Navigating the Snowy Charles

            by Paul Navarrete

 

I forgot to wear my United wings on the flight. They would have appreciated that, right? A passenger with their wings? Could that have earned me extra pretzels, or a trip to the cockpit?

            The airport is a disappointment. I knew Providence wasn’t going to have a monster labyrinthine space-station, but a McDonald’s or a Pizza Hut or something would have been nice. All they have is a restaurant, where you actually sit down and order from a menu and shit. What the hell?

            I grab my blue suitcase from the baggage carousel. There is something threatening about the metal slats expanding, revealing greased undersides.  

            I call Lucie. Lucie is my girlfriend. She goes to school in Massachusetts, near Boston. She goes to Wellesley College, or maybe The College of Wellesley. Anyway, it’s spring break and I’ve come to visit her.

            “I’m here.”

            “Already?”

            “Uh-oh.”

            “I’m on my way. I’ll be there soon, like forty-five minutes.”

            I step outside into the cold mist. This is April, and this mist is cold as hell. She comes in forty-five minutes, wearing a white skirt and turquoise tights. She looks lovely, as usual. She has her roommate’s dad’s Hyundai. I squeeze her blue thigh while she drives.

             We have to go to Friendly’s, which is a fast food restaurant. We are hungry, and we need hamburgers, French fries, onion rings, ketchup, everything. We need to eat and talk and enjoy each other. It’s suspiciously cold in the muddy parking lot, and nobody else seems fazed by it, not even Lucie. I keep telling her how cold it is. I’m being annoying. This is not spring weather. That’s all I’m saying.

            Back in the mist, Lucie and I walk through pine trees on a path to her dorm.

            “These lamps are famous. These are the famous Wellesley lamps,” she informs me.

            “Why are they famous?”

            “They used one of them as the lamp in the Narnia movie. Where they come out of the wardrobe.”

            “Why did they pick these?”

            “I guess they’re just like, really quintessential lamps, or something.”

            “That’s fucking awesome.”

            She punches me on the arm, and I kiss her wet head.

            It is important that I watch basketball tonight. Lucie follows me faithfully down to the lounge, or something, that has the T.V. The floors are hardwood, the curtains are velvet, and the rugs are Persian. It’s like the lobby of a really nice, rustic, lodge. About ten minutes after the tip, two girls come down to the room where I watch the NCAA championship game and Lucie works on geology homework.

            “They’re for Florida,” I whisper.

            “Let’s kill them.”

            It’s halftime, and Lucie is trying to explain something to me about erosion graphs.

            And there is a noise, some red bell ringing, some “DRDRDRDR,” and it is a fire alarm, I think. It’s a far cry from the shrill scream and strobe lights of the alarm at my school; this sound is a trombone compared to that one. 

            Everybody gathers outside because this is a fire drill. It’s very intimidating, all these exasperated girls in glasses and pajamas, complaining to each other, to the mist. These girls prefer to be called women, but Lucie would rather be called a girl, so I call them all girls. They’re somewhere in between, I think.

            After another half of lopsided basketball we troop upstairs to Lucie’s room. These stairs creak. Everything is old and everything creaks. We climb into the bottom bunk, and fall asleep under three blankets.

           

There is a lake on campus, Lake Waban. Lucie and I are taking the trail around this lake. We start on a boardwalk which snakes its way through the cattails, unassuming, unoccupied. During warmer months, I’m told, girls go swimming in the lake, and have picnics on its shores. But the April chill follows us around the lake’s rippling water, through the frost-bitten trees, past the president’s house, past a muddy basketball court. We’ve heard that if we walk around the lake three times we’ll become married one day, but the air is too cold and our legs are stiff and tired.

I set the toaster to the Poptart setting. Since when do toasters have Poptart settings? I have eaten thirteen of them so far. I take a shower while Lucie is in class. I keep feeling that I have to apologize for my presence, for knocking over bottles of grapefruit-scented exfoliating body soap, for being the weird guy hanging around campus.

