The Enthusiast (6 page)

“Have a seat,” Dobey said when I entered his office. “This is what I mean, about Jim. He thinks this is the way to broaden the appeal.” He held up the skateboarding magazines. “Let's hate all the regular people. Over-inked bullshit.” He threw them in the garbage. “Remember we talked about where you see yourself going? That's where we are now. There's a chance here for you to step up.”

So this was it: office politics, ruthless. Dobey wanted me to take over the magazine, but I couldn't do that to Rensselaer unless he'd had it here. Even if he had, was I ready? Maybe I was. I cleared my throat. “I think—”

“Have you looked at
Crochet Life
lately?” Dobey said.

“What?” I said.

“Cerise Lander does it. She could use some help. It's gotten a little stagnated. This is a year ago.”

He handed me a magazine whose cover was split into four photos of crocheted throws muddied by the cereal-box press: a unicorn, a raccoon family, the letters saying
LOVE
from that painting, and Rip Van Winkle yawning awake. The cover line was
EASY PLEASERS!

“Here's the most recent,” he said. It looked like the first one, except that the throws showed a koala bear, a soapbox derby car, the eye-rolling angels of gift-wrap fame, and a leprechaun guarding his treasure chest. The line was
DO-ABLE DAZZLERS!

“You see what I'm saying?” Dobey said. “It's lost some snap.”

Was this a test? A joke? If anything, I thought the koala bear had more snap than the unicorn.

“She's fine with someone coming in for a couple of months,” Dobey said. “She's in Wellfleet, Michigan.”

“I don't know anything about crocheting,” I said.

“No. Well, you know. Rosey Grier. The Rams? Bobby Kennedy?” I had no idea what he was talking about, though I later found out it was needlepoint. “Eileen has your travel.”

I went back and told Rensselaer what was happening. “Jesus,” he said. “I can't believe I got you to quit school for this. I thought I was managing him.” I said it was okay, but when I got to Rosey Grier and the unicorn, he said, “See, he's actually losing it. That's what I didn't count on.”

Jillian came over and said, “Cerise is nice, but two months? God. When are you going?”

“Friday.”

“I'll make you a kit,” she said, and the night before I left we had dinner at the Thai restaurant on Stovall Street. It was the first time since the Swedish book night that I'd seen her
without the friends. When she put down her menu she said, “Do you ever get this big feeling of well-being for no reason? Just really happy all of a sudden?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so. Like you go outside and everything looks perfect? I think I get that about twice a year for, like, twenty minutes. Is that the kind of thing?”

She nodded, but her look gave me the feeling I'd just blown it, that she spent whole seasons in that condition and that forty minutes a year was the record low score. She picked up a canvas knapsack from the seat next to her and handed it to me.

“Your kit,” she said. Inside were three sweet potato mini-pies from the Lofton Street Bakery, a beer from Riddenhauer's, a George Jones CD, a novel about fly-fishing, and a topographic map of the area I was going to.

“Thanks,” I said. “You went crazy.”

“Not at all. It's the minimum of what you'll need.” She opened the map and pointed to a whorl of elevation lines. “Megan and Steve and I camped up here. If you take this trail there's like fifteen waterfalls on the way.”

“Do you go a lot?”

“As much as I can,” she said. “Even if it's just over by Jonesboro in the Shawnee Forest. Sometimes just putting the big socks on gives me that feeling you were talking about. When people tell me their problems I want to say, ‘Buy a pair of hiking shoes and call me when they're worn out.' Most of them would never have to call.”

“I wondered about that.”

“What?”

“When I met you,” I said. “You were wearing that vest and the boots and everything. I was wondering if that was something you really did or, you know. A style.”

“Lick rocks,” she said, drawing herself up in the booth and
saying it with the same mock umbrage she used on the friends. I felt both anointed and doomed, as if I'd been grandfathered into those photo collages and stuck safely to construction paper, mugging at a bowling alley birthday party or making cowboy coffee in a national wilderness.

