Teachers are not supposed to be outside the students’ dorms. Teachers are not supposed to be drinking on school nights, either. Maybe I’m not supposed to be a teacher.
It’s easier to be outside than in. My living room still has papers and books all over, and I can’t be there. The cold out here, almost Christmas cold, is a make-you-walk-straight kind of cold. There’s nothing like rowing-on-frozen-lake cold.
One time in college, cold came early in autumn. The varsity crew was out on the lake where we practiced, but this afternoon our coach cut the ice with the motor from his launch. Every stroke was supposed to be a glide up the tracks, but splashing from the oars had filled the tracks with freezing. We had to pull ourselves over the bumps of ice. And then, when we exploded on the catch, we broke the ice. Every time. And our hands? No gloves. With gloves we can’t really hold on to the oars. Without gloves our hands froze, and we couldn’t hold on to the oars. Oars were flopping around and splashing. Each splash was a slap to the face. Water froze on windshirts in front, sweat condensing on the backs.
You were trying to keep us going. I broke the rowing protocol of no talking in the boat, not ever, and started singing “My Favorite Things” really loud.
Everyone joined in.
In our wood-composite shell in the middle of the lake at the beginning of winter, eight rowers and a cox’n were singing at the top of our lungs from The Sound of Music while ice formed in the tracks.
Sarah’s head turned to the left, and I could see the corner of her smile.
But she’s not here, and I’m not looking for her.
It’s December 1983, and I don’t know what I’m looking for.
From the outside, a dorm looks like a cruise ship, something huge and looming, most windows lit up and music leaking out closed ones. There’s a world in there, people acting in their stories, allegiances and vengeance and plots within plots, whole countries won and lost, and I’m outside looking in. But it’s so late right now there aren’t many lights on.
Carla’s room is upstairs, the corner room with the lights out.
Maybe Jack is right. I haven’t been here, not really. Crisco said that I couldn’t reach the students from so far away. Since Sarah died, I haven’t been anywhere. Maybe I was too far away to see Carla just trying on the idea of suicide rather than ready to do something.
Maybe I can be here for her now.
“What’re you doing out of your dorm?” A voice trying to be low came loud behind me.
“Sorry.” I jumped.
Carla raised both her hands to her mouth to quiet her laugh. She doubled over, collapsing in half.
“Damn it, Carla,” I said, “You scared me.” And I couldn’t help but smile. Everything was funny.
After she straightened up, she slapped her mittens on her thighs and doubled over again.
“And just what’re you doing out of the dorm?” I said.
“I asked you first.”
“I’m faculty.”
“And your point?” Carla was so quick. With beer and cold, I wasn’t keeping up.
“You’re supposed to be inside. What’re you doing?”
“Freezing my ass off, just like you.” Carla was curl.
“No kidding.” That’s what I’d say to a friend, not a student.
Carla walked up to me and raised both her hands to my shoulders. She turned me toward the light from one of the windows on the first floor where two girls were still up, each at her desk. I couldn’t see Carla so well, but she moved her face toward mine. Her face gave off heat, and she smelled like leaves and December. Her close was good close.
“Hm, has Ms. Alta been drinking, perhaps?” Carla held me with both arms, blocked my vision with her face.
“Hey,” I said. I twisted out of her hands.
“Oh, she has.” Carla’s smile was big, her hair kept back by her stocking cap. This Carla was the one before Kyle died, the one who was sassy the way Red Hots are, something more kick than anything.
This cold, this heat from a face so close was the cold the first time I kissed a girl. The summer before that movie with Sarah in college, I was eighteen and a Girl Scout counselor in a rundown Girl Scout camp in a rundown area of Nevada. Never before had I been a Girl Scout, in Nevada, at camp, or gay. It just happened. An older counselor looked out for me, showing me how to tie ties and put on pins and set up tents, and on the two days off we had each camp session, she took me to softball games, bars, and eventually, hotels.
One night in the first week of camp, we snuck out of our cabins and met on the banks of the creek that ran through camp. We weren’t supposed to be out in the mountains because there were cougars and bears and things a girl from New England knew nothing about. It was cold, the air was juniper, and she put her arm around me. It was easy to turn into her, easy to meet her lips, hard to know how the ground still held when I walked the next day. She was my first girl kiss.
The next day thinking of her lips made me dizzy. Thinking of someone finding out made me sick to my stomach. When I got back to college that fall, I didn’t tell anyone, especially not Sarah.
Turning away from Carla, I stepped under a tree. Less light. Carla followed, and we were both in the shadow of the tree, the building. The sky carried no moon.
“Were you out with Donny tonight?” I said.
“No way.”
“Who were you meeting then?”
“Whom.”
“Carla,” I said. I was rock on iced lake, boot through thin ice, boulder in pond.
“So what if I met him?”
“You could get in a ton of trouble.”
“Like sent away?” Those words were the ones I dreaded.
“Do you like him?” These were the ones I tried not to say.
“Sure,” she said, “he’s cute.” I had to hear those words.
“Cute? Donny Zurkus?” I turned away. “Oh, sorry.”
“Do I detect judgment, just a smidge?” she said. Her mitten raised toward my face. Her fingers inside were probably pinched forefinger to thumb.
I pushed her mitten away, but then I stepped into her, put my arms around her, pressed her down coat into my coat.
“Taylor,” she said. My name was a sigh.
Her dark coat and my dark coat and a night with no moon. I held her outside of her dorm, under a tree with no leaves, outside a window with no light. I held her, and we breathed in and out the same. I was there. Something must have happened to the anger, the flipping-off Carla that the nurse picked up that day when I turned her in. Some switch must have flipped in the hospital. What switch can happen to make someone live?
Before I pulled away, I squeezed her, down coat and all, as hard as I could.
“I have to go,” I said.
As I stepped away, she said, “Are you jealous?” Her arms were at her side.
“Of what?” I said. My steps backwards, away from her, were steps taken inside and out. “Good night.”