.”
“I’m not Blanche Dubois. I don’t want to depend on the kindness of strangers.”
I knew I was wearing a critical look on my face, like a hairshirt.
“Listen,” she said, “you can’t tell me you never shoplifted.”
“Well, yeah. But I was a kid then.”
She looked at me. She reached out with one hand while grasping the purloined bag of coffee beans in her other hand, and she touched me lightly on the wrist. She laughed, like a kite dancing in the wind. She said, “Okay, Mr. Categorical Imperative, I promise I’ll never shoplift again.” Her words didn’t matter. What I felt was the feather touch of her freckled hand against my skin. The touch was an electric charge.
Two days later, we went for a hike in Adamson’s Acre. Many years before, Noel Adamson, a Professor of Botany in the Biology Department of St. Anthony’s College, had undertaken the monumental task of adopting an acre of neglected land at the edge of the campus and carefully restoring it to the grass prairie that had historically been so typical of northern Indiana. Narrow paths led through the Acre, past the grasses and the blooming wildflowers. In my years at St. Anthony’s, the Acre had become a place of contemplation and quiet and reprieve. The paths took walkers out of sight of the buildings that comprised the rest of St. Anthony’s campus, away from the pressures of classes and grades and papers and midterms and finals.
We started walking together through one of the paths that curled through the Acre, past prairie grasses that were knee-high and wildflowers that blazed purple and yellow and orange in the brilliant sun. The day had an otherworldly cast, as if the sun were almost too bright, as if the atmosphere were going to twirl out of control. She wore hiking shorts and a Judy Collins T-shirt and well-used hiking boots, and a red bandanna around her head. I also wore hiking shorts, a plain green T-shirt, and a cap with the logo of Yosemite National Park. I felt nervous. What were we going to talk about? On Cyn’s left shoulder, the tattoo of the sun rising over a mountain shone more brilliantly than ever. I pointed to the tattoo. “Where’d you get that?”
“In Brooklyn. In a tattoo parlor, silly. Where do you think I got it? I stole it off a dead old man and sewed it onto my arm!” I felt that in a strange way, she had carried her native Brooklyn with her all the way out to the prairies of Indiana. We walked the path, and she was in her glory, stopping to smell the flowers, touching them, absorbing them. One smaller path curled off from the main path and led deeper into a patch of wildflowers, and we walked silently along this path and were soon surrounded completely by the flowers swaying gently in the music of the wind.
She walked slightly ahead of me, and once again she reminded me of a wraith. I had the sensation that she would be hard to capture–a highly elusive butterfly. She was like the breeze whispering to me on this magnificent day. I asked, “Did your parents object when you got the tattoo?”
“I just did it. Yeah, they were pissed. But so what? My dad was angry. He said college girls don’t get tattoos. I said, well, this one did. But after a while, he settled down.” She raised her arm with the tattoo. In the midday sun, I could see it clearly. The mountain on her skin was blue and culminated in a sharp peak, and above the peak, the sun rose and exploded in a panoply of golden rays. We sat down on the narrow path, out of sight of the main path, and our knees were touching, and we were surrounded by the grasses and the flowers. I looked into her sea-green eyes and felt that I was gradually losing myself. I felt the purity of the skin of her knee against mine. She said, “There’s a spell here, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Right now, we are the only two people on the planet,” I paused. “Can I tell you something?” I felt an impulse. Intuition.
“Of course.”
“I almost dropped out of St. Anthony’s last year.”
“Really? Why?”
I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to tell her–this person, this wraith whom I barely knew. I felt my heart beat a little faster. It was difficult for me to reveal myself, but there was something I wanted to tell her. She stared at me with her deep green eyes. “Well,” I said, “it’s kind of hard to talk about, actually.” I paused. I felt that I was going to be taking a risk by continuing to talk. I looked down at the grass path. “I don’t know if I should tell you.”
She looked at me. “Well,” she said, “just pretend you’re talking to yourself, if you know what I mean.”
“That’s a good idea. Like I said, it’s hard to talk about. Last year, I just went through this hard time. Like, I was really down, and I could barely function. I couldn’t do a thing.” She looked at me and listened. “It was last winter. I stopped doing everything. I just stopped. I was miserable. I couldn’t feel anything. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see anything. I felt like nothing. My roommate–he was worried. It’s hard to explain. I felt this darkness. I stopped feeling. I felt this blackness. I was in this black hole, like in outer space. I don’t know what caused it. It just sort of happened.”
