The Little Lights of Town - Northern Magazine

Short stories by Jonathan Johnson ’90 BA, ’92 MA

A Low Coefficient of Friction
 

The pond I skate after work is actually a river lagoon. Brushrimmed water where, in summer, paddlers launch to kayak down the Dead to Lake Superior or upstream to the falls. I take uncomplicated solace in the metaphor—gliding weightless over a little territory of water alongside a river called the Dead just before it empties itself into the sea. My skates fit snug around my feet and ankles. I’m solid with the blades, the only movement their effortless slide. All that’s required of me is maintaining momentum over the small swath of cosmos some kids from my son’s high school have cleared. Through the dark I can see the white edge of snow they’ve shoveled back. On the twin stacks above the abandoned power plant across the river, the high, white lights blink back and forth. Question and answer. Question and answer.

Of the stories I bring down to the ice, undergraduate breakups are the most comforting. That first session unspools so easily for the student and me. They sit in the overstuffed chair and take out their precious facts and look at them there between us. We look at them together. While somewhere else, usually somewhere on campus. The person who has left them—for almost invariably it’s the left who come to me—goes about their day.

At the end of the intake, I offer the heartbroken the choice of two books to borrow—How to Win Back the One You Love or How to Survive the Loss of a Love. Their choice tells me, and them, a lot. Maybe it’ll surprise you to know that after fifty minutes of longing and desperate tears, most choose the guide to survival. We don’t talk much about instincts in counseling, but I’ve come to believe in them. 

For example, mine must have told me if I’m going to go on living up here, I’d better not start avoiding ice. It wasn’t even something I thought about at first, unlike the way I deliberately drive the road. Defiantly, instead of finding other routes. With a little honk when I pass the accident spot, the memorial fir tree. A sapling still. But I have asked that the death-grief clients be steered to my colleagues.

A little time each weekday in romantic grief of the young reminds me there are pains we can hold and feel alive and ourselves in. The late-night light, up in her window. Her car, blue, beside a curb somewhere.

It’s a relief, a refuge, to empathize with those feelings. The young people on campus are kissing and sleeping together and making promises. They spin with vertiginous delight of want and discovery of being wanted back. They lose it all and wander with the warm vitality of the wounded. Then they start again. A smile. A name. Often before the school year and our sessions have ended, they’ve started again.

The frozen water below me is as inscrutable as the dark, overcast sky, but I can feel the weave and flow of others’ lives as I cross and braid them with my own. A little ripple up through my firm skates and feet and body. Side to side to side I push my strides through the continual curve, an orbit around an invisible center, then glide over the quiver of script. Stephanie. The girl my new client came to tell me about today. The girlfriend he’d promised to marry. Only this time my client was the one who’d done the leaving. It was the hurt he knew he’d caused this person he loved, Stephanie, the looking up at her window light with earnest remorse, that haunted him to my o. ice. I could think of no book or homework for him. But I’m already looking forward to seeing him next week.

I’ll do the death-grief work again, I know. It will be good. Real. I need that reality. Others turning and turning on this frozen lagoon, this territory adjacent to the dead. Meanwhile, it’s good to be occupying the sorrows of lesser magnitude, to live with the feelings of the young again. The child. Not the parent. Striding and gliding. While farther inland a person named Stephanie turns out her light and my new client walks lamppost to darkness to lamppost. Cold on my face from the void over the lake.

Newlyweds
 

The spring of his diagnosis, they went out to the forest. In places cut before he bought the land, where the open sky bleached the ferns, they planted trees. Hundreds of trees. Each slender wand in their closed fingers. Each filigree of roots down into each damp hole they opened.

Engaged most of their middle ages in houses across town, they’d savored slow-waking alternate weekends together when their exes had custody. And once their separate sons were raised separately, as agreed, there’d been college financial aid implications to consider. 

She’d finally moved into his house to recover from double knee replacements. She walked slow laps around the rooms downstairs—dining room office with the fireplace, archway to the living room where they’d moved the bed, archway to the entry, hall with the coat pegs, kitchen, back to the dining room office with the fi replace and fire he’d build her mornings before he left for campus.

Healed, she’d kept her place (where she lives again now) but more or less continued to reside at his. Cards with friends. His crowds of books and papers. Her crowds of books and papers. Laptops opposite across the dining room table. Dusk clouds across the horizon at the beach two blocks away.

Sixteen years she wore an engagement ring.

Then the news.

Then the little wedding beside the little waves. His son’s speech.

“Well, Dad finally found a way to marry Terry without making a long-term commitment.”

Exactly his dad’s humor. And one of my favorite jokes to this day. Except, forgive me, it’s not altogether true, is it? Even if

they got a little less than two more months. 

My other favorite joke?

Know why one side of a wedge of geese is longer than the other?

More geese on that side.

Every spring they come with their voices. Every spring they come sailing over those trees north of town for some wild lake beyond. Over those trees drinking and eating from the earth and breathing the sun.