High Desert Journal: Aspen

contributors Bill Babers, Elizabeth Enslin, Andrea Mason Clark

Aspen

Fiction

by Andrea Mason Clark | 0 Comments

"All sorts of different landscapes seem to open whichever way I look." - Vita Sackville West in a letter to Virginia Woolf

As soon as I clicked the shutter of my camera, Sharon said, "Pictures are so contrived." Instead, she wanted to stare out at the awe-inspiring vistas and imprint them in her mind. I was just trying to get proof of my Colorado vacation to show to my parents and friends back in Philadelphia.

The first summer I visited Sharon, after our sophomore year in high school, her parents had rented a condo on the Aspen ski slopes. The condo they owned had burned down, and it would take several years for it to be rebuilt. I wanted to return to the West I'd grown to love through train trips and ski vacations, and Sharon's invitations to her usually uninhabited parents' houses were a way to do that. That first year, we ate brick oven pizza at a restaurant where we spotted Christy Brinkley. We ate pancakes and ice-cream, saw the latest blockbuster movies, and went hiking. We did what normal high school girls spending the summer in Aspen might do, but each summer, both of us were successively transformed.

The second time I visited Sharon in Aspen, she was staying in a Victorian in town. She told me, my first morning there, that she was going Ayervedic, and then showed me a diagram in a large, old-looking hardback book that mapped out the healing or destructive qualities of different types of food. I had never heard of Ayervedic. Sharon explained it as "eating locally," but to me, it seemed a cryptic dogma where the rules kept changing. And what for? What did she hope to come of her new commitment? I didn't know. I found out over a decade later in New Mexico Ayervedic is an ancient Indian philosophy and system of eating where a person modifies one's diet to correct dosha imbalances, the Indian equivalent of the Greco-Roman humours.

Sharon told me that she was avoiding nightshades, meaning eggplants, tomatoes, zucchini, and yellow squash. That was when I was still eating cow's milk on my cereal. We had met in Switzerland two years earlier and bonded over sledding, skiing, and a miniscule bottle of vodka she'd bought at the candy store. I chose to see her vigilant eating as just another form of rebellion. She was an only child, and before Ayervedic, it had been anorexia and fashion magazines. Then, I was totally unfamiliar with health food; I ate for dinner whatever my mom served (usually some type of meat, rice or potato, a vegetable, and salad), and I was not even vaguely interested in the positive or negative qualities of vegetables. It was soon after that, however, that I began to see my mother's cooking as inadequate.

That summer, I also began to understand how I, having attended private high school and having grown up in a nice house in the Philadelphia suburbs, fit into the rest of the world. I didn't realize the extreme privilege I'd been afforded up to that point, and still, I was only catching a glimpse. It made me wonder if my mother's depression-era thriftiness wasn't really an accurate portrayal of my family's class. Sure, she made us wear heavy sweaters instead of adjusting the thermostat, but my parents had been able to send me to Aspen for two weeks, and I didn't have to get a job for the summer, with the exception of helping my mom mulch her garden and clean the windows. I would spend the rest of the summer suntanning around my high school friends' swimming pools and talking about what clothes or bikinis we'd bought at the department stores and boutiques near school.

It was that summer that Sharon introduced me to a pair of petite, brunette twins in their early thirties, Jenn and Jasmine, more often called "the twins." Their older sister, also a blond, owned a local fitness boutique. All of them (the three sisters and Sharon) wore clothes from the store, where workout shirts in pastel-colored waffle fabrics were priced at eighty two dollars, and matching gym shorts were sixty eight. I had never been friends with older women, and I wondered both why Sharon didn't have friends our age and why these women wanted to spend time with us. We were silly. We got a thrill out of driving her parents' jeep through back roads though neither of us had licenses. We liked to talk about boys, but these women had actually dated and slept with them. Neither of us had any tangible experience. It made me feel young, and it made Sharon seem mature that she knew these women. Perhaps that was why I never questioned her judgment or her increased monitoring of my eating habits.

Sharon had one local friend our age. I'd met her the summer before soaking in the hot tub at the Aspen club. Sharon and I visited her at her house one day, where we spent the afternoon. Sharon told me this girl was "old Aspen." The house was slightly out of town, made from recycled wood, and had no doors inside, only curtains. The friend's mother had a visitor who supposedly had an intuitive gift.
When we arrived, the visitor was in the process of telling the girl's brothers and sisters their medicine animals. She told me my medicine animal was an elk. It stood next to me, she said, and I drew on it for strength. I imagined a towering elk looking at me with deep brown eyes and a massive rack of antlers. The girl's older sister was preparing to leave for college on the East coast. She had been accepted to Wellesley, and I wondered how she would make sense of the large buildings, the curt people so unlike those in the Rocky Mountain West, if any of the fellow classmates she would meet the following week had grown up in homes with curtains instead of doors, and if any of their parents knew their medicine animal.

