Everything You Want (12 page)

Fifteen

I get a job waiting tables at the lodge, which helps some. I’m not always alone. And it’s good for me to be there with women whose lives are truly difficult, nothing like my own. I like to listen to their stories. Sometimes I have dreams about them. In one, I line them all up in the kitchen and hand out hundred-dollar bills; in another, I drive out to the double-wides they live in, knock on their doors, and give them checks like I’m the star of some kind of reality show.

They’re dirt poor, most of them. They wear cheap clothes from Wal-Mart. Most of them aren’t that much older than I am, and they have kids already. Their husbands, if they have them, are usually unemployed. They don’t know I’m rich. Well, they don’t know I’m fabulously rich. They know I’m not from here, they know my parents own a vacation house in the area, and to them that
is
rich, which I see is true, in a way. Even before we won the lottery, we had a whole lot more than any of those women will ever have.

I swore Jules to secrecy about my leaving Bloomington, and since then she’s reverted to her sensible big-sister mode. She calls a lot, usually late. It kind of reminds me of how Josh and I used to drive around at night, talking about everything under the sun. I don’t know. Maybe it was the enclosed space, the way when he was driving he had to look straight ahead and mostly couldn’t see my face when I was talking that made me feel like I could say anything. I feel that way now, talking to my sister. I tell her about Freud, the real story of spending whole evenings at the psych lab because there was nowhere else to go. I even tell her about Gabe Parker—just the embarrassing coffee interview, not that I haven’t been able to get him out of my mind ever since. Nothing about Josh, though. I can’t even stand to
think
about that. Still, it’s nice feeling close to her. We laugh a lot, puzzle over the sticky ethics of wealth.

“Will’s very weird about the money,” she confides. “He doesn’t like me to pay for show tickets or dinners out. But
other
people! It’s like, now they know I’m rich, they think I should pick up the check every single time. And should I? Even when it feels like someone’s sponging?”

“Beats me,” I say. “Up here in the north woods all alone, how to deal with the money hasn’t really been a problem. Though I keep having this weird impulse to give it away.”

“Why?” she asks.

I tell her about the women I work with, and how they make me feel.

She’s quiet a long moment, and I can almost hear the New York traffic going by outside her window: cars honking, that wheezing sound buses make. Then she says, “But isn’t it all relative? I mean, Bill Gates probably wouldn’t consider us rich at all.”

She’s most likely right. But I still feel bad having so much more than the women I work with have, and I’m constantly trying to think of ways to make it up to them—without being obvious. I help bus the tables, take the coffeepot around to everyone’s stations. Sometimes, when nobody’s looking, I even put extra tip money on a table.

The bartender at the lodge, Harp, is in his twenties, tall and lanky with a sparse goatee and black hair that he wears pulled back in a ponytail. He’s been pleasant to me at the restaurant and he always nods in a friendly way if I see him on the slopes or walking with his St. Bernard around the ski area. But we’ve never really talked. Then one night he follows me out of the restaurant, out the big front doors of the lodge into the freezing cold, and calls, “Emma?”

I turn. He’s standing there in just a V-neck sweater, a faded tie-dye T-shirt underneath, his hands in the pockets of his rumpled khakis. He doesn’t say anything more, just tilts his head and kind of half-smiles and looks at me. I have no idea how I know what he’s thinking, but I do.
What were you doing with Marcy’s money
?

“I wasn’t taking it,” I say. “I was leaving it. You know, so the tip would seem bigger.”

But he knows that, too. I can tell by the way he just keeps looking at me with that curious but detached expression. Now his eyes say, why?

“She needs it,” I say. “They all do. And I don’t need what I make at all. I’m only working here because I can’t think of anything else to do.” At which point, I start crying. And right there in the parking lot, snow starting to fall, I tell Harp about my parents winning the lottery and how I’ve ended up a complete and total screw-up because of it. When I finish, I’m shivering; my face, wet with tears, stings with the cold.

“So,” Harp says. “
That’s
what’s driving you to random acts of kindness.”

“Random acts of guilt, you mean.”

He shrugs. “Effect’s the same, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, big deal,” I say. “A dollar, two dollars. Like that’s going to make any big difference to anyone.”

“It can.” Harp glances toward the lighted restaurant. “Could even be there’s something you’re supposed to learn from all this. Or are you too into beating up on yourself to consider that?”

“I’m pretty into beating up on myself,” I say.

He laughs. “And does it make you feel better?”

I shake my head. My throat feels tight again. I can’t speak.

