Love in the Time of Climate Change (38 page)

“Nine o'clock,” I said. “Be warned. If the Mayans are right, it'll be the last night of the world.”

“I hope they're wrong,” she said.

“God, so do I.” This time I looked right at her.

“Shall I bring anything?”

“No. Just you.”

She laughed again.

“Nine o'clock. Saturday.”

She left the room and I lay down on the floor, my legs still in a pretzel, not caring if the dean or the college president or Obama himself walked in.

I
T'S NOT LIKE
I
COUNTED THE MINUTES
until nine o'clock on Saturday night. The hours, yeah, but the minutes, not until the end.

There were, of course, reasons galore to count down. It was a monumental day with epic reasons for celebration.

Reason #1. I had gotten my final grades in on Friday, twenty-two minutes before they were due, a new world record for me. I was thrilled. Fall semester was finally one for the books, thank God. I was done, finished for the semester. Samantha was officially no longer my student!

Reason #2. Winter solstice: a holy day. The end of fall, the official beginning of winter, the shortest day and longest night of the year. It was thrilling and incredibly reassuring to know that from this moment forward every day for the next six months would be longer and longer. The light was returning. Hallelujah! No coincidence that early Christians determined that Jesus' birthday just happened to fall at this sacred time. They weren't stupid. Get all of us pagans and atheists who were partying down anyway and co-opt the day into becoming one big birthday bash.

Reason #3. The Mayan ultimatum for the End of the World. December 21, 2012. Go figure. Who would have thought that the end of the 5,312-year-old Mayan calendar, falling as it did on winter's solstice, would set people off the way that it had? With the possible exception of Warren and maybe my nutso brother-in-law Winnie, no one I knew believed any of the bullshit, but that certainly didn't stop everyone from talking it up. Students, staff, faculty, friends, everybody. It was all the buzz. Winnie called to beg pot off me. “If it's all going down,” he said, “I'm definitely gonna want to be high at the end.” Jesse had made a “Last 30 Days” calendar and we'd been counting down to catastrophe one day at a time. It was entirely unclear to me what the Mayans had thought would happen come solstice midnight, but it was yet another fabulous reason to party.

Reason #3. Last but totally first. The obvious one. Certainly the ask had not been my finest moment, but somehow Apollo, Cupid, the Mayans, and maybe even Jesus Himself had miraculously intervened and, will wonders never cease, I was actually going to a party with her! WITH HER! Can you believe it?

It was hard to tell who was more excited—Jesse, Sarah, or myself.

“Christ,” the Roommate said. “If I had to endure one more day of your fucking angst I would have ended it all and cut off your testicles.”

“Don't mind him,” Sarah said, smelling my armpits and giving me the thumbs up. “He's just jealous that you're going to have two women fawning all over you rather than one.”

I had spent most of Saturday afternoon at the Y, desperately trying to get one more workout in to buff me up, hoping a round on the nautilus machines would miraculously add an inch to my biceps. Given the train wreck that I was, it proved a good way to kill time before the big event. I had
been reassured by Sarah that I couldn't overdose on Tums, but damn if my stomach didn't continue to do flip-flops even after a dozen of them. The shortest day of the year seemed like the longest, but finally, somehow, thankfully, day turned to night and it was that time.

Taylor, the same neighbor who had the fab Halloween bash at his house, had rented the Field House at Smith College for this extravaganza. The Field House was a funky old athletic function hall, with a beat-up dance floor and a great sound system. A perfect place for a party. As inviting as Taylor's home was, this event was way too big. His wife taught at Smith as well, the two of them had a wide circle of friends, and the triple-threat nature of the evening had called for an upgrade.

Taylor had set up a huge whiteboard on the back wall and you could write witticisms about the Mayans, school, solstices past, or any random thought that popped into your head. One of Taylor's astronomer colleagues had made a detailed drawing of the solstice sun in relation to the earth with little orbits and degrees. An artist had drawn an amazing picture of Chichen Itza, the most famous of Mayan ruins, with one Mayan saying to the other “RUN!” A kid had drawn a cute smiley-face sun and written, “Welcome back” in a big-kid-like scrawl underneath. I resisted the urge to draw a heart with “C and S” in the middle of it; that would probably be pushing it and would completely freak her out.

There was a request box for the DJ, which I jumped on immediately. “School's Out” by Alice Cooper, R.E.M.'s “It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” the Beatles' “Here Comes the Sun,” and Blink 182's “First Date” seemed to cover all four of the reasons for being there. An ancient torn and tattered disco ball from the seventies hung from the ceiling and the light inside was trippy and sparkling. Outside were three inches of new-fallen snow, just enough to cover up the exhaust
and the dog shit and the late-December yuck and make everything fresh and beautiful.

Jesse, Sarah, and I got there at 8:35 and things were already grooving. The music was blaring. People were dancing. The drink was flowing. I had agonized over what to wear but eventually settled for the usual uniform—jeans and a T-shirt that I thought she'd like, a bright and shining sun with the words “Solar Energy Now!” emblazoned underneath.

Three minutes before nine o'clock and I made Jesse and Sarah go to the other side of the dance floor and leave me alone. I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself; standing in the corner and staring at the door—waiting, watching, waiting, watching—seemed way too lame. Dancing was clearly out of the question and I was way too anxious to mingle, so I sort of lingered, fidgeting, by the drinks table, pretending to pour something but not actually doing it. A tad awkward but I was left with few options.

I had rehearsed opening lines. The gems that rose to the top were:

“Great to see you!”

A little too long, I thought.

“S'up?”

Perhaps too flip.

So I had settled on a good old, tried-and-true, common-sense standard:

“Hey.”