She was silent. She picked up a flower that had fallen to the ground, twirled it in her fingers, and smelled it. I felt that I had revealed more of myself than I wanted to, but an impulse had moved me to open myself to her. It was something about her. I looked at her. “Sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to drag you down or anything like that.”
“No, no,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s fine. It’s interesting. It was interesting the way you described it. It was actually kind of beautiful. So what’d you do?
“My roommate, Bill, told me I should get see someone, like on campus. I did. I went to talk to her through the whole semester last year, the second semester. But while I was doing the counseling, I would come out here, to the Acre, and I would do just what we’re doing now, you know, like walk around and be alone with everything here, and it felt good in a way that I can’t even describe.”
My words of self-exposure sat between us. She continued twirling the flower in her hands. I felt relieved that I had told her this secret about myself. She said, “Do you feel better now?”
I nodded. She said nothing, but she reached out with her freckled hand and touched me once again on the wrist, and again there was something between us, and I felt the warmth of her touch like an electric charge that traveled through my skin and into my veins and arteries.
She looked at me and said, “If it’s any consolation, I have felt that way.” She paused. “You were lucky to find someone. Even though I’m sure it was difficult what you went through, but you made the feeling so vivid.” She stopped talking. It looked to me as though she were going to say something more. She opened her lips. But she thought better of it, and she closed her lips. Silence fell between us. Neither of us felt the need to talk.
Two weeks later, friends of Cyn’s invited her to a cabin that they were renting for the weekend near the sand dunes of Warren State Park, which bordered Lake Michigan in Michigan, about three and a half hours from Terre Haute. She asked me if I wanted to go, that I’d have to bring a sleeping bag and sleep on the floor because, she’d been told, there weren’t enough beds for everyone. Honestly, forthrightly, she said that we would not be sharing a bed—not yet.
I thought about it. I remembered vividly that brief moment at Adamson’s Acre when she had touched me lightly on the wrist after I had revealed myself so un-self-consciously to her. I continued to wonder what she had thought about that . . . about me. But I didn’t. I remembered how, when she had touched me, an electric charge had transmitted itself from her skin to my skin and traveled up my arm and into my heart.
In the two weeks since then, we had gone dancing together, then we hung out at the Blue Light Lounge in Terre Haute, we had played pool together. We had kissed. We had shyly touched each other. But I felt, in some instinctive way, that Cyn held herself away from me. I felt that I was ahead of her, and it frightened me, made me feel vulnerable. I liked her very much. I liked her natural ways and her tattoo, and the fact that she had not been afraid to challenge Professor Larson that day. It was the farthest I had ever been with someone.
Two couples—friends of Cyn’s—were also going to the cabin at Warren Dunes, and we all squeezed into one car for the drive. One couple was made up of Lizzie, who was black-haired and talkative, and her boyfriend, Tom, who was a surfer dude with bleached blond hair and quite an athletic physique that made me a little jealous. Then there was Amy, who also had dark hair and nut-brown eyes and a skinny neck and who laughed out loud at every joke told by her boyfriend, Eric, who was a bit chubby but had a funny way of talking. I sat beside Cyn. We were squeezed together like existential sardines in the back seat of Tom the Surfer’s 1962 Oldsmobile 88.
When we reached the dunes, we all unloaded our stuff in the cabin, and the others wanted to eat lunch and start drinking beer right away. But I said to Cyn, “Hey, let’s look at these cool dunes. I’ve always heard about them, but I haven’t ever seen them before.”
She agreed. We left the cabin and walked about a quarter of a mile to where the dunes began. The dunes stretched before us like the waves on an ocean of brown, and the dunes had this elegant undulating shape that was like nature at its sexiest. The dunes extended like a cool brown sea all the way to Lake Michigan, and the lake itself reached toward the horizon. The dunes were dotted with little tufts of grass, struggling and grasping like life itself to hold onto the hills of sand that supported them. We stood together, looking at this amazing scene, and then we looked at each other, and I felt closer to her than ever, and I wondered if she felt the same way about me.