We stand there awhile longer, Harp still showing no effect at all from the cold. He’s so calm. I’ve never known anyone as calm as he appears to be. Who is this guy, anyway? He looks like he took a wrong turn after a Grateful Dead concert years ago and never found his way back. Still, he’s smart. I can see it in his eyes. I wonder if there’s something that tending bar in this nowhere place is teaching him.

“How’d you know what I was doing, anyhow?” I ask.

He smiles enigmatically. “Mirrors.” He pauses just long enough for me to think, okay, this guy is too weird for me, I’m out of here. Then he laughs. “I can see that section of the restaurant from the mirror behind the bar.”

I laugh, too.

“I live in the log house where the cross-country trails begin,” Harp says. “Got a pool table, great stereo, cold beer. Come over if you want. Any time.”

“Thanks,” I say. “Maybe I will.”

The next day, I dress for cross-country skiing, carry my skis to the wooden arch where the trails begins, and stand there pretending to study the map.
You are here
. A red arrow points to a cluster of triangles: the pine trees that shelter me. Broken lines that signify the dozen or so trails meander out from the arrow into the forest, which is marked by many more triangles and the lacy circles that are deciduous trees. There’s Harp’s house just to the side of the arrow: a small black square. The actual house, tucked into a stand of birches, looks like a child’s drawing of a log cabin. It’s the house that Jules and I used to call the Little House in the Big Woods. Sometimes we pretended that we were Laura and Mary Ingalls, skiing away from it toward school or church or to get something for Ma from Mr. Olsen’s general store. Or, even better, we were Laura and Mary lost in the great forest with night falling, trying desperately to find our way home.

The house is long and low, with a wide porch that wraps around it. The windows are hung with prisms winking in the morning sun. There’s firewood stacked neatly next to the front door, more—a whole winter’s worth—in a lean-to at the side. Smoke curls lazily out of the brick chimney into the blue sky.

I really want to visit Harp. I can’t stop thinking about what he said to me. I lay awake a long time last night, wondering if my being here might actually have a purpose, and if so, what purpose? I don’t have a clue. Now I stand under the arch, trying to work up the nerve to walk across the unspoiled snow in the clearing and shake the cowbells on Harp’s front door. What would I say? Hi, if you’re not too busy, could you please explain to me what I’m
doing
here? It’s all I can think of to say and it seems totally stupid. Not to mention confusing. Even I don’t know exactly what I mean by it. “Here” as in the arrow on the map? In Michigan? In this life?

Anyway, he was probably only being nice when he invited me to come by, I think. He probably felt sorry for me. That’s the last thing I need. I’m dressed for skiing, and I brought my skis, thinking that I could pretend I was just stopping by at Harp’s on my way out to get my morning’s exercise. I hadn’t really meant to go out on the trails; why start doing something healthful and constructive
now
?

But I feel agitated about having nearly embarrassed myself by my own neediness, and I think maybe skiing will calm me down. It’s a perfect day for it: sunshine, blue sky. That nice, crisp kind of cold. So I set out in no particular direction, skiing right past the maps that are placed where various trails merge, allowing the challenges of each path to appear to me in a seemingly random way, as if part of a game.

I feel myself grow calmer, feel the ugly chatter in my mind loosen and drain out of me into the shadowy forest, until finally it seems that there’s nothing in the world but this forest and the blue sky above it. The clear, cold air and the warm sun on my face seem to be the same thing. I hear birds calling, the occasional rustle of deer. I look up at the trees. The sight of them, like gargantuan pussy willows because of the way the snow has caught in the crooks of their branches, makes me so purely happy I think I will die.

Stop, I think. Remember this. I bend over and brush the snow from a fallen tree, and the moment I sit down on it, a mosquito flies up, wobbles in the cold air for a moment, and settles on my glove. It can’t be real, I think. A mosquito can’t possibly have survived into the middle of the winter. I sit still and look at it a long time; it seems more like a quick line drawing of a mosquito than a mosquito itself. But when I raise my hand and blow gently, the mosquito lifts off, flies dizzily to the tree trunk and perches there, proof of its own existence. Proof of anything, everything—or so it seems to me at this moment.

Sixteen

“I saw you heading out to ski this morning,” Harp says. “Great day for it.”

I nod. I told the other waitresses to go on home and I’m filling the salt and pepper shakers, getting the tables ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. He’s been taking the clean wine glasses out of the dishwasher, hanging them upside-down on the rack above the bar. Now he stops, leans forward, and folds his arms on the bar expectantly.

I wasn’t going to tell him—or anyone—about the mosquito and its cosmic message. But I look at Harp and have this weird idea he knows it anyway, like he knew about the tip money the night before. Which makes me think, why not?