            We drive into town to eat Indian food, to remind us of home. It is dark and rainy, and colder than ever. “This is Why I’m Hot” is on the radio, and Lucie is feeling it.

            “I don’t get this song,” I tell her.

            “I’m hot because I’m fly, you ain’t because you not.”

            “I know how it goes.”

            “I guess you’re just not that fly.”

            “I’m fly,” I insist.

            “You’re not fly and you’re not hot.”

            “O.K.”

            Why am I not fly? What makes Lucie so fly? She’s a dream.

           

 

            I wake up in an empty room, in an empty bed, in a cold, foreign, land. Lucie is in class. The trees are dripping dew, or rain, or sleet from their needles. Stepping outside, I see that it has snowed; there is a thin layer of dirty, gritty slush like that of a ski resort’s parking lot.

            Today is the cursed day. My parents had issued the decree in March, their voices booming. I had expected the worst, and here it was: ONE DAY IS TO BE SET ASIDE FOR VISITING COLLEGES. This day will test my willpower; this day will give me frostbite. This is the cursed day.

            Lucie and I board the charter bus which will take us through these brick suburbs to the City of Beans. It is a Peter Pan Bus Company bus, and hence is called the Fairydust Carriage. I will soon be immersed in white fairydust. There is something disconcerting about the Carriage: the seats are a little too soft; the driver is a little too friendly. The bus rolls into the foreboding fog as I receive a briefing on the scandalous stories of the Fairydust Carriage.

            Let the wet, wild goose chase begin. We step out onto the streets of Cambridge, zipping up, huddling, holding hands. It is hailing. Balls of ice pepper us like the beebees of so many air-powered rifles. I have no idea where we’re going, a university, I think, or to visit Lucie’s brother. The precipitation turns to snow, a relief from the hail’s sting. For a moment it is wonderful, the snowflakes, the unlikelihood of the whole situation. For a moment there is that aura of adventure, of a story in the making.

            Can you see me? Can you see how my canvas shoes are soaked through and my toes have turned blue? Can you see two young lovers braving the snowy wind, our ears red, our dark hair matted, our steps shuffled? My wet toes curl as we approach a bridge. I understand that we must cross the bridge. As we move forward, suspended above the Charles River, the snow becomes suffocating, delivering horizontal blows unhindered by buildings. The river roars, unfrozen and gray, below us.

            And finally we’ve done it; we’ve conquered Charles, his girder bridge, his wind. We’re in Boston now, though it all seems like a white blur to me. We are walking through a neighborhood where people are shopping. Shopping in this weather, shopping as if this blizzard is nothing.

            Lucie leads me into a fancy-looking store called Kiehls. Little bottles of lotion, soap, conditioner, shampoo, and every imaginable type of hygienic goop cover the white walls. It is a classy version of The Body Shop, free of fruity scents and bright colors. I sit in a chair while Lucie is helped. They have a guestbook. What am I doing here?

           

I flip through the guestbook. Most entries are along the lines of “Kiehls is the only place where I can find silkening meringue which complements my tone. Thank you Kiehls!” One entry in particular, however, catches my eye:

 

I love Kiehls more than my children!!

 

            Images come to mind of affluent wives selling their children for skin care products. I have to get out of here.

            Back in the snow, we turn around and walk the way we came. What’s going on here? Have I been pussyfooting around in a blizzard just to run an extravagant errand?

            “Lucie, where are we going?”

            “We’re going to the subway now. I just had to make that one stop.”

            After visiting a university for a few awkward, pointless, minutes, we take refuge from the onslaught of the blizzard in a Dunkin’ Donuts. “Hotel California” is playing, and I have never hated a song more.

This is where I must be, of course. I would brave any blizzard for the opportunity to see Lucie; I would spend a day in Kiehls, sampling tubs of moisturizer. There is no doubt that I am loving every minute of this.

            Still, deep inside, I yearn for the golden West. Everything here is brick and snow, old, lavish. I want to bring Lucie back with me, back to young, lazy, goofy California.