The others were back in the cabin drinking beer, but Cyn and me—we just really wanted to explore. We looked at the map that the great state of Michigan had printed up for the Warren Dunes, and we saw that the tallest and most challenging dune in the park was Tower Hill, which the map said rose something like 250 feet above ground level. We walked along the shoreline, following a trail that snaked in and around the smaller dunes. We didn’t talk much. We were enveloped by the beauty of the scene. We didn’t have to say a word.
I did not take her hand. I honestly didn’t know whether she wanted that physical contact. She walked steadily and strongly in her well-used hiking boots, which had obviously seen so many miles of hiking through nature. I saw her hand dangling there, freckled and tanned from being out in the sun. Her hand excited me in a strange way, and I wanted to grasp it and to hold it, but I did not.
We reached the bottom of Tower Hill, and we stared straight up at it. She turned to me and said, “Pauly, we gotta climb this mother, don’t you agree? Have you ever climbed in sand?” She had taken to calling me Pauly. I don’t know why. I liked the sound of it.
“Nope.”
“Well, get ready, ‘cause it ain’t easy. I’ve climbed along these dunes on the Jersey Shore, which by the way is a cool place and even has these bars where Mafia guys like to go to, but actually that’s a whole other story. Anyway, climbing dunes, it’s a great workout ‘cause your feet are constantly slipping and putting a strain on your legs and stuff like that.” We looked up, and the hill looked intimidating. It was not only a huge mound of sand, but it had tufts of grass and trees, and shrubs that barely clung to the sides and the top of the Tower Hill. The green of the grass and trees, and shrubs contrasted sharply with the deep brown of the sand.
We started to climb. Cyn led the way. We made good progress for fifteen or twenty minutes, but then, oh my God, it started to get harder and harder to climb. Cyn was right—our feet kept slipping on the sand, and I kept sliding back down and having to try to catch up with her as she climbed steadily, and both of us started to breathe heavily, our breath coming in gasps and grunts as we climbed ever more slowly up this mountain of sand, both of us breathing hard and gasping and pushing our legs like pistons as we slowly grunted our way up this sand mountain, which was becoming like the enemy, an implacable force of nature, an obstacle course that resisted the simple efforts of us poor pathetic human beings.
Cyn was perhaps five feet ahead of me, climbing steadily, gasping a little less than I was. I looked at her. Her legs were strong, and she climbed slowly but confidently, sure of herself, and her legs were lightly tanned and strong, the calves muscular, the thighs tightening and loosening as she pushed herself up. Her body was like an engine climbing that intimidating sand dune. I started falling a little behind her, and I pushed hard to catch up to her.
That . . . that was when the seizure, the cramp, came, seized my left leg. The cramp shot through my left leg, seizing it, and the pain traveled through my entire body. “Yow!” I yelled and fell to the ground, to the sand. Cyn looked around and came down to where I was lying on the ground and holding my leg. “Goddam it! I’m all cramped up!” I screamed, almost crying with pain.
She sat down beside me and removed her backpack and opened her canteen of water, and held it to my lips. “You gotta drink,” she said. “Cramps happen ‘cause you don’t drink enough water. You’re dehydrated.” She paused. “Where’s it cramping up?”
With trembling hands, I pointed to the muscle that had cramped up–the hamstring of my left leg. “I’m gonna work on it,” she said. “Just relax.” She gently pushed me over onto my belly and proceeded to massage my left hamstring. Her fingers were strong but gentle, and I was amazed by how she took control of my body. Her fingers dug into my cramped flesh and worked them and worked them, loosening the cramped muscle, working the muscle as if her fingers were a combination of silk and iron, working and reworking. Gradually, the cramped muscle began to loosen, and I continued to drink water. I looked up at her over my shoulder, and she worked on my leg, and her freckled face seemed like something beatific as she worked with such commitment and concern, and her eyes blazed with concentration as she grasped my hamstring and worked it, worked it. “Is it helping?” she asked.
After fifteen minutes, I could feel that my leg had loosened up, and I could stand up once again. I looked at Cyn in wonder. She was so able, so confident. “Do you wanna turn around?” she said. “Your cramp seems better, but we can turn around if you want and go back down the hill.”
We looked upwards. We were about fifty feet from the top of Tower Hill. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s finish this, mother.”