Once during that summer, Sharon handed me the telephone. It was Sharon's mother, who lived on the Upper East Side in Manhattan; she begged me to convince Sharon to come back to New York City after the summer was over. Sharon had been telling her parents she was planning on going to the local Aspen high school in the fall. She would not be returning to "the city," she told them, maybe ever. I couldn't believe her parents had so little control over her.

That summer, I bought my first mountain bike, tried unsuccessfully to ride it up a mountain, ate pounds of organic salad, hiked the maroon bells, a well-known group of mountains just outside town, spent hours relaxing in the hot tub at the Aspen club, and got my first hour-long massage. I now wonder if my parents would have been so keen for me to continue visiting my friend Sharon every summer if they had known about some of the self-indulgent activities-hot tubs and massage-they were funding. I can't remember how much I told them, but they claimed they just wanted me to enjoy myself out West. I was happy to.

That fall, Sharon did go back to the city and back to her final year at the private, all-girls school she attended in Manhattan. Sharon and I kept in touch throughout the school year. I went to visit her by train for weekends in Manhattan, and she came to visit me a few times at my parents' house in Philadelphia. The year before when I'd visited her, we would sometimes buy a six pack of beer at one of the Korean delis even though she was usually wearing her school uniform of a white blouse and a plaid kilt and owned no fake ID.

By the winter of twelfth grade, I had tired of my high school friends and my boring suburban life, and Sharon's life in New York City seemed bold and exciting by contrast. Everyone lived in apartments, nobody (including parents) seemed to care what we did, and there were no boys our age. The boys, I was told, left the city for boarding school by eighth grade. To me, that meant I didn't have to be self-conscious. I hadn't had a boyfriend yet, and I was nervous instead of excited at the prospect. In New York, I was free to be interested in whatever presented itself: the Pink Floyd Laser show, ice skating in Central Park, art films too obscure to show up at any of the suburban movie theatres near my parent's house.

That winter, Sharon preferred to go to juice bars instead of drinking beer.

Eventually, because I was a teenager, because I was susceptible to peer pressure, because I had either became convinced, intrigued, or a little of both, I also started eating tofu and steamed spinach. I had to agree that her organic vegetables tasted better than conventionally grown ones. And once she got me in the habit of analyzing food labels, I was horrified by the food I had previously eaten: what my mother kept in her cupboard. Sharon was a missionary, and I was her first convert.

She wanted to attend the Earth First! summer camp, but I wasn't ready for activism. The kids in the brochure looked radical; they reminded me of the teenagers with whom I attended my mother's Unitarian church. At the time, I loathed the very vocal Unitarians my age who didn't wear bras or brush their hair and wore displays of earrings all over their bodies. They made me uncomfortable. Sharon sent me literature about how to write letters to Dominoes and McDonalds asking them to provide more vegetarian and healthy options. The text featured cartoons of humans sucking on cow udders and farm buildings in the distance, their green sludge running into lakes and streams. I read Diet for a Small Planet, and my mom bought me a subscription to Vegetarian Times. When I was with my other high school friends, I did things I know Sharon wouldn't have approved of: drinking beer and sometimes coffee. My other friends didn't understand this "transformation" I'd gone through in Aspen, and I wasn't sure I could explain it. Some of them had been to Aspen, and they'd come back the same, but maybe for a fur-trimmed jacket, a new love interest, or some thick, silver jewelry. They looked incredulously and with amusement at my tofu sandwiches during lunch. Some of it I believed in, but I had also effectively been brainwashed.

The third summer I visited Sharon, her parents had rented a large, rambling house in the mountains outside of town. We had to drive most places except if we took the bike trail that ran through the aspen trees along the river in back of her house.
The afternoon I arrived, I flopped on the cushy, queen-sized bed that would be mine for the next two weeks. Sharon sat in the armchair in the corner of the room, and I told her about my up-until-now mindless summer. She told me sometimes she couldn't bear this burden, this weight on her shoulders.

I remember then looking at her slightly-hunched shoulders and seeing nothing.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"The pain of the world," she said.

I remember then realizing that we must be growing apart. Perhaps I had experienced the pain of the world, but I didn't recognize it as such, and I certainly didn't want to talk about it. I was on vacation.