Later, though, when she was dropping me off and I already had the car door open, she said, “Henry?” I turned to face her and she was on me with a kiss that lasted twelve seconds and crossed the blood-brain barrier. When it was over I tried to do it again but she pulled back, shook her head, and said, “I don't know what that was. Call me when you get settled, okay?”

I went up to my apartment. It occurred to me that it couldn't have been Jillian who'd said, “Fuck you,” to Rensselaer the first time he called me. She didn't talk like that. Maybe it was Suzanne.

 

I
was almost at the ticket counter of the Clayton bus station when I realized that the clerk was the woman who lived across the hall from me, wearing makeup that made her look a little less spectral than she did at home. I stopped for a second but then continued to the window and said, “Hi, how are you?”

She said, “Can I help you?” as if she didn't recognize me.

I bought a round-trip ticket and asked, “How long is the return part good for?”

“One year from the date of purchase.”

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah, I might not be back too soon. I'm looking forward to getting away. You know, someplace quiet.”

Now she looked at me like she knew exactly who I was and said, “That's nice, that you can get to do that,” so that I had something to feel bad about for all seven hours of my bus trip to the least scenic part of Michigan.

 

C
erise Lander was in her fifties, a little stocky in a fleece top, stretch pants, and a space-helmet perm. She said, “Come in and excuse the mess,” but her split-level house was spotless, with a La-Z-Boy, graduation pictures, squiggle-icing cookies, a thermostat set to seventy, and a dog scrabbling on the linoleum by the constantly spinning clothes dryer in the pantry. Her husband was a civil engineer.

Crochet Life
had a small office in town, but Cerise did most of the work at the computer and yarn basket in her living room. “I've been talking to Arnold on the phone,” she said, “but I'm not that clear on what he's asking for.”

“I think it's mostly about keeping the snap going,” I said. We looked at each other. “Maybe you could kind of walk me through what you've got coming up.”

She showed me the next issue on her computer. I searched for flaws and said, “I wonder if the ladybug could be
doing
something.” When I suggested adding a few more colors of yarn to the Weekend Wonder project, she asked if I'd ever tried crocheting, handed me some yarn and a hook, sat on the sofa with me, and showed me a basic stitch. In fifteen minutes I had a lumpy row, and a kind of calm was setting in.

Cerise took a half-finished throw with Monet water lilies on it out of the basket, sat down across from me, and started running off fast three-color rows. I tried to think of more suggestions for the magazine but it made me lose track of my stitches. Neither of us said anything until she asked if I'd like some lunch. Two hours had vanished, but I had eight rows I was pretty happy with.

I was surprised at how much I liked being in her house, as if I'd been briefly exiled from places like this and then repatri
ated. It was like a Klondike in Rancho Cahuenga, cost-effective rooms on a cul-de-sac. I'd fled all this a year ago, but after a few months at the Tradewinds, I couldn't get enough of Cerise's pocket doors and lazy Susans.

Over soup at the kitchen table she asked if I'd like to go to Belton, Ohio, to see a woman named Wendy Probst whose throws always got good reader response. “You'd just take some pictures of her new pieces and get any comments she has on them,” Cerise said. “She and I can do the technical stuff later on. I still get letters asking for her Paddington Bear.”

The next day I took a bus to Belton, a poor town with houses the same size as their satellite dishes spread out through thin woods. Wendy Probst lived in a red wooden house with a sagging flat roof, bandanna curtains, and a dirt yard inches deep in pine needles. When I knocked on the door, she opened it looking like I'd wakened her from a dream of falling. She was in her thirties, thin, in a worn yellow housedress, her breasts and hair going where they wanted. In her hands were a crochet hook and a nearly finished throw the size of a twin bed.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi. Are you Wendy? I'm Henry Bay. From
Crochet Life.
Cerise talked to you?”

“Oh gosh. Yes. I'm sorry. Come in.”

