Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“I wish I could, too. I wish I could give you some support. But this is new to me.”

“Jeez, Mal, it’s new to me, too!”

“Ginnie, I never even slept with a girl, and you want advice from me on...”

“Abortion. Abortion. Abortion. Say it, Mal.”

“Abortion.”

“I’m too young to be a mother.”

“You’re pretty mature for your age, though.”

“In what sense?”

I shrugged. “Most every sense.”

“So, what? You think I should have the kid?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’re not Catholics, you know. We’re Methodists!”

“And not very Methodist, if you get right down to it.”

“Right. I’m not having it.”

“The abortion?”

“The baby! Oh, Mal, can’t you be of more help than this? You’re just pitiful...”

“I’m sorry, Ginnie.”

“It isn’t John’s, you know.”

“Well, I figured. You broke up and all.”

“I don’t want to tell you whose it is.”

“That’s okay.”

“’Cause I’m not going to have this baby.”

“Hey, I’m on your side.”

She smiled and looked at me. Her freckles were washed out by the moonlight. “You really are, aren’t you? Whatever I decide is okay with you.”

“Sure. What are friends for?”

She started to sing a Carole King song, then: “When you’re down and troubled...”

She didn’t have a very good voice, but it was moving, hearing her sing that, her thin voice cracking every fourth word or so. I held her hand. We sat. I held her. She cried. I didn’t cry till I got home. I didn’t think crying in front of her was the sort of support she needed.

We drifted apart our senior year. Drugs had hit the Iowa high schools, about two years after it hit the two coasts (there was a time lag then that has been reduced from years to weeks now), and Ginnie was into them heavily. Grass was just the beginning; she smoked hash, dropped acid, went the whole hallucinogenic route. She and a group of girls were the school hippies in their beads and tie-dyed clothes, and became combination outcasts and celebrities.

Me, I was very uptight about drugs. I was involved in sports and wanted nothing to do with those substances. A year later I’d be in Vietnam smoking dope, and not long after that in Haight Ashbury doing drugs Ginnie had never heard of back in high school; but at the moment, I was a virgin and possessed a smug righteousness about my chemical celibacy.

“Loosen up,” she said, lighting up a joint in my parents’ rec room.

“I don’t go for that shit,” I said.

“Come on! You listen to The Beatles, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I hate The White Album. Now, don’t do that in here! My parents are upstairs, for Christ’s sake. And so’s your mom.”

“What’s she going to do about it?”

Ginnie’s mom was a wonderful person, but she had about as much control over Ginnie as... as I did.

“You shouldn’t do that to yourself,” I said.

“It’s mind -expanding, Mal. Christ! After all the long philosophical raps we had over the years on the meaning of life, and you reject the key. ”

“If that’s the key, I got no interest in the door. I hate that smell.”

“You are a drag. I never thought I’d see the day. But you are a drag, Mal. A real drag. A drag.”

“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m a drag.”

“Straight is right. A drag.”

I didn’t see much of her after that, our senior year. Except for one disastrous encounter in the cafeteria, perhaps a month later.

I sat down with my tray of food across from Ginnie. Several of my friends joined me. Male friends. Guys I played football with, played cards with. Ginnie was sitting with two of her hippie girl friends; cute girls, one of whom was dating one of the guys who’d sat down with me.

We began chatting about various school matters. I mentioned I was working on a short story to be entered in a national competition.

Ginnie snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

“Pardon?”

“Mal, you’re such an unimaginative pathetic little shit, what could you write?”

I felt as though someone had hit me hard in the stomach; I could feel the discomfort of my friends next to me, despite their nervous smiles.

I wasn’t smiling when I pointed my finger at Ginnie like a gun.

“We’re through,” I told her. “We’ve been friends for a long time, but we’re through. It’s over.”

She laughed. Her girl friends laughed.

I stood. “Was putting me down for laughs worth our friendship? I hope so. Because I’m never speaking to you again.”

She laughed some more, but in her eyes I could see what I’d said had registered.

And as the weeks, the months went by, she would approach me and grin and say, “Still mad?” And I wouldn’t speak. When my story won the national competition, she came up and congratulated me and I said nothing, feeling no sense of victory, just empty. Finally, at the all-night party after the senior prom, a party held on a Delta Queen — style riverboat that lurched down the Mississippi while a rock band played “Louie Louie” so many time we eventually thought we could understand the words, she approached me with tears in her eyes and said, only, “Can we be friends again?”

And I said, sure.

But it was never the same again.

I ran into her over the summer, several times, but there was a strain and the conversation remained polite, brittle. And pretty soon I went to Vietnam, and she went to the university, pre-law.

Two years later I was in an army hospital, Stateside, and her letter found its way to me; in it she said: “It’s New Year’s Eve. I don’t usually write letters, Mal — I guess you know that. But tonight, for some reason, I have to deal with what I did to you in the cafeteria that time. I hurt you. I don’t know why I said what I did — strike that. I do know. It’s the gambler in me, the risk taker; more than that — that nihilistic streak of mine. I knew what our relationship meant — and I decided to see what would happen if I — just — mindlessly — lashed out at you. Just to see what would happen. And I saw. I ruined us. Can you forgive me?”

I was moved that she would — after all this time — write such a note. And I wrote back: “Of course, I forgive you. What are friends for?”

Yet even then, something was gone. Because over the years, that cafeteria incident remained between us, somehow. She lived in Iowa City — not forty miles from me, who lived in Port City, our home town, where I settled after my bouts with Vietnam and Haight Ashbury. She ran a head shop up there, ever since dropping out of law school. Even at the peak of her hippie period she never let go of her make-a-million-by-thirty goal. From the looks of her shop, maybe she’d made it: Ginnie’s ETC., ETC., ETC. was more than just a head shop, having grown from a hole-in-the-wall storefront to a three-story building downtown: she sold furniture and lamps and what-have-you for apartment dwellers, which a college town like Iowa City has more than its share of. But the dope paraphernalia remained a part of the shop, and I had — post-Vietnam/Haight Ashbury — gone celibate where dope was concerned, and had a passionate disinterest in it. Full circle. A virgin again.

Still, whenever I was in Iowa City, I’d stop in the shop and say hello. Now and then she would call me on the phone, just to talk — once it was to see if I was as angry that NBC had cancelled SCTV as she was. I was. We decided to make phone calls and write letters of protest. We felt close again. Closer than in years, and over the phone.

A few years of no contact drifted by. The last time I saw her was at our fifteenth high school class reunion, the month before. She was happy, she said. Business was good, she said, though she had not made her million yet; what the hell, goals were made to be ignored. Or anyway, adjusted. Was money still her main goal? She shrugged. What about her personal life? She was married and had a little girl, four years old.