Sharon was completely focused on attending as many overpriced, new age dance classes per day at a dance studio the twins owned. It had been written up in Shape magazine as one of the great places in the U.S. to take a dance class. The twins had grown up in L.A. but had always vacationed in Aspen. A few years earlier, they had come to Aspen to join their older sister, given up cocaine, and opened a dance studio. They both lived in a closet space at the end of the dance floor, big enough for one futon mattress. At the studio, I gyrated to African beats, meditative music for ballet or yoga, and combinations of hip-hop and whatever music the twins were in the mood for.

Although I had never previously taken a dance class, I found the unpredictable music, the open space, and the mix of people who frequented "Dance One" interesting; I particularly liked the cool down stretching that happened to slow music at the end of every class. Sometimes people lay on the floor long after the music was over, and sometimes people, including Sharon, would cry, lying or sitting on the floor, while the others picked up their belongings and made their way to the door. When I asked her about it, Sharon said it was a huge emotional release. She said she couldn't really describe it but likened it to an early morning bowel movement.

The group of people who frequented the studio was an eclectic one. There were people living out of their cars and the independently wealthy. One woman from Chicago, maybe in her late thirties, ran up the ski mountain in between morning and afternoon dance classes. The woman's husband, who never seemed to be with her in her Aspen condo, was, according to Sharon, fat and unhealthy. It was his Coca-Cola in the fridge and potato chips in the cupboard, the woman informed me when we visited her condo one day after class. Sharon liked to say, "She's obviously running away from something." Then there was the guy from the bike store who used to come over just to watch the twins. He finally asked Jenn out, but they could only go out for brown rice sushi as that was the only thing Jenn would eat from any of the town restaurants.

Sharon was talking in terms laden with new age philosophy and the metaphysical about how she could not communicate with her parents until they "changed their dance." She would say "I told my mom that, but she just doesn't understand." I didn't doubt that they didn't understand. Her mom was a Manhattan socialite who, a few years later, was written up in Us Weekly for celebrating her fiftieth birthday by showing a private screening of a Hollywood movie, inviting fifty of her closest female friends, and giving them each a tennis bracelet from Tiffany's. Sharon's mom was far from being a reflective Aspen New Ager.

Perhaps I just had a better sense of audience than Sharon, but I knew that if I told my parents "they had to change their dance," they would have no idea what I was talking about. After all, Sharon was an only child. I wondered if Sharon's parents ever asked her when she was planning on changing her dance, for instance, getting a job or doing something conventionally productive with her summer. They didn't seem to care much what she did.

Sharon, however, thought she was being extremely productive. She was attending six to ten dance classes a week at the studio, reading every metaphysical book she could find at the bookstore, stretching, and eating lots of organic salad and toasted seaweed. When I was with her, I often felt like the life I'd known up to that point was ordinary and boring. On top of that, my parents, who were largely responsible for the way my life was, now seemed incredibly bourgeois. At that time, I had no notion how privileged I really was, but I knew my parents' Protestant work ethic would have never put up with my spending hours in bed stretching and reading new age books, and shopping at the overpriced health food store. My dad would have called it flaky and my mom lazy. I never considered if I was taking advantage of Sharon and her large, empty house because it was the only way I knew to spend time in the beautiful West I longed for or if I was following her cryptic rules because her life was strange enough that I found it seductive. Now I wonder.

I had spent one day in bed reading on that vacation, but it was not by choice. I had fixed myself some tea that morning and hadn't thought anything of the name "Smooth Move" printed on the front of the box. I soon found out where the name of the tea came from. It was an herbal laxative. Sharon laughed in a sorry way when she found out what I had done, and although the effects subsided by late afternoon, I didn't go back to Sharon's tea cabinet. She said it was good, that I was "detoxing."

I claimed I didn't have any toxins in me. "I can't remember ever eating any lead paint," I said with complete seriousness.
"Oh, come on Andrea," she said, condescendingly. "Everyone has toxins."

One morning, Sharon came into my room wearing the pajamas she always wore, her stawberry blond curls hanging over her face. "We're going to get bodywork," she said. "Jenn arranged it. It's this guy downvalley who's supposed to be amazing."

"How much is it?" I asked, knowing by this point that all of Sharon's therapies and classes and events cost money - and usually lots. There was no such thing as the inexpensive Aspen vacation, and Sharon never offered to pay for me - not that I wanted her to. I was too proud to take her (or what would have been her parents') money.

"Seventy five," she said. "It's a really good deal. He's giving us a discount since there are four of us," she said, and then proceeded to tell me about the life-changing book Way of the Peaceful Warrior she had been reading while I was sleeping in.

