FICTION    

Try downhill skiing with me today?   
                          Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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No
by Joyce Hendrickson

​Nuzzling on the couch of the rented ski lodge condo on Christmas morning, my lover whispers in my ear, “Want to give me a special Christmas present?”
 
Wondering what “No” would sound like, I shiver and ask, “What’s that?”
 
“Try downhill skiing with me today?”
 
I am someone who likes striding on the cross country trail, careful of precipitous inclines and reckless situations in and out of the snow.
 
I trained with my friends before the holidays, repeating for them my determination not to be talked onto the slopes, bunny or not, and not to be talked onto the lift because of my woozy and lightening quick attacks of vertigo. No, no.
 
“And he will try to talk me into it,” I cautioned myself, if not them, “and he’ll think because I took some crazy hikes with him, or risked a hefty fine swimming nude in an off-lim­its water reservoir that I am game for anything he suggests, if he just suggests it sweetly enough, drawing me in with those cobalt blue eyes of his, that sweet Southern voice and liquid smile.”  And I’m really in love with him, yes.
 
No.
 
“Just tell Dan to go alone then,” they reasoned, dismissing my obsession. “You do your thing and he’ll . . . “  But it was our first Christmas together. Even as I write that I hear the smack of expectation, as though there were bound to be others—our first Christmas, filled with the anxiety of buying Dan gifts, clothes even, for heaven’s sake, that I had no assurance he would want to spend five minutes in. And music, CDs, and he a classically trained musician with a glass ear and iron-clad tastes.
 
But I had done all of that, done it with great love and a feeling that this year, unlike last year, I would not be partnerless over the holidays. And I had seemed, even to myself, to be on some sort of good behavior the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But now, the pre­sents had been opened; my material love and his, anyway, had  been tested and proved. 

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​No. Why was that so hard to say? I wondered as the shuttle bus filled with bright-eyed skiers who strapped their skis into the bus’s rack and hobbled gamely but lead-footedly aboard in their calf-high ski boots that made most of them—also tightly bound in spandex tights and zippered jumpsuits—appear like shimmering Apollo astronauts.
 
“You’re going to love this. The views are going to be killer!” Dan exclaimed, squeezing my thigh. The bus was climbing now, and I did have to exclaim over the views so much like a little Switzerland.
 
But killer was just what I had thought of the sport whenever my friend at work walked del­icately through the hallway, two-and-a-half inch steel pins remaining in her knee two years after her sud­den twisty, wrenching fall on the slopes. And she had not been just a beginner.
 
The sun was shining on the white crags of Mt. Reba as we continued to climb into the mountain range. The azure of the sky and Dan’s eyes were the same, I thought, as he slipped his tongue maddeningly into my mouth. He looked more animated than I had seen him in the past five months we had been together, and I was full of love.
 
I tried to relax and get into the spirit of giving. I listened to the father and son behind me talking about Christmas presents: “And when we get back, I’ll set up that hot wheel track, but you’ve got to take care of these cars, son. They’re special ones, so make them last”  . . .blah blah blah ...
 
No. Why was that so hard?
 
I was swept along off the bus into the rental room, where my Apollo boots were pulled from shelves and shelves of identical plastic Apollo boots, enough to fit a small city, half of which I could see out of the corner of my eye: hoards of little rubberized insects being pulled around on various ski lifts, or otherwise gliding and swooping down the icy white hills, their ski poles like prehensile feelers.
 
Dan was petulant about the fit of his boots, but I was quickly ready and exchanged arcane and in-triplicate paperwork for poles and skis. Outside it seemed time to, as they say, fish or cut bait.
 
I guessed at how the locking device of the skis was meant to work, while Dan dashed off to get lift tickets.
 
“No!” I said, to his back. “No lifts.”  

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​“Even the bunny slope you need a lift for,” he said breezily and sped off. I watched as a constant stream of happy, well-appointed skiers poured over the snow toward the lodge, upended their skis and poles, hobbled inside, and then, just as suddenly flew back outside, reassembled themselves, and began stroking merrily over to the lift lines.
 
“Practice,” I commanded myself, as I locked the clumsy skis onto the clumsy stiff boots. The boots were nothing if not the foreshadowing, it seemed, of a leg or body cast. Anything above and outside the calf where the boot ended was open to brittle seismic snaps and sudden high-speed impaction.
 
I pushed myself over the laminated corrugate of snow, my poles taking on the feel of crutches as I swayed warily over the snow drifts. Dan flew up beside me, humming like hov­ercraft, with a mechanical adrenalized purr.
 
“Let’s go,” he said. “It’s great, you’ll love it.”  I realized then, for the first time, that he had already gone up, skied a run, and had returned for me in a comfortable lather of well-loved exertion. He was already one of them. In comparison, I was slow and uncoordinated as he propelled me to the lift line.
 