 

            I am having a glimpse into a different universe. A different realm. I am seeing focus, purpose, ambition. I am seeing snow. And what’s more, I am seeing Lucie in a different environment, and praying that this is not her element, because this could not be further from my element. And the question which hides as if behind a curtain in every phone conversation is screaming, the curtain drawn, or parted, whatever, this curtain is thrown aside, and the question: What makes this work, or, even more alarmingly, does this work? This question has never arisen when Lucie is in Berkeley. At home we are a unit, we sit in bed, we have dinner with the family, hold hands under the table, go to the beach. At home, we wake up hoping that her father has bought croissants this morning. We don’t have to worry about what to talk about, because we can just look at each other and be satisfied.

            I know the answer to the question. Of course this works, and it doesn’t matter why, what matters is the way I can see Lucie’s tongue poking out between her teeth when she smiles. I love it when she smiles. That is what matters, those little details, which loom larger than the big picture. So as long as these little things stay the same, these glances exchanged and these feelings, we can be in California or Boston or anywhere, maybe the moon one day, and we can be doing anything.

           

 

But now I am back on the bus, and this is no Fairydust Carriage. This is a Swarthy Villain.

            “I never feel well on this bus,” Lucie informs me.

            “I never feel well on any of these buses. These long-distance buses. They always give me a headache.”

We agree that the curse lies in the seat cushions.

            We are in Boston again, only this time there is no snow, there is no bridge. We stop by the world’s fanciest 7-Eleven to buy some candy. This floor is spotless; this clerk is friendly and speaks English well. This is another world.

            We walk through the park, the Common, the big park. We are seeing a movie later, the one where the girl has a machine gun for a leg. She stands on the regular leg, her right leg, and bends back, spinning, blasting zombies or mutants with her machine gun leg. She’s a stripper, too.

            We need dinner, so Lucie whips out her crazy guide to Boston, by Frommers, or AAA, or somebody. There are maps sticking out, and they are hard plastic, folding out of this book. It’s the handiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.

            “I know a place,” I insist, and I do, I recognize this part of Boston, I stayed in a hotel near hear once. But we run into a cheap pizza joint, where we don’t have to pay much or tip at all, just what we need.

            “Check that guy out,” Lucie whispers.

            “Which guy?”

            “The bald one.”

            “Oh. What about him?”

            “His eyebrows aren’t eyebrows.”

            It’s true. What appeared at a glance to be eyebrows were really thin tattoos of cursive writing in the shape of eyebrows.

            “Can you see what they say?”

            Lucie is curious.

            “‘Puerto Rican.’”

            “Yeah, I can see the ‘Rican’ one, but are you sure the other one says ‘Puerto’?”

            “No.”

            “Because it could be Costa.”

            “Do you think he’s an albino?”

We are in awe of this man. Does he have any hair at all? Does he have more tattoos? We’ll never find out, because he will leave soon, and so will we, and after we see that movie, the one with the stripper who has a machine gun for a leg, we are back on that bus. I don’t know what this one is called.

           

And before I know it, we are back in the Hyundai, hoping to stop for hamburgers again, but running late. And we are at the airport, and I am leaving.

           

There is a space tube in the Chicago airport. It has neon lights in sleek designs on the ceiling, diamond-shaped eyes, one color chasing the next, and then the cycle starting over again, so that this corridor glows red, then green, then white, then blue, all these colors fading into each other. There is music, too, space music, ethereal chimes, and I am amazed by this tunnel, whose moving walkway glides towards the next terminal. I have been here before; my dad used to make us visit this passageway every time we changed planes in Chicago. He had memorized which terminals it connected. A robotic male voice calls out to me:

            “The moving walkway is now ending. Please look down.”

           

This is the passage to the West, this final checkpoint. Soon I will be home, and there will be no snow, and there will be no girls, not even one. It will be shingles and sunshine and Golden State basketball, and I will wait patiently for May, when Lucie will be home and, for a few perfect months, everything will come together.