The Lift Operator's Lesson

The week after Thanksgiving at Snowdrift Lodge is what we call the dead zone. All the leaves-early skiers are gone, the holiday crowd hasn't shown up yet, and the mountain just sort of sits there breathing. I'd been running chair three for ten years by then, twenty-nine years old and already feeling like the furniture up there. Silas, they'd say, you still on that chair? Yep. Still here.

That particular Tuesday I came in from the cold shift around four and found the bar empty except for one woman at the end, poking at a laptop with the expression of somebody losing a fight. I recognized her from orientation. Hailey, the new event planner. Twenty-five, sharp laugh, always seemed a little surprised when a room noticed her.

"Rough week?" I asked, since the bartender had vanished and I figured somebody should say something.

She looked up like I'd pulled her out of water. "Oh my god, hi. Silas, right? The lift guy?" She closed the laptop halfway. "Rough doesn't cover it. I planned a corporate dinner for forty people and the supplier sent me forty-three steak orders and zero vegetarian. Zero! Who does that?"

"Forty-three steaks is kind of impressive though."

"It's a disaster is what it is." She laughed anyway, which I remember noticing. "Sit down, please, before I talk to a laptop alone for the rest of my life."

So I sat. I ordered a beer I wasn't supposed to have on the clock, whatever, it was December, the rules get soft in December. And we talked for maybe an hour. About the lodge, about how she'd driven out from Denver in October with everything she owned in a Corolla, about how I'd been here since I was nineteen and sometimes couldn't remember what I was before that.

Then she got quiet and did the thing where you swirl your drink and look at the middle distance.

"Can I ask you something kind of weird?" she said.

"Those are my favorite kind."

"There's a supplier rep coming up next week. Jamie, from the rental company. And I need him to like me, professionally, I mean, because he controls whether we get the good equipment rate." She said all of that very fast. "And I am terrible at charming people. Terrible! I get nervous and I talk too much and I apologize for things nobody did wrong. And I saw how you are with guests. You made that whole lift line laugh on Saturday. You're just... easy. How do you do that?"

I'll be honest, it caught me off guard. Ten years of running a chairlift doesn't exactly build your ego.

"I yell 'keep your tips up' and people laugh because I'm a goof," I said. "That's not charm."

"It absolutely is charm."

I should say here that I'd had one real thing in the last few years, a tourist named Bonnie who stayed a whole winter and then didn't, and since she left I'd been going through the motions a little. So when this woman sat there asking me, sincerely, how to be confident, something in my chest woke up and stretched.

"Okay," I said. "Here's the weird offer. Forget Jamie for a second. I could teach you. Like, actual lessons. Eye contact, timing, how to take a compliment without apologizing for it. The stuff underneath charming somebody."

Her eyebrows went up. "Lessons?"

"Why not. You've got the raw material, you just keep burying it under sorry and um."

"And what's the catch?" she asked, and she was smiling but I could tell she wanted a real answer.

"No catch. No strings. If it gets weird we call it off and I keep running my chair and you keep wrangling steaks."

"You'd really do that?"

"Beats watching the snow melt."

* * *

Our first lesson was Thursday night in the employee break room, because that's the glamour life we lead. There's a sagging couch in there, a vending machine that eats dollars, and a whiteboard with somebody's joke about patrol still on it from two seasons ago. Hailey showed up with two coffees from the lodge kitchen and sat down across from me like it was an actual classroom.

"Teacher," she said, and saluted me with the cup.

"Okay, first lesson. Eye contact. When you talk to Jamie, you hold it a beat longer than feels comfortable. Not creepy long. Just long enough that he knows you're not scared of him."

"Long enough that he knows I'm not scared of him," she repeated, nodding, writing it on a napkin, which cracked me up.

"Try it. Look at me and tell me something boring. The weather. Anything."

She squared her shoulders like she was about to defuse something. "The... weather today was cold?" Her eyes darted to the vending machine, back to me, down to her coffee.

"That was a C minus."

"A C minus! Rude." But she was laughing so hard she had to put the cup down. "Okay, okay, again."

Second try she lasted about three seconds before cracking up. Third try she held it, and I'll admit it affected me, those steady dark eyes just sitting there on mine while she said, "The weather today was cold, Silas." Two extra beats. She'd gotten it.

"Hold on, that was it. You felt it, right? That little extra beat?"

"I felt like I was staring. I felt like a weirdo."

"You felt confident. It reads as confident. I promise." I took a sip of my coffee, which had gone lukewarm, standard break room tragedy. "Second lesson. Compliments. When somebody gives you one, you don't deflect. You let it hang in the air for a second before you say thank you."

"Oh no. I'm the worst at that. Someone says nice jacket and I say oh this old thing it has a hole in the pocket."

"Exactly, that. Don't do that."