I don't know if at that point I was still curious - what was this "bodywork" she talked about? - or if it never occurred to me that I didn't have to do everything she did. As a teenager, I was passive and shy, an observer. Also, Sharon and I used to be real friends. And we still were - weren't we? All the same, it seemed like I was changing myself and my notions of my Colorado vacation in order to continue being her friend.

We stopped by the ATM before driving downvalley in the twins's old, maroon Subaru Loyale. We drove until the mountains were lower and more spread out and parked outside a high fence. Jasmine opened the gate, and as we walked down the walkway past a fountain in the small, neat yard, a woman and a man of Asian descent with shaved heads wearing brightly-colored robes emerged from the house. Both the woman and the man extended their arms and embraced both Jenn and Jasmine, who were obviously regulars.

One night, there was a concert by a Colorado band. I liked the band that was playing, and I wanted to attend the concert. Sharon didn't want to have any part in it. By then, the only kind of music she listened to outside of the studio was chanting, but one of the twins was babysitting for her older sister so she could go to the concert, so I got a ride with Jenn and tagged along with the sister and her friends. A couple in their early twenties that were part of the group kept bringing me beers they bought at the beer garden. From outside the beer garden, the three of us looked out to see all of Aspen and the snow-capped mountains beyond. The beer was already going to my head, but the view from the top of the mountain would have made me dizzy on its own. I was finally having the Aspen vacation I'd dreamed about, but I was with strangers instead of the friend I'd come to visit, and Sharon would have turned up her nose at all the carcinogens I was ingesting.

About a week into my two week visit, I became ill and was in bed for several days. During that time, Sharon volunteered her parent's house as a place to host a guru freshly arrived in town. He was working with people (namely wealthy women searching for inner peace) who wanted to experience a rebirthal cry. I asked Sharon to explain the term to me, and she said he "guided them through the birth canal all over again." The guru visited me in the downstairs bedroom where I was staying.

He looked like a classic guru: tall with patchy gray hair, and a gray beard. He led me through a meditation where he suggested I saw my angel coming up over a mountaintop. Already in a slightly feverish state, it took little encouragement for me to see my father's good friend walk over the ridge of a purple mountain. I did not know this man very well, but he lived in Denver, and I was planning on staying with him and his wife for a few days after leaving Sharon's. I had cooperated with the meditation in the hopes that the guru could make me feel better. He didn't. At that point, I barely knew my father's friend, and more than anything, I just wanted to be left alone to sleep.

The guru was still there a day or so later when I felt well enough to wander upstairs and forage for something to eat. I opened the fridge, but all I saw was a wilted salad on the bottom shelf. I started crying. The guru rounded the corner, his blond assistant in tow. He told me I must just want attention. Why else would I create such a sensation by crying like this?

"I'm hungry," I said.

"We'll make food. We'll serve you," he said, but he didn't move, and I knew there was no food to serve me. Eventually, I went back downstairs, still hungry.

A day or two later, when I had truly recovered, Sharon and I sat outside on the back deck of the house, listening to the rebirthal cries coming from the window of Sharon's father's upstairs study. The cries were full of anguish and relief, and I wondered what the guru actually said to them, if he guided them through the birth canal all over again like Sharon had said? And were they imagining it? Could they really remember? Sharon took her turn in the line of middle-aged women, but I vehemently declined his offer. It would be free since we let him set up shop at the house, Sharon said.

I'd had enough - of releasing I didn't need. Of people who made me uncomfortable. Of food I didn't like. All the same, those summers in Aspen did stir in me an awareness I wasn't ready for at the time, but that I confronted shortly thereafter. In Philadelphia, I hadn't had friends who talked about the emotional turmoil of their inner lives or how to deal in any authentic way with difficult emotions. Looking back, I can see many of them dealt with their lives through regular shopping and the occasional gin and tonic. Perhaps I was only beginning to be aware that I had difficult emotions. I was still living under the assumption that my parents and brother were miraculous, safe, and loving, my suburban life happy and carefree, and my future open and luminous.

While Sharon and I listened to the rebirthal cries, the twins lay naked on the hammock even though anyone riding on the bike path would have had a pretty good view of them. They were talking about what roles each of us would have played if we had been in a tribe together. They said maybe I would be the storyteller since I liked to write.

Sharon had finished Way of the Peaceful Warrior, read The Mutant Message Down Under while I was sick, and was now on to The Celistine Prophecy. She told me how profound, and yet still how basic it was. "In the book, the narrator can communicate with plants since they have such a high frequency. Everyone knows plants vibrate at a higher frequency than meat though." Did they?