It was 9:05. Then 9:10. When 9:15 rolled around, I was getting all pretzel-legged again. I could even see Jesse from the other side of the room getting punched in the arm by Sarah when he brought out his cell to check the time. I was desperately fighting off evil demon thoughts about my awkwardness and my inadequacies. What had I been thinking, that a woman like her would stoop to going out with a dweeb like me? Maybe she really did have a boyfriend or a girlfriend and they had found out and they were consumed with jealousy and
rage and pathological possessiveness and they were going to blast in here and beat the living shit out of me. Or worse yet, what if she had tried to come but been hit by a snowplow and was just now on a respirator in the ER crying out for me, calling my name over and over and over. I much preferred the last scenario, minus her on the respirator and all.

Just when I was about to abandon all hope and pray that the Mayans were actually on to something, in she walked through the door.

“Hey,” she said, smiling.

Damn! She beat me to my line!

“I'm sorry I'm late. Car issues. I had to borrow my sister's.”

“I'm so glad you're here!” I gushed. She looked ravishing.

“I'm so glad you didn't not invite me!”

She took off her coat. “I was going to wear my pirate outfit but I didn't know if it was that kind of party.”

“You look great,” I said. “Pirate or not.”

Awkward.

“So do you. Great T-shirt.”

“Thanks. I thought you'd like it. You know, the sun and all.” Ouch. Another awkward line.

Fortunately up came George's unmistakable guitar and amazing voice:

Here comes the sun, here comes the sun

And I say it's all right
.

“My song!” I said. “I requested it. The Beatles.”

“My fave!” She clapped her hands. “What's not to love? Do you want to dance?”

So we danced. We danced and danced and danced. We danced with Jesse and Sarah. We danced with Taylor and his wife. For a couple of songs she floated away and sort of danced off in a world by herself while I just stood in the corner and watched in rapture. But most of the time we danced together and it was wonderful.

My legs had un-pretzeled, my stomach had untwisted, and what I lacked in grace and poise on the dance floor I made up with in enthusiasm and the joy of being with her.

She was, of course, both enthusiastic and graceful.

After a wonderful couple hours of talking and dancing and laughing and dancing and talking some more, she pulled me aside.

“I'm hot,” she said. “You want to take a walk?”

“Lead on,” I replied.

We put on our coats and our gloves and our hats and headed outside.

Behind the Field House, on the other end of the tennis courts and the playing fields, was Hospital Hill. It was on the site of the old state hospital grounds, a lunatic asylum turned housing development, the top of which gave a great view of Northampton. The moon was out and the stars were twinkling and the night was absolutely gorgeous.

We walked to the top of the hill, heads bent toward each other, talking against the cold and the wind. She told me how she loved her job and loved her kids, how she missed her parents, who lived in Seattle, how her sister was her best friend and confidante, how much she enjoyed our class. I told her that I loved my job and didn't really miss my parents because I saw them maybe too often and my brother and sister were sort of not like me but that was okay and how much I enjoyed our class.

When we got to the top of the hill we stood together, gawking at the moon and the stars on the most beautiful of all solstice nights. We were about to head back down when she gave a little yelp. There, flung unceremoniously against a tree, was a beat-up old sled with a deep gash in its side. A blue, plastic, tattered, shot-to-shit sled.

She grabbed it.

“Oh, poor thing. Poor, lonely, sad little thing.”

I laughed.

“Do you know what this lonesome darling wants? On
this solstice night, the last night of the world? Do you know what she really wants?”

“Uh oh,” I said. “I think I know where this is going!”.

“One more run. Just one more run down this hill.”

They didn't call it Hospital Hill for nothing. Yeah, it was where they locked up the loonies back in the day but it was also where folks routinely dislocated their shoulders or screwed up their knees or wrenched their backs or brought some sort of hideous bodily harm onto themselves. It was an awesome sledding hill if extreme fear was your idea of a good time. Just standing at the top was nerve wracking.

“You game?” she asked.

I peered down into the darkness, the steepness alarming, the ice glistening.

I was absolutely terrified.

“It is the end of the world,” I answered. “Might as well go out with a bang.”

I climbed behind her into the sled, put my arms around her as tight as I could, buried my head beneath her shoulders, curled my legs into her lap, breathed in her hair and the warmth of her body and the cold of the night air, and shut my eyes tight. Wrapped up against her there was clarity, a sense of calm, a feeling of belonging. Riding shotgun down the avalanche.

The run didn't last long. Maybe ten seconds at most. I didn't have an epiphany and the meaning of life didn't suddenly appear before me, but
God
it sure felt right. Horrifying as it was, there was no place that I'd rather have been. Ten seconds of total terror as we hurled into the dark abyss at five zillion miles an hour, completely and totally out of control. I held on for dear life, squeezed her tight, and prayed to the Mayan goddesses that keep sledders safe. I could hear the wind howling and me shrieking and I felt her scream as the sled flew into the air and I plummeted face first into a pile of ragged ice and snow. I lay there, stunned.

“You okay?” she panted as she helped me turn over and sit up.

“We're alive!” I gasped, spitting snow out of my mouth. “We're alive!”

She laughed, reaching out to grab my hands and pulling me upright.

“You lost a glove!” she said. We searched around for a minute or two, to no avail.

“No big deal. Please don't make me go back up there to find it. I've already peed in my pants once. No need for an encore!”

She laughed again. God, what a sweet laugh. Like George Harrison's guitar. Like the Sun God singing. Like all the Mayans from the last 5,000 years gathered together on Hospital Hill at this very moment lifting up their voices to the moon and the solstice and to life itself.