“Attaboy,” she said, with a grin. “Then we’ll go back and have a beer, and that’ll loosen you up some more.” I walked slowly up the monstrous hill, so intimidating, so implacable, so immovable like nature itself, which frankly doesn’t give a damn about us poor pathetic human beings. “Go ahead of me, Cyn,” I said. “I gotta take my time.”
“Yep, that’s right, Pauly. Go slow. I think you can make it, but go slow.” She was there at the top, a few feet ahead of him, this wraith, this elusive butterfly, self-contained like a force of nature itself, born in her well-used hiking boots, self-reliant, complete within herself. She reached the top, and she gave me a hand for those last few steps. We stood atop Tower Hill and surveyed the beauty of the magnificent Lake Michigan from our perch, and I suddenly and impulsively put my arm around her waist, and she put her arm around my waist, and we stood there together, drinking in the wondrous view of the dunes and the lake, which stretched into the distance—the distance that sparkled blue in the far, far beyond. We smiled at each other and laughed. And in that infinitesimal moment, I felt closer to her than I had ever felt to anyone in my entire life. But, but, even as we had our arms around each other’s waists, I still felt that she was like an eagle, a little separate, not ready to meld together, asserting her separateness, her independence, even as I felt her arm around my waist.
By now, my leg felt all right. We had no choice but to climb down the hill, that force of nature, and we began to descend, Cyn once again in front of me, leading the way, looking back and asking me several times how the leg was. “It’s okay,” I said. I went slowly, feeling the tightness in my hamstring but confident that I would make it to the bottom of the hill and back to the cabin.
We returned to the cabin. By then, it was getting to be late afternoon. The cabin had a front porch with a grill, and the six of us– these young people with our entire lives before us but still totally in the now and not worrying about our futures–gathered on the front porch and brought our beers with us and fired up the grill and put hamburger meat on it in the good old American fashion, and the six of us sat in a circle in the wicker chairs that the owners of the cabin had provided, and we talked and laughed and giggled and told dirty jokes and clean jokes.
Cyn sat next to me, and she talked animatedly to the others, and I listened and drank my beer and started to feel slightly tipsy and gazed at her tattoo and at her freckled nose and her thin lips and her incendiary hair and her green eyes like those of a goddess, and I could still feel the tightness in my hamstring, but as I drank beer, the tightness continued to feel looser.
She was right next to me in one of the wicker chairs, and suddenly, intuitively, I remembered how she had massaged my hamstring so skillfully, and without thinking, I reached up with my arm and slightly touched her left arm, just above the tattoo with the sun rising over the glorious mountain. She felt my touch and turned toward me and smiled, and then turned back to the others and continued talking to them.
It was at that very moment, that tiny moment, that I realized with a shock that I loved her. I wanted her for myself and only for myself. I felt it sharply. The feeling surged through me . . . electrified my entire body. The feeling nearly choked me, it was so powerful. I felt trapped by the feeling, and I felt liberated, all at once. The feeling was so sharp, so piquant, like a knife stabbing me. I had to have her. I had to have her now.
She continued to talk to the others and to laugh at things they said, but I was barely aware of what they were saying, so consumed was I by this feeling that was like a tsunami, that was overwhelming me. I had never felt this before. There was no way out for me. I had to have her. The feeling stabbed me like a dagger. I felt it in every inch of my skin. Once again, I touched her lightly on the skin of her shoulder, and she felt the touch and turned and smiled at me again. The smile emblazoned itself upon me. Desire spiked through me.
She turned to me and smiled and said, “Well, here we are.”
I nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, here we are. Two souls together in the vast universe.” I paused. I said, “Let’s go for a walk. Let’s get away from them.”
She looked back toward the others. I could tell she was torn. She was enjoying talking to them. She looked at them and then back at me. She must have sensed the yearning in me. “Okay,” she said. “All right.” We arose and left the front porch of the cabin and walked onto the sand and toward the lake. The sun was descending like Helios, sinking slowly toward Lake Michigan and toward the horizon, and the sun cast streaks of red that splayed like blood across the darkening sky.
We reached the lake and walked along the very edge of the water, and felt the cold water on our bare feet. Dusk was gathering by the minute, as the sun slowly sank toward the horizon and then drowned below it. A breeze flamencoed around and through us, and the cold water lapped at our feet. I led Cyn a bit away from the water and sat down on the cool sand, and she sat down beside me. The breeze lapped at our skin, and the end of the day beckoned like a broken promise, and we felt the cool sand beneath our bodies.