It was the day after the Fourth of July when Sharon's father came into her room and said he had reservations to go on a guided fly fishing trip. "Do you want to go?" he asked Sharon, not paying any attention to me or offering to include me in the trip. She looked at him in an annoyed way. "Daddy, I'm vegan."

"It's catch and release," he said, hovering just inside the doorway.

"It totally traumatizes the fish," she said, looking at him like he was an idiot.

Sharon's dad turned to me even though up until that point he had not acknowledged me. "Do you want to go, Andrea?"

"Sure," I said, grateful to take part in something where at least I knew what to expect. I also knew the flyfishing trip was probably both expensive and part of the Colorado vacation I had dreamed about but was not having.

We drove to the fly shop to meet our guide, and he ended up taking us to a spot that was practically in Sharon's backyard. It was on the same river, off the same bike path Sharon and I walked or rode on nearly every day. The water sparkled as it flowed over submerged rocks, and the oval-shaped leaves of the aspen trees fluttered in the wind. The guide instructed me exactly where to cast my fly, and when I landed it there, the fish bit, and I caught it. It seemed a little too easy, but here I was doing something I'd fantasized might be part of my Colorado vacation - if I hadn't been visiting Sharon. After fishing, the guide popped the trunk of his car. Out of a cooler, he took a beer for Sharon's dad and himself, and I chose a can of Coca-Cola. I remember how strange it was to taste sugar after the stringent diet Sharon had me on. Still, it seemed like a necessary ending to an afternoon of flyfishing in Colorado.
Sharon and I were both leaving for college that coming fall, and while my school had a pre-semester hiking trip in the Adirondacks where I was simply told what day to arrive on campus, on her college's pre-semester outdoor orientation trip, Sharon could mark that she wanted not just vegetarian, but vegan food, and where she wanted to hike. She wrote "Below treeline, preferably near H2O." We were both going to small, elite liberal arts schools, but mine was on the East coast, and hers was on the West coast.

On the way to the airport, where I would fly to Denver and stay with my father's friend and his wife before eventually flying back to Philadelphia, Sharon pulled into the parking lot of a health food store that advertised a juice bar. "Why are we stopping here?" I asked.

"They have wheatgrass shots," she said.

"What are those?" I asked cautiously, but we were already inside, and she was already holding one out for me to take. I raised my hand in protest.

"I've already paid for both of them," she said.

Perhaps I should have said, "I don't care. You can have both." That's what I would say now. The shots were bright green, darker green and pulpy near the bottom, in quarter-sized, white, paper cups. Instead, I closed my eyes and poured it down my throat. I only gagged a little.

That fall, Sharon told me the guru had died. He had fallen asleep at the wheel of his car and hit a tree. She told me over the phone, "I guess his work here was done."

I did see her again. It was only two years later, but we had both changed so immeasurably that it seemed like a decade had passed. Sharon had taken the semester off from college to ski for the winter in Aspen. On the slopes, she'd met a guy, an orthopedic surgeon. They were dating. Her parents had rebuilt the burned-down condo.

Sharon answered the door of her boyfriend's house in downtown Aspen. I had driven seven hours from Taos, New Mexico in my old, navy Volvo station wagon. I had brought along the Teaching Assistant from my archaeology summer school, Heidi, who had bright red hair and wore Harley Davidson apparel. I wore a thrift store-purchased muumuu and an old, perhaps slightly stained, cream-colored fisherman's sweater. A brightly colored hair wrap adorned the right side of my head. Sharon and her boyfriend were watching the Olympics on their large, flat-screened TV before anyone had flat-screened TVs.

"You're a hippie," Sharon said after she hugged me, her voice edged in condescension. I didn't understand why she was saying it like it was a bad thing. After all, she'd introduced me to soy milk. She was wearing light blue linen shorts and a demure, cream-colored cotton sweater.

The next day, Sharon told Heidi and me she and her boyfriend were going to an early lunch at one of the most expensive hotels in Aspen. "What will you eat?" I asked, mistakenly assuming she was still on a strict seaweed and raw foods diet. I was still a vegetarian at that point, and I preferred organic vegetables to conventional ones.

"Chicken?" she answered. "I eat meat now."

I didn't know what to say. She was the reason I was a vegetarian. She was the reason I drank soy milk, but she still held sway over me; most of all, I felt betrayed. I thought we'd been saving the world, but now she was making fun of me. I realized I would never be able to keep up with her phases. Heidi and I packed the car to drive father west to see more people and more places that we hoped would welcome us.

Andrea Mason Clark has an M.F.A. from University of Idaho. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Clean Shot, Here We Have Idaho, and Washington State Magazine.

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High Desert Journal

002

Aspen

Fiction

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