So we drilled it. I told her nice jacket, and she said thanks, and then we both started laughing about how stilted it sounded. I told her she had a good laugh, which was true, and she opened her mouth to deflect and caught herself and just held my eyes instead and said, "Thank you." And then that little extra beat again, on purpose this time, and I felt it in my sternum, honestly. She was learning fast and I was the one off balance.

"Ha," she said, pointing at me. "You blinked. I made the teacher blink."

"You did not make me blink."

"I so did. That's a power move, right? Did I just do a power move?"

"You did a power move." I raised my cup to her. "Natural talent."

"Careful, I'll put that on my resume. I'm twenty-five, I have a lease and a Corolla, I'm a professional." She kicked her boots up onto the coffee table, right next to the patrol joke on the whiteboard, getting comfortable. "Okay, next lesson. What else? Give me the hard stuff."

It was going on nine and the break room smelled like burnt coffee and the ski wax everybody tracked in on their boots, and I sat there thinking this was the best evening I'd had on that mountain in a year. Which seemed odd to think about a woman I was supposedly instructing.

"Next Tuesday," I said, "we do touch. Hand on the arm, stuff like that. The stuff that actually lands."

Her eyebrows went up again, and she grinned into her cup. "Touch. Okay. Homework?"

"No homework. Just don't apologize to the vending machine on your way out."

"I would never... I definitely already did that once," she admitted, and I laughed all the way to my cabin down the dark quarter mile of road, snow squeaking under my boots, feeling twenty-nine going on something younger.

The next Tuesday came around fast, which was funny because the dead zone usually crawls. Tuesday was also the day I came in from the cold shift around four with my fingers half frozen, and Hailey was waiting at the base of Pinnacle Lift with two coffees again like she was paying me in caffeine, which honestly worked fine for me.

"Okay, professor," she said, breath fogging. "Teach me about touch."

"Come on, walk with me. I'll show you at the bull wheel. It's empty this time of day and you can actually hear yourself think."

Pinnacle Lift was closed for the day, chairs swinging empty in the wind, and we stood under the bull wheel with the whole mountain quiet around us. It's kind of a magic spot when there's nobody on it. You can hear the cables hum.

"Alright. Touch. The move is simple," I told her. "You're talking to Jamie, you make a point, and you touch his forearm. Just once, just two seconds. Hand flat, not a grab, not a tap. It says I'm here and I'm friendly and I'm not going anywhere."

"That's it? Two seconds?"

"That's it. It's crazy how well it works. Watch, I'll demonstrate." I held out my own arm like a lab specimen. "Practice on me."

She put her hand on my forearm. Flat palm, light, right where the sleeve of my jacket ended. And she held it there. Three seconds. Four. Five.

"Hailey."

"Yeah?"

"That was more than two seconds."

"Oh. Sorry, I lost count," she said, and pulled back, but she was grinning like she absolutely had not lost count. "Did it work? Did you feel the magic?"

And here's the dumb part, the part I'm putting on the record because it surprised the hell out of me. It worked. My whole arm felt warm where her hand had been, through two layers of jacket, and I stood there like an idiot under the empty lift while the wind swung the chairs around.

"It worked," I admitted.

"Ha. I knew it. Okay, again, I want to get the timing right."

She did it again, and this time she kept her eyes on mine while she did it, the extra beat, the whole lesson one package deal, and my heart did a stupid little skip. Twenty-nine years old, ten years running chair three, and a woman touching my sleeve turned me into a rookie.

"You're blushing," she said, delighted.

"It's cold out. Faces get red in the cold."

"Sure it is."

We ran the drill maybe six more times, her hand on my arm, me trying to keep talking about steak counts as a normal person would, both of us laughing every time. Then she did it one last time and didn't let go, just left her hand sitting there on my sleeve, and said, "So when do I get to try it on Jamie for real?"

"Next week. He's coming for the rental meeting Wednesday."

"Right, the rental meeting." She squeezed my arm once, quick, like a full stop. "What if I don't need him to notice me, though?"

I looked at her. The wind was doing its thing, the chairs were doing their thing, and she was looking at me with a completely straight face.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. It means what if I want practice on somebody who's actually hard to fluster." She shrugged, all innocence. "You're very easy. You blush in thirty degree weather."

"That's slander."

"That's observation."

* * *

Friday she knocked on my cabin door with a bottle of wine that cost about six dollars and a look on her face like she'd been planning something. My cabin is nothing special, a bed, a stove, a couch with a blanket on it, a poster of a mountain I've never skied. But she came in and looked around and said it was cozy, and I believed her, which is the trick of it.

"Okay, so here's my idea," she said, sitting cross-legged on the couch after I dug out two mismatched glasses. "A practice date. Full simulation. You be the guy, I'll be me, and we run a whole first date. Conversation, flirting, all of it. Like a fire drill."

"A fire drill."

"For flirting. I want to do it with somebody I can fail in front of. You're safe."

"Thanks. I'm safe. Great."