In letters to Sils I would write “I miss you!” “How are you, schweetie?” and then I would tell her about Howie: a dunk, half dork, half hunk. “He keeps me busy!” I would write. “Wink, wink.” And then I’d draw a picture of a wink.
The few times I went home on vacations, I would see Sils, but we were strangely awkward with each other. We looked different. She had layered her hair in a long wavy shag and was wearing a big leather jacket and palazzo pants. I had grown rounded and tall. We would sing in her room, but at the end of a song she’d strum the chords and we’d retreat shyly into silence. We didn’t reprise our repertoire, all the songs we’d learned with Miss Field in Girls’ Choir, or from the car radio, or her brothers’ band. Instead we struggled with talk, though it all seemed to separate us. She had broken up with Mike and was now seeing a boy named Doug, who sold mobile homes. Months before, her brothers had once again fled, with their band, to Canada. Was I going to college? She thought she might not, but might just stay in town and work for the post office or something. Someday she hoped to move to Boston or Hawaii or Santa Fe.
“Oh,” I said. I’d somehow always thought we’d go to college together, to the same place; I couldn’t imagine being totally without her.
“There’s just no money,” she said. But she smiled at me encouragingly, like an older sister.
“No prob,” I said. “No biggie. I can get the cash. I can do this thing with ticket stubs.” I hoped she would laugh. Instead she smiled weakly and ran her fingers through her new hair. She seemed tired and sad and it made me want to run, to be gone, to be back at Mount Brookfield with Howie.
I was Howie’s girlfriend for a year, before he left, graduated from Mount Brookfield ahead of me, and bucking his parents, set out with two buddies for the Alaskan pipeline, where after three months, I was told later by his mother, he disappeared in the snow, came down with the snow madness that caused men to get into their tractors and just drive off into the blinding white horizon, never coming back.
I forced myself to go on to someone else after that, then someone else again, never attaching in quite the same ferocious, virginal way, never with that enthralled and orphaned heart, not quite like that, and I missed him for years, years into college. By then my parents had moved from Horsehearts to the east coast of Florida with my grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face. The living didn’t interest her; she grew bored when anyone spoke. In her yawn I could see the black-and-white dice of her filled teeth, the quiet snap of her spit, all gathered in a painting of departure. It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.
——
AFTER COLLEGE, I did go back to Horsehearts, for a class reunion. Ten years. I was invited despite the Mount Brookfield diploma—“a mere technicality,” wrote Susie Vito, the class secretary, who had been in kindergarten with me. Sils wrote me a note: “If you go, I’ll go,” she said. “The reunion’s at a motel. But please stay with me at my house. I’ve got room.” She was still in Horsehearts, renting cheaply, working as a letter carrier and putting in requests for transfers. Her handwriting was exactly the same, jazzy and elegant, with fs that looked like G clefs. Ss like flowers.
Like so many others, I arrived by car, still smoking cigarettes, my hair shorn, some money and credit cards in my purse. How simple and sweet and nice Sils seemed then, at that befuddled gathering! She ran toward me and hugged me so long I felt abandoned when she let go. Her face was slightly lined — there were deeper folds by her mouth — but otherwise she looked the same. It was her! “Your hair looks great,” she said, and took my hand. How kind she was! She was a lovely and gentle person, and I’d almost forgotten. I had gone out into the world and in it imagined myself sweet and good compared to the jagged acrimony I met everywhere. “I’m just a girl from Horsehearts, what can I say?” I’d murmur, and men would touch my face; New Yorkers, Bostonians, Parisians would smile. But now, returning to Horsehearts, I realized, I no longer knew what sweetness was. By comparison to what I found there, I had become sour, mean, sophisticated. I no longer knew from niceness, was no longer on a daily basis with it. I didn’t meet nice people. I met witty, hard, capable, successful, dramatic. Some vulnerable. Some insecure. But not nice, the way Sils was nice. She was nice the way I had long imagined I still was, but then on seeing her again — strangely shy before me but illumined and grinning, as ever, her voice in gentle girlish tones I never heard anymore — instantly, completely, knew I was no longer.
We jumped into the motel pool, with our clothes on, laughing and practically drowning. We swam together to the shallow end, and when she stepped out of it, gleaming, her clothes wet and tight as leather, her hair streaming down her back, everyone looked. Though there was weariness in her walk, she was still slender and bold; I could see she was still some kind of sexual centerpiece here. All the Horsehearts boys who had stayed in town, become managers of stores or cinemas or the roller rink, still thought of her at night. In this neck of the woods, she was the neck of the woods.
We sat in lawn chairs, drying in the sun, and smoked quietly, with Randi, who seemed just the same as always except that, recovered from her Mary Kay days, she had changed her name to Travis, which she’d written on her name tag, with Randi in parentheses underneath. (Could one do that? Could one put one’s whole past, the fact of its boring turbulence, in parentheses like that?) We murmured about how bald all the boys were. “They look exactly like they did in high school,” said Sils, “except that now their hair’s gone and in their wallets instead of condoms they carry before-and-after photos of their home renovations. Welcome back to Horsehearts.” As she held her cigarette, and blew smoke away from me, I looked for the men from U.N.C.L.E. in her toenails but could not find them.
After the afternoon reception and buffet, we left, went to go drink in a new local restaurant, what Sils called “an-all-you-will-have-eaten place.” There was a long salad bar and a big open grill. One was supposed to cook one’s own steak. “Cook your own mistake,” she called it. I smiled in a way that I hoped wouldn’t seem distant. What did it mean that she had stayed here, in Horsehearts, in one place, like a tree? Though I knew one’s roots grew deep and steady that way, still, one’s lower limbs could fuse, or die, killed off by one’s own stalwart shade. “It’s the coleslaw here,” she said. “I just can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I think that, you know, watch: the slaw alone will keep me in this town forever.”