So I say, “I saw this mosquito while I was skiing. A live mosquito! Huge! It flew out from under some dead leaves on a log and landed on my glove. It was—I don’t even
know
what it was. The way the woods felt, that mosquito. I was so happy. So
there
. And I know it sounds totally insane, but when I went back out on the trail, it was like it wasn’t even me skiing. Like it wasn’t anyone at all.”

He doesn’t laugh. He looks—interested. “There’s a word for that,” he says. “
Shunyata
. It means emptiness, as in emptiness of yourself. It’s a Buddhist idea.”

“You’re a Buddhist?”

“Nah. I don’t buy into the religious thing. I’m interested in some Buddhist ideas, though.”

I think he’ll say more, but he stands and puts away the last of the glasses. I go around with a box of Sweet’N Low packets, refilling the little ceramic holder on each table. I glance at him when I’m through, but I guess he’s decided to ignore me. So is this
shunyata
a bad thing? Yet another clue that I’m a person to avoid?

“Well,” I grab my jacket. “See you tomorrow.”

He raises his hand in a salute. But when I’m halfway across the parking lot, he opens the door and calls out to me. “Hey, Emma! Want to come over to my place and play some pool?”

I stop. But I can’t help thinking, wouldn’t it be a little crazy to go off into the woods in the middle of the night with a guy I barely know? Then he catches up with me, throws his arm around my shoulder in a friendly way.

“Come on,” he says. “You’re lonely.”

The way he says it, like it’s just a fact of life—nothing to be embarrassed by or ashamed of, nothing that can actually be fixed by a game of pool—tells me he understands loneliness. He’s inviting me be lonely with him, which is better than being lonely alone. And so I go with him.

It’s nice, crunching along the snowy path not feeling like I have to think of something smart or witty to say, and when his house appears, strung with twinkling white lights, it seems right to be there. Harp opens the door, and his big, furry St. Bernard lumbers up from where she’s been dozing in front of the fireplace. He bends and ruffles her fur.

“Lani,” he says. “Short for Thulani. It means ‘peace.’”

He gestures me toward an old flowered couch. Lani follows to sniff me, then curls up and falls asleep at my feet. I feel so comfortable here. Everything in the house is simple and worn: another couch, a couple of easy chairs—nothing matching. These are gathered randomly around the stone fireplace. The pool table takes up the other half of the room. The floors are wood, with faded braid rugs here and there.

Harp goes into the kitchen and brings back a couple of beers. It’s another thing I need to do if I’m ever going to get a social life: learn to like beer. I pull the tab on mine, take a sip. If Harp notices me wrinkle my nose at the bitterness, he’s nice enough not to mention it.

“Nice place, huh? My uncle’s.” He smiles wryly. “He’s letting me use it this winter, so I can get my shit together.”

“Join the club,” I say. “So what got
you
out of whack?”

“If I am out of whack,” he says.

“Meaning?”

He shrugs. “My parents think there’s something wrong with me because I don’t want to be stressed out all the time over some high-power job I don’t give a fuck about. I don’t want to spend my life pleasing a bunch of greedy assholes who don’t give a shit about anything but grabbing all the power they can. Not to mention all the people you have to step on or rip off if you want to get ahead.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I ask.

“Nothing, in my mind.
Now
. The problem is, at one point I was all set up and gung ho to do it their way. Business degree from Michigan, accepted into law school there. Funny thing is, it’s my dad’s fault I changed. Always the good liberal, he says, ‘What you need is a few years in the Peace Corps, son. It’ll broaden your horizons. Look great on the resume.’”

He laughs, sort of. “So I spent two years in this tiny village in Niger, teaching the people basic farming skills. News to me: they didn’t even know our country existed. How could they want to be like us? It blew me away how much they
didn’t
want or need.

“I don’t mean to romanticize how they live,” he adds. “Or to say I want to live that way myself. I don’t even know if I could hack it. But it shocked the hell out of me. It made me think. And the more I thought, the more I wanted—” He shakes his head. “I wanted
not
to want, if that makes any sense at all. To just
be
.”

“Like I was, skiing this morning. That Buddhist thing.”

“Yeah,” he says. “The problem is, unless you’re a Zen master, you can’t be like that all the time. Plus, you’ve got to eat, which means you have to make some kind of living. So I’m trying to figure out two things. How to get to that place in my head more often, and how to make enough money to keep from having to ask my parents for anything.”

“So, do you meditate?”

“Too squirrelly. I turn on the Tibetan chant CD, get in the lotus position, and immediately start itching. I smoke a little weed sometimes, but that seems like cheating. The need thing, you know? I don’t want to need weed to get there.