It was an enthusiast crime scene in there, with teetering piles of unfolded clothes, unopened mail, dishes, skillets, sketchbooks, shower caps, pets' leashes, and Midol bottles. Industrial-size balls of yarn, in twenty colors, were spread around the house like designer tumbleweed.

She put the throw on the couch. The crocheted picture showed an equipment yard full of pallets and forklifts. A man in a uniform shirt and ball cap was shooting a woman with a handgun, her blood spraying across the scene. Another man, on his
knees, pleaded with the shooter as people ran away in the background. The detail was finer than anything I'd seen in Cerise's house or the magazine, but the style was blunt, the people's heads like swollen knees and their hands like sandbags.

“That was a workplace shooting last year at Belton Lumber Byproducts,” she said. “I wasn't there, but I saw the coverage. Most of these things, I was there for.”

I looked at the other throws lying around. They showed violence, sickness, arrests, and people weeping into pay phones.

“I don't know what happened,” she said. “I was starting out to do some stuff for the crafts fair in Dundee. In Kentucky. I was going to make a geometric, but the first line across it came out crooked and I said That's how the ground looks out here. The horizon. That's how it started. I had a big bag of frozen drumettes in the house and I just kept going.”

She bent over a pile of throws on the floor and flipped through them. “This is the kids from Washington Park kicking my nephew Danny's head on the curb. He had eighteen stitches. This is us waiting in the emergency room. This woman had a chest wound. This one is Danny after his bad reaction to the medication. This is a fistfight at my niece's First Communion. This is a dishonest lawyer.”

She stood up. “I don't know what I was thinking. It's not like I can take these to the crafts fair. I'm sorry I got you all the way out here.”

“No,” I said. “I think Cerise will like these.”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Cerise will shit,” she said.

I photographed them anyway. When I finished I said, “Can I get you anything? Some food? Do you want to go into town?”

“No thanks,” she said. She'd picked up the workplace-shooting throw again. “I think I need to finish.”

 

I
walked out of her house and straight into one of those unearned euphorias Jillian and I had talked about. For some reason Belton looked beautiful now, with its doublewides and shot-up
STOP
signs, and a ripped page of arithmetic homework on Big Chief paper lying in a patch of dirty snow. I saw the ratty horizon from the crochets laid over the real one. When I spotted a pay phone I called Barney and said, “It's Henry.”

He said, “Hi,” but not “How are you?” a habit of his that usually started the first of several silences.

“I think I might be leaving my job,” I said. I hadn't known it till I said it to him, but Dobey had me troubleshooting unicorns, Jillian thought our kiss was a freak accident, and that shaky yarn horizon was making the world look wider.

There was a pause. “Okay,” Barney said. “I'm sorry it's not going well.”

“I didn't say it's not going well. It's just going how it's going. There's a woman I don't think I'm getting anywhere with, either.”

“Are you going back to college?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Look, I know you're mad at me. I'm sorry about that. I just want to tell you what I'm doing.”

“What are you doing?”

“I'm in front of a grocery store in Belton, Ohio. The sky is bright orange. It's pretty, but I don't think it's healthy. I think it's from a company called Belton Lumber Byproducts. What are you doing?”

“I was reading about nuclear division in strange cytoplasm.”

“Okay.” It was getting colder. “Do you remember when we went to the zoo in L.A.?”

“I remember we went there, yes,” Barney said.

“Do you remember telling me what the animals' philosophy was?”

“Their philosophy? No.”

“Yeah. You watched them all day, and then you said all the animals had the same philosophy. It was ‘I think I'll go over here for a while.'”

Another pause. “How old were we?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Young.”

 

I
took the bus back to Wellfleet, and in the morning I went to Cerise's house to show her the photos of Wendy's new throws. “This one is a social worker from the county,” I said. “This one—”

“Oh my God.”

“That's her friend's daughter. She was ten.”

“Is she okay? Wendy?”

“I couldn't really tell.”

“Well. We can send her a little money.” She squinted at a picture. “How is she
doing
this? It's very fine yarn, but still.”