Through the thin slice of air between us, I could feel the electric charge of her. It was as if the charge jumped from her to me. She drew her legs up and put her arms around her legs and stared at the lake, and was silent. I put my right arm around her shoulder and gently drew her to me. She let me pull her toward me. I leaned toward her and kissed her. She let me kiss her. The kiss lasted several seconds. The kiss was glorious, stupendous, sensuous, magical, transformative, splendid. The kiss carried me outside myself. I had no idea that one simple kiss could do this.
The kiss ended. I drew away from her and looked at her. She looked at me, but I could not read her look. I stared into her universe-driven eyes. I said, “I love you.”
She looked down at the sand, and when she looked down, I knew. I felt her draw away from me by an inch, by two inches. She looked down at the sand, and then she looked out at Lake Michigan, and she stared at the darkness creeping like a panther over the magnificent lake. I looked at her, and my words hung between us. She was silent as she continued staring out at the lake. We were separated from each other by an inch or two, but I knew . . . I knew . . . and I turned away from her and stared in the other direction so I would not see her. I felt as if an arrow had pierced me. The silence attacked me as much as a fire or a gunshot or a punch to the jaw. I felt the silence as viscerally as a blast. My belly ached from the silence. I looked briefly at her, and I knew she was embarrassed, I could feel it, that she wanted to get away from me. My words had come out of nowhere and had caught her off guard. She hadn’t expected that. “I love you.” Such dangerous words. I wished desperately that I could take the dangerous words back, but I had said them, and the words hung between the two of us and separated us from each other.
She stirred and looked at me, and there was something in her eyes like fear combined with embarrassment and sorrow. “Well,” she finally murmured, “maybe we’d better get back to the cabin.” I could tell that she was now afraid of me or afraid of the feeling. She sat beside me, but she was distant, a wraith, an elusive butterfly, not wanting to be captured and held, flitting, desperately clinging to her freedom. I turned away and felt ridiculous and panicked because I suddenly felt tears creep into the corners of my eyes like tiny ugly worms, and I turned away from her quickly, and I looked out at the lake, at the beautiful moon and the stars. And I hated them, I hated the moon and the stars, no matter how beautiful they were. I just absolutely hated them.
She arose from the sand without using her hands—just lifted herself up with her legs. She did not look at me. She brushed off her shorts, brushed the sand from her shorts. She looked at me and managed a smile. “I’m all sandy,” was all she said. We walked together back to the cabin, and she was a little bit ahead of me, apart from me. My words continued to hang between us as if they had come to life, as if they were real objects. I felt stupid and angry at myself for having said the words—the fateful words—the words that I now knew that she didn’t want to hear.
We reached the cabin. The others were by now fairly drunk, and they shouted out at Cyn and me to join them. Cyn said in a quiet voice, “You know, I’m exhausted. I’m going to go to bed, if you don’t mind.”
I stayed up and joined the others, and drank beer. I barely said anything to the others. I sat in one of the wicker chairs, feeling lost and lonely and stupid. I’d been a fool to say the words. I really had been. Lizzie asked me if something was wrong. “No,” I snapped. “Nothing’s wrong.” Lizzie drew away from me. “Sorry,” I said. “Really sorry. It’s just that it’s been a long and exhausting day.”
The next day, I left the cabin early. I asked Tom the Surfer, who had the Oldsmobile 88, to drive me to the Greyhound Bus Station in Michigan City. There, I waited many hours for the bus, which, after numerous stops, eventually took me to Terre Haute. Before I left, Cyn came up to me and gave me a hug. But she did not look me in the eyes. She was afraid to. I confess that I was afraid to have her look into my eyes.
I rode the Greyhound bus all the way back to Terre Haute. All the way, I stared out the window at the Midwestern landscape spinning by like a huge painting as the bus wound its way along the road. I was in a seat by myself. No one sat next to me. I stared out the window as the world passed by, and I stared at the prairies and the farmland and the farm towns that the bus passed. I saw farmers plowing their fields and children playing in parks, and I felt as though they were all of a different species from me. I stared and stared out the window. I watched the world pass by.
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