“So what about you?” he asks. “You’ve got the money problem beat—unless your parents are setting up a lot of bullshit rules about how you ought to be.”

“My parents are wonderful,” I say, blinking back the sudden tears that burn my eyes.

He raises an eyebrow. “No rules?”

“No
unreasonable
rules. There’s nothing wrong with rules if they’re reasonable, you know. There’s no such thing as living with
no
rules.”

He raises his eyebrow again, but doesn’t comment.

I know what he’s thinking, though. Once, he believed
his
parents’ rules were reasonable. There’s no point in arguing that my parents’ rules really
are
reasonable, so why wouldn’t I want to live by them? Though it strikes me, suddenly, that if Mom and Dad’s rules and expectations had been unreasonable, I’d have been glad to go off to college. If they’d given me something really serious to rebel against, it would feel good to leave them behind and make my own way.

Which gives me that old familiar plunging-elevator feeling. I mean, I must be even more fucked up than I realized to even
consider
that it might be a bad thing for me to love Mom and Dad the way I do. But it’s the kernel of truth I see in the thought that really scares me. I
do
have to separate myself from them to make my own life—and not in this chickenshit way I’m doing it now. Somehow, I have to figure out which parts of them I’m
not.

“Another beer?” Harp asks.

“No thanks, I still have some.”

“You don’t like beer,” he says. Just like, earlier, he said, “You’re lonely.”

He takes my can, still half-full, and disappears into the kitchen again. When he comes back he’s got a mug of hot chocolate, whipped cream piled high on the top. It’s wonderful, creamy and sweet, and the two of us sit quietly, Harp having another beer, me savoring my hot chocolate.

“Listen,” he says after a while. “I really don’t know shit about anything. You want to keep that in mind about me. So—” He grins and leans over to wipe the whipped cream moustache from above my lip. “Want to play some pool?”

We rack the balls again and again, concentrating so hard on the game that I’m surprised to glance at the clock and see it’s well past three in the morning. Even more surprised to realize that, all that time, I didn’t think about anything but the balls on the table, how to position myself for the best shot. I didn’t once feel stupid or self-conscious. I didn’t feel anything. I just
was
.

I like this idea that you can learn to be empty of
yourself
. That when you’re empty in the right way, it doesn’t make you feel lonely or sad. In fact, when you surface, reenter your skin, what you feel is this weird, pure, clean happiness. Amorphous happiness that really isn’t about anything at all. When I wake up the next day, near noon, I make a list of the moments in my life when I was really, really happy. Reading them over, I realize that in almost every one of them I was empty in exactly the same way I was empty while skiing and playing pool with Harp.

Craig, my boss at the restaurant, gestures me into his office when I clock in for my evening shift, nods toward the chair beside his desk. I sit down. He’s a nice guy, overworked, always worrying about his wife and kids and how he’s going to give them everything they want and need.

“Emma.” He clears his throat. Then clears it again. “Uh. I hope you won’t take this wrong, but, well…”
Again
. “I need to talk to you about Harp.”

“Harp?” I sound like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Yeah,” he says. “Listen, I know this is none of my business. And Harp is an interesting guy. Smart. No question about that! He’s got a real good heart. I can see why you’d—” He blows his breath out through his lips.

“Emma,” he says. “Jimmy, the night guy, mentioned he saw the two of you leave together last night. He was a little worried when he looked out and saw your car still in the parking lot—pretty late. And, well, I’m a little worried about that myself. Harp’s quite a bit older than you, Emma. And he’s, well, he’s not—”

“He has a pool table at his house,” I interrupt. “I went over to shoot a few games with him. That’s all.”

Craig doesn’t look convinced.

“We’re just friends. Really.” I stand up, smooth my black waitress pants. “I need to get out on the floor,” I say. “There’s a group of ten coming in any minute. Thanks, though. I appreciate your being concerned.”

But I don’t, really. The tight band of anxiety that settled itself across my chest when Craig called me into his office bursts into rage that makes me feel light-headed and dangerous. What’s with him anyway, I think. Trying to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed about a perfectly innocent relationship. What’s with
me
, letting him sucker me into feeling that way?

“Are you okay?” one of the waitresses asks.

“Fine,” I say. “Why?”

“You look upset. Did Craig say something to upset you?”

I shake my head, pick up the Specials sheet, and pretend to study it until she goes away.

Harp’s not here tonight, and I’m glad. Whatever happiness I had felt this afternoon, thinking about how our time together had made me discover something that might help me change my life, collapsed with Craig’s words. I’m right back to where I always am when there’s a male involved: second-guessing myself about every little thing, scrambling for a plan to make him think I’m cool, trying to convince myself that I don’t care if he likes me or not.