She kissed him — they kissed whenever they met, no matter where or when, even if one of them had just stepped out of the room, because that was love, that was the way love was — and then they took two bowls of ice cream into the living room and, with a flick of the remote, set the maniac back in motion.
It was an early spring that year, the world gone green overnight, the thermometer twice hitting the low eighties in the first week of March. Teachers were holding sessions outside. The whole school, even the halls and the cafeteria, smelled of fresh-mowed grass and the unfolding blossoms of the fruit trees in the development across the street, and students — especially seniors — were cutting class to go out to the quarry or the reservoir or to just drive the back streets with the sunroof and the windows open wide. But not China. She was hitting the books, studying late, putting everything in its place like pegs in a board, even love, even that. Jeremy didn’t get it. “Look, you’ve already been accepted at your first-choice school, you’re going to wind up in the top ten G.P.A.-wise, and you’ve got four years of tests and term papers ahead of you, and grad school after that. You’ll only be a high-school senior once in your life. Relax. Enjoy it. Or at least experience it.”
He’d been accepted at Brown, his father’s alma mater, and his own G.P.A. would put him in the top ten percent of their graduating class, and he was content with that, skating through his final semester, no math, no science, taking art and music, the things he’d always wanted to take but never had time for — and Lit., of course, A.P. History, and Spanish 5. “Tú eres el amor de mi vida,” he would tell her when they met at her locker or at lunch or when he picked her up for a movie on Saturday nights.
“Y tú también,” she would say, “or is it ‘yo también’?”—French was her language. “But I keep telling you it really matters to me, because I know I’ll never catch Margery Yu or Christian Davenport, I mean they’re a lock for val and salut, but it’ll kill me if people like Kerry Sharp or Jalapy Seegrand finish ahead of me — you should know that, you of all people—”
It amazed him that she actually brought her books along when they went backpacking over spring break. They’d planned the trip all winter and through the long wind tunnel that was February, packing away freeze-dried entrées, Power Bars, Gore-Tex windbreakers and matching sweatshirts, weighing each item on a handheld scale with a dangling hook at the bottom of it. They were going up into the Catskills, to a lake he’d found on a map, and they were going to be together, without interruption, without telephones, automobiles, parents, teachers, friends, relatives, and pets, for five full days. They were going to cook over an open fire, they were going to read to each other and burrow into the double sleeping bag with the connubial zipper up the seam he’d found in his mother’s closet, a relic of her own time in the lap of nature. It smelled of her, of his mother, a vague scent of her perfume that had lingered there dormant all these years, and maybe there was the faintest whiff of his father too, though his father had been gone so long he didn’t even remember what he looked like, let alone what he might have smelled like. Five days. And it wasn’t going to rain, not a drop. He didn’t even bring his fishing rod, and that was love.
When the last bell rang down the curtain on Honors Math, Jeremy was waiting at the curb in his mother’s Volvo station wagon, grinning up at China through the windshield while the rest of the school swept past with no thought for anything but release. There were shouts and curses, T-shirts in motion, slashing legs, horns bleating from the seniors’ lot, the school buses lined up like armored vehicles awaiting the invasion — chaos, sweet chaos — and she stood there a moment to savor it. “Your mother’s car?” she said, slipping in beside him and laying both arms over his shoulders to pull him to her for a kiss. He’d brought her jeans and hiking boots along, and she was going to change as they drove, no need to go home, no more circumvention and delay, a stop at McDonald’s, maybe, or Burger King, and then it was the sun and the wind and the moon and the stars. Five days. Five whole days.
“Yeah,” he said, in answer to her question, “my mother said she didn’t want to have to worry about us breaking down in the middle of nowhere—”
“So she’s got your car? She’s going to sell real estate in your car?”
He just shrugged and smiled. “Free at last,” he said, pitching his voice down low till it was exactly like Martin Luther King’s. “Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
It was dark by the time they got to the trailhead, and they wound up camping just off the road in a rocky tumble of brush, no place on earth less likely or less comfortable, but they were together, and they held each other through the damp whispering hours of the night and hardly slept at all. They made the lake by noon the next day, the trees just coming into leaf, the air sweet with the smell of the sun in the pines. She insisted on setting up the tent, just in case — it could rain, you never knew — but all he wanted to do was stretch out on a gray neoprene pad and feel the sun on his face. Eventually, they both fell asleep in the sun, and when they woke they made love right there, beneath the trees, and with the wide blue expanse of the lake giving back the blue of the sky. For dinner, it was étouffée and rice, out of the foil pouch, washed down with hot chocolate and a few squirts of red wine from Jeremy’s bota bag.
The next day, the whole day through, they didn’t bother with clothes at all. They couldn’t swim, of course — the lake was too cold for that — but they could bask and explore and feel the breeze out of the south on their bare legs and the places where no breeze had touched before. She would remember that always, the feel of that, the intensity of her emotions, the simple unrefined pleasure of living in the moment. Woodsmoke. Duelling flashlights in the night. The look on Jeremy’s face when he presented her with the bag of finger-sized crayfish he’d spent all morning collecting.
What else? The rain, of course. It came midway through the third day, clouds the color of iron filings, the lake hammered to iron too, and the storm that crashed through the trees and beat at their tent with a thousand angry fists. They huddled in the sleeping bag, sharing the wine and a bag of trail mix, reading to each other from a book of Donne’s love poems (she was writing a paper for Mrs. Masterson called “Ocular Imagery in the Poetry of John Donne”) and the last third of a vampire novel that weighed eighteen-point-one ounces.
And the sex. They were careful, always careful—I will never, never be like those breeders that bring their puffed-up squalling little red-faced babies to class, she told him, and he agreed, got adamant about it, even, until it became a running theme in their relationship, the breeders overpopulating an overpopulated world and ruining their own lives in the process — but she had forgotten to pack her pills and he had only two condoms with him, and it wasn’t as if there was a drugstore around the corner.
In the fall — or the end of August, actually — they packed their cars separately and left for college, he to Providence and she to Binghamton. They were separated by three hundred miles, but there was the telephone, there was E-mail, and for the first month or so there were Saturday nights in a motel in Danbury, but that was a haul, it really was, and they both agreed that they should focus on their course work and cut back to every second or maybe third week. On the day they’d left — and no, she didn’t want her parents driving her up there, she was an adult and she could take care of herself — Jeremy followed her as far as the Bear Mountain Bridge and they pulled off the road and held each other till the sun fell down into the trees. She had a poem for him, a Donne poem, the saddest thing he’d ever heard. It was something about the moon. More than moon, that was it, lovers parting and their tears swelling like an ocean till the girl — the woman, the female — had more power to raise the tides than the moon itself, or some such. More than moon. That’s what he called her after that, because she was white and round and getting rounder, and it was no joke, and it was no term of endearment.