“No,” I said, as a wall of people filled in behind me, my only avenue of escape.
 
“This isn’t the beginners slope!” I wheezed as I stared first up the icy stairways lined with trees then into the housing where the chain of the lift engine spun around in its wheeled caul­dron.
 
The manic energy was pushing us closer and closer to the head of the line where we were sorted out, inspected, and readied as the next pair of empty green plastic chairs soared down in an arc to the ground.
 
“Get ready,” Dan panted in my ear. I saw a chair and pounced on it, and it wasn’t until sec­onds later that I realized that Dan was still on the ground below me. The attendant pulled a switch to make the lift stop. The film reran until Dan was carefully seated beside me.
 
“You took my seat,” he explained only slightly miffed.
                       
I wouldn’t look at him since my skis, awkward enough on land, weighed on my legs as they dangled uselessly at the end of my feet. I hung onto my ski poles with one hand, grasped the chair rail and sides, and managed to stay on. The motorized hum and vibration filled the brisk clear air around us as we headed up and then started a slight descent with a shudder. My knees began to ache, and my vertigo bloomed.

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​The sense of the skiers below me as small, inconsequential insects became overwhelming. We were all easily dwarfed by the mountains and hollows of snow around us. Peaks sailing off toward the horizon, the ant runs, the avalanches cabled around the mountains ready to uncoil at any time.
 
“Take a look,” Dan advised. “Isn’t it beautiful?”  I took a breath. He continued.
 
“Now this is tricky. Listen. The lift doesn’t stop so you have to jump down and start ski­ing down the little hill when we get there.”
 
That’s ridiculous, I thought.
 
But said, “I can’t ski down anything. You’ve got to be crazy, Dan. No way!”
                       
But “no” was coming a little late, probably, as I squinted ahead to where twinned pairs of skiers briskly and noiselessly slipped off their chairs in poised synchronization and glided out of sight.
                       
Dan was pointing out the ski run I should try as very gentle. The wires hummed above us. Adrenalin was radiating from my socks to my ski vest, my heart infused with a thin altitude of fluid. I braced and looked for a bit of level ground I could rest on, then jumped when it was our turn and the lift chair sprang away from me.
       
Late last summer one Sunday Dan and I made love in the morning as we tended to do, ate pancakes we made, and then set out on a two-hour hike to a lake to swim. By the time I was cut­ting though the brush, sinking in mud, and tramping over a large encampment of fallen trees that emerged in places from the swampy headwaters of a reservoir, I had seen several signs prohibiting swimming.
 
Later, nude, we glided through the almost black water, our skin like pale suede, lambskin. We rested when we tired on the limbs that thrust themselves out of the watery world that once was forest.
                       
We swam for an hour without the sight of a person or animal besides the local birds. Everything was silent, except eventually I heard a conversation grow stronger. We were strok­ing back to the embankment where our clothes were hidden. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a yellow raft and three life-jacketed men, perhaps water district rangers, perhaps not. We scrambled without pause out of the darkness of the water, over the slick mud bank. As we worked our clothes anxiously over wet skin, Dan turned to me for a long second, looking at me covering myself up with my shirt, and winked, and I thought I understood.

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​I tried to ski down the mountain. Dan would coax me patiently ("Straighten up, straighten up!") and then at last fly down the run. Once he called down to me from the lift as I picked my way along, dodging children and adults who came catapulting from above, twisting over the slick rutted crust of snow.
                         
I looked up and saw him above me, twinned with a woman skier who glanced down at me also curiously. I was falling a lot and was frustrated at how hard it was to get back up. The next time I fell by a stand of trees, I lay on my back and looked up at a bit of sky framed by two peaks. A gauzy liquid cloud was fluttering over the descending sun and spreading like a blanket unfurling as the landscape seemed to rotate away from it. The cloud drew up over the sun and shone like gossamer as I watched the top of the mountain grow farther from sight.
                       
By the time I came back to my body lying in the snow, Dan had skied up in a fine mist of white and held out his hand to me. His face was flushed from skiing and his eyes sparkled.
                       
“Have you had enough?” he asked buoyantly, as he helped me stand.
                       
“No,” I lied.
                       
He gave me a melting look and a little smile, with a cloud of condensation marbling the air around his mouth.
                       
“I love you,” he said, dropping down the mountain again. Was I getting it yet?
                       
“No,” I said, all the way down. No.

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​​Joyce Hendrickson is a writer, editor, and publisher—first in Chicago then San Francisco. All starting with the underground newspaper she helmed in middle and high school. She has published three books of poetry (Mind Jazz, You Bring Yourself, Now Open). two books of photo essays (Seeing San Francisco, Vol. 1 and 2), and a short story collection (Love and Other Confusing Stories) from which this story comes. “With a nod to surrealism and mystery short fiction, these stories aim to amaze, confuse, and amuse all of us who both believe in and run from love.”

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